What went well:

• Obviously I got good game idea
• Physics turned out well
• Game mechanic was fun
• Interface turned out to be simple, not buggy, etc. For 12h spent it is weird

What well wrong:

• Failed to make more complex graphics because most I tried made it lag fast
• Made mistake of making game time constrained. Should have been some ind of resource constrained. Thing is that most fun is aiming probe well and exploring planet or even few in one show. Time constraint rather made you shot a lot of average shots instead of aiming really carefully which is bad.
• Probably 1/3 of time spend was spent on things that did not work… Would have been good to spend it more on polishing core mechanics and game aims.
• I added only a mouse-wheel based zoom. That was a mistake as Mac users have problems in Flash with that (tough I head Flash player release on 9 December 2009 should have fixed that, can’t confirm)  Also users playing on notebook without mouse had problems too…

What now:

• Well firstly I think I will make one more version of it removing time limit and adding some “probes per planet” limit. Should make it more fun. May be I will try adding a little bit more graphical things.
• As for large game based on idea I think I will but it on hold. Needs a lot of content and thinkering on technical sides of it(there are some). Exploring idea for enemies and war, AI, etc. I have some other game ideas that have less of such complications so for time being I will not make it in to a full game. In time being I welcome anyone to try and make their versions of the idea Just bother to send me a note/mail. Would like to see it  and play it
• Need to add alternative to mouse zooming.

Longer version of how it went

Day 1.  Well woke up and read the theme. Started brainstorming for ideas and (more…)

Screenshot

So yeah here is first screen shot I am posting.You can see sun, two colonized planets, and 3 other planets that are not yet colonized + many moons

Progress

Unfortunately I am bit tired from long week + have many other things piled up from week so I had only some 8 hours to work on the idea… And it progresses very slowly   Also some technical parts of it gave me problems as I have pretty large maps that should be zoomed out/in a lot and still look well and do not lag… Ending up with pretty simple representation in vectors because of it. Also fog of war without lags took some time and looks very simplistic… Ahh… Anyways I almost finished minimalistic part and will probably switch to doing interface/start menu/game over/help screens soon.

Idea

As I wrote yesterday I went with space exploration theme based on my older idea for a game. It basically is based on single game mechanic of lunching rockets in a solar system with more or less real gravitation physics.

I picked this theme because it scales well and seemed as minimal part of it would not be that technically complicated. Well I was little bit wrong… Anyways at max this idea would give me kind of civilization+rocket physics combo. You have mother planet from which you can lunch satellites to find new planets and explore their environment and territories, then prepare colony ship for some territory on planet surface (say ocean or mountains or something) and start lunching probes trying to land them on the territory you want. When successful you lunch colony ship on the same trajectory, if you miss you loose the ship, if you hit you get new colony which you can then expand getting new lunch site + resources + experience etc etc. You can expand the idea in any direction like adding meteorites, aliens, etc…

And idea minimum would be some more casual game where you need in short period of time to colonize as many planets as possible without any resources/ship types/experience and level up complications. Well in the end I am going for this minimum Other things to do and damn how slow and unproductive I am this time Spending hours on some things worth 15 minutes…. Well at least I will have something playable this time.

Well back to work.

Well in this LD I promised my self to keep things technically simple as usually I spend some 70% of time trying something new. This time I want to reuse some old code/idea and try to keep it smiple.

Well first thing that come to my mind was to reuse this experiment Alone In Darkness So some dark caverns exploration with a twist of not seeing much all the time. Other then that traps, treasures and stuff… Buuut I don’t think that it is such a good idea… Lot needs to be done technically and probably making graphics for it won’t be so simple aether.

Another direction of my toughs was space exploration and I think I will go with that. I had idea for such game for a long time but it is too complex for 48hours so I will be cutting that idea down to simple elements for next few hours and trying to gather some prototype code together too see if has any promise at all. Wish me luck while I wish you all luck with making cool games in next 1-2 days

Well will try to participate. Last time went experimenting with some ideas and was not able to finish a game in time. Rather ended up with some toy.

This time I am not shore how much time I will have and how creative my mood will be so probably if I will try making something it will be simple/small with intent to finish something.

As for tools as usual Flash AS3 + my code, probably will not be using any libs except for may be some Box2D in case theme and game idea will need some solid physics.

Well it is almost 2 o’clock of night here and I need to go to work tomorrow… And still not game

Here is my last result:

So idea was pretty simple after I finished with tuning up my experimental water physics… Game would be called something like A.W.C.A.F.I.T or Asteroids.With.Caverns.And.Fuel.In.Them. Idea is that spaceship traveling trough space sometimes stops at asteroids and tries to got fuel from them. Game mechanics are kind of simple. You need to use rotation of asteroid and gravity to bring fluid to place you dig a hole in it.

So as things are now I will not be able to finish it (at least at a level of quality I want) in time so probably I will stay it at that and finish it properly later this week.

For those who are interested in progress here I assembled all 4 versions of my development here. Good luck to everyone who are trying to finish now.

Well since my last post many hours before not much changed… I mean I spent pretty many hours testing some ideas I never got testing with how to simulate particle collisions without checking each colliding particle pair. Those were weird ideas and isn’t it 48h compo a place to test weird ideas Well some idas worked, some did not but here is result I am stopping at. Have spent too much time at it anyways already:

So now I will go eat something and will be turning it in to a game as it is only a toy right now. Considering not much time is left it will be something really simple… Should have been at that stage yesterday and not today heh

Well I remembered that JayIsGames is running another casual game desing competition with theme Explore. It is only for browser-based platforms so it may not be of interest to everyone but to some it will.
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Well here is my breakfast some Solomon sandwiches, Cola and few peaces of Melo

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So it is caverns huh… Before the compo started I was thinking that this theme is not so bad, but it is kind of hard to think of something original where caverns is main point of the game… All originality will probably come aether form game mechanics or from wondering beyond cavern theme but staying in caverns

Well anyways. Have 3-4 ideas and will probably be testing them together today. Then will decide which to finish/polish tomorrow.

So far here:

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Hey guys. Participated two times before and hoping to participate this time too. Not shore that I will finish with something playable tough.

As in previous times will be using Flash. May be some open source physics engine depending on the theme like Box2D. Also may be some of my code libs for user interface and may be physics. Nothing special tough. Doubt it will have any sounds or good graphics as I am no musician or designer but may end up using Photoshop or this srfx(for first time) everyone  is talking about here. Probably will need to test it out on Friday before it all starts.

Well no video Just some time scale of how things went. Well times are not precise but close.

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Okay. Well first two days i was mostly getting feedback and trying to restore my brain to usable state Yesterday started to implement all changes that i hope will make game more fun.

You can still access old version and sources trough links in my Final journal.

And here is new version:

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Ok here is my final entry. It is far from being polished but I am up for 17 hours 12 of which were programming… My brains are messy now

So no sounds, no bunch of planed effects and sleek interface… And output codes may not be forum friendly… Not time to test and debug but mostly game works.

Also sorry for English don’t have willpower to go and check if I did some mistakes and ofcourse there are bugs and glitches

But at least I did everything I wanted from mechanics point of view. Enjoy this game and share bugs and replays here plz.

Image

Links:

EXE file

Browser version

Source FLA and AS files

Well source codes. Half of the time I was waging war with interface which resulted in really messy structure and some bad dependencies. Also I go tired of commenting so I am not shore if it will be of any use to anyone

Used Box2DFlashAS3_2.0.1 and some my utilities of my own

So time for some home made pizza And Heroes series second episode in a meanwhile
So this is Meat/Chease pizza and some ice cold cola for a break from playing with the game.

Considering the progress. Well controller class is ready and game is playable. Now i need to add interface and other game mechanics which can work good only after interface will be ready. Tough i think i will make interface simple for now and will start making making additional features faster(like high scores).

So that’s my breakfast for today Yeah tea and a cookie I think i will go for a walk now and then beck to work on Crystal Towers

P.S I usually only drink tea at breakfast but today i need some strength

Hi there. Well my second time trying to participate in this. Considering that results should be open source decided to try out available for Flash physics engines. Started with APE http://www.cove.org/ape/index.htm but didn’t find it to be even close to game development demands…

Well some 4-6 hours ago started to play with http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net/

Well I must say this engine can a lot. But internally some parts of it look and sometimes even work ugly

So here is screen shot of todays progress:

Basically 70% of game mechanics is ready. Trying to keep things simple cuz last time I failed to finish I have few aces left in my sleeve for tomorrow programming

Well I am new to Ludum Dare so hi everyone.

Wanted to participate this time but now when there is almost no time left and my mini project being far from playable stage… Ehh… But in some way it was fun. I even wrote some weird maze generator. You can see flash version here.

Idea was about “Snake Vs Pacman” where you play a snake in a maze and hunt down Pacman’s which try to run away using some path finding. When you eat Pacman you grow your tale which you can use to block pacmans runaway path. When you eat all the pacmans in a maze a new one is created with narrower corridors and more pacmans. Also there was idea that there may be some mushrooms that makes pacmans enraged for a while so that they can eat of your tail.

Well i made some mistakes in path finding and after 16 hours awake i don’t have any working brain cells left… May be i will upload this bugged version tomorrow or latter when i finish it or something.

Good luck to those who are still finishing their game worlds breaking gods 7 day record