Waking up just an hour ago, i was a little disappointed in the theme.. “Alone” – oh well, i guess the idea is to get you out of your habits, right?

After brainstorming for a while I have decided on an exploration/puzzle solution for the theme. In the style of puzzle games, like Myst, but a bit (read: a lot) more straight forward. Thinking what I could do differently that the Myst series, i remembered that you cannot carry items for usage (at best you can have a picture of the item), so there it is:

You’re on a lone island trying to solve “puzzles” that involves a lot of object scattered around the place. Of course, you can only carry a few at a time.

I hereby declare my intention of participating in the 22nd Ludum Dare. I have participated once before, here. I’m very excited about participating once again, and have therefore, and have therefore been mentally sharping my knives, over the past week!

When I last participated I made a couple of mistakes that you guys helped me realize and this Ludum Dare my main focus will be to get these straight:

• While both are important, a solid gameplay is far more important than interesting mechanics.
• User input must be SIMPLE, SIMPLE, SIMPLE – if I, the creator can barely use the controls, then strangers to it will be utterly confused!
• Despite my coder set of mind (I enjoy ASCII Roguelikes), correct usage of graphics actually matters a lot to the gameplay. Improper use of graphics will mess with the users’ perception of size and depth.
• With only 48 hours, every minute matters – the idea must be simple. Does “Shooting laser through enemies to mix colours, thus killing other enemies” sound simple to you? Wrong, it’s not simple enough.
• Hide that mouse cursor if you don’t use it to point, it makes people sea sick!
• Don’t use MIDI instruments. Good sound is more important than melody and why even measure it like this when you can have both?

Additionally, from my warm up game I was once again reminded to include instructions INSIDE the game!

With that in mind, here’s the list of tools that I intend to use:

• Unity
• Fruity loops
• Audacity
• Bfxr
• Maya
• Sculptris
• Freemind
• The Internets

I will be recording a timelapse with Cronolapse. Happy Ludum Daring everyone!

Not that anyone watches these, but here goes

Some of you were having problems figuring how to play my game because of the complexity and the lack of tutorial, so here’s a two parted video of me playing it:

Part 1

Part 2

Anyone know how to do a youtube embedding? (i promise to be a nice boy and put it after the more tag!

So my colour game is pretty much done.

ARH!! THEY'RE COMMING!

Sadly i wont have time for making a tutorial level, so here goes:

• Walk with WASD
• Look with Mouse
• shift to fire colour beam
• space to lob “droplet” enemy into the air
• Choose fire color with Q, 2 and E to get Blue, Green and Red respectively.

kill enemies by firing a beam of matching color into them. shoot both eyes of the “walkers” to destroy them. shoot your beam through an enemy of a any color to mix the two colors and thus being able to take out other colors than your standard Red/Green/Blue. When in doubt of color mixing, look at the paddle you for guidance.

The goal is to defend the big flowerish thing in the middle.  the “droplets” wont hurt it very much, so don’t worry TOO much about them. They’ll hurt you though. go close to the flower to heal. take note that you’re draining its health by doing so. The big “walkers” will take a huge bite out of the flowers health if they get a chance.

Play here:

• Win: www.zigs.dk/resources/files/unity/colour_win.rar
• Mac: www.zigs.dk/resources/files/unity/colour_mac.zip
• Web: www.zigs.dk/resources/files/unity/colour_web.html

Can somebody confirm that the mac version works? Any comments, rants, horror stories welcome.

todo:

• sound
• graphic cues
• optimize
• bug hunt
• music

probably not gonna have time to do music, to be realistic.

Edit: I’m also in need of a name…

Frame of my game is pretty much done. Basically you have a “gun” or whatever, which shoots colors.  red, green and blue. There are enemies of the same colors, and you have to match the color to kill them. but wait, that’s the easy part. There are also  magenta, cyan and yellow enemies, and you for instance have to shoot your light blue light through a green (or green through blue) to finish the cyan ones. In addition there are also orange, crimson, violet, cobalt, turquoise, lime and white enemies, and you’ll have to combine your beam with more enemies to get rid of them!

Red ray + Cyan enemy = White ray.

the next part of the game is making a simple AI chaser, and a level “director”  along with something to protect in the middle of the map. I’m pretty happy with the color system, though, when you combine the “3rd” set (orange, violet etc) of colors you always get gray, which is the only loose end.

If things goes well I might even make an entertaining game, who knows I’m hoping to add slower but tougher (maybe they have two colors or something) enemies. but can’t say if there will be time for that.

I’m off to watch the outsides now though. been working 12 hours straight. weird part: I’m in a great mood! go ludum dare!

Edit:

Some air did me great. my plan for the rest of the day (putting it here so that i wont be able to lie to myself or procrastinate!):

• eat + coffee
• concept “art” (using the term loosely) and modeling. hopefully i will get a nice butt ugly city
• code the chaser AI and the level/AI director.
• Sleep (This is important!)

I’ll join the workspace picture fad:

I like it in the darkness! Also, how on earth can you guys work without desk space to rest your arms on?! You gotta teach me that some day, cause I surely can’t. Also, here’s my mascot:

I love him to the very core where he stores my coffee. Well, Coffee is for later, I’ll get some sleep and see you guys in the morning about 3-4 hours into the dare!

8 hours to go, and what’s this? Joining with tradition of posting food pictures, I present to you my tasty dinner for the weekend (and today for that matter):

This:

Became this:

And This:

mmmm *drools all over my monitor*

I figured that I’d join this ludum dare, having been curious about it for a while.

Okeay, to dive right into my well of thoughts: Was I a bit more experienced, I would probably go with C++ or at least python – I know how there has been some discussion whatever if game engines are fair play. The way i see all this though, it is that it’s all about what kind of cup you are trying to fill. The smaller cups, being the game engines, which of course can’t hold much content. (brick walls, anyone?) The bigger cups are the ones where you go from scratch. It takes much more juice to fill a big cup (which easily can be made up by experience), but the big cups also hold much more, making them the only of the cups people are usually interested in buying. (There are, of course exceptions to this but you get my drift no doubt.)

I feel safer going with the small cup for this one, and for that same reason will I be using either Unity, Flash, MMF2 or Inform7 (not that I plan on Inform7 really, but you know.. should a text adventure be the only reasonable good thing popping into mind..). Regardless of these I’ll be using sfxr, musagi, Photoshop, Audacity and Sibelius. Should I go with Unity, will I also be using Maya and Sculptris as well.

So yeah, in other news – no custom anything. Looking forwards to my first dare and wishes you all the fruitful development during the dare.