Ludum Dare 22:

While Isolated Assault was huge success in my eyes considering it was my first Ludum Dare game, and by the scores it received, I’m struggling to come up with a Post-Compo version. You see, I’m just not feeling the motivation to work on it. Every time I sit down, I just feel, “Wow, this is old.” It’s like one of those projects I just gave up because I had no motivation for it.

That’s how it went with Dunnet (My most worked on game), and with my First Person Shooter (My first professional game), and with all those projects I started but never got around to.

Currently my Unity Project Folder looks like this:

Where “Abandoned” have been worked on for a while. I could always go back to the “Abandoned,” but I haven’t, and why should I?

My Problem:

I need a due date on projects.

Some people can never get work done knowing there’s time management involved. For me, it’s the other way. Knowing that there’s no time to procrastinate, and that there’s a reward for finished, I can get a lot of good things done.

I also have problems focusing on one idea and getting it implemented quickly. All of focused ideas I have are too complicated even for top-notch game companies.

Therefore, Ludum Dare was perfect for me–it gave a theme for the game and a deadline. I now know my best work will probably come from future LDs.

Will there ever be an Isolated Assault 2?

Not now. And probably not from me. Anyone familiar with Unity (That means you, reader!) can take my Isolated Assault Source files, and add some new levels, as long as I receive credit.

I have no motivation whatsoever to make an Isolated Assault 2. All my ideas were expressed in the first one. You are a guy. That fights cubes. That wears glasses. The only thing added to this game would be gloss.

Will you participate in LD 23?

Of course! Ludum Dare is the best way to manage time and get good games squeezed out!

Will you stop asking yourself random questions?

Never!!!!

Now I ask you, do I stick with deadlines for making games, or do I learn to get around them?

Do I use Ludum Dare to create all my of my work?

For some reason, I need some sort of reward/time limit for everything I make, because that’s just how I work.

Either way, I’ll obviously still be doing LDs, and I can’t wait for LD23!

I last mentioned that The Love Letter will be released after judging ends…

And yes, judging has ended (and we got voted the best in Theme for the jam, thank you!) and The Love Letter is not released. But our original pronouncement still stands – the game has a release date, and that release date will take place *after* – and not before – judging ends.

And it’s the perfect release date.

What else could it be but… Valentine’s Day! February 14th!

We’re so close. We were working all weekend, and we’ve got all the major features in – at this point, we’re just iterating on polish and playtesting feedback. I’m excited!

Source code is looking good too. I’ve factored out two new Flixel plugins from the code for this project, and I can hardly wait to get them on GitHub. FlxScript and FlxTilemapPlus, coming up!

Release for the full game code will probably be a week or two after the game release, just to give us a bit of a head start on the inevitable flood of copies and clones that will soon follow…

It’s been around a month now, but now I want to take Enola to a new level, and make a full game out of the concept. The game I made for the 48 hour competition was purely an exploration game, but for the full game I want to implement other stuff, including puzzles and death traps. I’m crowdfunding the making of that game, so if you want to help, you can visit the campaign page at www.indiegogo.com/Enola and donate. Also, please share the link with everyone you know.

I actually added new stuff to the game I made for ludum dare, so you see what other mechanics I want to implement in the full game. It has a puzzle, a trap, and 2 endings, including the “good” ending. Since the contest was over a month ago, and I made this as a way to present a small prototype, I did use a couple of premade models for this build. For this same reason, I’m not switching the download link on the contest entry page (I will simply post a link on that page to this blog post).

A lot of people found Enola a very mysterious and even somewhat unnerving/scary game. The full version would be a “horror/adventure” game, but not the kind of horror found in games with monsters, zombies, and such, but rather horror related to the human nature. Enola will focus on a different kind of horror.

My game for the SOPAjam (also my first entry ever) is finished! I finished it yesterday, but I didn’t have enough time to post anything about it until now.

It ended up looking kinda ugly, having a couple of annoying glitches and it wasn’t even close to what I attempted to make, but I have never made a game in under 24 hours before (including school, sleep and other stuff), so I am very satisfied with the finished product. I learnt a lot very fast and I had a lot of fun.

Not the prettiest thing in the world, but it is something

Download for Windows and Mac on my website!

PS: My game isn’t showing up under the all games category for some reason, but it is clearly uploaded (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=10299). Am I doing something wrong or is it supposed to be like that?

Im entering MiniLD31  I will be Using Game Maker 8.0 Pro

So I’ve heard of this “Ludum Dare Gamejam-Competition” and I thought I’d enter my own jam.

To create Game-Jam of course only the classic ingredients of Grapes, Apricots, Mango and Elderberries would do (I know, I’m a comic genius).

Here is the fruit. I had to fall back on elderberry-preserve, as they are ridiculously hard to come by.

Turns out cutting grapes is totally fun, and not at all tedious or complicated.

It also turns out that Elderberries have a very strong color that overpowers everything else. Or it’s the food-coloring I added. Not quite sure.

And here it is! Finished Game-Jam!

Quite tasty. And extremely sweet.

-Matthew

Today’s screenshot looks a lot like yesterday’s.  :)

Squiggly thing == Internet

I still have a few things to do after work before I finish.

We were very happy to win the 2nd prize in the Jam with our game Together Alone. Although this was our first LD, Gijs and I have worked on creative projects together for a long time, including games, and it’s gratifying to see that people appreciate our imaginings.

As we’re planning to do more games together, we’ve decided on a name for our two-man team and created a website: Qwok Games. Qwok was a minor character in our old comics (see the site if you’re interested), and we both liked him so much we’ve adopted him as our mascot.

Together with a few other LD22 participants (including Midas and Follow) we were asked by JayIsGames.com if they could host us. We were happy to say yes, and worked hard to provide an even more polished version. It is now up on the site, along with a very positive review. Woohoo!

My SOPAjam entry Congress Chainsaw Massacre is ready!

Play on my website!
Play on Newgrounds!
Play on Kongregate! (with high scores!)

Hey everybody, Dan from Lantana Games here, and this is my first LD48 entry for the SOPA Jam, entitled ftp://Breach. It’s a hacking-based text adventure which takes place in an unfortunate dystopian future where the net is completely text-based.

The game isn’t done yet however all the core mechanics I wanted in are in. Going to different IPs, jumping to nodes, hacking servers, trace countdowns, pinging the server to buy yourself more time, etc. I even added in lives because it was getting a bit too unfair to keep dying while trying to write “ping” as quickly as possible.

Feel free to test it out, only available for Windows right now as my Flash exporter seems to be busted. :/
http://www.lantanagames.com/breach/ftpbreach.zip

SOPA and PIPA see online communities as the childish clubs of pirates and script kiddies. I indulge their delusions in Netbaby, my first game jam entry!

Download for Windows and OS X at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=10237

My SOPA themed DX:HR hacking / Uplink LAN hybrid is finished! You can find it here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=3939

Hope you enjoy it!

So yeah, it’s done. Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=5267

Remember: SOPA is no one’s friend!

For anybody who was aware of me in the last LD48, I have made a stop SOPA game! It should be way more playable then my LD48 game.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=8522  Enjoy!

so i made a game for sopa jam.

youre a person and you help disco pirates fight off pro-sopa jetpack policeman, with the power of rainbows.

i couldnt figure out the kongregate api/flixel stuff, but I think I will do that when I finish a bigger game. heh.

enjoy

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=7853

I made a SOPAjam entry, but for some reason when I try to submit it it tells me I need to log in. I do, and then it give me the same message. It’s on a url, so the least I can do is post it here! http://stoppipa.netii.net/StopPIPA/ Move with the arrow keys, don’t get hit!

The starship NALS – Not A Lost Sale – is making a run at the wall of SOPAPIPA.  Firing blasts of education, it will bring down this construct of ignorance!

The game is called Red America.

The concept is simple, to oppress all the continental United States. Each state will have it’s own oppression meter, once it it hits %100 it stays there, otherwise it declines overtime. The United States a whole also has an oppression meter which is the mean of all the states.

When the player starts he’ll look at a political map of the USA, and all states start at %30 oppression. Every few seconds an issue will arrise and the player can choose how he responds to it. At first he only has two options: Distract (Starts a new season of American Idol / Starts a random war with a random country.) And Propaganda. Distract is effective against large groups/organizations while Propaganda is effective against the individual. After about 6 events, the player gains access to the NDAA: Dissapear option, which makes an individual dissapear because the goverment says they are a terrorist. A more effective version of the propaganda option and the player should always end up using this option over Propaganda. After about 6 more events the player gets access to the SOPA/PIPA: Censor option, which is a more effective version of Distract. When the player reaches %100 operation, Russia invades America because they believe that America is a communist totalitaristic dictatorship and must be purged from the world. Russia obviously wins because most intelligent Americans decided to hide that fact on the account that they didn’t want to get NDAA’d and thus couldn’t help with the war even if they wanted too.

So, around 7PM yestedey – someone on the IRC channel posted that Ludum Dare was hosting a mini-compo. I’ve been following LD but never had the chance to actually participate in it. I fired up Netbeans an started coding a console that draws text, I found a proper console font (PC Senior, great 8×8 font) then started drawing some text. After a while I noticed that the colors didn’t look very appealing so I got Solarized color scheme (Brilliant one) and edited some colors of it. Made some color constants for my use and started gathering up some Screen and Main Menu code

I ended up having a tiny menu with a nice “shifting” effected title. At first, my idea was to have a dodging reflex game or whatever they are called. Then thought that I’d rather do some shooting action and merged both together. Not sure where the name came in to my mind however. I continued thinking, and got the idea of a difficulty menu, Easy-Normal-Extremely Hard. It affects pretty much everything, spawn rates, damage, health, everything. The difficulties also stand up for their names, Easy is casual fun, Normal is a little challenging and Exteremely Hard is.. Extremely hard I guess.

The biggest problem was that I wanted to sleep early and started rushing the coding a little so I jumped into the actual game. I wasn’t sure how to do the architecture at all so I just started putting some game objects in the game class (Player, Censors, Bullets)

Non-stop programming action continued and my code started getting fattier and fattier (In a good way). I continued coding and by the time I thought I finished I noticed that a lot of bugs were present and it was around 10.30PM as far as I know. I continued fixing and went to bed in 12PM. I wasn’t quite confident of my game as there were still bugs and a lack of content. When I woke up about a hour an half ago I directly started up my laptop and noticed that the charger stopped working (Probably my sister, will question her when she wakes up). It has replacable tips so I got another one and started working. I fixed the remaining bugs, changed powerup hitboxes, edited movement on some constructive comment (by Drabiter), added a speed powerup. You still can’t win though, not sure of any win conditions still – so PIPA has 100% chance to pass unless you keep up until forever (Will think of a win condition soon)

By the time I started writing I also noticed that harder difficulties increased powerup spawn rate, well v3.1 soon I guess!

The title says it all. Before starting my SOPA/PIPA protest game, I decided to release a new version of EpiCat.

Play it here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27464471/EpiCat/EpiCat-1.1.0.swf

It’s mostly art improvements, with some bug fixes, a new enemy, and gameplay balancing. Please let me know what you think!

Things still to do:

• Add music
• Add more enemies
• (Maybe) Add a better intro to tell the story