Actually I’m really considering using this Raspberry Pi as my new target platform for game jams like Ludum Dare. The technical specifications are rather limited which gives an extra challenge. As I’ve already been using mostly python and pygame for game development this should work without much extra effort. Next I’m going to test if my previous entries run on it. (This should not prevent me from having additional Windows builds of my games )

Raspberry Pi – Runs Linux

On other platform-related news, some French guy that goes with the webname “Loopingstar” has experimented with the basic idea of my LD23 game Bottlecolonies and made a port to Flash with some extras added. I especially like the variations in buildings and clearer visual feedbak of points earned/lost while placing buildings. You can give it a try here: http://loopingstar.fr/colonies/colonies_v2.swf

For LD#23 I tried to create a sort of fast-paced puzzle game called Tinyville Confidential. I wasn’t really able to finish it on time for LD (here‘s my entry), but I finally got around to working on it some more! Now featuring multiple levels, the ability to win the game, and (hopefully) a time limit that’s actually fun. Give it a try!

I probably won’t work on it much more, but I’d still be happy to hear comments and suggestions. I’m really happy that LD inspired me to make this interesting game, and I’m looking forward to LD#24!

Timelapse video (speed: 10x) – Work on my Virtual Machine and work on my new microgame Tiny World Adventure developed inside this new VM.

My LD23 entry: Tiny World Adventure. Consider to provide constructive criticism.

Enjoy!-)

So, since AlwaysGeeky shared info about his voxel engine he did for his Worlds in Collision (really great work, you should check it out!), and it got your attention, I would like to show off my library – XuProto.

It has started as an idea to create a framework to help develop XNA games for game jams, so it has a couple of other features as well.

• Asynchronous background task management
• A couple of math functions (random vector generation, interpolations)
• Perlin noise – 2D and 3D
• Rudimentary skinnable GUI functionality
• Texture Atlas
• Event-driven input management (keyboard and mouse)

Feel free to have a look at it, even though it’s still work in progress, I’ve made sure that it’s stable.

If you have any ideas for what a XNA-based Game Jam Framework would need – let me know on Twitter or here

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24565598/Ludum%20Dare/LD23-Spitoon-PostCompo/LD23_Spitoon.html

As promised, I’ve finally finished the Post Competition version of my LD23 entry, Spitoon. It seems I can no longer edit my entry page to include a direct link to the this version, so consider this the official link, I suppose.

To cut to the chase, it’s been an amazing past month since the end of the competition. I don’t typically like to wax personal in a public forum, but I feel compelled to mention that my first son was born nearly two weeks ago, a bit past the due date. He’s amazing, and everything I have done in my life for the past several years has been for my lovely wife and our beautiful family. I have never made much money by American standards, but thanks to them, I have always felt both rich and blessed.

I promise not to drag this out, so suffice it to say that my supportive family has helped rekindle my passion for programming as well as life in general, and I can’t wait to see what the rest of this year has in store.

P.S. If anyone knows of a way in which I can add the link to the post-compo version to my main entry page, please let me know.

I just uploaded my entry to this weekend’s mini-LD, check it out if you feel like it: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-34/?action=preview&uid=5364

Defend the radar station! Detect incoming enemies, click to launch a missile, and last as long as you can!

I just finished my first mini-LD Game ! I could only spend 12h on it (4h+4h+4h) so I tried to keep it simple.

At first I wanted to build some kind of infinite boulderdash runner game ( from bottom to top ) with randomly generated content and water flooding form the bottom of the screen.

The result was not very fun to play, water was easy to block with boulder and always going up was boring ( and not very strategic )

So I finally removed the level generator and changed it to a more classical version with just infinite cycling level as new mechanic.

Few innovations here but I hope somebody will like it

Only 9 levels to beat.

Play Never Endin Rock Slide

It’s done!! You can now blast away at monsters with an infinite number of randomly generated guns to your heart’s content. (The guns can do some pretty interesting things, if I say so myself).

Can you beat my highscore?

     Guns Rule      

First time participating in a mini LD! Had nothing better to do, and when I was browsing around, checking my RSS, I was like: ‘huh, MiniLD is this weekend? Aspect? Sounds interesting! I’ll take 1024 x 128.” I wanted to create some minigames with my Chicken character anyway, so why not? It was a bit of a shock though to see for the first time, that 1024 x 128 was in fact wider than I thought it would be . Nice choosing of the theme!

It’s a tribute to Kirby’s adventure , NES

So here you go, play it here

Make a game with these resolutions is proving quite challenging and i have gotten now were and there is only a couple of hours left

It’s on! I’ve decided to make a protoype of a game idea I had, so please be detailed in your feedback!

It’s a game about guns. There’ll be tons of attributes and combinations, and lots of monsters to shoot them at.  It’ll have fun sci-fi laser effects too; although I decided to leave out the Lightening attack type.Basically you have fun trying to find the optimal (or the weirdest!) gun. The monsters will have the same guns you can have, too!! Although i MAY give them limitless ammo.

It’s going to be called Guns Rule.

Will put up a screenshot when I have something to show; I’m just about to dive into coding.

Cheers!

UPDATE: It’s working! I still have to hook up being the HUD and improve the monsters and add bosses (and polish), but I’ve got the engine in place!

UPDATE 2:

It’s looking cooler now…

UPDATE: Finally figured out how to get it to let me put up screenshots!! Yay! (It’ll look better when it’s done.)

I’m doing a circle resolution. I have an idea for my game: you can change the gravity for yourself, but for other objects it remains the same. I even made up an intro:

*school, physics lesson*

- Username, how much is gravity force?

- I don’t know.

- Why don’t you know?

- I don’t want. Gravity is unimportant.

Play the demo! Drag the level, get the ball (either one ) to the yellow circle. Red is no-drag zone.

The placeholder name is “Problem, Newton?” Maybe I’ll leave it as it is.

And I’m going to port it to Android! You will have to tilt the device to alter the gravity direction.

P.S. I just started, so I’ll end a bit later.

The Basic Engine is done! Tomorrow graphics and gameplay! Now I’m going to sleep! (4:50 am here T_T)

Hey guys!

So yeah, Soul Searchin’ placed 4th overall :O which is a score I’m pretty pleased about ^^ thanks everyone who rated my entry!

I’ve decided to continue working on this game and to try and publish it. The new version’s got:

• A new world: the world of Fears (*tam tam taam!*)
• 2 new pieces of music (one for the world of Desires and one for the world of Fears)
• Better controls.
• A more haunting ending.
• And general small fixes :3

The post-compo version is as good as done. Right now, I’m looking for play testers who want to help me make this game even better and iron out the last little quirks.

Interested? Shoot me an email at: maxim@sir-realism.com!

Cheers,

Maxim

What? Next Ludum Dare is when? August?! Damn.. what to do in the mean time? Post mortem I guess..

I suck with post mortems, so I’ll make it short. I expected to be ranked a lot higher, since I got #50 overall last time, and that game was not that good. This time my game was a lot better, so I expected to be ranked a lot higher. But of course, there were a lot more people participating.

The results

 Coolness 93%

Next time 100%!

#42    Theme     3.96

I’m glad I made it to the top 50 with at least 1 category. The fact that it’s this category is even more awesome.

#52     Humor     3.44

I guess the story had some humor. Also the fact that the tophat shoots rockets.

#150   Fun            3.35

Well, I’m always glad people enjoy my game. That is really important, so I’m glad with this ranking.

#158      Overall      3.46

As I already said, this came really unexpected. I thought I would end up #40 or higher or something. But damn, there were so many good games! I should be happy with this ranking!

#182        Mood        3.14

Not much to say about this one. For most games I skip voting this category for most games, since I think it’s more for the sad, artistic games.

#283       Audio       2.84

I would never got this ranking without the Autotracker-Bu tool. Thank you so much for that! Although a lot of games used it. Oh well..

#332     Innovation      3.15

I expected a much higher ranking with this one. I thought my games was quite innovative. Oh well, better luck next time.

#435       Graphics         2.88

Again. I expected a much higher ranking. I forgot how good (or ‘not bad’) I was with pixelart. I thought the cutscenes would have helped me with this category, but apparently not.

Yay, that was my stupid short post mortem. See you next Ludum Dare!

So I know that a lot of you guys played my game, “Tiny’s World” (the one with the mouse), and I know that many [all] of you, including me, experienced severe lag. Though I didn’t put this in the game info, that game was the first that I have ever written. I’m here to say that I realised why the lag was so unbelievably high and the framerate, so low. Basically, I have been placing (“blitting”, as PyGame calls it) images on the screen, when actually I should be blitting sprites as they are all constantly moving. To fix this, I changed the pixel format of all my images using Surface.convert_alpha() which converts the Surface (image) to a sprite form. When I changed all my regular game objects, I increased my framerate from 15 to 17 FPS. This was much to my disdain, as I expected more. But then, I proceeded to change my (moving) background images to sprites, and I managed to get the framerate to in excess of 100 FPS!

What I’m here to say is, I love ALL you guys and the LD. Thanks to all you guys who run it and contribute it. And thank you for all those helpful (constructively criticising) comments you made about my game and for all the suggestions which I am currently working on adding into my game.

And by the way, I am working on a post compo version of my game and if anyone is interested in it. It wont lag [or will lag much, much less] and I will be adding features you have expressed your interesting in in your comments when you played it.

Thanks again for the LD, as I’m learning more and more about Python; both its strengths and weaknesses.

If you want to play the old version of my game (for the time being, before I upload a new version), it’s here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10594

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=5397

Post Mortem

Good evening. This account is the shared account of James (err, cool James) and sstrandberg. We worked together on Fancy Seeing You Here for Ludum Dare 23. We made the shared account as we are total bros and have decided that we will do more Ludum Dare’s together. I (James) decided to write this post-mortem on this account as to establish our identities on here.

This was James’ first LD (and first game jam ever), and sstrandberg’s 3rd (although he has done other game jams in the past).

Results

Overall, we’re both pretty happy with the results. From the beginning our intention was to focus on the atmosphere and mood, and coming in 8th place for the mood category proves that we were at least moderately succesful. The rest of the results are more or less what we expected although I am particularly happy with 77th overall as being in the top 30% or so proves that I’m better at making games than I thought I was. One thing that results did teach me is that the Ludum Dare community are awfully sadistic. They gave us a 2.6 for humor, but the only “joke” in the game is that you get to murder your best friend. You sick bunch.

The coolness rating really is a bit of a let down. You see, one of the reasons I have made this combined account is so that we can both rate games and get that rating up. We both played an absolute ton of games that were entered, but sstrandberg being a forgetful bugger kept forgetting to rate them and I couldn’t as the game was tied to his account, not mine. Still, people should know that we played loads of games and the vast majority were really quite excellent.

Some Things What We Did Do Learned

While we were both pretty satisfied with the results, there were a number of things we could have done better. One of our biggest failings, in my opinion, was that we had lots of clear ideas about different elements in the game (for example, we wanted a lighter in it as fire is a fun mechanic to play with) but we had literally no idea how we were going to implement this into one coherent game. So, we made the lighter, and then we were like “well now what?”

This is a pretty small example, but there were some bigger things that came into play. For a while, we didn’t even know how the game would be structured. We knew where it started, we knew where it ended and we knew how we were going to hook this into the theme. However, we had no idea what would go in between these two points. In the future, we’re going to have to think more about implementation than we did this time in order to get all of our ideas into the game.

Some Things What I Did A Learn On

On account of their being two of us, and on sstrandberg being the much better coder, I mainly spent my time being an asset slave over the weekend. I am not an artist, but it seemed like the role that I would be most useful filling. Now, having spent 72 hours being an artist, I have learned a number of things.

The main one is that, similarly to coding, you really need to have an idea on how you want to implement your creative vision. The initial plan for the game was to have you start in a lush, green area and have the word gradually degrade and tear apart as you got nearer to the end (that is what your mate (who we refer to as Fred) is on about when he says “shrinkening”). I started out by creating the lush green environment tileset that you can see throughout most of the game, and that worked totally fine, but when I then tried to tear it apart I had literally no clue how that would work.  We were using Ogmo to edit the levels, and with how the visuals ended up looking I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make it look as if it were degrading. I also underestimated the amount of assets I would need to create and also how much time I would need to create and prettify the levels, so that led to me pretty much completely abandoning the idea to have the world degrade.

Similarly, I was in charge of all the text stuff. Now, when we discussed how we were going to show the things that Fred says, the initial plan was to have a traditional RPG style dialogue box pop up with his freakish square face at the top of it. However, mid way through making that we noticed that it looked pretty cool just floating above his head as you can see in the game now. This was totally fine for most of the development time, but as we neared the end and I started trying to implement some of the things he said, I realised that it was super hard to tell a coherent story like this. I literally had to completely abandon the narrative that I had planned and instead just used Fred to drop hints as to what was happening in the world  . In the end, this worked quite well for establishing mood and positioning him as some kind of sinister figure, but it’s still a little bit disappointing.

Stuff What I Am Really Proud Of

Now, as I mentioned previously, I am not an artist. However, I have tried my hand at creating sprites and tilesets and what not in the past so I wasn’t a total virgin. This was the first time I had ever tried to animate any kind of sprite though. With that in mind, I think the four character animations that I did came out pretty darn great. sstrandberg was the one who did the walking animation for the player, but the hammering, the shooting, the Fred dying and the Fred checking his watch were all mine. The shooting could have been a little better as I really should have put in a bit of code that started Fred’s dying animation when the gun was fired rather than when the animation started, but the dying, the watch checking and the hammering are all as good as I could have  made them, and that makes me rather happy.

The dying in particular, as morbid as it sounds, is pretty much my best contribution to the game. I wanted to make you feel really guilty about it as there are basically only two situations in which you would see that animation. a. you are a psychopath who enjoys murdering people or b. you messed up the only failable puzzle in the game and didn’t have a spare key to get the artifact. In both of these situations, I wanted you to feel disgusted with yourself and to be filled with unimaginable shame. The way that the blood seeps down and the way in which he just becomes a gross slump of blood and flesh works really well to that end.

What Is The Next Thing What We Will Do

Basically, the plan is to enter this weekend’s mini-LD. So that should be pretty cool. We will take these lessons to heart, and hopefully that one will come out better. Cheers to everyone who played and rated our game, you are the best people that exist.

My game got into the top 20 for both Innovation and Humour (#19 and #17 respectfully)!

That’s just really weird.

My coolness was very poor as I had my finals immediately after the compo through to a couple of days before the end of the judging period.

Anyway, I’ve since learnt HTML5 canvas +  Javascripty type stuff so expect my next game to be much more accessible.

My little friend and I read your comments about Burning Platform.

Then we got to work…

We tweaked.

We Playtested.

===========================

And we posted an update to Google Play

We’ve addressed the main criticisms from the comments in the compo release and we’re really happy with the way the game plays. If you tried the original and rated it, have a look at the post compo update and let us know what you think!

And of course, if you never played the compo version, now’s a great time to try it out since the main “fun” adjustments have been made.

This was the best Ludum Dare I have participated in so far. I actually managed to get into the top 50 this time! (38th to be exact)

Thank you everyone who played and rated my game and gave feedback! And to those of you who couldn’t play my game or didn’t want to download anything, I have good news: I’ve finished an improved html5 version of my game!

Unfortunately that doesn’t mean everyone can play it now, since in order to keep a lot of things in, the game requires WebGL. But people with a recent version of google chrome or firefox should be able to play it. Let me know if it works for you, since I’m getting mixed reports.

Play it on Kongregate!