since people might be wondering

the “music” should be best appreciated as textural rather than melodic

falling off is the end

the fact that there’s no gameplay is intentional

the only part I didn’t finish is windows on downtown skyscrapers

the game does have meanings but none of them are related to each other

I get a kick out of the love/hate reviews

everything was drawn with a mouse

oh no LD haha its crappy game season

i hope the theme is snow because i know wher to get some LOL its in my back yard

i made a tutorial to help people I hope you like it

1. get an idea. like rolling snow balls
2. make a clear simple goal from it. “make the biggest snowball” isnt clear because you dont know biggest than what? i will use “roll up all the snow”. other good ones are: get to the exit without dieing, eat all the apples, kill the evil boss. if its not simple the game will be confusing
3. add obstacles to get in the way. if the snowball is too big it will be too hard to push so thats my obstacle (you can only push it downhill). it will be a puzzle game to rollu p all the snow by finding the right way to roll your balls LOL
4. make sure its not boring. if your game is about shoting enemys and theres no reason not to shoot them then its a crap game because “should I shoot him?” is a boring choice. good decisions make you give up something because fun is when you make risky decisions in your life. so the risk in my game is that rolling a ball makes it too big and then you lose the puzle
5. test it by makeing a simple version on your paper so you know its fun. delete all your boring ideas, you mihgt have a lot of them so dont fall in love with your turd game haha. look at my game that i made in like 10 seconds while i typed this (my camera string is not part of it tho):
   i also wrote down the rules which i edited until it was fun to play. can you get all the snow??? you move snowballs up down left or right, except against an arrow, unless they rolled into it. balls dont roll downhill automatically, you have to push them down. also its supposed to say “10 or more” snow. i already started that level it was kinda tricky
6. now you can add powerups very carefully but dont forget to make them intersting tradeofs and dont add them if they make the game boring. i could add a rule to remove one snow by melting it with pee but I havent played the game enough to know if it would be any more fun also its kinda gross

so now you can make your game. but watch out for these highly important tips:

• design while youre sleepy at night or just got up because thats when your brain is the best at creativity and art
• write down your ideas so you dont forget them when youre programming
• if youre not sure about an idea, do not do it. simpler is better.
• finish the game in 24 hours, because it always takes twice as long as you expect

good luck making your crap game, everybody! (plz vote this 5 stars if you liked it)

When I saw “Caverns” I quickly thought MinerVGA and decided to make a sidescrolling game about mining for gold and facing dangers like cave-ins and enemies. I decided that wasn’t going to work for some reason, and went to bed to come up with more ideas. (I always go to bed when I need ideas because late evening and early morning is when the mind is most creative.) The second concept was a sidescroller about shooting at cave formations like stalactites/stalagmites and suspended bridges to make them physics down onto enemies. After thinking about it for a while on Saturday morning, I started to hate that idea. It seemed gimmicky and hard to pull off well.

Several random walks. The final level generation algorithm isn’t much different. (more…)

This uses my level generator code: Lightning (Video)

Since I want to learn to write good blog posts, I would appreciate any feedback about which parts of the following post you found interesting. I tried to make it not dull. Hopefully you’ll learn a couple of new game design tricks or something. And if you’re not a programmer, just ignore any code, you won’t miss much.

The wiki mentioned that I should keep a log of some sort as I develop my game. I decided to write short entries in a txt file, then thought I would post it all when I was done. Now that my game is finished, I thought it would be a good idea to expand this short log into a full commentary-type thing of my Ludum Dare 14 experience. I will describe the development of DoomDrive in detail in the hopes that someone will find this interesting. Maybe this will make up for not doing a timelapse. Note: In this post, all times are EST and entries from the original log.txt file are italicized.

SF’s devlog

The first real language I learned was C++, I started learning it at age 11 when my older brother gave me a book about it. I didn’t know anything about compilers then so I couldn’t even write a program until much later, but I absorbed the information with great interest anyway. I love C++ for its speed and the amount of control it gives me over my code. When choosing graphics and sound libraries to start learning I did a few comparisons and settled on OpenGL with GLFW helper tools, and OpenAL. I haven’t had too much trouble with these (though my OpenAL knowledge is limited) and they’re what I know best so they’re what I used to make DoomDrive.

Saturday morning (18apr09)

2:40 – Forgot about LD for the past couple days, remembered it just now.
The contest began at 23:00 on Friday, so it was 3:40 in. I had decided to start developing a game (unrelated to any contests) a week before. It was to be my very first serious game (a space shooter, heavily inspired by the rather obscure Hell Fighter). I’d done enough half-projects experimenting with the aspects of game design – code structure, physics, graphics, art, sound, game theory, etc – that I knew I had a good grip on making games… I just hadn’t done it yet (other than a GameMaker game I made at 14, and of course Tetris). My problem was I never felt like doing anything. (more…)

Mama always told me to keep a safe distance between myself and the advancing wall of doom.

Navigate treacherous terrain while a giant wall of fire chases you at unreasonable speed! Increase your boost meter by getting rad airtime! And…that’s about it. All content including audio is procedurally generated, except the car model, which I punched in by hand. This means the filesize is small; the linux binary is 66 kB. Note: It seems I forgot to compile a linux version after my last change–putting in code to restart the game when you die and press space/shift. Also this doesn’t work like I intended on windows (restarts immediately if you’re boosting when the wall hits you). That and the fact that there’s no scoring are the biggest problems. I’ll do a postcompo version with some more polish later.

Controls: up, down, left, right to move. shift/space to boost.

THIS GAME HAS SOUND.

Official entry: Download 256kB (win32,linux)

DOWNLOAD THIS: Download 491k with DLLs (win32) if you’re not sure you have OpenAL. This is an update that’s way past the deadline, but it’s the same as above except with DLL files for audio.

Check out the postmortem for commentated journal and dev screenshots.