So I’m in for the *counts* sixth time now, I hope for an idea fit for simplistic 3D graphics, so I can learn more Three.js this Weekend

I will use:

• PSPad Editor
• Google Chrome Debugger
• Gimp
• Capella

Good ideas and lots of fun everyone! Let’s make some games!

Quote = ^DJ_Link^

Hi there. Just to share that http://www.theindiebay.com/competition will be having a competition in which you can use whatever framework you want

.
It’s a 48 hour competition in which you will be given a theme or topic to follow, the rest is up to you.

Hope to see you there

Competition#1 – 19 September

I finally got around to doing something I had been thinking about for a while — dumping all of my ludumdare code on a hosting site somewhere. You can find all the ld48 (and a few related contests) that I’ve participated in at:

ld48jovoc at Google Code

This has a branch for the compo versions and the post-compo versions (the trunk) of each project. Most of these are unchanged or have only minor edits (such as moving from plib to prmath).

Right now the build system needs a lot of work. About half of them build on linux, and you will need to tweak the project files a bit to build any of them on windows. As soon as I sort that out, and fix a few other things, I’ll make a release with some prebuilt binaries. But trust me, it’s not worth trying to build any of these at this point.

Non of these are finished games, they are pretty unplayable and incomplete. My favorites are BadFood, Railroad Merchant, Crossroads and The Wanderer. Which, oddly enough, also happen to be the least complicated game designs. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

The other reason I did this was in preparation for the next LD48. With this set up, I can check in code as I go, providing a more or less “live” update of my progress.We’ll see how it goes.

Also, I lost the code for my LD3 “Hannibal’s Cannibal’s”, which was not a very good game, but if anyone has a copy of the old LD3 entries, please email me.

Hey Ludum Darers!

Just a quick heads up: If you can’t contain your anticipation of this month’s coming LD, there are two opportunities to vent this weekend!

First up, RPGDX are holding a 48 hour contest, with the theme “Sidescrolling Mini-RPG“. It’s not a sub genre you see a lot of, so there’s bound to be lots of room to explore it! A few of you might remember the LoFi RPG contest earlier in the year, which went down quite well The rules are loose, and attempting to make an RPG in that kinda timeframe is a pretty interesting experience, to say the least. More information here!

Also, if you happen to have two hours free at midnight on saturday (GMT),  Glorious Trainwrecks host a rather cool monthly jam called Klik of the Month, which happens to fall this weekend. Klik and Play is the recommended development environment, but you can use anything you like – the only rule is that you finish whatever you’re working on in just two hours. More information on that here!

Personally, I’m planning to do both And can’t wait for Ludum Dare!

Well, as I’ve been working on it throughout the week, I’ve been putting a lot more effort into it, and it’s been going way past the original 48hr game concept, hehe.
As such, I thought I’d post up a post-mortem on what went wrong in the 48 hours, and what went right.

The Good.

The theme was great. I love sandbox style games, be it sandbox in a “giant world to do as you please” sense, or even in a “here’s a puzzle, figure it out as you like” sense – as Little Quirks was to be. So that got the creative juices flowing, so to speak!

My concept was very simple – basically a Lemmings clone where they can crawl up and along walls and ceilings. The art was nice and simple too, fitting with the cute aesthetics as well.

The engine was in better shape than last time, after being used in another couple of projects since LD11 ( Plight of The Weedunks being one of the most well known – yes, this is basically the same engine, minus the 3D layer! ) and I got something up and running very quickly, and only took an hour to upgrade the engine to do dynamic colour replacement.

The Bad.

Hard drive hiccup. That wasn’t fun, especially seeing as I’ve just recently replaced one of them. Losing several hours of work is a killer, and more so when you’re in the middle of an SVN commit to an external server to try and avoid losing too much. Moral of the story, save and commit often!

Sound. Or lack thereof. I actually factored no time in for sound. This may have went against me if I had actually finished within the time limit. Something to be wary of for LD15; making time for everything is quite tough, but then that’s half the challange of Ludum Dare!

The Ugly.

Tilechecks are quick, and for the most part work very well. However, when there’s a lot of logic behind what your entities are doing (crawling around any side of a tile), those tilechecks quickly spiral out of control. I really should have been doing pixel checking with a hotspot being at the bottom of the sprite. Then again, I was able to get a ludicrous amount of them squirming around, with a full Lua-based state machine for each of them which a more expensive pixel check routine may not have allowed. A puzzle for sure as to what would’ve been better

What Next?

It’s become apparant that there’s actually a bit of depth in this concept while I’ve been continuing it after work, and it’s been slowly going beyond just a 48hr game. I’ve decided to continue working on it on the run up to LD15, as it’ll let me see what my engine still requires, and fix some of the hideous bugs I’ve uncovered along the way.

I’ll still be releasing the game – source and all – when it’s done, and probably post it up here complete with final tag … more than likely 48 days after MiniLD11 rather than 48 hours
The game was also designed for handhelds ( GP2X, Wiz, and Dingoo in particular – click for image – ) so you’ll probably see it on one of the sites for those hand helds when it’s done too

done, finally this evening was all about fixing a single bug. i took saturday evening off. anyway; i’m counting it as 48 hours.

Windows (1MB)
OSX 10.5+ (Intel)(2MB)
Source (14KB)

EDIT: the previous version had nasty assert in it that caused it to crash at some generations. new version fixes this bug, tweaked the algorithm significantly, and, maybe most importantly, fixed the fact that it was outputting the wrong notes ;p

I started late, but still went over my 48 hours.

I used my Large Polygon Collider engine for the physics (with many modifications). It would have been much quicker to just use Bullet, but I learnt a lot more this way.

Download for Win32

Download for Linux

This game started as something vaguely inspired by the Grow series; now it’s a sandbox tower defence. Also, in my extremely humble, unbiased opinion, it’s pretty cool.

Link is here, with a standing bug involving complex mazes. (Sorry.) May try to create an improved version later, involving more stuff and a fix to that bug, but it’s pretty okay right now.

If you encounter any bugs besides that one (it’ll manifest as the red dudes attacking your towers when you’ve left them a clear path), please leave a comment. Also: Enjoy! (If possible.)

(Note: If you haven’t found a way to use stone, you haven’t seen everything there is yet.)

Edit: new version here, with a number of bug fixes and improvements. Feedback totally welcomed.

Edit Edit: Even newer version! Will probably move future updates to a Tigsource thread henceforth. Huzzah!

Here’s my first entry into LD/mini-LD:

Play the game at:http://www.echelon5.net/max/STB.swf

—-

I present to you:

Stygian Tunnel Beast!

Stygian Tunnel Best is a game where, as you might have guessed, the player is a Stygian tunnel beast. Don’t worry if you’ve not heard of them, I made them up. They’re sort of like the worms from tremors, except they live in the underworld, feed on souls, and are responsible for managing the complex netherworld ecosystem.

The game is built around a semi-sculptable world where the player has to interact with a regenerating set of creatures that live in the world. The player can’t die, but if you only have 1 point of energy left, you will be unable to move. This doesn’t mean you’re dead though, because if you’re lucky and not completely cut off from the rest of the map, a soul might wander into your mouth, giving you energy to move again. If you’re really truly stuck and don’t have enough energy to move, you’ll have to restart the game manually.

There also isn’t any way to win. You can carve up the environment, place tons of obelisks, hoard up energy, thralls, and mana, and occasionally a tough enemy will show up for you to kill, but beyond that there is no end to the game, or any given objectives.

How to play:

- Move around with the arrow keys.

- You can climb along walls and even ceilings, but not around in space.  (Note: Moving up along a wall costs 2 energy, and is slower.)

- The x button makes you eat any souls or thralls that happen to be near your mouth. Eating gives you energy. You can hold the button down and happily chow on an oncoming stream of souls.

- The number keys (1-7) select your powers.

- Press c to use the selected power.

- All actions require some energy to do, even moving.

- When you eat souls, you get a bonus 10 energy for each soul beyond the first you eat, so try to batch as many together as possible in 1 place before eating them.
- Mana is required by 2 of your abilities. To get it, you need to create thralls. Either keep your thralls alive and you will slowly gain maina, or eat your thralls for a quick boost.

—-

Gameplay reference: Read more here

—-

Tools used: Flixel, SFXR, WinLAME, FlashDevelop, GraphicsGale, GIMP

—

Bugs:

- You can get “stuck” in midair. I wanted to overhaul the player movement (and improve the animation), but didn’t have time. If this happens, you can try placing blocks and using them to reach dry land again.

- Souls on the right side of the map walk through the ground often. I have no idea why, but didn’t have time to really debug this. Partly because I like the middle area of the map more anyway..

- I’m sure there are more. In fact there are probably some things I just accept now that are actually bugs

—

Things I havn’t tried doing in the game yet:

- Destroying/eating every destroyable block. I imagine it would be very difficult…

- Getting more than 200 concurrent thralls. I imagine the game will start slowing down at some point.

- Building a little undead city with a bunch of thralls and obelisks in it. (Wish I had time to expand the game in this direction.)

- make a colony of thralls using only golden souls

—

I’ll be uploading a dev timelapse later. Time to sleep

EDIT: timelapse can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDbMpd0U-dI

I hosted my game on Newgrounds, ’cause I still don’t have my own hosting >.<

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/505085

Instructions are on the Newgrounds page. I really really like the mechanics in this game, even if the gameplay as it’s implemented here sucks (collect stuff, dodge hurty platforms). I think I might expand this out into my next full flash game.

I took about 46 hours, counting the fact that I was out partying all Friday night.

Hi everyone!  This is my first entry ever for an LD contest… glad to be here.

The game is about a little dude named Beebo, who loves to stomp on cakes.  Your job is to set up a tableau of pastries upon which he can wreak his havoc, and then point, aim, and fire him.  There isn’t a win condition, but there are plenty of interesting ways to get points, or set up interesting chain reactions.  I did all the scripting with GameMaker, and image modding in either Photoshop Elements or mspaint.

As I imagine is usually the case with most people’s first ever 48-hour design sumbission… I’m not 100% happy with it.  I spent too long putting in content and not long enough designing the actual gameplay.  What gameplay is there can be entertaining, but there are probably many more interesting ways I could have implemented the cakes to cause cool explosion chains.  I make no apologies for the art either.

I am happy with the number of achievements I was able to squeeze in last-minute, and the overall number of different play styles that the game supports.  Hopefully each of you will find something new to do with it.

The final version of the game can be found on the GameMaker site, here:

http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/90841

Playable with Instant Play on the site (requires plugin), or downloadable, and manageable enough at only 2.7MB.  Let me know what you think!

~pkubit

Edit: I accidentally uploaded the source instead of the exe.  The standalone should be up now.

Edit2: Instant play working now.

I’m a little late with my final post. I finished early yesterday, I didn’t know what to do with my sandbox program. I went for a swim, thinking I might get a good idea, sadly that wasn’t the case. So this morning I decided to post this unfinished game area thingy.

linux build

windows build

source

The linux build need SDL and SDL_image libraries.

I tried making a windows build, but I only tested it in wine, so I am not sure it will work.

The source is all in one file, only ~500 line of code.

Maybe make a sand castle or two and post the pictures.

Well, it’s not finished but it’s close enough to be interesting. We’ve got dinner plans so I’m out of time for this weekend.

It’s kind of a freeform fantasy RPG, inspired by  MrPiglet’s fauna entry with random critters, i used PixelRobots to generate random creatures and NPCs. You wander the land, adding to the landscape as you explore it. But right now NPC’s can’t do more than just join your party, and critters just get in your way.

Update: A release build is now available:

The Wanderer (700kb)

Here is my final entry for my first Ludum Dare, it’s been a blast.

I didn’t get too experimental with the gameplay or code as I had no idea what I would be able to do within the time alloted. In the end I’m fairly pleased with what I’ve made.

You are a robot sent into an open-world orange grove to stop a roaming wave of mutated eight-legged oranges. You can upgrade both your weapons and your body. Good thing the rules of this compo are loose, it’s only about half-sandbox and half-cute.

A few screenshots:

Windows Executable

All in all a pretty good weekend, can’t wait for LD15 at the end of next month.

Well, I had the start of an idea, but then never really figured out where to go with it.  It could have come out worse, I guess, but I really feel like I should be better at this by now.

In the future, I think I will actually spend time figuring out how I want the game to work instead of going with something extremely vague and getting right into implementing something before I know what I want.

Live and learn, I guess.

PLAY IN BROWSER LINK

for those interested:  Source Code

time-lapse: link

Well,..finally I got ready more or less.

It’s is a typical collect stuff in order to come further game:

It is about Sandro Sand that is searching the last Sandbox in the world as the government forbid everything that makes fun including sandboxes…

In the second level (on the other island) there is a bug that the camera perspective is changing to very high above the player. You can still see him very very small (beside the mousecursor) so go on collecting and go then to the brown door of the tower! Actually to finish the game you need about 2-3 minutes

Here two screenshots:

This my second try in python. First one was in pygame, now I tried panda3d (as I usally use jMonkeyEngine). It was quite cool. Nevertheless somehow I wrote everything in one(!) class. LOL….usally I’m a java  programmer using for every small piece a class Quite a difference…Panda3d has a pack-function that makes an installer for you. Problem is that the package gets quite huge. This one is about 57MB. So be warned…

Nevertheless I hope you are able to run it. (Starting it from the installer doesn’t work for me! Try to use it from start-menu) At the moment I have only a win-installer but will try to create a linux-deb as well.

Here is the LINK

And here is the source with all of the blender-stuff included also: LINK

CU, ToM

just have to fix a few nasty bugs that suddenly appearedgrrrr

After losing several hours of work due to a hard drive hiccup ( annoyingly while I was backing up the code to SVN at the time ) I won’t be able to finish this within the 48 hours.. I can’t even release anything just now as it’s currently very broken.

The code I lost was most of the refactored state machine – which worked properly! So I’ve been having to rewrite that again, and it’s not pretty.. specially seeing as it’s not working as well as it was.
I shall be continuing this throughout the week when I get back from work, so I’m hoping to have it finished by the end of the week.. though if I was to restart it, I’d be writing an actual pixel detection routine as this tilecheck system is just hideous!

Once it’s done, I’ll write up a post mortem of what went right, and what shot me in the bum.
Here’s a picture of it’s current state ( clicky for full screen ):

That’s 256 Quirks running around a screen area of 1024×768.. it’s now got a dynamic playfield so if you set the config file to any ( reasonable ) resolution, it’ll create a playfield big enough for you.

That’s it just now.. as a warm up to LD15, it’s highlighted a few issues that I’ll need to resolve to take part properly… but it’s been fun anyway
Apologies that I couldn’t finish in time, but I’ve had a lot of good feedback from this so far, so I’ll try get it done throughout the week.

Here’s my current alpha:

http://games.mochiads.com/c/g/super-action-ninja-agents-ld-version/SuperActionNinjaAgents.swf

The ninja rope physics finally work. They’re not perfect — gravity pulls you incorrectly (if you hang for a while you’ll slowly slide down), but it’s pretty serviceable. Right now you can attach the rope anywhere, to anything (including air ). Also, there’s literally no game. Next is making the rope actually shot the little grappling hook bit out, and have it only collide with terrain. Then adding enemies and a goal.

Arrow keys move, mouse button jumps (you can aim the jump), mouse button activates ninja rope while in the air.

Sorry about it being arrow keys instead of wasd, but flixel defaults to arrow keys, and I don’t have time to go and change it.

I wasn’t originally going to participate in this Mini Ludum Dare, but I wound up making two simple toys that are a little fun to play around with.  I didn’t really want to commit to actually making a game, and since the theme is ‘sandbox,’ both programs are entirely pointless.  Both require Python and PyGame — which are easy enough for anyone to obtain.

Squiggle Draw

It looks better in motion (along with perhaps a higher squiggle value.)  Basically, you draw and it makes the lines all squiggly looking.  As you can see, Left Mouse Button draws, Scroll Wheel increases/decreases squiggliness, and Space bar clears the screen.

Download: squiggle_draw.py

Particles

This program lets you play around with particles.  You can place down ‘attractors’ which draw particles towards it or ‘repulsors’ which push them away.  Left Mouse Button puts down attractor, Right Mouse Button puts down repulsor, Scroll Wheel add/removes particles, and Space Bar clears attractors and repulsors.

Download: particles.py