Hey guys and girls. I’m up for my third round of Ludum Dare compo, and I’m really looking forward to it!
My weapons of choice for the upcoming battle will be:

• Language: HaXe/NME
• IDE Code: FlashDevelop 4.2.1 (I wanted to use intellij, but FD actually seems to work really good with haxe)
• Graphics: paint.NET or something similar thats free
• Libraries: Apart from NME I’ll use my home-baked entity system I built a couple of months back, full source code on github
• Sound: Probably SFXR if I’ll use any at all… thats really not my strong side so I’ll try to focus on what is

Place:
I will join the meetup in Stockholm/Sweden over at the awesome guys at Goo Technologies, who arranged a public meetup.
Kudos to you guys, looking forward to meeting you!

PPL:
An extra shout out to my mates:

• Nilstastic, who’s going strong for his fifth time – and promises that his game will have a reload button this time!
• Boenah, who’s still a LD-virgin – but has very high expectations after his epic win in the coders vs project managers competition with haxepunk

I predic a heavy code-hangover on monday =)
/Tommislav

Just wanted to write a few notes about my submitted entry “Abandoned”, which participated in LD21 (escape).

You can try the game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2393

First of all, it feels really good to have been able to submit the entry within the deadline. I have to say I’m really pleased with the result.
I had a great time coming up with all the weird artwork (which IMHO looks really good considering that I’m not a particularly good designer/illustrator). I really wanted the game to be creepy… which it is

About the controls I think the basic movement is really good, however the attack is a bit tricky (a tip is to collect a lot of green chrystals to speed up the rotation of the eyeball and just use it as a shield). That specific attack is based on an attack from a game for the C64 (I don’t know the name, and haven’t seen it since about 1989, so its probably just a twisted memory).

I really wanted the game to be more of a bullet hell game, but I designed the level in the last 3 hours and was really tired. Just one more hour would have improved the game a huge lot. Tweaking the position of the enemies and the rate which they spawn their particles.

Anyway, it was a great weekend, and now I have a lot of games to browse.
My thanks to the LD-crew (who struggled with the servers) and all developers who kept inspiring through status updates on the blog and in the irc. I’ll see you again!
/Tommy Salomonsson

Short status report, then right back to work.

I seem to have most basic stuff working in my engine now. I was a bit unprepared, so I had to spend almost 4 hours on getting a really good collision detection, but thats finally done now.

So I have sprites with collision detection. I can create and load maps from a very simple level editor. Scrolling works correct. I have a spriteManager that spawns the correct objects at the correct place (the diamond).

Time to start on the game play =)

Hey everyone. I’m joining LD for the second time, hoping for a better result than last time when I didn’t manage to finish my entry.

I’m feeling a little bit unprepared. I have decided to go with PushButton Engine as game engine since I really like its component based setup, but I’ve only been reading up on it for about a week… =/

I’ve also noticed a few things I didn’t really like with it. It has no support for tilemaps and tiled backgrounds. And it relies on box2d for physics – which I really don’t like. Also, I have noticed that the framerate was a bit jerky.

So I have been modifying the engine a bit. The processManager uses a Timer instead of EnterFrame wich gave a much better impression. And I have been adding my own custom components for reading, rendering and scrolling a tilemap. Its not as perfect/polished/finished as I wish it would be, but its a hell of a start. So as the rules says: here is the modified library, with an example (built with FlashDevelop). Don’t hesitate to contact me (do it through comments on this post plz) if you have any questions about it.

http://www.salomonsson.se/ld21/PBE_modified.zip

Sorry for just making it a zip-file. When its a bit more reliable I’ll probably put it on GitHub.

Tools I plan to use:

IDE: FlashDevelop (miiiight use flash cs5 for animated cutscenes)

Library: My modified version of PushButton Engine (see the rant above)

GFX: Photoshop

Music/SFX: Don’t know. Probably nothing. If I do I might just sing a song (or whistle) in a microphone

Here is a screenshot of my test-app. Animated dude and tiled background. Source code included in zip file above.

Ok, I think I have the basic plot done. It’s time to start writing the engine.

This is my first time working in XNA, so I have no classes or libraries to fall back on. Should have started on something earlier, like spritemanager… yea yea. The whole idea of the competition is to start from scratch anyway =)

I’m gonna go with semi-isometric 3d (kind of like golden axe), and since I’m terrible at graphics I’m going to go with the rough Paint-style (which I find very charming). Early concept below. You won’t play as a Rabbit though =)

Well, there’s a first time for everything, and I’m finally entering LD. Something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time now.

I will also code my first game in C#/XNA, so it’s a double first time. Being an old flasher, and having experimented for a couple of days, I’m pretty hopeful though =)

Tools:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express
• Paint/Photoshop
• Sound:??? Probably as3 sfxr
• Frameworks: XNA, don’t know if I will need any other components…

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to this! See you there =)