I had every intention of submitting something for LD22, but as often works out I’m usually busy on weekends and this one was no different.  So I’m bowing out.  I might get something done for the jam, but we’ll see.

I probably won’t get this entered in to be judged,  but we’ll see.  It took me 3 hours to get that little pink block to move around, that’s because I was building sort of a scripting language, you might say (yes in AS3)

http://www.gamesafoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/EverybodyWantsYou1.swf

Anyways I think the “script” code is kind of neat –
npc01 = new CNonPlayerEntity(11 * 8, 8 * 8);
npc01.patrolScript.push(new CPatrolCommand("east", 3, 6));
npc01.patrolScript.push(new CPatrolCommand("wait", 1));
npc01.patrolScript.push(new CPatrolCommand("south", 3, 5));
npc01.patrolScript.push(new CPatrolCommand("wait", 1));
npc01.patrolScript.push(new CPatrolCommand("west", 3, 6));
npc01.patrolScript.push(new CPatrolCommand("wait", 1));
npc01.patrolScript.push(new CPatrolCommand("north", 3, 5));
npc01.patrolScript.push(new CPatrolCommand("wait", 1));
npc01.QueueNextPatrolState();
add(npc01);


It may not be brilliant to you, but to me it’s pretty neat. Basically the only commands or directions it recognizes right now are north, south, east, and west, as well as wait. second command after wait is the wait time in seconds, otherwise it’s a measure of speed, the third command is distance in tiles. You want it to move back to the original position, you need to use the same distance as you did when you got there. this makes one complete circle. before starting all over again.

For LD #22

I haven’t figured out if I will be able to participate.  I will try to make a good-faith-effort though.

Second “1-day” prototype for my 12 single-month games for 2012.

Turret Gunner.  Z,X,M for rotate ccw, rotate cw, shoot respectively.

Final version (final 1-day prototype version) on the bottom of the post.

Okay it’s not actually my first game.  It’s the first 1-day prototype that I will turn into a single month game come January.

Not really October Challenge worthy but who knows it’s still October.

Wallball

Keep in mind is not really what you’d call a release-worthy game.  It’s just the bare minimum I needed to call the 1-day prototype finished.  The code is going to have to be severely refactored.  I’m going to have to add something in that will make it more gamey or something.  Obviously will need polish, high scores, etc and so forth.

As some of you may know by now I’m setting a goal of making 12 games by the end of 2012, basically one a month.  To facilitate this I set myself a task of coming up with 36 game ideas that I could turn into possible one-month games.  Now I need to decide, and I would like you to help me.  I’m going to go for two rounds, the first round I want to get it down to 24 game ideas, and then finally get it down to the 12 I’m actually going to use.  I will use the ones that receive the most votes.  So I would like to ask you all to vote in the comments and pick the 24 ideas you think could most likely be done in a month and you would think would be fun.  Just by writing down 24 numbers for the ideas you like.  I will wait a week for the first round, and then create a new list of the top 24 games that were voted on (even if they only get a few, I will still do it).  Then I will narrow it down even further, later.  Since this post is going to be long I’m going to put a page break here.  Please read the whole post and vote.  Thanks.  (If I get enough votes quick enough I might even try to get one of these games done for the October Challenge).  Most games will be played on a single screen, which means it’s going to be non-scrolling.  If there are any scrolling games the level will be randomly generated.  Please click “Read the rest of this entry”.

(more…)

One of my goals for the year of 2012 is finishing 12 one-month games. In preparation for that I am going to come up with 36 game ideas, and pick 12 of the best and make 12 1-day games. Then I will expand them into 2-day games. When January rolls around I will expand the first game into a full one month game. I’m going to try to use stencylworks. I probably won’t be competing in the October challenge.

Since some of you suggested I make the games and only worry about polishing any later, I’ve decided to take that advice.  I’ve also decided to shorten the length of each of the prototypes to 1 week or 10 hours.  Yes it’s so little, and yes so little that my first LD catch-up game suffered from the amount of time I didn’t put in.  But I’m thinking it will hone my skills, not to mention not take a whole year to do all 20 themes.  Instead it should be about 2-3 months.  Then I can decide on how and what to improve on.

And unless I get an overwhelming response to this change (from 30 hours to 10), this is my final decision.  If any of you raise any logical objects I will hear them and respond accordingly.

Thanks

Would it be a better idea to do all the LD Catch-ups and just keep doing them until done (about a year and a half’s worth of work), or should I instead continue to work on a single game until it’s viable for release online?  I realize it means getting through all the LD themes in a much longer time span… say 5 years give or take.  (Let’s say I did one game every 3 months).  Would it be better to do 21+ complete games within 5-6 years, or 21+ prototypes in a year and a half?

What are your thoughts?

Now a new LD catchup is upon me so I turn to the Guardian theme.  I’ve decided to spend tonight sort of brainstorming.  I may draw some diagrams some temp-temp art and maybe a mini-design doc, or more like a design outline.  My idea for the Guardian thing may not be new at all.  In fact it’s a take on a well worn game genre, the space invaders type of game.  Well what could you guard in a space invaders game.  The player, “Duh”.  You know those little barriers from the original game that protected you briefly from the shots of the enemy.  Well this time you ARE the barrier and you’re going to protect the “player” which will be some sort of AI-thing.  This game should take approximately 30 hours give or take, but no more than 32 hours.

Final version of LD catch-up #0 – same as in previous post but included here for completeness.

Okay a brief readme:

Who am I?

Keith Weatherby II otherwise known as Uhfgood

What is this?

It’s a game made in 10 hours based on the Ludum Dare #0 (beta) competition with the theme of Indirect Interaction.  It was a 24 hour test compo, and since I have only about 2 hours a weeknight to spare I decided to do this one within a week.  My upcoming games will be about 3 weeks or 30 hours.

The rules are simple move left and right and dodge the rocks.  See how many levels you can pass.

The source code is copyrighted by me as well as all content including the lovely <ahem> art.  Source code is free to use as you like (although I doubt you’ll even care to use it).

It was written with FlashDevelop and the Flex 4 SDK as well as Flashpunk.  The FlashDevelop project with flashpunk is included in the source distribution.

Here’s the source.

Timelapse will be forthcoming.

And now the link to the semi final version – HERE

And now with more game!

Here’s the link to the new demo.  Left/right arrows to move, and avoid the rocks.  Game starts over once ended.

LD00 Demo number 2

Well here it is… the next screen.  This time with rocks!  And a demo

Demo here: http://www.gamesafoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/LD00.swf

Tomorrow I hope to add some sort of gameplay, I guess with time running out, I’m going to make it continually speed up and allow you to hit the rocks thereby restarting.  Or something like that.

Well it took the whole two hours but I finally got a tilemap up and running. The tilemaps in this game are going to be dynamically generated. but at least we have something resembling a river. The first one is the regular screenshot, the second one is an error. I’m using Flashpunk and apparently the tilemap seems to be getting created correctly, or at least the map array is.

This time I added two basic “bank” rectangles (just to show where they are) until I decide what will go int he background. And two cloud images (which are merely two colored rect images, I’ll be updating the images in the coming days). You can actually move this left and right but it doesn’t do much other than that.

I had to actually “re-learn” flashpunk a bit here… but I finally got my first screeny up. What I came up with for indirect interaction is a game like Toobin’ where you navigate rapids in an inner tube. But since you can’t directly control the player, I decided that you would use the winds to change your direction. But instead of an inner tube I decided to use a raft, maybe like Huck Finn traveling down the Mississippi River and you have to navigate things like sharp rocks, whirlpools, waterfalls, dangerous crocodiles and the like. Although I haven’t set up a definite plan for that yet. What you’re looking at is a rough raft graphic (just a brown rectangle) on a blue river (although I plan to change the blue because that’s too much of a sky blue.)

Most of the time I don’t participate in LD’s because I’m usually busy on the weekend.  So I thought why don’t I have my own LD compo.  So I asked some of you how much time you spend on average… so it’s pretty common to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-35 hours of actual dev time.  (Dev time can include planning time).  So I thought how much time can I spare per day, and the answer comes back to me, 2 hours.  Okay so then I ask myself how long, and then answer comes right back to me, 3 weeks.  Actually this was through careful deliberation.  I figure about 30 hours is a good roundabout figure and something I could actually manage if I were to participate in an actual LD.  Of course this presumes using up most of my available time, and 2 good 8 hour sleeps.  I was thinking about also trying on weekends (but this was when I was going to do 2 weeks).  So here’s the plan:

I will go through each LD theme and build one game in about the same time as it takes to do an actual LD compo by spending 3 weeks per game, and 2 hours per night starting around 9:30 pm – 11:30 pm pacific time.  I will not be doing mini-ld’s at this time.  I will more or less follow the rules of LD.  By essentially making everything from scratch, except I will probably use a premade helper library.  I’ve decided I would do these games in flash so I can immediately put them onto IndieFlux in the games section.  Originally I wanted to use the lua-based LOVE engine but instead realized that flash may make it more readily accessible to people.  I’m thinking of actually porting it to LOVE later but we’ll see how this goes first.

And… that’s… it…

Thanks for your advice thus-far (those who I’ve talked to in #ludumdare).  I’m going to start tomorrow (Monday, March 21st, 2011) with the beta ld which was 24 hours, and thus I will do one week (about 10 hours, hope I can make something by then).  (Indirect interaction).  So see you then!

Keith

I would like to know if anyone could tell me about how many hours they actually spend working on their LD entries. It’s not feasible to spend a full 48 hours (although I wouldn’t doubt some have tried) — So we’re looking at at least one night of sleep which is 8 hours approximately — that leaves at the most 40 hours of work time — but you’re probably spending 32-36 hours.

I am going to catch up by doing a game for each of the past LD themes on my own time. I am deciding how many hours total to spend, and it shouldn’t be more or less than a typical LD’er spends on his or her game. I don’t want to do any more than 2 hours a night, and I might not get to weekends. So I’m basically going by the week. If I don’t do weekends it’s 10 hours a week — so at least 2 weeks for a total of 20 hours (although I believe the average LD’er probably spends more time than 20 hours) If I do weekends too it’s aproximately 14 hours a week for a total of 28 hours.

In any case please comment!