Here’s a screenshot of my game so far:

My initial idea was to take the tower defense concept and flip it on its head, so that instead of annihilating a swarm of enemies, the player IS the enemy. The player would be a sort-of cruiser ship moving on rails (i.e. a pre-defined movement path), and would be able to send out smaller fighter ships, pop a shield and boost movement etc.. Basically trying to annihilate everything on the islands, while also staying alive.

However, I derailed quite a bit yesterday and I’m pretty sure that there’s no way I can make all the gameplay that I had imagined in the current time frame. I’ll definitely have something playable by the end of today though

Just about ready to hit the sack so I can get up early and go all-out rambo with the, hopefully suitable, theme.

My preferred content-creation tools seems to be working, and so does visual studio coupled with my platform of choice; XNA. We’ll see if I can remember how this stuff works.

Earlier today I snapped a couple of shots of my workspace. Not much has changed here since the last ludumdare I participated in, except for a switch in monitors and a lovely new keyboard (it glows in the dark!):

Good luck everybody!

PS: -1 PAG!

So, yeah, I haven’t done anything at all today. Mainly because I completely lost motivation on day-one where I just didn’t get any bursts of inspiration.

It was my plan to use Unity3D and create awesomely sweet looking 3d graphics with lots of cool gameplay, but lacking that one *good* idea, it just never happened. Also, I really suck at modelling AND drawing graphics/textures!

Late day-one, however, I did decide to just whip up a heli-flyer game using the iso tech I had sort-of implemented earlier that day, but after fiddling around for a while creating some temporary art I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. So here’s a shot of the few (crappy) things I made:

Isometric graphics textures projected onto 3D cubes

Should you not have realized it yet, this is an “I give up”-post

This is how the office looks in my new apartment, and this will serve as my workspace this weekend. Look, there’s even a plant! (although, I gotta admit, it’s plastic)

I would just like to pronounce my intent to participate in the upcoming ludumdare. Provided that this week does not turn into chaos, of course.

Having recently installed a trial version of Unity3D, i’ll be attempting to use it for the competition. Luckily the trial period lasts well beyond the weekend, so I should be covered there. Using this middleware will help me tremendously in both getting to create the gameplay faster, and (more) importantly actually making other people able to play with it. Both of these points have been very limiting factors for me in previous lds, so I hope that using Unity3D will make it much smoother

I’ve got it setup so that I can use Visual Studio for all code writing (seriously, auto-complete/intellisense is necessary to be efficient), and i’ll be using Photoshop/Blender for other asset creation.

Bring on the theme-voting!

As the title suggest, i’m gonna give up this battle. I was not really prepared for a real ludumdare-weekend, so getting started took longer than it should have and I didn’t manage to maintain a steady progress.

Anyways, here’s a short video of what I produced. It’s not much, and certainly isnt a game, but it did make me realize that I need to prepare more for the next big one. And I learned how to make lasers, and sounds to match! (yay sfxr)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjoG7ja74N0

Here’s a progress shot of what I have so far. I’m not totally into the game idea, but i’ll see if I can continue until it reaches at least a playable state.

It’s supposed to be a game about mining asteroids/stuff using your spaceships’ super-heated laserbeam.

I’m not entirely happy with the looks of the spaceship, but since it takes me forever to make anything (except asteroids) in blender I’ll probably skip that to gain more time for game mechanics.

Peace.

Here’s a little bit of video from the final build, since so many seem to not be able to run it. I tried running this on the various machines I have at my disposal, and they all ran it fine. So i’ll chalk the crashes up to people missing .NET/XNA binaries. Nothing new there

Video, lookie!

Got around to adding some gameplay in there, so I think it’s alright to call it a game now

POST-FINAL EDIT:

I understand some are having difficulties understanding how to play it, so here’s a few key tips:

• You have 3 unique battle pieces at your disposal; namely Melee (sword), Ranged (arrow) and Defend (shield)
• In certain levels you have a barracks at your disposal. It can produce a piece with X units every turn.
• You need to wipe out every enemy piece before it kills yours off, or reaches the opposite end.
• The wall (red pieces) only has one action (move forward), and cant defend itself.
• The damage a piece does is represented by the number seen below its icon in the turn-queue. (except the wall, which shows the total units the wall has split over its pieces)
• Some pieces does extra damage in certain situations (e.g. when a defender retaliates)

Video!

Download

This morning I realized that I had not really thought the gameplay through before jumping into the tech implementations, and as a result of that the game is now in a state where im not sure that I can save it. I’ll keep going today though, and hopefully i’ll get struck by some ideas that’ll help the game turning out as an actual game!

Anyways, here’s another progress shot:

Some additions since last night:

• Queue displaying whos turn it is
• Simple text fade-animation whenever a piece loses or gains units
• New icons for some of the pieces

So, as i’ll be wrapping up for the day I thought i’d share a progress screenshot, enjoy:

Still not sure whether or not this will be any good. My goal is that it becomes a turn-based strategy-ish thing where you need to kill off the enemies (the wall of red pieces) before they wipe you out. The AI is pretty much just a Column++ each time it’s the enemys turn, so that’s one thing fully implemented at least!

So, like always, I think up a way too ambitious game mechanic and fail to realize it before its too late

Anyways, the above shot shows my progress so far. Every graphic is placeholder, and basically all there is to the game at the moment is controlling the arms of an undersea-monster. I spent pretty much the entire first day just tweaking the physics parameters, and im still not satisfied

Aw man, i’ve just been lacking inspiration this entire weekend, and it does not seem to get any better. So i’m going to cut my losses and call it quits now. I really hate doing that, but I just can’t see it happen this time.

I did make a little thing, though. It has zero gameplay, but it does have a bunch of pretty snowflakes trickling down the screen. Hopefully i’ll be more into it for the next mini!

Download

Requires the usual bad guys:

XNA FX3 and

.NET 3.5

Oh boy, this one was rough.. THE TOWER?! I think I started out with that in mind, but I guess I kinda lost touch with the theme somewhere a long the way. Although I do keep the sense of heights (with the skyscrapers/roof and such).

Anyway, after a couple of huge coding sessions, here’s what I finally have to show for it:

YouTube

Vimeo (<3)

MUY IMPORTANTE:

You need all kinds of sweet stuff to run this bad boy:

• updated directx
• .net 3
• shadermodel 1.1 (and hw support for scaled pointsprites, i think)

So, yeah.. I hope there’s at least one windows dude out there

DOWNLOAD

EDIT:
It would appear that it might crash if you don’t have any XNA redist installed. The problem lies with the non-opensource physics library that I chose to use; it tries to find the required xna dll’s through whatever-its-called-place where redist dll’s are placed, instead of using the dll’s i shipped locally with the exe. So, only solution is to install one of the XNA redists. What a mess.

More visuals:

More progress shots! Wee!

mid-day1

Here’s what I have to show so far. It’s supposed to take place on a rooftop where you direct the wind in ways that will make it blow crates over the edge.. and quite possibly end up killing people and the occasional owl at the bottom of the tower.

Finally done, here it is!

Do not be afraid to shake it up, shake it up, sha..

The entry can be downloaded from here:

Download

Watch capture (stream)
Watch capture (xvid)

Requirements:

.NET 3/3.5
XNA 2.0

up2date DirectX dll’s

Here’s some of the latest models:

In other news, I suck at composing music so I have made sure that people can turn it off in my game.