Hello fellow survivors (or survivors-so-far, where applicable) of various holidays, yule-tide celebrations, mid-winter feasts, and zombie infestations.

Since LD16 I have done some additional work on my entry, “Ruins”. (And thanks to everyone who’s commented on the entry!) A lot of what I’ve done has been technical and a bit behind-the-scenes, but I wanted to share a very short (3 room) demo I’ve put together of both a new mechanic for the player and several smaller features of the engine.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can find it here:

http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/ruins-demo-1220/

(This is more of a tech demo than a “game” — you can “win” by completing all three rooms, but there aren’t any gems to collect or any leaderboards to deal with.)

And here’s a couple of quick screenshots:

From a gameplay point of view, the interesting change in this demo is the addition of a brief (about 6 seconds) period of time after dying during which you can exist as a spirit. During this spirit existence you can still interact with objects like levers and switches, but you are immune to damage and cannot attack. If you’ve created a “Patch of Life” before dying, and you reach it as a spirit before your 6 second time limit expires, you will be restored to life.

(more…)

I have a feeling the scope of my idea for this LD (tentatively called “Ruins”) is way, way too broad, but here’s a screenshot from the last few hours of tinkering with the latest version of flixel (and an hour of mind numbingly drawing mediocre pixel-art leaves), and a picture of my first and second meals of the compo (…they really were both identical arrangements of pizza and wings — I promise you’re not missing anything exciting by just having a picture of one of the two):

So far the player can wander around, jump over things, and shake mangoes out of trees; and since it’s 4 AM for me now, I’m somewhat reluctantly calling that “good progress” for the first night ;p