I submitted my game to Apple. Have a look at the submission post here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/october-challenge-2010/?action=preview&uid=531

Basically I added some sounds (and some description to each level), and called it done, I then proceeded to create a games page and add it to IndieFlux my game review website.

So hopefully that will drive traffic to IndieFlux and then maybe earn some views which will in turn get me some adds from project wonderful. I don’t know if I’ll make any money with this game, it’s probably kind of lame, but still it was fun to essentially complete my 4th game (that was actually of my own design and coding).

I’m going to continue to work on the game though, and when I have polished it enough, I might take it down and put it on FlashGamesLicense — I sort of doubt I will get a sponsor though.

To play the full size version go here -
Ballsy! Challenge Version

My game, Endeavor, has been getting some great feedback and is nearly done!

I’m holding off on releasing it to give it some extra polish. The game will be free to play, though I’m not yet sure what site it will be published on.

I’m glad to have participated in the challenge, even though I won’t be submitting it on time, and haven’t earned anything *yet*! I will post here when it is finished and released.

Congratulations to everyone who completed the challenge!

I finished Five-O on October 21st and submitted it to the App Store for approval that night. As the days went by, I started to get worried that it wouldn’t be approved in time, but on Friday, October 29th, I received confirmation that the game was approved for sale. I got my first sales on October 30th! Woohoo!

View Five-O in the App Store

I’ve put up what I got. I’m not exactly proud of it as a whole. And, it probably deliverers just short of $1.26 of fun, but it is what it is.

Part of me wants to make it better, but another part of me is done with the idea and wants to move on!

Compo Link: Stacker
Website Link: Stacker

PS I’d lower the price, but BMT Micro has $1.25 minimum

Update: I switched to FastSpring and was able to lower the price to a dollar!

Five-O is a board game I’ve been developing in my spare time over the last few years. It started as a side project during college. I was taking a course in artificial intelligence, and I wanted to create a game with an AI component. Growing up, I had played one of the many “Scrabble-but-with-numbers” games and had fond memories of it. Searching the internet revealed not a single good implementation of this idea for the computer, so that’s what I set out to make.

The basic rules are as follows. Players take turns placing intersecting sequences of numbers on a board. Each sequence must total to five or a multiple of five, and no sequences may be more than five tiles in length. For example, 7-3-8-7 would be a valid sequence because it adds up to 25. The sequence 3-9-5 is not valid because it adds up to 17 which is not a multiple of five. You can read more on the game’s webpage.

With the release of the iPad, I put the desktop version of Five-O on hold and started focusing on getting an iPad version done. The device is just too perfect for board games like Five-O. The October Challenge was the push I needed to finally finish version 1.0 and publish it in the App Store.

Hey,

My game Dynamite is *almost* ready for “beta sale” but I really want to add in a few tutorial levels so people know how to play. I’ll be putting it on sale within the week for sure though! This challenge has been great for motivating me to get this done

I’ll post here once it’s available for sale!

-Phil

We’ve used this months Ludum Dare to amp up production and set a goal for creating a demo of our upcoming game. An action adventure game similar to Legend of Zelda, let us know what you think.

Blossom Tales

• Check out a video of the game in action, Blossom Tales: Gameplay Video
• Download the Game. You will also need the Xna 3.1 Redistributable download here
• If you need help checkout our website.

Cheers.

I finished my game last night and submitted it to MochiAds. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for it to get approved (I hadn’t thought about this being a weekend, so far my experience was that games get approved within a couple of hours). So I probably won’t make the $1 before the end of October…

Anyway, you can play the game here: Zwarte Piet (flash)

I am ever so close to finishing up HAckBotZ. I plan on putting it up for bidding on flashgamelicense.com within the next couple of days.  While technically I will miss the the deadline, I am still quite happy with my progress. Good or bad this will be my first ‘finished’ game, and I credit the October Challenge for motivating me to do it.  There is  something about the LudumDare compos/challenges getting a group of people working towards the same goal and posting about their progress that is quite motivating and fun.

Obviously, with me in the process of starting business and stuff, things haven’t been progressing as planned with Kobo II with regard to The October Challenge. I’ve given up on the idea of starting the pre-purchase alpha period this month, as there isn’t enough to show yet – and besides, I risk getting in trouble if I actually sell anything at this point, so that’ll just have to wait.

Anyway, I can fly around in rather nice looking terrain and fire two different weapons at the mountain peaks in the area, but that’s about it so far. Next project is adding some sound effects, I think. I mean, no sound is really boring – and I’m a sound/music guy, perhaps more than anything…! That just won’t do.

As to the Challenge, I am going to try to release a small technology preview before the deadline! The watermark in the corner actually says “GAMEPLAY PREVIEW” right now, but that doesn’t seem appropriate just yet.

Now, as I said, I couldn’t safely start doing business at this point even if I did have a product ready for release – but I suppose I don’t have to refuse the occasional donation… And I suppose I could accidentally give away a final version license or two. You never know…

(cross-posted from Under The Bridge)

So no doubt you remember ten days ago our Ludum Dare October Challenge entry BallZOut went live, and that was rather satisfying and everyone has been very complimentary thank you, but as an investment … well, not the greatest idea. Week and a half later, a total of 101 sales and down to trace daily levels; still just hanging on to the charts in the Puzzle category as of this morning with yesterday’s single sale amazingly enough,

but as those rankings are on a four-day rolling average (last we heard, anyways) no doubt it’ll descend into complete obscurity in short order.

So while we’d really like add a bunch of stuff to make it more engaging, pretty darn hard to justify setting any more time aside in the near future with that complete lack of traction. Not that one should actually expect to get any without a) excellent marketing or b) being featured by Apple, mind you. So shall we whip out the credit card and start doing some marketing? Weee-eellll, we were kinda toying with that idea, then we read this thread.

Marketing: What else can I do to promote?

That particularly caught our attention as the game discussed, “180″, was actually on our phone — we caught it’s freeappcalendar.com feature day, and hey it’s icon had a cartoon redhead and trolls like redheads — and it’s a puzzle game more or less in the same headspace as BallZOut, except it’s polished to a fine sheen, and as you can see reading through that thread their marketing effort was nothing short of breathtaking. End of June, that thread was; so how’s 180 been doing since? Let us check Applyzer for it’s US rankings …

… it’s #850 paid in Games/Puzzle and off the charts in Games/Arcade their other category. So BallZOut is beating it right now? Oh, dear. Let us take that as acceptably solid evidence that a big marketing investment would be at the very least fraught with peril and more likely completely ill-advised, shall we? Which leaves us with the strategy of continually updating content and features and waiting for lightning to strike in the form of somebody at Apple deciding to feature it someplace as the most rational way forward, we’d say. Which still requires setting time aside. How shall we finance that?

Well, here’s what we’re giving that a shot with. You catch a week ago we posted about this appbackr place for wholesaling your iOS apps? Yep, this evening BallZOut went live on appbackr:

See that post for full details, but briefly how this is working is that appbackr is making 40,000 future sales available at a wholesale price of 45¢; whenever any of those get sold, we get advanced 35¢, and once they’re sold we get a further 10¢ out of the proceeds, leaving the remaining 25¢ for the wholesale purchaser’s profit and appbackr’s cut for running the marketplace. At the very least an interesting idea, yes?

And not only is it an idea interesting enough to try out just to see what happens, this kicks the whole competition thing up a notch — why yes, there is an appbackr Challenge:

Reach $1,000 dollars in sales on appbackr before November 22nd and WIN!

• appbackr will back an additional $500 worth of your app
• The top 5 apps (based on dollars sold on appbackr) will get a FREE iPad

Yep, now that’s really a challenge, indeed it is. Stay tuned to hear how we do with that one!

Hey guys,

Fruits! is finally done and while it can still need further polish, I decided to submit this evening to Ludum dare.

Play it in your browser here: Fruits! web version

Thanks to the guys at Ludum dare for organizing all this, it’s been a great motivator for getting the game done.

My game, Blow Da Bricks, has been public on Kongregate and in other places, embedded with MochAds. After less than 3 days, I have earned over $1.00 in ad revenue! I have earned $0.88 on Kongregate and $0.17 through MochiAds! I have also received a Kreds tip on Kongregate, so that totals the money I’ve made for the game at $10.61. In addition to that, I have just been approved for MochiGames publication and distribution, so hopefully I’ll see another spike in game plays and add revenue over the weekend. As for the game itself, it is currently been hovering around a steady rating and is at 2.8 on Kongregate now. I was a little disappointed that I didn’t reach 3 stars, but for my first released game, I think a 2.8 is pretty good. Head over to Kongregate and play it now, and rate it if you like it.

We’ve had a change of thoughts on our Ludum Dare Dwarf Dash project.

The original deadline for the project was to have a game that could be submitted by the end of the month.

As things lie at the minute, we have a game that we could easily submit to the Apple store for review, but to be honest we don’t want to do that.

The game that we’ve come up with has surprised us in playability and already seems to be quite a lot of fun – because of that we want to extend it a little and add some features and content. We’ll be launching it as a kind of hybrid game jam / actual release.

We’ll continue to update this blog with progress and link to announcements and other information as and when available. Look forward to reporting back again soon.

We’ll be regularly blogging here and on our parent site under ‘Ludum Racer (challenge blog)‘
Further to this, both myself @deltamikealpha and Gareth @36peas will be tweeting about the project as it evolves.

Hey guys,

My game Fruits! is now ready for test release. You can play it directly in the browser here.

There’s a few issues discovered earlier today that’s in need of fixing. Expect to release final version tonight or tomorrow. No sales though, so no Ludum dare challenge win, but at least a released game

Enjoy and be sure to let us know what you think can be improved!

Hi

I created simple helper that might help few of you who use c++ with STL. It adds foreach to the c++ that traverses over all of the STL container, so the code is more readable, like in this example:

#include <cstdio>

#include <vector>

#include "foreach.h"

int main()

{

    // make int vector and fill it

    vector<int> k;

    for (int i=0; i<10; ++i) k.push_back(i);

    // show what the upper loop filled

    foreach_ (it, k) printf("%i ",(*it));

    printf("\n");

    // show all the data, but get rid of 4

    // http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraphobia  

    foreachdel_ (it, k)

    {

        if (*it == 4) it=k.erase(it);

        printf("%i ",(*it));

    }

    printf("\n");

    return 0;

}

Will result in following:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

0 1 2 3 5 6 7 8 9

More on my blog:  http://pleasanthacking.com/2010/06/17/foreach-in-cpp/

I hope some of you will find it useful during compos

I’ve been working on getting sound to work on space waves, it wasn’t working….. And I just found out why. It turns out ‘ofSoundPlayer’ hasn’t been ported to the iPhone like the rest of OF, turning into one big headache for me to find out why it wasn’t working. I found out after searching on the OF forum, and looking at the last page.

I’m going to use something called ‘ofxiPhoneFile’ for saving. I just got to work out how it works.

I’m going to make sure that enemies  don’t spawn on top of each other and then finally submit it to apple.

-bear

Space Waves is getting close to being a fully working game. Its feels fun to be me and its something I’m quite proud of.

I’ve still got the saving and the moving backgrounds, but I can hopefully do them quite quickly, some work tomorrow should have both things out of the way.

I won’t have the game on the app store by the 31st but It will be done and submitted.

-bear

AVOIDAL (my August 2010 Ludum Dare entry) and October Challenge entry has found a home!

I’m excited to report I finalized on a primary sponsorship deal with Tom Fulp of Newgrounds last week and have finished all the integration and testing work required. That work included getting to create 23 fun medals (achievements) for players to win when the game is played over on the Newgrounds site with a player account. The game will launch over there next week on November 3rd. I’ve also managed to sell a few non-exclusive licenses including one to Big Fish Games. The primary sponsorship was found via posting to Flash Game License. I spent a good bit of time in October working on, play testing, and polishing the original competition version into the final version.

The highscores have been reset so get in there and play!