Ok, I’m in. I gotta finish painting my apartment this weekend, and the malmö festival is going on, Little more than a week of free live music, and food from all around the world(I tend to stick to mini-donuts). Yesterday I enjoyed CocoRosie and Iron & wine, and today it’s even more. This all adds up to that I might not make a great game, but a 3-hour game-maker game with really basic programmer art (boxes, circles and simple colors) and probably somewhat sucky gameplay and less than perfect theme accordance.

About an hour in I got a basic gameplay and mousebased onebutton control, that probably will be okayish when I go fullscreen.

I’m done, and I’m really tired. See you guys when I’m awake. Then I’ll do apost mortem and see if I’ll post my foodpics. Single day ludum dare was crunchy…

I’m thinking of making a game based on a ladytron song-title “They gave you a heart, they gave you a name”, meaning you play a sa dark charcter/spawn and your goal is to get to the living world, and you wont survive without a heart and a name. You wont be able to enter the living world without the heart and your heart wont survive for long without a body, and everyone knows that a spawn with a name is powerful…

Anyway, I hope that I have enough time, since its walpurgis night and well…

“During the day, people gather in parks, drink considerable amounts of alcoholic beverages, barbecue and generally enjoy the weather, if it happens to be favourable.”

Here is my timelapse:

I was going to add a titlescreen and a gameplayvideo at the end but crappy software stopped me(i should probably go and buy/download premiere as that is the only video software that I’ve used that didn’t suck). I also used youtube audioswap to add some music so that it doesn’t feel like your computer hangs at  hanged when nothing happens.

So I guess my post mortem is don’t look or try to sort your funny pictures collection during ludum dare

With the deadline less than 3 hours away, I’m slightly feeling the panic. Although I don’t have much left to do, I got making the world, and that one is big.

.. and without further ado, here comes pictures of food that I have eaten…

… and the screenshot

Back to coding

Some progress update… With hours to spare I think I actually might finish a gameplay demo this night, despite my urge to sort place all my funny pictures in dropbox and sort them (I got close to 2 gb and dropbox started to complain). I need to get a foodbreak now, since well… I’m hungry But first…

Foodphotos!

And the game screenshot!

Playersprite is almost done, worldsprites needs more work and I haven’t even started on the enemy(evil monkey) sprite.

And yes, the player/hero is partly based on/inspired by Heffer from Rocko’s Modern Life.

Ok, this was my breakfast

Here are my notes so far:

and here is a screenshot:

The player, tiles placement and gameplay code is from my basecode, that I will throw out soon. The only thing that I’ve made so far is a tilemap, but I figured that it’s more fun to show a screen

The tech so far is flex, flashdevelop, flixel & paint.net. I expect to be expanding it with hg, sfxr and audacity before the end of the day.

I got an idea and I’m going to start making it. I’ll be lazy this time and using a previous game of mine as basecode. The first thing I’ll probably do is remove most of the code, all graphics and well… start coding

Here is the warm-up photos that I took yesterday:

And here is my workplace:

I’ll probably be using my laptop, since it got windows, and has some power. The multi monitor setup is running ubuntu and has about 5 year old hardware

After ludum dare, I’m gonna install that nas(the white thing) so that’s why it’s on the desktop.

Edit/update: For those of you who want to follow me, here is the music I’m currently listening to (thanks last.fm) and here is my twitter

I’m in… and I’m not sure what kind of framework or language I’ll be using. I was planning to go with html5 and made some smaller tests, but giving that I couldn’t get sound working in a working state for the stable version of my main browser(the firefox 4 beta is awesome!) I’ll go with the tried and tested. This means, in my case, C++ if I get my current framework to a working state or flixel if not.

I promised a lengthy post and I guess this is it…

This is a screen of my post-compo game, a few things changed. Play, comment and read the full list of changes here.

Today I spent most of my day sleeping and making the post-compo version with a few bugfixes. Next compo, december probably, I’ll use my own chronolapse that will rock, and will be out of my way. I’ll also write a tool or two that compensate for actionscrip not having templates/generics, and add a few base classes that make the flixel game development even faster.

I’ll probably do food shopping on thursday/friday instead as that is taking up too much precious time

The only other bad thing I did was not making the graphics at the start, and instead used temporary graphics for most of the compo. The good thing about this is that I focused on gameplay early on, the bad side is that I spent too much time tweaking and playing the game. With these changes I might have a showable game earlier, allowing me to get feedback from irc/other people instead of post compo feedback; and this good folks, really is the only thing that I want

Food photo times, you know you want to hit more… (more…)

It’s currently 4:51 (am) and my game is completed, you can probably play it online here. Now I’m gonna sleep and then upload more food photos

I’ll probably write a lengthy post-mortem compensating for the fact that I forgot starting chronolapse and my mot using twitter (I’m on a smaller screen than normal so I need that space)

If anyone wonders how I got the name of the game… ask or browse the source

The game is almost in a fully submittable state, however I can’t really show you guys and gals anything since I’m temporarily using graphics from my No More Sweden entry. That will of course change in the following few hours. I’m aiming for a happy coulourful character in a black/dark “full metal alchemist” inspired world that plays sorta like super mario, hopefully I can pull it off

Hit more, for images of what I have eaten this far during the event and (more…)

Good morning, good evening good day or whatever your local time is…

I’m in with a super mario like platformer. I’ll use flixel, flashdevelop, tiled, paint.net, sfxr and my awesome typing speed for the job. Unfortunatley, I’ll be visiting the malmöfestivalen this weekend, and that means that I wont be working on the game after18.00, since then I’ll be listening to free live music

Things that went well:

• The fact that I managed to finish a pretty decent game in a day.
• My first ludum without C++. This time it was gamemaker, and given the time I had I couldnt have made a playable without it. That said, I miss C++, and there are things that would be different if I used it

Things that didn’t

• I have to ban vlc, and stop watching full metal alchemist and other tv-series during development. The game would probably have been slightly better if I didn’t.
• Avoid celebrating the birthdays of family and friends, they keep you back

Feedback response:

Given that I can’t respond to the feedback/comments in the voting system, and it kinda relates to the postmortem, I figured that I would respond to some here as well…

“Would of loved to see some music in the game.” Agreed I’m investigating that at the moment, as sfxr does the sounds I think musagi is a good bet for the music. To bad my music, so far, has given it’s listeners headaches

“it might be easier to use WASD” As far as I know arrowkeys are the only universal system. wasd works on qwerty keywords, but are a pain on azerty. It would be best to default to wasd, and let the user choose it’s settings, or have two settings. Time however stopped that path. If anyone have any better alternatives/quick paths I’m all ears

“cute graphics” – just have to say.. wow! someone likes my programmer art *happy*

Here is the timelapse of my game, I hope you apreciate it as I wrote a 12-line custom c# application to generate input files so that mencoder wouldn’t crash

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxngui36z64

If anything, this shows that watching to many full metal alchemist episodes in one ludum dare, will effect the overall quality of the game

“the Traveling salesman problem” is complete. Made in gamemaker (and fraps don’t detect that) so I don’t have a gameplay video available (yet), exploring other options at the moment…

Anyways, I’ve been bad at posting the usual food pics, so here is all of the pics I haven’t posted..

(more…)

It’s “Islands” theme, and I already got an idea. You’re a traveling salesman and you sell stuff, while trying not to get killed by pirates. It should be a fun game! I’ll be using gamemaker as my weapon of choice as I only got one day.

My breakfast!

Vanilla yoghurt with a taste of strawberry, raspberry and rhubarbs. I added a banana(not pictured) for extra taste!

Candy leftovers

… and some candy leftovers from yesterday. My brothers though Minnie Mouse candy suited me

Tools
Visual studio 2005 express, paint.net, sfxr & Turtoise SVN for development
DestroyTwitter & Chatzilla for community
Firefox, wikipedia & google image search for information gathering

Languages & libraries
C++, sfml2, boost & stl

The good
Retained focus on a easy game and trying to polish it. I originally wanted to do something with a hex-based map, but since I hadn’t done anything close to that, I decided to go with a traditional square based map. I also decided to make a random level making my need for a level editor pretty much null.

The bad
There was no time for polishing.

Missing, but wanted features

• A better gui, with buttons and a in-game tutorial
• More than 2-players game
• Increase the positive reinforcement when picking up treasures, with animations etc
• Computer opponents!
• More treasures, I had plans for some inca gold and some western/money treasure too
• More environments such as rocks/mountatins that you can’t pass, quicksand that forces you to wait a turn and, in general, more pleasing enviromental grahics. I guess once you stop working on a texture, in ludum dare it is finished
• Bonus items, such as binuclear that allows you to see far and lantern that illuminate the area around you.

Xplorer the timelapse

Play and tell me what you think. Linux users should be able to build it as long as they have a c++ compiler, sfml2 and boost on their system. If you run into problems I’ll be happy to help.

I’ll upload a timelapse later this/next week as it’s 02.33(am) local time and I’m getting tired.