So anyway. I only had about 5 hours to work on this one, a couple hours in the evenings, as we had guests over and stuff like that.

I woke up, checked the theme, and thought about it. What is “alone”, really? Absence of other people who are supposed to be there. I thought about making a game where you’re living a normal day, think you see people, but when you go there, they’re a mirage or something. But that would have been a massive content load and doesn’t really have any point..

So I thought about.. what if we hold a party.. and nobody came?

While doing some babysitting, I used some crayons and drew art for a maniac mansiony game. Sort of. Very simplified.

When I got time to actually work on the game, I scanned these in, created one wide texture in photoshop, placing all items where I wanted them, and then blew up the graphics using my Koalizer filter (which can be found on my site) and destroying the resolution.

It looked better while windowed, but I always planned the game to be played fullscreen. In retrospec, 160×100 pixel resolution MIGHT be a bit too little for modern audiences..

Anyway, during the first couple hours I got all of the above done, plus loaded up in OpenGL, with a person walking and you could click on things and it would say things about the clicked things. But there was no game.

It’s strange, but I got really stressed about this project, enough that it affected my sleep. I’ve never gotten such things from LD games before. And I’ve thrown in the towel more than a couple times, and it’s not a biggie.

Anyway, I decided to go with a look/use interface, with a couple cutscenes. You’d do things and eventually hit the bed, as nobody came, and reach game over. Designing a few (short) action chains you have to go through and hacking them in (and they are a hack!) took most of the rest of the time.

So there it is, for what it’s worth – hope you have more fun with this game than I’m expecting you to =)

So here’s my entry, Worst Birthday Ever. The zip (link in image above) contains C/C++ sources and win32 binaries. Done in about 4.8 hours.

Bonus feature: launch with a parameter for windowed mode.

Can walk around, and click on things to get descriptions and stuff. I’m 37.5% confident I’ll get something together. Heading off to bed, and I’ll probably have around 2-3 hours to work on this tomorrow. Maybe it turns into a game? We’ll see.

This is 70% mockup – everything’s rendered through opengl and most (if not all) art is loaded as textures, just the whole game is missing. I’ve worked on this one for about 1.5 hours now, and if I’m lucky I’ll have another 2.5 hours left. Not feeling too motivated at the moment, but we’ll see.

I wrote a simple particle system editor.

http://iki.fi/sol/thingamagic/

win32 binaries and sources there. Have fun.

I don’t claim it’s bleeding edge in any way or form, but hey, maybe someone finds it useful.

Here’s an oversized picture of it to annoy you:

..the visual editor is white on white text on both firefox and chrome, preview doesn’t work.. neither do most of the buttons.. let’s see what ahppens on ‘publish’ =)

EDIT:..gah, of course my bbcode doesn’t work here, so.. deal with it. This isn’t even in the October Challenge 2011, but I can’t remove that category from the post. yay!

EDIT:..okay, managed to get the html editor on, even though it doesn’t SEEM to be on, so I fixed the links. Enjoy.

Seriously, let’s retire the “humour” category. There’s some games that try to be funny, but there’s even more games striving for a certain kind of mood – dark, scary, relaxing, whatever.

I’ll just throw this one in here. In case someone is interested, I’ve recently released a dialog tree middleware (engine and tools), free to use. If you decide to give it a spin, toss me a mail afterwards. I’m interested in any comments regarding any good and bad experiences with it for further development.

http://iki.fi/sol/d3/

^ tools and sources there, along with tons of docs. Engine is in c/c++, but concept is easy to figure out and the tool outputs xml and json too.

And while I’m posting, be sure to read my ludum dare survival guide too at http://iki.fi/sol/ldsurvival.html.

Evolution - You Know What To Do

Isn’t it time for “evolution” to win?

If it wins, we finally get to see what kinds of games people make with the theme.

If it wins, it’ll never again be in the voting lists.

Go evolution, go!

Thought about the theme a lot. Honest, I did. Eventually I had an idea of having an AI companion with you (as it’s dangerous to go alone), which was more or less like walking a dog. Dog is interested in some things you don’t like (like stopping to sniff at things) and would fight for you (you, on the other hand, couldn’t fight). So you’d have to drag the dog kicking and screaming along across some bits. But that’s about it. Some basic game mechanics (things that attract / detract the dog), but the actual game idea was missing.

I toyed around with the code a bit, but I really wasn’t feeling too hot about the whole thing, so I threw the towel early on, and went to watch megamind instead.

A couple hours ago I got an idea for a joke, and built it very quickly. It’s such a stupid joke that I won’t be submitting it as an entry, but here it is for your (questionable) enjoyment. Win32 binaries only. The game freezes when you reach the joke, so don’t be surprised.

Has someone downloaded all the games yet and ready to host a torrent of them? That would save a lot of time from a lot of people..

I’ve done it a few times, but I don’t have the time now.

Updated my entry in-place with version 1.1. Changes:

• Tuned gameplay a bit
• Three modes: quick, normal and zen
• Quick is pretty much the same as the 1.0 version was
• Music bits don’t trigger quite as often anymore

This one’s final. I think.

Just submitted my entry, but here’s the data about it anyway.

Night of the Muglies

You’re, like, in a forest, and hunt muglies with your flashlight. All you need to do is point your flashlight around. No clicking required.

I’m particularly happy with the audio side this time, as it’s the first time I’ve used my audio equipment. Whee! Too bad I don’t know how to make music, but well.. it’s the feeling that counts, I guess.

You can also grab the game, the zip includes win32 binaries and source code. The sources need SDL, SDL_Mixer and GLee to compile. I’m fairly certain they will work as is on linux and/or osx.

I’m off to an amusement park tomorrow, so I doubt I’ll be updating this further. Have fun!

So. Got a few more moments, so I finished basic gameplay and added a menu. This is RC1; if I find more time there’ll be sound as well. Comments appreciated =)

hide n seek shot #2

Oh, and the RC1 can be downloaded here (win32 binary only, sorry)

Got a couple hours in, so here’s a shot of my progress. We’ll see if I find the time to finish this. Probably have around 3-4 hours here and there which I can devote to this. Fingers crossed..

Hide n seek shot #1

Don’t have time to participate, sorry. Too much social pressure.

If I had entered, it would have been a spin on this classic:

Robots

Anyway, I’ll hang on the channel every now and then. Have fun!

So, here’s my totally expected reminder yet again; I wrote these “survival rules” for LD some years ago. If you’re new to Ludum Dare, be sure to check it out.

http://iki.fi/sol/ldsurvival.html

(Tried to play around with wordpress, managed to mess up this post, so that’s why you’re seeing it again. Apologies)

So, plenty of people are breaking the rules. Using pre-made content, not releasing sources, doing a team effort.

When LD started, originally, the rules were really loose – not set in stone at all. It was more about the feeling – if you feel like you’re cheating, you’re cheating, that sort of thing. Later, when things progressed, and LD grew bigger, the rules became more defined (and in some cases, unfortunately, slightly conflicting).

The more rules, the less likely it is for people to actually read them. As an example, here you can read the final ruleset of the TMDC contest I organized for about a decade. Lots of rules. Strict rules. Rules that define things exactly. Rules most people didn’t bother reading. Rules someone always complained about.

Which leads to this LD – and folks not releasing sources. The rule is there for several reasons. Primary reason is for people to check what you’ve done, maybe learn something. I don’t know how many people do, but that’s it anyway.

If you fear someone is going to steal the code you made in a rush in a weekend, you’re simply delusional. You’d be surprised how difficult it is to get people to use your GOOD code =)

Free code isn’t free. Just take any random third party library; you’ll find it takes time to figure out what it does, how to use it, and what the limitations are. And this is for code that’s designed to be used by third parties. Code, that’s not designed to be looked at ever again, written by you, in a weekend? Please.

So anyway, I’d propose we design a very small set of simple rules that are easy to understand, and then have a bunch of clarifying rules based on those. For instance:

• 48 hours, clearly defined start and end in a certain timezone
• Solo competition – everything must be done by you.
• All graphics and audio must be done from scratch. Fonts are ok, but only for text.
• All source code and content must be released, along with binaries.
• Pre-existing code is ok, as long as:

1. it’s available for everyone
2. it’s available well in advance (say, 2 weeks?)
3. it doesn’t contain any gameplay code

Now, we could debate forever about just about any rule there:

• Is it fair that the 48 hours fit some timezones better than others?
• Is everything done by you if you record sounds by some other person (with or without them knowing)?
• Is the graphics done by you if you take photos?
• Why can’t we use font ‘A’ character as the spaceship? (seriously, what’s the harm?)
• If you record your synthesizer that you bought with big bucks, is the sound “from scratch”?
• <insert any other edge you might get by buying fancy toys to do content with>
• What, exactly, is gameplay code and what isn’t? Is menu code ok? Is my level-data-specific A* ok? Is state machine code ok?
• etc.

And if we go back to “if it feels like you’re cheating, you are”, well.. different folks’ threshold for feeling guilty about these things are different, and the bigger LD grows, the more varied it becomes.

Someone suggested LD should have different categories for different things, like team efforts etc. I’d say no. If you want to, set up another event – it’s not rocket science! And if you don’t like the rules, nobody is forcing you to enter.. or if they are, please do tell us about it!

For transparency, I’ll mention that I did not do an entry this time. No time, sorry.

Well, tried to hack something together based on a nutcase idea, but giving up. Sorry!

On the positive side, you have one game less to judge =)

So, it would seem I might have some time tomorrow. Bad side is, I haven’t been able to think of anything sane so far. One insane idea does keep popping up, so I might do some research towards whether that’s plausible or not.

As the magic 8-ball might answer to the question whether you’ll see an entry from me; forecast hazy, check again.