Check (and rate) the game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1947

Making a game in 48 hours is never easy, but thankfully it was less hard this time. Mainly because I decided to use tools I was more familiar with, instead of using the weekend to learn a new tool or framework.

I started the weekend with the idea of making a super-hero canabalt. Something that lends a bit of variety to the one-button run genre. A constant threat from the rear, a path that makes it difficult to stay out in front and some kind of upgrade system.

I structured my development a lot more than usual, with index cards and a vague agile methodology (and the entire living floor). I tried to sleep well during the weekend, getting 6 hours on Friday night, and 9(!) on Saturday. I also ate well, cooking rather than the usual takeaways, and only drinking one energy drink the whole weekend. (I did manage to polish off 5 pots of coffee though, which was around 25+ cups.)

What Went Right™

Organisation – I didn’t feel stressed much at all during the weekend. I managed time for music and even some graphics polishing at the end (not much mind, I’m not an artist and it’s hard to make faeces shine). All in all, I always felt like I knew what I was doing, what I had done, and what I would have to do.

Tools – I normally take a sackcloth-and-ashes approach to development: “If it can’t be done on the command line, then… you’re lying, because everything can be done on the command line. Fiend!” – But this weekend, I used FlashDevelop and worked on windows most of the time. FlashDevelop really is unparalleled when it comes to Actionscript coding.

K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) – I nailed down the initial mechanics early. Platformer with tilemaps, jumping, double jumping. I did it all with multi-coloured squares too, sprites were an afterthought. I didn’t try to invent a new genre, and I didn’t try to rewrite the entirety of FlashPunk’s BitmapData handling (see: LD #19). I took a simple idea, and made it.

Asset Pipeline – I learned the workings of D.A.M.E. very early on in the weekend. Got familiar with its output format, its awkward, awkward tools, and it’s habit of refusing to write to CSV on occasion because it believes MXMLC is still holding on to the files (although this is more likely Adobe’s fault). I got much better at using Graphics Gale for initial pixel pushing and animating, and then using Photoshop to touch up and bake in some vague lighting.

Emitters! – Who doesn’t love little objects that fire random things in random directions? More Emitters, I say. More. I wish I could have Emitters every day of the week. My next game might be made entirely out of Emitters.

Guinness – Thanks to my first point, Organisation, I afforded myself an hour on Sunday for a few relaxing pints of Black. Boom.

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Click to play

LD Page

Linky

Graphics, expanded world. Powerups.

Time for my first break! After five hours of good solid work, I’ve got a great understanding of the story and some thoughts about the game’s visual style. Anyway, here’s a working prototype of my progress so far. That camera was a royal bitch, but gosh darnit, she’s a-working! Flash AS3 Profession IDE, CS5.5

http://www.nyonge.ca/Flash/WhoSoldTheWorld_00.html

Linky

Testing stuff.
No death yet.

Ok I won’t continue with bad jokes… One is enough…

It’s my first Ludum Dare and I’m really excited! I don’t know if I’ll use Unity 3D or Flash, it will depend of the concept I’ll find…

For the graphics I’ll certainly use Photoshop.

For the sound, it’ll be sfxr and maybe Audacity.

For the design, a piece of paper and certainly Visio if I need to do some level design.

Anyway, I’m convinced it’ll be fun!

Good luck everyone!

I’m in!

I will be using FlashPunk 1.6 with FlashBuilder 4.5, Photoshop for the assets and if there’s time, as3sfxr for the sound effects.

Also, I challenged IRC users to make a game in 30 minutes, as a mini LD. I did my own challenge, here’s the game:

Pizza Eater

And here’s pekuja doing a record: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I5O07j9w-Q

I’m sure I’ll have fun doing this! I won’t have time at saturday afternoon, but that’s part of the fun!

I have officially decided that I will be using AS3 to make my game.

Programming Language/Library: AS3/Flashpunk
Sound: SFXR (and maybe Autotracker-C & Schism)
Art: MsPaint & Paint.NET & Game Maker 8
Timelapse: Chronolapse

This is my “base code”, and like LD20, it’s basically just a main class:

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I’ll hopefully be entering my first Ludum Dare this weekend. I imagine I’ll use FlashDevelop/Flixel for programming, Fireworks and Graphics Gale for graphics, and either SunVox or MilkyTracker for the music and sound. Dunno how I’ll fare, but I’m looking forward to it anyways!

Hi.

Things I’ll be using:
- FlashPunk, FLEX and gedit for coding
- sfxr for sounds and pxtone for my first sorry try at music
- GIMP for graphics
- tons of orange juice for surviving

Right now I’m trying to get something together in pxtone which doesn’t make ears explode around the world. I suck at this.

This will be my second Ludum Dare.

I’d like to submit an “I’m in” video clip, but my internet uploads at 1 MB/minute…

Language: AS3
Library: Flashpunk
SFX & Music: SFXR and Autotracker-C and Schism Tracker to make minor edits to the music that comes out of it
Graphics: MSPaint, Game Maker 8, Paint.NET
Text Editing: Flashdevelop
Target Platform: All flash capable devices with keyboards and mice. Sorry Macbook Air 2nd gen, you don’t have flash
Fuel: Food and Water

I’m for sure in Ludum Dare 21, looking forward to making and playing!

I’ll be using Flash CS5 for programming, most likely programming within The Flash IDE but might use Flash Builder 4 or Flash Develop. Graphics will either be made in Flash or Photoshop, audio will be done with Audacity, Sony ACID Music Studio 8, and a SFX/loops library I’ve been collected. Any external libraries or whatnot I use, I’ll notify of once I know what on earth the theme is

Happy Ludumming!

I’ve been following Ludum Dare for a couple years now and have finally worked up the courage and the free time to participate.

Here’s my setup:

• Language: AS3
• IDE: FlashDevelop
• Library: FlashPunk
• Tools: Paint.NET, sfxr, OGMO, coffee, and hopefully creativity

So the tentative title is WarBeats and is hitting the borderline between games like Rez (where the music reacts to the player’s actions) and Guitar Hero (where timing is key to high scores).

I’ve narrowed down the actual design and working on putting the pieces together. Three to four weapons are used to destroy the same amount of enemy types. Firing and destroying generates musical queues, while the marching army generates a constant beat to the music. They fire automatically, my intention being that the rifle shots are the central melody of the composition. So, beat (marching), tune (rifles), incidental rhythm (player actions). It either becomes sweet music or bitter cacophony. I’m too far now to turn it any other way

I’m piecing together standard parts right now, trying to ignore the really tough features. I’ve figured out a model for the music sequencer that should (hopefully) minimize delay between synchronized musical samples to a very small millisecond count, but coupling this with movement of spawned enemies to the rhythm is quite a different beast.

Fun fun.

I doubt I was the only one to break out in a small private karaoke concert when the MiniLD theme was announced. War followed by Cannon Fodder (in all fairness in this version by Press Play On tape). Closely behind followed Fortunate Son. Had this been a true LD these songs would be playing in non-stop repeat. Seeing as how I’ve got more than just the 48 hours, I fear for my sanity should I keep the music running.

Regardless, the music gripped me instantly and tossed me back to what I consider the epitome of W*A*R – Vietnam. The satire of Cannon Fodder and the udder foolishness expressed by both Edwin Starr and Credence Clearwater Revival (henseforth CCR) easily sets the stage for war gone wrong. Beyond this, I’ve had a notion of fiddling with games that work heavily with music. Trying to merge the two has given me three options:

1. Guitar Hero Vietnam (meh)
2. ReZ vietnam (still meh)
3. Compose-a-war (yeh!)

I’m going with the final one. In principle, I’m aiming for an RTS-puzzle hybrid that relies heavily on the rhythm of the music as queues to the player on how to react to enemy movements. This requires some intriguing features not innately accessible in the engine of choice, most notably a run-time dynamic music tracker. Fun fun!

Anyway, to summarize my tools du jour:

Language: AS3

Engine: Flashpunk (custom version integrating RichardMarks’ sound mixer and a few custom fixes)

Sound: sfxr

Music: Pure code (rhythms tested in Musagi and MODPlug Tracker, samples created with sfxr or my vocal cords)

Graphics: Paint.NET

Others: tellusLibsAS, a modest helper library publicly available on Github.

Break a leg, everyone!

I’ve polished up what I had, though it’s exceptionally short. I found tarting up the background an excellent displacement activity to avoid actually writing content. Play “White Flag” here.

I’ll let it rest a few days, then add to it. The dialogue system was intended to have internal variables, but I ran out of time – only managed to spend about 12 hours total on this, much of which was learning Stencyl and ActionScript. It’s been good fun though, and I’ve got a good solid template to build a more advanced system on…

Asteroid Explorer by McFunkypants

A Molehill tech demo programmed in 48 hours for the LD48 game jam.

Featuring high-poly Flash 3d hardware acceleration, .obj file parsing, heightmap terrain generation, terrain “splatting” multi-texturing, cube-mapped skybox, mp3 engine sound with pitch-shifting, rigid-body car physics simulation, flash sprite 2d overlays, and Molehill (AGAL) vertex and fragment programs.

This game requires Flash 11 or the incubator beta version which can be downloaded here:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplatformruntimes_incubator.html

Please visit my blog: www.mcfunkypants.com for more games, music, art and code.

I warmly invite you to follow @McFunkypants on twitter (I *only* tweet about game development)

Play the game here:
http://www.mcfunkypants.com/LD20/

I would LOVE your comments and feedback:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=2297

Finished the Dare, just in time I’m really quite proud of myself for this one, not only did I really push my technical skillset (first time integrating a full-on level editor in a game!) but I also kinda pissed away the first 12~ hours Anyway, in the end it turned out pretty well, check it out if you want, hope you enjoy it!

Eunaborb

Here is a little screenshot of some work-in-progress for my Ludum Dare jam game. It features Molehill (Flash 11) hardware accelerated 3d graphics and is using only about 20,000 polies. The terrain is generated on the fly using a heightmap jpeg image and is textured using the “splatting” techniques for detailed textures that fade from one kind to another depending on altitude. The car physics “works” but is rather floaty and (so far) extremely unstable. You can drive around the terrain and perform some crazy huge jumps and stunts, though right now you tend to flip over very easily and can’t die. I’m getting fabulous performance: it never dips below 55fps and runs fullscreen on my HD 1920×1080 monitor plus the CPU usage stays below 25%. Not bad for Flash, overall. Hopefully I can put in some actual gameplay (eg. enemies? weapons? score? gameover?) after I take a little break.  Wish me luck!

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!