So, minimalism turned out to be a great theme for me. I’d already been thinking about the idea of just doing a simple, fun game to relax after all of the hard work I’d been doing on my other game, so everything worked out. But not before a sidetrip through the insanity of development that was just a little bit more insane than usual.

I decided to take a well-known genre and pare it down to the core experience. Hence, a bullet-hell shooter with no shooting. The player doesn’t even have to click on anything–the click at the start is just to make sure your web browser is focused. While the art style references De Stijl, I felt that for a game the essence was in the mechanics, not the visuals, so I avoided the visual minimalism of horizontal and vertical lines in favor of an interactive minimalism of a handful of actors and the tightly defined but emergent relationship between them.

Despite everything in the game being a square, you can pretty much instantly tell how they relate to each other just but how they move and interact. I like how that turned out.

You can play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=12047

What Went Wrong

Time

Technically this didn’t go wrong so much as I knew going in that this was going to be an issue. I had a major paper due the week of Ludum Dare, so there was no way I would be able to devote the full time to the game, or even very much of it. I actually wasn’t sure if I was going to participate at all until a late evening conversation on Saturday made me realize that I had to get this idea out of my head. I always make a point of sleeping properly and not disrupting my usual routines, so even though I had deadlines about to steamroll me I ended up putting in about three hours on the game Saturday night and picking development back up at about ten or so on Sunday. In total, I probably spent about twelve to fifteen hours on the game.

Audio

I knew I wanted to get audio into the game, but a bug earlier in the day had put me behind, so I ended up with three hours to go, no audio–and no idea how to add it, because Processing.js doesn’t natively do audio. I had to learn HTML5 audio and make the sounds in three hours or less. Preferably less, because I like to leave some extra time at the end of Ludum Dare for breathing room. It worked in the end, but I’d have liked to have a bit more attention to the audio–but not to add much, because the minimalistic effects that are currently a part of the game do fit the theme. Just be glad my screeching temp sounds got replaced.

Testing

The procedural generator I wrote is fairly clever, given the time constraints. It divides the different possible features a wave can have into buckets and then uses Perlin noise to select a subset of those features to use. But it needs a bit more tuning than it has. I was the only one testing it, so I knew the ins and outs of the generator, but other people take a bit of time to figure it out and mostly die when the difficulty curve ramps up really sharply at the fifth level.

If I had been able to watch other people play the game I probably would have been able to avoid the other big problem, which is that there’s no “Game Over” screen. I didn’t need it while I was testing, and I didn’t care what my score was, so I didn’t notice that it was missing. But having one turns out to be really important for the game. Adding it in was a simple 26-line change, and the post-comp version has it, but I feel that if I had other people test it during primary development the game would have ended up even better than it is now.

What Went Right

Processing

Processing was a great platform to work with. I had to implement my own collisions, but that wasn’t a problem since I already knew how. I was able to use a lot of programming tricks that are technically feasible anywhere, like adding easing to most of the movement, but Processing’s immediate feedback let me fine-tune to get the exact feel that I wanted. And feel is a huge part of a game like this. Processing.js was easy to get working once I figured out which PVector functions weren’t implemented yet–in fact, it was so easy that I switched to make the web version of the game the primary one for the competition release.

Scope

I gave myself permission to not do everything. That is, the game wasn’t going to be the best graphics, the best sound, the most innovative concept–I was going to focus on making a game, not starting a revolution. Minimalism turned out to help with that, since it let me make a game that is deliberately about the most basic expression of a core idea.

No Feature Creep

Speaking of which, minimalism gave me an excuse for avoiding feature creep. Every time I had an awesome idea for something that would be an awesome addition to the game, I could just say, “Nope. Minimalism,” and go on my way.

Source Code Control

I took a few minutes on Sunday to set up a git repository for the game. I never ended up needing it, but it let me experiment, knowing that there was always going to be a mostly-working version of the game that I could go back to. I can, right now, jump back to the compo-version or forward to the post-comp changes with no trouble at all. If you aren’t using source code control, take a few minutes to learn how. You won’t regret it.

Conclusions

Keeping yourself healthy is important, even during a crazy crunch situation like this. I made a point to sleep and eat–and that really helped when I needed the energy and concentration to learn a completely new thing three hours before the deadline.

Finally, the community is a big part of why I participate. I make a point of rating a bunch of games–nowhere near all of them, but as many as I can find the time to do. I’ve already incorporated some of the suggestions I’ve received into the post-comp version I’m working on. I try to leave feedback that will help make the games better and I encourage you to do the same.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=12047

wordhunter v100 in-game

WORDHUNTER is a twin stick shooter (like Geometry Wars) where you shoot at characters. If you get a word together your multiplier rises. Well, that’s it. Two sentences for two days work. I started late at about 12 PM (GMT+1) Saturday. I had the idea of shooting characters early, but three different concepts to make a game out of it. One being a space invaders clone. I choose the twin stick genre and got started. I worked with black squares and a triangle as temporary art. The explosion was done by hand in Gimp because I wasn’t happy with the results of explosion-generators. Spent some hours with my girlfriends Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Got at coding again at 12 pm. The stress was building up and my head started to tell me that I could just quit, but I wasn’t going to quit as I had a working prototype at that point and I NEEDED to finish. But no game over event, no high-scores, menus or music. I started with the menus, trying to get them right at the first time (which I did), then the game over event. After a (late) lunch I wanted to compile a demo for play testing  That’s where the terror started. I used Slick2D before, in other prototypes, but I did never reach the state to actually export a game. In that moment, high-scores were cut and the music fell a bit short. I was aiming to enter the game at 12 pm (because I had to work on Monday) and entered it at 2 am I guess. Cooled down a bit after that. Viewed other submissions and finally got some sleep. I’m happy with the result, well, if you get over that fact that it get’s too hard too soon. And the hit boxes have a slight (8 px) offset to the right. And words are hard to get. But well, it was my first time and I loved it. I already fixed a lot of bugs for a release the next days on my website.

What went great:

• I had a Slick2D  template ready
• Used OpenMPT, Gimp & sfxr before
• Some experience in game writing from a couple of prototypes/demos
• Went out with my dog a couple of times to get fresh air and free my mind – That helped a lot
• Setting myself a deadline was good
• Trying to export a play testing demo was a good idea

What went no so great:

• Exporting – You should figure out what you need and have to do BEFORE entering a contest
• If you need pixel explosions – do them by hand. Don’t try out 3 different generators for nothing
• I thought my idea was small enough to get everything done – it wasn’t. Next time: Start small – Use the time I have left to add stuff.
• I had to cut some stuff in the end: High score lists, better Music, more types of enemies and better balancing of waves.

For the next time:

• Take Monday off
• Get to bed early on Friday and start directly at 4am

Thank you for reading and enjoy the game. And if you liked it, rate & visit my website soon for a better version

PLAY WORDHUNTER NOW!

Intro

IceBreaker is a minimalist free-pause RTS-ish thing (probably better described as an FTL-like, though bearing little similarity) set in a Cyberspace similar to the one portrayed in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (a book which changed my adolescent life and is at least partially responsible for my getting into programming).

I didn’t get much (okay, any) journal-writing done during the weekend, though there’s a vague run-down of events in the project’s github page.

So consider this (rather large) postmortem post-hoc overcompensation. (and apologies in advance for the spam)

Blender was extremely helpful for rapidly producing the future-retro look very quickly, even the sprites were tiny renderings with wireframes

You can’t quite tell, but it’s a stripped-down RTS:

• no resources or buildings (instead you have gestation periods for replication)
• since you can’t build unit factories, you instead have to replicate (and be vulnerable), but if you’re standing still you will heal
• there /are/ classes, but they are restricted to *strength* (hit amount) and *vitality* (health)
• it’s meant to be broken down into very short levels, generally with you collecting/destroying something which is being protected.

Statistics

• Four litres of coffee consumed
• A whole forest of tobacco
• 3,617 lines of code
  • That’s 60 A4 pages if printed out
  • According to Wolfram Alpha that’s:
    • about 17.8 metres ( 58 ft ) tall
    • 6.6 storeys high
    • and about half the diameter of the Hindenberg
  • Very sore wrists (hush, you!)
• somewhere between 3 and 6 hours of sleep

What went wrong

1. strong underlying system
   • unlike my last two LudumDare attempts, I knew what I wanted to do very quickly, I wrote about three pages of ideas and then stopped when I realised I’d already made my mind up to do the first one.
     However I didn’t flesh out the details as much as usual and so started building the basic framework while pondering, knowing I could change the details later on.  This resulted in a lot of code ( ~60ft worth! ) that, whilst extremely useful was probably not necessary to get the basics of the game done.
     I remain convinced that it was doable within the alotted time period (the post compo version is only an extra 4 hours work, with the last 3 mostly being unnecesary tweaking)
2. not enough testing of environment
   • I did more preparation than previously, but I wasted time on a few things which could have been sorted out before the compo:
     • setting up the live stream stole about 1-2 hours, admittedly I was feeling a bit braindead/overwhelmed/uninspired so this was a better utilisation of time than say, nothing.  But this should have “Just Worked”
     • Final builds (I’ll get to that)
3. using an unfamiliar framework and language (again)
   • In my first LD, I used AS3/FlashPunk which I’d picked up a couple of hours before the compo.  In the second, I used Java/LibGDX and didn’t complete – whilst I had familiarity with Java I was very very new to LibGDX and as a result spent wayy too much time googling.  This time was a fair bit better (Haxe is quite similar to Java/AS3) but I still had little to now experience with either it, or HaxePunk
   • HaxePunk is quite nice, but unfortunately not quite “there” yet for me, I wrote a disproportionately large amount of patches to the library in order to get basic features to work normally.  This stole quite a bit of time, but it was far too late in the project to change ships.  I look forward to using it more though.
4. refactoring at the halfway point
   • despite having most of the system quite well designed in my head, I had to stop and write a vast swathe of code on day 2, partially to undo the odd choices of my sleep-deprived self the night before
5. sleep (braindead 6+6 hours)
   • I should have done it sooner, and more.  I’m quite good without sleep, but I ran rampant on the code-base when I  started getting exhausted.  Much time was spent rectifying this spaghetti.  I’m not sure how long I actually slept (somewhere between 4 and 6 hours), but I easily lost 12 hours to silly choices and then the bleary-headedness upon waking.
     

     an early screenshot complete with pointless UI and ugly tiles

6. didn’t demonstrate theme clearly enough (despite following it)
   • I had basic gameplay down very early in the project this time, but the sleep-spaghetti resulted in about 10-12 hours of programming which left me (effectively) where I started
7. planning
   • I actually planned quite well in a lot of ways, but some very fundamental (and rudimentary) aspects were overlooked initially, resulting in much confusion and wasted time
8. submission process panic!
   • I tested my environment this time to avoid this exact thing.  However I discovered (at submission time) that whilst my project ran perfectly in the Flash standalone player, it would silently fail completely in-browser.  It turns out all I had to do was add “-web” to the build command, but it took me far too long to discover this!
9. no end-game detection or automatic level progression
   • despite “shipping” with a few levels, the submission process issues resulted in my missing the 20 minutes that I needed to finalise this important factor of a “short-level based game” and the gameplay suffers for it.

What went right

1. strong underlying system
   1. Yes, it’s a dirty trick having this in both sections.  But I maintain that the approach was a good one, early efforts resulted in the tutorial system being a mere 45 minutes to implement, and most new features were added extremely quickly
   2. I used JSON for most of the configuration of the game, allowing rapid prototyping of enemy AI, character attributes, menus and the tutorial system)
2. using Haxe and SublimeText 2
   1. This was a pretty awesome combination, I look forward to being able to justify the $70 license for SublimeText2 (this was my first real experience with it, and it was wonderful).  I have been using (shudder) Eclipse for a while despite my lack of appreciation for IDEs in general so it was nice to have a “real” development environment again.  However I’ve gotten rather dependent on Eclipse’s easy mass-refactoring, and you can really tell (names of things changed through the course of the project and thus there are some things named Agents which are actually Actors and so forth)
3. the game idea
   1. I think this concept is pretty sound, and I enjoyed playtesting it.  Definitely building some more levels and a little more “Juice” and thrusting it in the face of anyone who walks by
4. music and art
   1. There were a few times when my brain completely went on strike, so it was good to change gears and work in Blender or Renoise to build some of the feel, having these elements in game was also fantastic for morale.
   2. The music was made in about 5-15 minutes for each of the two tracks
   3. Art was quite quick too, despite a few false starts
5. tutorial system
   1. I’m really happy with the tutorial system, which could also double as a mission introduction system.  It hooks into game events and each dialog of the tutorial can have a number of events required before it appears, or disappears making it very easy to make a clear (and importantly, responsive) tutorial.

The in-game tutorial system is quite smart, if a little overenthusiastic

Last words

Thanks to everyone for an awesome experience yet again!

Project source (github) | Project page | Live stream (twitch)

I strongly encourage you to try out the Jam/Post-compo version after you’ve rated, as it’ll be a lot more clear what I was trying to achieve

Ludum Dare END

SUBMISSION: Cave Runner

And so ends my first Ludum Dare. It was a challenging experience, especially since I didn’t have as much time to work on it than I had originally hoped. My plans changed a lot throughout the competition. I’d like to highlight the biggest changes.

1. My original plan was to submit my game into the 48 hour competition, but I ended up needing more time, so I submitted it to the 72 Jam instead. I hope to make an entry to the 48 hour competition next time.
2. I did not add sound. This had to be cut in order to meet the 72 hour deadline.
3. I code generated shapes rather then art. I made this decision after the theme was announced, since to me it showed minimalism.
4. I chose to make an infinite runner game instead of a roguelike. I ended up making this change almost as soon as the theme was announced, since I felt I could achieve this, and my top objective was to get something I could submit.
5. I ended up using OpenGL as well as SDL, since I knew it would fit well with my level generation. I did not know how to do this in SDL, and with a little research I realized it would require one of the extra SDL libraries. This could have been a bad decision, since I didn’t have any experience making a game with OpenGL, but I believe I learned a lot because of this decision.

This wraps up my thoughts so far. I might make another post after I get the results back. I’m hoping to get at least 2′s or 3′s, and maybe get some insight from comments.

Play Here

Well, we are going to start from the beginning. I had high hopes about the theme would be Parallel Worlds so I started to do an idea about a game with this theme in my head.

The day 26 came and the final theme was Minimalism. The first thing I did was curse to the people who had voted that theme. The second thing was start to think how can I innovate and at the same time create a minimalism game, but the ideas weren’t coming to my, and magically I remembered my first idea for the Parallel Worlds theme. This idea consisted in a split-screen with two characters who would interact between they. You would have to get the objects in the ground and go changing of screen for kill enemies who only could be killed by one of the character (ok, this sounded better in my head).

So I made this concept more minimalist. The game would have split-screen and two character running forward, each screen would represent the black or the white and this would create a contrast between the characters and the background.

Then, when I had this in my project of Unity, I added blocks who kill you when you touch him. Although this look like a simple thing but this was one of my hardest challenges in the develop of this game, all because Unity not detected any collider. After two hours and almost come to despair I decided restart my computer, and YEAH! THIS SOLVED THE PROBLEM, FUCK U UNITY!, were my words.

Well, the colliders works good, the characters run forward and when they touch a block they die. And has not spent even one day, this is amazing!.

Is time to level design!

The level design was very frustrating, to each block that I put I needed complete the level until that point, and this isn’t easy, seriously, I wanted to hit something!. It took me a lot of hours.

Ok, the day had not finished and I still had time to do the menus. I made it and finally came the time to sleep after 22 hours of work without rest.

The game was complete and I still had one day more to polish it.

The second day was a relaxing day. I did the music and fix a lot of bugs. I still had more of half day more so I started thinking in what could I add to make the game experience more satisfactory, the first thing I saw was that the graphics were very very simples, I knowed that the theme was minimalism but… I love the pixels and my game had to have pixels!, so I set to worked. I did a wall of bricks and some windows and the game now looked like an ancient castle. The problem of it was that the game was now more hard. But fuck, I really loved how the game looked!, so I add a “button” for choose if you want play with textures or without them.

Finally I publish the game when still missing about five hour to finish the compo.

And this is basically how I did feel while I was develop this game for my first ludum dare.

PD: Sorry for my bad english, I’m not a native

Hi there again!

Today we finished the assets and the most important parts of gameplay implementation, there’s one little thing that I liked to make, but ah well, things weren’t working out very nice, and since I managed to do the main thing that I wanted to implement, I think that’s ok for now…

So, first things first!

We have a logo! YEAH!

Logo of the RED game

I really liked this logo, I think we managed to get something quite stylish, game related and minimalist, this one was made by me with the help of Hexels! An awesome software for drawing stuff with hexels, many thanks to @saint11 from miniboss for showing me this jewel!
Btw, for those who didn’t read the past WIP, RED stands for Red Eyes in the Dark!

About that thing that I managed to implement, here’s a look at it

Predictive movement

Already know what it was?
Yup, I implemented a little system to make the AI predict the players movement before it called up the pathfinding algorithm, because it wasn’t very useful before, it was almost impossible for it to catch the player when it was just following its current position, so, to make the experience meaningful this was a must do!
In the case above, I just moved the player to the left and the AI aimed correctly according to the player’s linear velocity, but it also takes angular velocity into account when needed!

Next up are more aesthetic than functional things we made today, the first one we did was actually having the idea to take inspiration in minimalism quotes to inspire the level design of the stages, which we plan to make ten at most, maybe 9 and a final boss, maybe…

Da flavour

We really liked this font, for some reason it creates a dark atmosphere around it, we liked the idea of it being kind of typewritten, it’s like the kid (read the past WIP for story stuff) was making annotations of its experiences, really awesome!
We also finished the final UI of the gameplay scenarios, here it is

RED’s UI

It will be possible to have more than one enemy at the same time, and they may have different sizes and speeds, it will be a really fun game to play and the challenge level is quite awesome!
The three blue bars up top are the battery level of you flashlight, they will go down fast, so you have to make it past the creatures fast, or else the lights go up and then the red eyes creatures will be unstoppable.
The little beam of light on the top right corner is the exit, the player’s objective is to get to it! I think we will have to make it more viewable, I think it is quite dark as it is now, more stuff for the last day!

For the last day we will be finally getting the sound stuff and effectively design the levels and stuff, I wish we had done a bit more today, but the event slowed us down a bit, as our workplace was used for the speedpaint session of our artist, Joao, that made this quite impressive piece there

SpeedPaint made by the artist of the RED game

Still unfinished as he told me to say here!

And here are we again, at our little booth, this time the whole crew getting in the frame!

RED game devs

From right to left: Joao, Pablo, Tiago (me =D)

Thanks a lot for your attention! Final updates and game ready tomorrow! Have a good Ludum Dare!

That was a bit of a challenge. Didn’t get even close to being able to use the full 48hrs due to an AWESOME TOOL CONCERT, followed by EXCESSIVE DRINKING. That said I’m pretty happy with the result.

Got a timelapse up here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTzC4s0W4ys

The game is available here. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20671

I tried to do some things I haven’t done before with Multimedia Fusion 2, especially with the lighting model I implemented. It’s not overly technical, but I’m damn happy with the visuals. I wish I had a little more time, then I would have tried my hand at PXTone, since I’m not a musician, it would probably have ended terribly. Need some food/sleep now, and then I wanna get onto voting, just need to work out how that works.

After thirty hours of work, I can proudly say I finished my game for this Ludum Dare.

I called the game “Nothing is impossible”. Is a platform game where you must control two characters in a split screen, each screen represent the black and the white and this create a constrat between the character and the wall.

The game consist, as I said before, in the control the two characters dodging the boxes and stakes you will find in the way, all this while they run forward.

My intention was do the game very very difficult, but at the same time do a addictive game and I think I finally achieve.

But well, let’s cut the talk. You can find the game here.

Thank for read and play!

Sorry for no add potatoes, serious, i’m very sorry

Progress has been pretty good today!

We’re nearing the end of day 2 of the jam, and the game is basically playable. The potato Easter-egg isn’t completed yet, but other than that (and bugs) the game is finished!

Game will definitely be finished in time!

Test build:

32-bit: http://www.mediafire.com/?p494j7w5a84505d
64-bit: http://www.mediafire.com/?cavvl5go9vu4jg7

(if the 64-bit version doesn’t work, try the 32-bit version.)

Feel free to post your high scores in the comments!

-TheMaster99

Hello, everybody who care about this. This is my progress of my game, but I’m not sure if this is right with the theme, what I plan to do is that this Mr. Sphere shrank of size and now must fight a giant potato (because the Mr. Sphere is tiny, of course)

I think this game is going to be like an advanced platformer test

Have your game got Potato?!

If that’s the case, why not give it a Potato Seal of Approval badge!
It includes lots of.. Uhm.. Fiber, potassium and vitamin C… And Approval?

Anyway, use as wished!

Seal of approval!

(Made in Photoshop CS6, it's not vector based so I can't give any bigger version though Hope you like it anyway!)

That’s it, lots of new features, we have these awesome iconic minimalist killer circles with spikes, these incredible poligonal vectorial one directional turrets, and all our old friends triangles trying to survive in this hostile world!

Last update for today, going to sleep, tomorrow we have more hard work to do! =D

Hi there,

This is the first Ludum Dare that me and my team are participating, it’s been quite a ride, literally, we started the day traveling to another city in another state where we would be present at a games and anime event, so, obviously, we started thinking in the idea of the game in the middle of the road! YAY!

As we’ve made lots of platformers in the pasts GGJ, we were looking for to make some top-down-ish game, soooo…

Our game will be called RED, which stands for Red Eyes in the Dark! (and we thought about it right before lunch, minimalism in the title, way to go!)

It is a game about a kid who is in his house alone and there’s a power outage in it, leaving him in the dark and only with a flashlight to guide his way to the outdoor moonlight.
The thing is, when he is in the dark, he starts to see glowing red eyes coming at him! OH NO!
However, when he aims at them with his flashlight, he is able to slow them down, giving him time to avoid them and make it safe to the light.

As if there wasn’t trouble enough already, it turned out that his batteries are drying out and his has little time to reach the light before they run out.

I am doing the game design and programming, Joao is making the assets and Pablo is having its way with the level designs.

We have some prototypes that somewhat work already, here are some pics of them:

RED ScreenShot

In this first screen we see the player moving and the red eye creature following him, the flashlight is not hitting the creature, so it is at full speed!

RED ScreenShot

In this second one you can see that the creature is illuminated by the flashlight, so its eyes close and it gets slower.

This jam is being quite the ride so far, we plan to get more assets done and stuff before tomorrow, where we will be in the event again and things get a little bit noisy there (btw, oh yeah, we are making the game while in the event, live! No stream though, what a shame… but here is a pic of us there, with the Ben Powell keynote in the background, so people will know what the hell we are doing there).

Our booth at Saga

Thanks for reading until here! More updates tomorrow! Have a good Ludum Dare!

Surprisingly, this game is going a lot smoother than I expected it to so far.

Raining Shards is a game being made by Team OCLU, specifically Derek, Mike, and I for the Ludum Dare Jam #26. It is a game where “A bunch of random shit was mashed together in order to make a somewhat coherent idea.” -Derek… But seriously, it is a game that is a combination of Asteroids and Breakout (sort-of, but not really) where a cannon in the center of the screen shoots at asteroids that, when shot, break into shards. You control a ‘basket’ at the bottom of the screen, which you collect the shards with. Collecting shards earns you points. You can also get power-ups, such as Potato (secret), Larger basket, Time-warp (slo-mo for all but the basket) and 2x points. The objective is to get the highest score possible, until some currently unknown event happens that ends the game.

So far, I’m having trouble getting the asteroids to spawn shards successfully when they are destroyed – they are initialized, but for some reason they don’t really exist according to the for loop (they are obviously null, because inside the for loop in question it checks if a shard exists, and if so, draws it. They aren’t drawing :c)

How the game looks so far:

Raining Shards (Hallelujah!)

This is my very first try on a Jam, been watching Ludum Dare Compo for a few times now as one of my friends participate in them.
I’ve been to the Danish, Game Development Camp, last summer which was excellent, but that is the closets I’ve been to such an event.

My tools,
Language: Java
Framework: Slick2D
IDE: IntelliJ IDEA
Sound: Audacity, bfxr. Going to record my own sound properly.

But hoping for the best!
Oh yeh, and here is my current progress of my desk (As I’ve been working for a few hours now. Just forgot to write this post)

A few post-it. Secondary screen for Livestream I’m watching and few other neat stuff.

Decided to go with a Minimalist City simulator, as my current interest has been in urban growth.

Code is available on https://github.com/DarkLotus/lotus-ludumdare26 hourly updates or so hopefully.

3 hours in and time for a quick break and a blog post.

Im using Java, with the Eclipse IDE, and LibGDX as my framework, im also using the Artemis entity system, as playing with it in the last few weeks it allows very quick additions and modification of the game.

I’ve imported a little self code, just some helper functions related to Artemis and intergration with LibGDX, mostly just boiler plate and saved an hour or two.

Whipped up some art in Photoshop, just 5 colored tiles with Labels, Residential, COmmercial, Industrial, Power, Road.

Got them rendering, some camera movement, save/load, and some UI. Ease at getting this far so quick is definitely down to LibGDX and Artemis.

Little screenshot to show so far, currently no logic but that comes over the next few hours, the logic will follow the UI and the arts minimal style. Just enough…

3 hours in

Let’s do this! Stuff I’m going to use:

C#&XNA, Visual Studio 2010, Paint, Gimp, SFXR, Audacity, lots of junk food.

edit. also energy drinks!

First LD48 however i have watched 3 times excited to be the one actually coding this time.

Tools:

• Language- Java (+ a little xml for particles and other things like that)
• Libraries- Slick2D (LWJGL)
• Art- Paint.net / Pickle
• Music- Not sure yet will have to look through tools on ludum dare site
• Livestream-OBS (http://www.twitch.tv/jacobbev)

This is going to be my first Ludum Dare. I’m pretty nervous.

Here are my choice for tools, libraries, etc. so far:

• Language:  C++
• IDE:  Visual Studio Express 2012
• Libraries:  SDL
• Art:  GIMP
• Platform: Windows

My goal for this competition is just to complete a game, and keep it simple. I want to work on scope control and focus. It will be a plus if I get any decent scores. I’m going to be spending most of my time until the start time making sure I can quickly bash out the basic code for setting up the windows, rendering, update, etc.

Here’s my game plan from the start time so far:

• Friday Night –  Saturday Night

1. Get basic program up and running [window, rendering, update, fps control, input].
2. Create a basic game state control [nothing too complicated].
3. Get something moving based of of input.
4. Plan the game elements I want to implement.
5. Break the game elements into there gameplay atoms, and check the scope of the game.
6. Start implementing the high priority gameplay atoms, such as movement, attacking, GUI, etc.
7. Get the core gameplay implemented.

• Sunday

1. Start polishing the game, and looking for bugs.
2. Add more/extend features if QA is finished early enough.
3. Finish quality control at least 2-3 hours before the end time.
4. Submit.

My current idea is to create a dungeon crawler style game, assuming it works with the theme. My priorities for the game are as follows:

1. Core Gameplay
2. Basic Art
3. Extended Gamplay
4. Polished Art
5. Sound/Music

I will be hosting my game on my website here:

http://benshutt.com/[Projects]/LD48-26/

Since it’s soon time to start working on the real entry, I’ve decided to take the time to grab a few pictures and links before I start work.

First off, a picture of the battlestation I will be manning during the upcoming event:

I will be using the C++ code skeleton I’m currently writing a bit on, located on my github here. This code skeleton is built on my own entity system library that’s called Kunlaboro, and I’m hoping to have enough features in it to be able to create any type of 2D game by the time LD26 starts.

I’ve tried a few music generators and found Sound Helix, one that gives pretty upbeat piano music with the example preset. To simplify everything a bit for myself, I’ll be taking those midi files and running them through timidity and ffmpeg to get some ogg vorbis files instead, since SFML comes with built-in support for playing such things.

All in all, I’m hoping to be more prepared for this event than I was for the last three, maybe even get a basic Ubuntu system running so I have something mainstream to compile Linux builds on.

Here’s hoping for an awesome weekend, and lots of comradery on the IRC.
(Anan)Ace out.