Sismicos team from Spain is IN for the Jam!

Introducing Jose “I-Dont-Believe-You” Cámara, youngest brother and expert programmer:

Suspicious Programmer

Introducing David “5-More-Minutes-Please” Cámara, fine artist and forum troll:

Sleepy Artist

Introducing myself, Alejandro “Grumpy-Errand-Boy” Cámara, helping with the programming, graphics, tea, coffe, and food:

Grumpy Errand Boy

Working in our hidden headquarters with the latest technology:

We aim for the WIN!

• Programming: Java with our custom engine build on top of the excellent libGDX.
  
• Graphics: Gimp, Photoshop Elements, or whatever.
• Sound: Still no idea… SunVox if we find time…

Good luck to all!

Hey everyone!

How are you faring at your last hours? Did you all come out unscathed?

We are David and Alex (soy_yuma) and we manage to finish our first-jam game which can be played and rated HERE!

Quarks vs Leptons!

How it went

Our team didn’t start exactly well: half the programmers -and that’s out of 2!- were unavailable due to sickness -yeah, go figure- and at some point in the beginning we came close to a food poisoning case, but somehow we did survive, and I daresay the outcome isn’t bad at all for us considering we’re greener than our muons! (inside joke, please play the game!)

Being my first jam, and not a coder myself, I might’ve pushed too far my poor brother, who had to do all coding job himself, but I kept getting too many ideas for gameplay, story and everything, and it was frustrating to push them aside. Moreover, at the end we never skipped the sleep because we both had to work today (thus we’ve lost like 30 totally useful hours) so the game has strived from the original idea a lot. But I guess this is what it is about!

Anyways, it is done, and it is up. Please try it and laugh a bit if you will, either at the physics nerdism (with quarks and leptons all along, please review Quarks and Leptons for more info) or the queer noises, and forgive us for the music, for it was randomly generated.

What went right

The outcome is quite nice, and we are particularly happy with:

• The team logo. We laughed a lot about setting up the apish voices.
• The lore. I was content with how we managed to agree with the idea of quarks and leptons so easily, without quarrels (please note that both of us are physicists), and it all fitted somehow. Curiously enough, it also fits the previous theme (alone) like a glove!
• How it all fitted together. Surprisingly enough, after the first 24h the game was already better than we expected, but once we put the music and sounds and more guns, well, we couldn’t believe it was our work!
• The sounds. Really, it was a mood raiser to use the ipad to record a few sounds and then tune them with Audacity. Totally recommended!

What went wrong

The features that didn’t finally fit in the game due to time issues are the following:

• Start with only a quark of your choice, grab the rest as you progress, and add guns as you go (up to two at the same time). Get hit and lose one randomly -> in-game: have all 6 from the start with all their “guns”
• Obstacles in the level -> in-game: only bottom and top obstacles, all of them with the same form
• Special combos: each of the 15 two-quark combos would have an special attack. For example, the spiral-frontal gun and the drill one could combine into a giga-drill-breaker for uber-epicness -> in-game: no specials
• Ending: you would finally reach the electron after defeating quite an army, and the end cutscene would pop, which I’m not going to spoil -> in-game: sad To Be Continued screen

What we would change

Finally, what we’d change if we ported back to three days ago:

• Get more programmers: one was definitely not enough for a group of two. We came to too many ideas and too little time to set them up. Also, whenever it came to discussing the coding would get paused.
• Invest more time in the set up prior to LD: I lagged a lot finding a proper music randomizer, and then I had to convert the output from midi to mp3…
• Find a way to stop time!

To sum it up… shump! That’s what the game is, your old-school horizontal shoot’em’up, with a few guns and sadly just two types of enemies. There’s a tiny bit of lore, which I hope you also enjoy. Ignore the poetry, it wasn’t really there, and have fun! We certainly did making it

{David and Alex} Cámara

Ahoy there!

Hey buddies! Yet another April, yet another LD, right?

Last December was my first, and my entry was an isometric puzzle game a bit too rough on the gameplay (can play here), so this time I’m gonna try and aim for the best gameplay I can offer!

I’ll have my brothers’ help too -although one is sick and his participation is still in doubt- so hopefully the outcome will be much more pleasant.

We’ll be using:

• Java with libGDX or LWJGL+Slick-util
• SunVox for music
• PyxelEdit and Photoshop Elements for art
• Tons of coffee, coke, and tea (mixed together)
• TEH unofficial Ludum Dare Survival Kit (see picture attached)

Good luck everybody! And try and don’t starve nor get stuffed with too much pizza!

May the power of kitties guide you!

I finished my first complete game ever in this Ludum Dare!

Screenshot dump!

I’m afraid I had more fun developing it than anybody will get by playing it (it’s sad but realistic). If you to give it a try I’ll leave some links:

• Play/Rate the game here (link).
• Game source code in Mercurial repository (link).
• Development blog in Posterous (link) (I didn’t want to saturate Ludum Dare’s blog posting there, but now I realize that was a mistake).
• Timelapse of the entire process (link).
• Some Link I found on Internet (this pun cost me the 10 game-developer followers I had in Twitter)
  

Just in case anyone makes a kitten compilation of LD 22 (wink, wink) I leave mine here to make free use of it (it is really ugly and small though).

Hey there!

This is my very first #LD48, so I’m really excited about it! I’m afraid I’m only here for the cookies because I have never finished making any game, but I wont let that prevent me signing in TEH competition.

I’d try to post updates over Twitter (@soy_yuma) and/or my Posterous blog.

My weapons are:

> Programming: Java (using Eclipse IDE) with LWJGL, the (deprecated?) Slick-Util library (not the whole Slick2D library), and some personal basecode (see [1]).
> Graphics: The Gimp or Paint .NET (depending if Gimp sucks more than usual). I will be using the pixelated font I created in FontStruct (pixel).
> Sound: DrPetter’s sfxr (I do know nothing about music)

[1]: The basecode I’ll use is something I’ve been building when learning the basics of game software design. You can download the full source code, along with further updates, in my public bitbucket Mercurial repository.

Best luck to all! Show us some good games!

Yuma

EDIT: Update graphics as I’ll be using a font I already made (I hope that’s not considered cheating).