[My name is Carlos Leituga and I’m a junior Game Designer / Implementer in a Portuguese company, where I’m working on a Hidden Object Adventure for a year and a half now. So here I am again, creating a game in 72 hours with the Make A Game team for Ludum Dare #22. ]

As we were packing our stuff after making Eggscape, someone said something in the lines of “Let’s do this again in December!”, and since that day in August we’ve been talking about participating once more in Ludum Dare.

As the final week till LD #22 began, we followed the theme voting closely, coordinated our votes and shared the possibilities of each theme that interested us. Having learnt a lot with LD #21, we were confident that this time everything would work out better, even with two fewer members.

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Yep! Finished my entry last night.

It’s very short, but I thought it was pretty cool. Good production quality. I spent most of the time on the art and physics, I did it all from scratch.

Written in C++ using SFML2.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=6035

Check it out, play it please, let me know what you think

I will not be making a 3D game this time around. I simply don’t have the time to learn the basics while doing the compo, so I’ll just be making another 2D game. By basics, I mean all the 3D math and stuff needed.

That doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t use jMonkeyEngine for 2D though. Its integration with external libraries on the scene graph is phenomenal and I’d like to find a way to utilize, say, Bullet nodes/controllers in a 2D environment. Plus, I find wrangling with LibGDX to be un-fun and rewriting boilerplate code for Slick again is not in my sights. I spent way too much time on simple crap like entity management on the Discovery game from LD19.

I’m guessing using jMonkeyEngine for 2D stuff the hacky way would be switching the camera to Orthographic view and just using objects with lots of volume in the Z axis, since I am terrible with physics.

In addition, there are a few new tools I may use:

• Tile Studio
• The Games Factory/Multimedia Fusion (total last resort, if I’m just not feeling up to speed)
• PXTone definitely, though I mentioned FamiTracker earlier I absolutely loath tracker interfaces and PXTone is like a really, really simple FL Studio to me.

There was some talk between my friends and I about doing the Jam instead, but one of them may be having travel conflicts that’ll prevent them from participating. Oh well. Dare it is.

My first Ludum Dare game, Madness, may seem a little cheaply made, but I have reasons why it doesn’t have power-ups, or enemy intelligence:
I started working on it on Saturday after tea, just after installing openSUSE. I added the basics and implemented lasers. On Sunday I was near to completion when the computer froze and wiped the game (i was editting it when it froze – thankfully a back-up was made of it on Saturday) – I had to try and re-implement enemies in an hour, which I did.
However, they deleted themselves after like 3 frames. So then I go on to Monday, which was school, tea, computer 1h, scouts 2+1/2h, computer 1+1/2h.
So, that’s why my entry’s not so good and not so well-developed as the others.

Tomorrow I’ll finish off the game’s lost and won screens and add in more enemies – I promise!

So, Cosmic Heist was my entry for the recent Ludum Dare compo. It was a major success by my reckoning, as it was completed in time. That aside, however, I would like to write a little about how things went.

What went right

I spent some time coming up with a couple of interesting(ish) ideas, but ended up throwing them out before settling on what became Cosmic Heist. When I designed the game that actually ended up being made, I actually cut out tons of things, and cut even more as I developed it. This is one area that I really want to improve (I, like many others, am horrible at the “cutting things until it’s right” part), and I feel I made some good progress during this compo. I was able to reject tons of ideas, some good, some bad, but all non-essential.

I had a decent personal code base to start from, and already knew all about the language, libraries, and tools I used beforehand, so I was able to jump right in.

I left some time for play-testing and bug fixing/tweaking near the end, but ended up not needing very much of it. The game was small and simple enough that it wasn’t too buggy by the end, and my wife and I tested it some as I worked on it anyway. However, I would definitely leave this buffer time again anyway, because it really kept things stress-free.

The menus ended up looking/working/sounding great, and I added a cool animated menu background near the end that I really liked. I’ll probably use some of the work that went into that stuff off into the future in other projects.

The music turned out to not suck as much as I thought it would. That was actually my highest-scoring area in the competition, and I am still somewhat unsure what to make of that. This was my first time really making any music, and I don’t really have experience playing/reading/etc. music either. But it doesn’t sound too bad, so I am counting that as a nice success.

The controls are really fluid, and are my favorite part of the whole thing by far. The way you control the ship is great, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I actually didn’t spend much time tweaking that, and by implementing everything I needed for it, I had a whole system for various enemy ship movements, too.

What went wrong

The player’s ship is a bit oddly shaped. This makes it hard to see where you are going. I didn’t realize this at all (duh! isn’t it obvious! the ship points in the direction I drew it to point!) until people began commenting on it. Certainly something that would need to be fixed.

Some people kept looking for the shoot button. I didn’t make it very obvious (at all) that there is no shooting in the game. You just pilot your ship, and enemy ships try to plow into you.

There were a couple of features I wanted to get in, but had to cut due to time constraints. I wanted enemy ships to shoot at you, and every level was supposed to start at a shipyard, from which you had just stolen a ship.

There might be a problem with the Linux build of the game, as one person mentioned they couldn’t get it to run. Unfortunately, it runs fine for me, but I only have two machines to test it on, and they are both almost identical in both hardware and software. If anyone has or can test the game on Linux and tell me if it a) explodes, b)doesn’t run at all, or c) runs fine, I would greatly appreciate it.

Conclusion

All in all, as I said, I was very pleased with the outcome, and I even got some people to play my game, so that was really exciting. I hadn’t ever participated or followed LD until now, so I didn’t have any idea what to expect. I honestly didn’t think anyone would even see my game! Thanks to everyone who rated mine. One thing that I regret is that I didn’t have time to rate any games myself. I did play a few, and they were all great. Next time, I want to set aside some time to rate a good number of games.

Links

Ludum Dare entry

Cosmic Heist on Cheese and Bacon (my website)

Cosmic Heist on Google Project Hosting (MIT License)

[My name is Carlos Leituga and I’m an intern Junior Game Designer / Implementer in a Portuguese company, where I’ve been working on a Hidden Object Adventure for a year now. I was invited by friends to help develop a game for the 21st Ludum Dare event. We are the Make A Game team.]

It was around 11pm when I left my house with a 1 hour trip ahead until I met the yet to be named Make A Game team. Having memorized half of the list of possible themes, I spent the little I could of brain waves keeping my car on the road, and tried to think of quick game mechanics suited for a 72 hour game development.

I was the last of the team to arrive; I met some new faces and joined in on the ready up ritual. There were still 3 hours until the official LD #21 theme to be revealed, so we started throwing ideas around, writing them down on our white boards and linking them to similar themes.

 Look busy guys…

The awaited hour finally came, and the Escape theme was victorious. We quickly (and sleepily) gathered around one whiteboard and started discussing our previous ideas, along with new ones. Among them, the Survival Tetris game was highly praised. For some dumb reason, I went to my computer and searched if someone already had done such a thing. It existed, and in two quite different forms. In one you only controlled a stick figure, and in the other you controlled both pieces and a round character. We were bummed out.

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No more art to do ; _ ;

With all the art done, we turned our attention to the team’s logo while the programmers keep churning out code.

We are near completion of what we can do with our 72 + 4 hour time limit.

Setbacks in the second day kept us from having the game done within the original schedule but we are really proud of our overall progress.

Some stuff won’t make it to our submission build, but we’re keen on finishing this amazing project.

You can check out our Day 2 recap at http://makeaga.me. We won’t be doing a Day 3 post or Post Mortem for a couple of days.

WATCH OUT, IT’S A CODERS’ BLOCK!

(Can’t get embedding to work…)

Here’s the link!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhWYc-e4Zmk

Hey everyone!

I’ve submitted my game to Ludum Dare. If you want to check it out, here’s the link. Screenshots:

Anyway, my game is submitted, but not done. I’m sure there will be code that needs fixing, which I’ll do during the last few hours. I’ll post my post-mortem after the 48 hours is done.

This is the first Ludum Dare I’ve actually completed with a game that resembles finished. Ah, that first time feeling Technically, I did attempt LD 20, but that failed miserably.

After the 48 hours is up, I’ll call my game finished. Until then, I’ve got everything covered so can spend the last 8 hours with the code. And maybe some caffeinated drinks.

I was planning to do the Jam this time round, but my team are all over the country right now on holiday

See you on the other side of the 48 hours.

Trying to fit in with our theme, I’m making our backgrounds. Just to be sure I don’t rush into anything stupid, I like to make color samples, were I lay flat colors and remove the lineart.

The Second one i may redo… Hm.

IT’S NOT STEALING! IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!

“Oh, I didn’t see you there, crushing my path for survival and my dreams of becoming a famous paleontologist.

Do you know how hard it was to find this egg? And how lucky I am that these debris are falling in such a coincidental position that I can climb some of them? It’s like someone is throwing them with exact precision. But I don’t have time to think about it, actually I can’t do much more than panic and run around, waiting for more debris to fall.”

We’re Make A Game and Eggscape is our entry for Ludum Dare 21′s Jam. You can read our Day One Update at http://makeaga.me!

Onward to Day 2! It starts right now!

Since yesterday I couldn’t submit the pictures and the progress of my game, but meanwhile I did a lot of progress in my game and even drew a cool caption for ludum dare:

Meanwhile the game has temporary graphics and levels:



By now you can move and push stuff around, and now I’m starting to work on story and graphics maybe sound later.
p.s THE SITE IS SUPER SLOW!!!!!!

I just woke up. I was getting a little stuck last night when figuring out my concept (which is what always happens to me).But, I got some sleep, am about to get more coffee and will probably eat something soon.

Hmm, I just decided that I would scan some of my note/sketches. I’m putting it through the automatic document feeder to not waste time, so it might look a little washed out. — GAH, nevermind, the auto doc feeder is a POS. It always fucks up.

Hello everyone!! Ludum Dare 21 starts soon and I wanted to say that “I’m in!!!”
This time I’m going to write my game in c++ using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010:

• Graphics Engine / Game Engine / Libraries: Allegro 5
• Sound: SFXR
• Graphics: GIMP

I hope the this ludum dare will be a lots of fun and good games
See you after a good sleep, and Good Luck Everyone!!

…. it’s just that the GF dropped on me two days ago that she wanted to go up to f’ing Sacramento on Saturday for a birthday (I live in San Francisco). Besides this last minute annoyance, I’m excited about LD #21, but still haven’t quite figured out my plan. =)

I’m developing for iOS in Xcode 4. I’ll be using the terminal screenshot script that was posted today. I actually used it in the last Mini LD; and it works reasonably well, especially considering you don’t need to install any extra software, which is nice.

I have my own small library for iOS games, which is the accumulation of what I’ve learned until now. There are still some glaring holes, like that fact that I have no idea how to build/import any kind of map haha! But I’m sure I’ll figure something out. Last Mini LD, I figured out collision detection on my own.

Hmmm, since a lot of entries include photos and stuff, maybe I should do the same. I’m at work, so I won’t be taking pictures of my messy house, however, I started dicking around on some music last night, warming up for this weekend’s challenge (don’t worry! I won’t actually use it. And my “song” really sucks anyway, haha). So I included a few screenshots of that.

Wee!

Hey all

I figure as rules demand I should really (re)present myself and intentions. It’s my first time doing Ludum Dare and it’ll be interesting to see just how much gameplay I can cram into a piece of code within the allotted time – if any.

The game will be Flash-based. I would have considered Flashpunk but I don’t have enough experience with the framework just yet. Instead I’ll be using a custom-fitted version of Flixel which I’ve used with some hibernating projects lying around Github (https://github.com/tellus). While none of them will likely be a basis for the game (actually, I intend on it not to), I’ll most likely draw on a few supporting routines and procedures from the modified Flixel and my support lib tellusLibsAs. As should be obvious by now, all of the code is freely available from Github. Flashdevelop will be the IDE of choice (I’ve fallen in love with that piece of software, delicious) as well as Paint.NET for graphical purposes (I’m spartan… very spartan… basically Spartacus-spartan) and if… when… eventually… sound may be a necessary evil element of the game I think I’ll fall back to something quirky through Audacity. Open-source and freeware throughout.

I’m rooting for a few particularly interesting themes myself (one cannot help but visualise possible ideas already) but let’s see where things head.

Good luck to all and cheers for a great weekend!

Well, let me add myself to the giant list of new folks for the upcoming LD #20.  I dropped by the IRC room last night and got some nice advice on useful tools and whatnot… thanks everyone.  A snag though!  I realized this morning that I’m actually moving that weekend!  This might not be as big a deal as it initially seems, though, as I’m only moving to the other side of the same building I’m already in, and I’m already pretty well packed up; it just means some valuable time is going to be eaten up by lugging boxes.  I still plan to compete! 

I plan on using a SDL-based sprite framework that I’ve been working on lately… right now it’s in an unusable state though (being moved from using SDL blitting to sprites as textures in OpenGL).  Assuming it’s fixed in time for the competition, I’ll post the code somewhere for y’all so that I’m within the rules and whatnot.

Uuuhh… yup!  Nice to meet you all!  Let’s have us some fun!

EDIT:  Aaand… that SDL->OpenGL conversion I mentioned?  I think I’ gonna abort it and instead move to SFML.  I’ve been reading about it some today and it really seems like the way to go.  There’re benefits to working with SDL and learning how things like blitting work, of course, but if the API for SFML is as much better than SDL as people are making it seem, it would really speed things up for me… in addition to saving me from having to link in extra libraries for some of the stuff I’m doing.  I’m pretty sure this is one of the useful things someone told me about last night on IRC, but I never managed to get around to looking at it at the time because I was too busy playing with bfxr!  I should have listened to y’all better!  Belated thanks!

Oh yeah, this is my first LD!

I have found the idea, the music kind, the mechanics… I just hope it’ll be the “Title of your game must be a year” theme, ’cause otherwise I’ll have to shoehorn my idea or something… So far it’s a 2D game, topdown, about a firefighter rescuing people in a very specific moment in history… More on that later!

I’ll be using AS3 and FlashBuilder (the Flixel framework, most probably), Photoshop, musagi, sfxr, and chronolapse! Also, I’ll be using a SVN system to reduce the “undoable catastrophe” damage ratio, if ever there is one. I hope everyone uses a version control system of some kind.

During the compo I’ll be blog my ideas and how I expect to expand them, and how everything goes.

Aaaaaaaaannndd I will also be updating my personal blog over here : clicky

KICKASS WEEKEND, ENGAGE!

Okay I am done I hoped I could do more it was fun though now here you are the link to the game:

http://download.thenet.sk/images/out/NiribuX.swf

Still got lots of stuff todo, but Im happy with the graphics so far. Next up: Loot!

Click here to try!