The blue dot is you. You will have to help the red dots escape.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=1441

Now, sleep.

Well, sorry old man. Sometimes I confuse you for someone who likes to have fun.

Yeah I have no idea what the black stuff is either. I don’t even know what this place is. It has tiled walls and metal floors. Maybe it’s a hospital or something. Could be a swimming pool for all I know.

Are the floors broken, or is this some sort of bizarro staircase? And why are there two rooms full of spikes on the bottom floor? These are questions that I have about 5 hours left to answer.

Finally! I have made a brief tutorial, and enough elements to let the actual puzzling take place! Granted, it’s not particularly challenging yet, and the graphics could use some work (maybe I’ll throw some flowers in there or something if I have time), but it’s playable!

Also, a new hat. Hats make everything better.

Wouldn’t you like to know what the Space bar does? Mwahaha!

That hat really doesn’t work as well as I thought. Oh well. Bed time now.

In adapting this level from top-down to side-scrolling, I inadvertently gave the old man the ability to fly.

For the benefit of my loyal fans (all 2 of you), I must announce that I have finished the physics side of things, and the game is slightly playable. The red goo sticking to the walls will eventually be replaced by a real tileset.

And in case you were wondering where the sword from the last screenshot went, he’s standing on it.

My first screenshot!

Ignore the nonsensically floating swords and the ugly-as-sin walls. They won’t be in the final build. Probably.

Maybe.

Actually, nonsensically floating swords are a pretty good idea. Hmm…

I’m in. I’m tossing up between Game Maker and Unity for this – probably end up with Game Maker because I’m more familiar with it.

My brother Ben says he’ll be joining in too.

Sorry. The playable build is a lot less fun than I had hoped and a lot harder to tweak. I don’t have time to start another entry. I guess I’ll see you guys for the next miniLD.

That is one ugly asteroid...

My intention is to create a scrolling shooter with very little shooting involved. Instead, you will use a grappling hook (behind the blue ship) to grab enemies and throw them at each other. So far, I have a few graphics, a small physics engine, and no sounds.

It takes some time to get used to the hook’s controls, so I might have to make a way of shooting the enemies instead of throwing them at each other. Or I might not. We’ll see.

Oh, and hopefully there will be some awesome explosions when I’m done.

Click here to watch the video on Youtube.

Barring further posts in which I change my mind again, I am taking part in this LD. I will use Game Maker, SFXR, and possibly HighC  for music.

Here is a picture of my desk with helpful labels:

The straw hat really is awesome.

I will now get some sleep in preparation for the challenge ahead.

This was originally a post announcing my intent to take part in LD48. Unfortunately, I have a prior commitment that I had forgotten and will not be able to come. Sorry.

I may just pick a theme from the list and try to make a game for that theme before LD48. Maybe. Depends on how much time I have.

This is not a game design-related post, nor even a computing-related post, except in a very abstract sense. It is to draw your attention to the fact that a solution to one of the world’s six hardest mathematical problems has been published. It has yet to be checked, and some people believe it may have holes in it, but this is still a very large development in the field.

P!=NP is a statement about the time it would take a computer to solve a certain class of problems: the “NP” class (which stands for “non-deterministic polynomial” if that means anything to you). If it takes a long time to solve a problem from scratch, but a short time to check your solution afterwards, that’s an NP problem. As an analogy, consider a 1,000,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It may take months or years to complete, but if someone claims they have finished it already, it only takes a second to check if they are telling the truth. The question is whether such problems exist (P!=NP), or whether there is always a simple way to solve them from scratch (P=NP). This question may seem very abstract, but it has a lot of important applications – such as optimising computer networks or creating secure encryptions.

Examples of famous NP problems include the Travelling Salesman problem, which is to find the shortest route through a city while passing everyone’s door at least once (this city may have overpasses and tunnels), the Knapsack Problem, which is how to fit the most value into a knapsack when you have a number of objects of known price and size, and solving many popular puzzles like Sudoku or Minesweeper. The paper at www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/Papers/pnp12pt.pdf concerns itself with the Conjunctive Boolean Satisfiability problem, which asks whether a list of logical statements can all be true at once. It asserts that the amount of time it would take a computer to solve such a problem increases very quickly – faster than any polynomial function of the problem’s complexity, in fact. If the proof turns out to be correct, Vinay Deolalikar may just have won a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute.

A number of blogs and magazines have already published links to this article. I thought you might be interested as well.

Earlier today, I googled my game Jump Pirate (hoping somewhat optimistically that had been reviewed as some other entries were) and I found a page for it on Softpedia with 56 downloads. This surprised me, as I had never before heard of Softpedia and I certainly hadn’t submitted anything to them. Yet there it was, under my name no less.

Further investigation showed that no less than 18 games I had placed on the YoYo Games website had been promoted on Softpedia, all without my knowledge or consent. I’m not sure how many other LD participants are concerned, but dock’s Turtle Ferry was also available for download.

Some of you may consider this a good thing – as you are right to, since Softpedia is a popular website and your game will be downloaded more if they feature it. I personally consider that they are benefiting from my work without my consent. I don’t mind YoYo Games advertising on my game’s page, since they maintain the tools I use to create games and the forums I use to discuss them, but anyone else is a no-no.

(Personally, I am on shaky ground with some of my earlier games, since I included a license agreement that specifically granted the player the right to distribute the game. Now that that clause has actually been invoked, I’m considering removing it. My own stupid fault though.)

Anyway, what do you think about this whole tangled issue? And are your games available anywhere without your consent?

I have completed 18 propositions which my miniature Ludum dares. I call it Flying Cow’s Risk And Missile. It is about a cow’s competition and a missile’s airplane. You must hit the missile to destroy them by the airplane, so that the innocent person has not been injured. The cow in English is not very good, please forgive him. Now goes! Your country is in need of you!

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?mz0wnnwnkmj

Click here for the ZIP folder that contains my cows. And my aliens. And a couple tilesets. And a helicopter-ish thing with no visible engine that appears to be powered by fairy dust.

I can’t get embedded video to work, so click here for linky.

This is not a timelapse video (that one’s here)This is a video of the last and hardest part of the entire game, just to prove that it can be done (and to refute the naysayers who say it’s impossible). There are even a few flowers that I don’t collect in this run – they’re just there to make it a bit easier. Yes, you heard that right.