Now, there obviously isn’t a prize and the whole rating thing is pretty meaningless, but this sorta bothers me. None of the comments fit that kind of rating, and if you have some complaint to merit such a rating, I think voicing them in the comments would be the nice thing to do… (I’m more than willing to take negative feedback, but a universally negative rating tells me nothing useful).

Here’s my timelapse, for my entry “Fratricide”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNui4u02JK0

I’ll have a postmortem and some general thoughts sometime in the next day or two…

In the meantime, I might make a quick game for the jam too… just got an idea and I have some assets I could reuse.

Alright, finished up my shmup. My attempts at making music for it failed miserably, so I’ve left it music-less… but the gameplay seems to work well enough, and while still shots look sorta iffy, it looks nice enough in motion.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=1503

Turns out that using full 3d physics and graphics engines for a game with entirely 2d gameplay isn’t worth the added effort… ah well lesson learned.

Good luck to everyone still scrambling for the deadline!

9.5 hours left!

Still got a long-ish list of stuff to do, but I think I’ll finish with something reasonably game-like.

Got textures and some simple particle explosions going:

Breakfast

Diet Pepsi (that’s less than half the cans I’ve drank this LD…):

Okay, 26 hours and 30 mins in, mostly feature complete, though I’ll have to tweak the controls a lot to get em just right (gonna have mouse, arrows/ZX, WASD/something, etc to allow for peoples’ preferences). I also need to get the enemy generation running better and add more enemy ship types, but other than those, gameplay is all there. After that it’s just gonna be a mad dash to texture it all up pretty (almost every texture in the shot is placeholder) and add particle effects everywhere.

At the moment I have the enemies’ colors set to their health for debug purposes:

It’s all coming along pretty well, I’ll have some screenshots to show in a little while, but all the physics are finally cooperating… using a full 3d physics engine for a shmup might have been a bit much, but I think it’ll allow for some cool effects when I get to the polishing stage.

Muffins!

And since everyone seems to be posting pics of their cats:

Okay, 9 hours in, gonna sleep now…

I’m making a shmup, it’s 3d (though until I get some nice textures and particle effects going, it doesn’t really look interesting…), and the premise is that you control a cargo ship of some sort with powerful magnet/tractor beam-ish tech, so you can “force push” enemies into each other (I’m using bullet for some fancy physics), or pull an enemy in to use them as a shield and use their weapon to destroy other enemies.

Here’s an early shot:

These seem to be all the rage, so here are my two (!!!1!!@!!) previous entries (the first of which didn’t even get finished on time..)

In other news my engine and test game both compiled and ran in Linux (Arch x64) with minimal tweaking, so a late/post-compo port is likely (and should only take a few minutes).

Also, my theme picks are Isolation, Bugs and Darkness (oh and double zombie rainbows of course!), I voted all others down.

Okay, inspired by the 2hr warm up game idea from IRC, I made a 2hr game based on the best (but sadly downvoted into oblivion) theme “Isaiah Mustafa – The man your game could smell like”.

It was made in a little over 2 hours since I was a bit distracted and getting it all to package up took some finagling (good test of my pipeline though), but here it is:

Windows (Linux may come later)

The goal is very simple (and not terribly fun); avoid the green “Double Rainbow Body Wash” boxes, and collect the red Old Spice ones to reach 100%.

My workspace hasn’t changed all that much since last time, but here’s a pic:

The CRT on the left is to my old PC (usually a headless server, but I’m setting it up to run IRC all compo).

Software I’ll be using this time:

• Visual Studio 2008 Pro (C++)
• My custom engine (“QEngine”, uses Ogre, Bullet, OpenAL and a few other bits and bobs; source was released in my earlier post)
• GIMP
• Paint
• Blender
• Notepad++
• sfxr
• Either LMMS or Musagi
• Spotify!
• svn

I’m leaning towards making a shmup of some sort, as I’ve never made one and my last few projects have been first-person.

I might also make a quick warm up game to make sure everything is in order…

I will be participating in this weekend’s Ludum Dare (yay!). It’s my third LD48 and I’m looking forward to making something!

I’ll be using a custom-made engine (written in C++), the engine is rather incomplete and filled with ugly code (atm it’s mostly just an Ogre/Bullet/OpenAL wrapper with a disorganized state machine and simple event system) so I don’t recommend that anyone use it, but as per the compo rules here is the GPL-ed source.

Also: I’ll be posting a workspace pic or two once I get all cleaned up and prepared, I’ll be using chronolapse for a timelapse, and I should be hanging around IRC on and off.

C’mon, I want to see 200 games based on this!