So remember Galcon? It was a Ludum Dare entry almost 4 years ago, and yeah, I’ve re-made it about 500 times now. And this time I re-made it in HD with a swell soundtrack and other goodies, and got it on Steam. And it’s available direct for Windows / Mac OS X / Linux too!

Anyway check it out

-Phil

Also, I should have posted this earlier but the organizers of Sense of Wonder Night (TGS) have uploaded the presentations on youtube. You can see my one on Swarm Racer (LD08) here

I plugged LD in the Q&A section, but they cut that part ):

Ludum Dare veteran Joseph White (aka Lexaloffle, aka Lex… when I’m lazy)’s latest game Swarm Racer 3000 will be on display at this upcoming Tokyo Game Show. It’s one of several titles being featured at the indie friendly Sense of Wonder Night. You can read more about it here.

Lets look at some gameplay footage.

Pretty sweet looking ‘eh.

The Ludum Dare connection? For those of you that missed it, back in 2006 we had the very awesome theme Swarms. And back then, Lex produced this really great entry named Swarm Racer.

http://indygamer.blogspot.com/2006/05/swarm-racer.html

Since then he’s made it far more awesome.

http://www.lexaloffle.com/swarm.php

And today, the all new Swarm Racer 3000 is looking pretty freaking great.

So a great big congratulations to Lex, from all of us at Ludum Dare!

- Mike Kasprzak (aka: PoV)

LD48 CHALLANGE.

Hello!

Final Release of my LD48 Entry.

GamePlay:

1 Use key W A S D to move around

2 Use key R to Reset the Game

3 MOUSE to Look Around

4 Esc to quit(Dont Quit!)

Playing

1 Goto the Rolling pillar to to Improve Health but be carefull, the pillar will
throw you away if you go too close to it.Just stay close to it to improve health
and dont stick to it

2 Goto the Exit Post to goto the next Level. Exit Posts change their
position every time level changes so you have to find its location.

3 When Level changes,Position of player changes

4 Stay away from swarns they eat you like crazy.

5 Dont foget to look around for the new position of exit post

6 Use Less Brightness and Contrast as possible

Suggestion: Tryto play upto 25 levels.The 25th level is most difficult.THe planes will lock you up you you go close to them

FeedBack Nessary!

StartTheGame by going into Folder SaurabhSwarm
and Clicking SaurabhSwarm.exe

This game was made in DXSDK 8.1, VC++6.0,Jim Adams dx libraries.

All Coding & Artwork Done by me Groundup including 3DMeshes and Textures

Art Softwares Used: Photoshop and 3DMax5.Panda .Xporter

saurabh <AT> ITnauts.com

DOWNLOAD http://www.itnauts.com/LD/SaurabhSwarns.rar:

Best Regards
Saurabh!

To start, Phil Hassey’s Ludum Dare favorite Galcon (now on iPhone) was nominated for the “Innovation in Mobile Design” award at this year’s IGF Mobile.  Go Phil!

Next, Ludum Dare regular tonic‘s companies game (Secret Exit) Zen Bound was nominated for two awards.  “Audio Achievement” and “Best iPhone Game“.  Contratz!

Finally… well… it seems I’m in the running for “Best Game” with Smiles.

Here’s the complete list.

	IGF Mobile Best Game: Cubic Republic (IKS Mobile) – Flash Lite Smiles (Sykhronics Entertainment) – iPhone/iPod touch Fieldrunners (Subatomic Studios) – iPhone/iPod touch Edge (Mobigame) – iPhone/iPod touch Wardive (And-or) – Nintendo DS
	Innovation in Mobile Game Design: Wardive (And-or) – Nintendo DS Galcon (Hassey Enterprises) – iPhone/iPod touch Eliss (Steph Thirion) – iPhone/iPod touch
	Achievement in Art: Fieldrunners (Subatomic Studios) – iPhone/iPod touch Dizzy Bee (Igloo Games) – iPhone/iPod touch Ruben & Lullaby (Song New Creative) – iPhone/iPod touch
	Technical Achievement: Football Tycoon (Dynamo Games) – Java Real Racing (Firemint) – iPhone/iPod touch Wardive (And-or) – Nintendo DS
	Audio Achievement: Radio Flare (Studio Radiolaris) – iPhone/iPod touch Zen Bound (Secret Exit) – iPhone/iPod touch Edge (Mobigame) – iPhone/iPod touch
	Best iPhone Game — Presented by ngmoco: Edge (Mobigame) – iPhone/iPod touch Dizzy Bee (Igloo Games) – iPhone/iPod touch Fieldrunners (Subatomic Studios) – iPhone/iPod touch Zen Bound (Secret Exit) – iPhone/iPod touch Frenzic (The Iconfactory) – iPhone/iPod touch

http://www.igfmobile.com/02finalists.html

Congratulations to all the finalists (which is a little strange to say being one of them).  We’ll keep you posted.

Stay tuned for MiniLD next week.

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

Man, this was a while back. Magnificent Gunbright is a totally sweet faux-Japanese abstract minimalist shoot-em-up (complete with terrible Engrish) where your ammunition is also your armour. Your blobs swarm around you, you can fire them at your opponent, and you can also collect blobs that rain constantly from the sky.

At the time, I thought that having graphics consisting only of black and white circles was strong graphic design, but the game is completely unparseable from a screenshot and it’s not much better in motion. The sound effects are awesome, though, and no one can tell me different. Bloop-bloop-shinngg!

The game itself? It’s pretty okay. It’s mostly a matter of always moving, and getting lots of shots off at the computer when he’s fishing for ammo. I liked that if you got far enough in, eventually the computer would start with a huge swarm and you’d start with nothing — when you’re on defense, the game is pretty enjoyable. It’s just that when you’re on the offense, there’s no interesting strategy; you either hit your opponent or you don’t.

The best feedback I received was from my friend Patrick Alexander, who draws funny pictures for some gaming website or other, who summed it up thusly: “It’s like Ikaruga, only… only not as good. By quite a lot.” If Magnificent Gunbright had a box, this quote would be on it.

Before MG, I’d tried Ludum Dare once before — LD4, apparently, when the theme was Infection. My entry was to be a puzzle game called Hachoo!, where you were a bacterium who could only move by causing the host you were currently infecting to sneeze on another person. Unfortunately, I made one really stupid mistake which caused me to not finish — I used unfamiliar tools. I was a cocky C programmer at the time, and I worked mainly in embedded systems. When I played with writing games, I used SDL.  So of course the natural choice was C++ on Windows using Allegro. I chose Windows for obvious reasons, C++ because I thought the STL would save me time, and Allegro because I’d remembered being annoyed at the lack of batteries included with SDL in comparison when I was 16. Well, I had major issues with the MingW debugger, the STL doesn’t save you time when you’re unused to fighting with obtuse template-based compiler errors, and it turned out that what was simple and elegant when I was a dumbass teenager rubbed the more experienced me the wrong way. (Not to mention that I made a bunch of stupid rookie mistakes because I forgot key things about the API.)

So for Magnificent Gunbright, I decided to learn from my mistakes, stop worrying about stray pointers and just use Pygame. It worked great! I highly recommend it.  The only downside was that when there are a large number of blobs on the screen, there’s some significant flickery slowdown; I say it’s just an unintentional homage to the NES.

You can download Magnificent Gunbright from my website. It’s built for Windows, but it’ll run on Linux, assuming you have pygame, because all the source code is included.

This was the first time I made something with a swarm-like behaviour, which was nice. The game turned out ok, though not really finished — those mushroom-dwelling things only ever face right, for example, and the levels weren’t supposed to be that flat. There should have been platforms and stuff. Still, there’s a win condition and level progression and such, so that’s something at least. Anyway, it’s kinda fun-ish for a little while, torching mushrooms while those poor guys losing their homes at your hand try to kill off your swarm, but it gets boring and repetitive after a while.

Oh well, I had fun making it, and learned some new things in the process, so I choose to consider it a success regardless =)

Download: [ Source code ]

Base idea for the game was to have the level be “swarming”, for an unexpected approach. I figured there could be loose platforms drifting around in space and you’d try to jump around between them, doing… stuff. The gameplay part of it was sketchy at best.

I suppose the better part of the first day was spent getting the platform movement and interaction working, and then I think much of the second day I just sat and tweaked it, fixing bugs. The gameplay elements and final graphics/audio were added in the last two or three hours.

Windows download: 128 kB zip (exe, data, source)

Linux port: 16 kB tar/gz (needs above file for data)

Arcade build a’la Lerc.

I happen to be at the Zoo when I got emailed the compo theme (thanks Pov) so I snapped a bunch of pics hoping I could shoe-horn them into the game, which I did.

This is kind of a WarioWare like ‘stroke’ based mini-game. You stroke your mouse (this is just sounding dirty) to knock flies off annoyed animals in a smooth motion – very, very quickly.

I played the guitar bits.

Download game and source

Set in space, you controlled a fleet of virus ships that could convert enemy ships. Fleets of enemy ships kept on attacking, and you needed to keep your fleet alive so you could go on fighting, gaining points while doing so.

The game was, if anything, more pretty than fun, but it really was playable once you got into it. Although you probably got bored within an hour or so. Don’t know how it placed, but it received OK scoring, and also got praise such as ‘The game I’m supposed to be reviewing is more like a screensaver’, ‘I liked Hat Swarm better, though’, ‘Without a doubt, Hat Swarm is WAY better’, ‘I honestly would have given the hat swarm a higher score though.’ But seriously, some people (including me!) actually seemed to like it.

You can get the Ultra Fleet compo version. It requires OpenGL and is for Windows, but I’ve been able to compile it for Linux, although I have no idea where that port went, but it should be pretty easy if you want to try yourself.

You navigated your hat swarm around islands to destroy dancers that tried to defend the islands, while at the same time trying to avoid the deadly dances that was danced at you.

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands prime features was an intro, an island generator (that I later used as a base for rather prettier islands), the famous Hoids algorithm that simulates hats in groups flocking behaviour (later adopted for the fleets in Ultra Fleet), stick figures, and a lot of dancing. Strangely, it was also my very first LD game (together with Ultra Fleet) that didn’t use tiles.

There’s no dedicated distribution for The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands, but you can get it as the bonus in the Ultra Fleet compo version. It’s for Windows, but if you’re a bit clever, you can probably compile it for Linux. It requires OpenGL with 512×512 sized textures support.

playing post compo I actually managed to figure out how to get all of the ninja home on that level by using a few tricks.

I also liked the look of Teeny Tiny Ninja. I got the stars idea from a previous Bluescrn entry. Adding a bunch of stars does indeed liven up the look of things. Also The ninja home came out surprisingly well for programmer art. I thought the sound worked well too, but the scores the game got suggested I was in the minority. when a ninja goes ‘Hut!’ every time he jumps it’s cool, but people found it less so when there were a couple of hundred Ninja doing it, serves themselves right for picking swarms as the theme I say.

The game used a homebrew physics engine made during the 48 hours. this worked quite nicely, Ninja were all implemented as tiny triangles

See. There was no Line to object collision detection so it was possible for Ninja to get stuck on corners by impailing themselves on a point and having their triangle points go either side. There were alsdo a few other little quirks that caused th ninja to get stuck. The solution worked brilliantly. I checked to see if a ninja hadn’t moved for a while and if so just added a huge random vector to its movement. A lot of people took this to be an intentional behaviour because it looked very ninja like. sometimes a ninja would jump to a wall or point and stick there for a bit then jump away again.

Once again the controls were a bit unintuitive. But I thought the use of a mousewheel worked well.

Download the game

I thought it would be nifty if instead of directly building units, you had to attract units with various buildings. So you start with a base and 1 swarm. There are resource buildings (Apple, Flower, and Metal) that you can hover over that will give you various resources. You also have a base. You can build either Apple or Nectar huts in your base. These increase your attraction rates for food or nectar. (It was originally going to be food and sex, if you read the code. I guess bees have sex with flowers or something.) Once bugs are attracted to your base, you can add them to existing swarms, or break them off into new swarms. You can also build Radar to increase your attraction range, or buildings to increase the power or speed of your bugs.

Initially this was going to be swarm vs. swarm warfare, but I ran out of time pretty quickly. (I’ll go into my mistakes below.) So instead the computer just sent a specified number of waves with a specified strength at you at regular periods, and you needed to have swarms built up and ready to fight when they came.

Obviously one of my largest problems was art. As you can tell from my screenshot, It’s ugly. Really really ugly. All the art in the game was ‘placeholder’ art that I was going to go back and fix. That never happened. Secondly, I panicked at about 30 hours. I barely had an engine, and the deadline was closing in. I actually ‘gave up.’ I came back to it, and finished up later. Thirdly I didn’t have a good plan. I know I wanted an RTS, but I didn’t have a good execution plan. I also bit off WAY more then I could chew back then.

My tips for beginners are:

1. Make a plan – Seriously, take that first hour, and may out some code to get rid of the urge. THen take the next hour or two, and make a task list. What code does your idea need? Divide it up into tasks. As you go along, check things off that you’ve put in.
2. Take breaks – This is always a newbie mistake too, but, make sure you take regular breaks. 48 hours, even with a couple of sleep periods, is plenty of time to get something done.
3. Start Small – It’s much easier to add to a simple game then it is to try and cram in everything a more complex game needs.

Theme Swarm. I did a shoot em up, sidescrolling thing. Play the game online

Ingame screenshot

This is an in-development screenshot, showing some octree debugging going on.

That’s how the game looks like. Shoot down all the pink, eyed balls to encounter the uber-cool-final-boss-with-superior-AI. (I got feedback suggesting that at least one person actually played long enough to encounter the boss – so I consider the gameplay aspect successful.)

Here’s a mirror of the original submission: Swarm

On the tech side I realized I needed to up my production going beyond what can be done with pygame. I used pyplus and swig to build C extensions for my game so that I could do some cool graphic and swarming techniques not possible within python. However this caused some trouble, I was able to submit my linux source of the game for the deadline, but due to the craziness of python extensions for windows it took me another full day of work to get it ported to windows.

After the compo I made a shareware version of the game:

Check it out.