Thought a few of you might be interested in another time limit compo. To keep it relatively short: GameJolt.com just announced a competition to push their ad revenue sharing program, which entered beta today. The contest lasts a week and the theme is “Shocking!”. Three winners will get accepted into the beta, and one will recieve a steam game. More information can be found on their forum.

Some of you may also have seen this via the gamecompo mailing list, if you’re signed up for that. I hope to enter the competition myself, though I’m a bit pressed for time.

Assembled out of more than 10k JPEGs, totalling almost 2GB O_O.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5iXb51buMs

You play on the side of the advancing wall of doom, which is trying to engulf all. The lousy civilization which is getting in you way has set up barriers, though, in an attempt to hinder the darkness! Your job is to destroy these defences so that the cloud can continue its conquest. (Edit: I posted a bit more info about the process at my blog)

Download:

• Windows executable
• 32-bit Linux executable
• .love source (rename to .zip if you want to extract it)

Pretty simple game. There is imaginary water on the left side of the screen. Your job is to create a path to the other side of the moving dam. Break the dam by moving three of the same colored blocks together.

Edit: my game

http://seank.50webs.com/DamOfDestruction.tar.gz

Edit 2: ok zip file didn’t work. Try this one:

http://seank.50webs.com/DamofDestruction.tar.gz

Testing

It’s 4.30am here, but the end is in sight so I’ll probably push through until it’s finished. Finally got some gameplay happening; no “goals” or win/lose conditions yet, but it’s something. Basically humpty is now a little under the influence and stumbles along his wall drinking ‘Nog and RadBuzz energy drinks, avoiding obstacles (OF DOOM) (currently the little red placeholder things, later to be egg-beaters and frying pans). The eventual goal will be to get him home to his bed at the end of the wall (OF DOOM) (not yet visually “there”).

The drunker he is the further the wall advances in front of him. “Buzz” doesn’t really do anything yet but will soon affect how in control of humpty you are. McDonald’s should be open in 1.5 hours, breakfast of champions.

Spent the morning profiling and banging my head against the wall, hence all the timing data on screen. Finally figured out why my game was rapidly losing FPS over time. It was all because I forgot to clear my flex canvas before drawing to it, whatever that does.

I think that about wraps up my tech stuff on the graphics, dodgy 3d in flash and all. Time to add a game, or at least some wall doom.

Picture should take you to a “playable” version. There’s nothing to do but move left and right (arrow keys) and you might have to click on the screen after you start the game to gain focus (it is a mystery).

You play on the side of the advancing wall of doom, which is trying to engulf all. The lousy civilization’s set up barriers, though, which the cloud can’t cross! Your job is to destroy these defences so that the cloud can continue its conquest.

Basic mechanics are working, the main things missing are enemies that fight back. Better graphics should be on the way, as well as some sound effects.

Here’s a shot of the Giant Laser of Doom.

I didn’t start work on this until 9.12pm as I had a lot of things to do today (visit bank, go to museum, take a bike ride, cut grass, etc). It’s now 2am (UK time), my brain is fried and my body is knackered.

I’ve concentrated on keeping my entry as simple as possible because I know that my time is limited. I got thinking about the theme when I was visiting the museum. I just liked the idea of a giant laser of doom, erasing everything in its path, darkening the screen as it went.

I figure that I have until 4am on Monday morning local time, which is just as well as I’ve got a few commitments tomorrow, but let’s see what I can do with the remaining time.

Here’s where I’m working most of the weekend. I’d like to clean it up a bit, but there’s no time for that this weekend =). I’ve got an second monitor I could use with xinerama, but that make the timelapse impossible to follow, so I won’t be. On the left is my afternoon snack, tortilla shell things with sliced chicken and Emmental on top. There’s also a bunch of Sambal Oelek under the chicken, just to make it a little bit more interesting XD.

Well, I have my idea, just gotta do it! Yummy lunch:

Well, it wasn’t awesome, but it was okay. More later!

Spent most of the day pondering the theme, procrastinating, and playing TF2. Finally opened up flex builder and drew a sprite, I guess this is progress.

Game is basically humpty dumpty walking along his wall, having partaken of a beverage or two. The wall advances in front of him, and there’s plenty of doom on it for him to avoid.

The first of many. It may look small, but it makes up for it with lots of cheese.

And yes, it is sitting on top of a stack of encyclopedias, it’s just that kind of food.

Well, this is going to be my third Ludum Dare if you count the mini-LD I did. Previously I used Scheme/SDL/OpenGL, but since Lua’s a language I want to get comfortable with for other reasons, so I’m going to be putting it to use this weekend =).

I’ll be starting simple and working with the LÖVE engine. I have a bit of code already set up for miscellaneous things, which includes a small demo. Good luck everyone!

towlrdf(screen);

Now includes source.

just to let anyone who feels like warming up for the main compo with a little towlr action and who wasn’t hanging in IRC.. there is a little towlr precompo going on… you’ve been warned. 

and for those of you who have been spared from towlr so far… here is the link: http://www.towlr.com

Will probably use:

• Flex 3/AS3
• Box2dAS3 for physics
• as3ds for data structures
• musagi, sfxr, audacity for sound
• gimp, paint.net, inkscape for imagery

I am pretty sure I’m going to make a go of LD14 this weekend.  I will be voting in the theme rounds all week long and take a look Friday to see the theme that is picked.  I will make up my mind then for sure.  Why the hesitation?  Well, I have a lot of things I’m already working on game wise so I have to make sure working on ANOTHER game is the best use of my energy… ;)  I do love the LD compos though.. it’s what got me back into game programming again so it will always have a lot of pull on my heart.  It is just so much fun as many of you know to participate in this event.

As far as programming tech and libraries go I will be making a change for the first time in all my LD experience!  Previously I was rocking the Ruby language and using the excellent Gosu game dev library (which I still highly recommend!)

This time I’ll be using Flash / ActionScript 3.0.  I have spent the past couple months learning ActionScript (first used AS2 for one game) and then another game I did in AS3 to work on my knowledge in that.  Plus I’ve cranked through a couple really great books I picked up that I also highly recommend to anyone looking to make the leap.  Essential ActionScript 3.0 (O’Reilly), ActionScript 3.0 Animation (Keith Peters), and Flash CS4 Professional  (Katherine Ulrich). The Kongregate Shootorials were also a great place to start for AS2 and they have an AS3 version of the finished tutorial to learn from the code (it is well commented.)  I learn good from books so I had to grab a few to help out.  Anyway, I’ve been having a blast with Flash / ActionScript!

I’ve been very impressed by how quickly you can rough out a game prototype using the Flash authoring tool and some simple ActionScript classes.  I used to think that I’d be hard pressed to find as rapid a dev environment than what I was already using with Ruby / Gosu but all I can say is DAMN.. flash is fast. 

Plus, the added benefit of having both rapid playable cross platform versions for compo feedback as well as not worrying about the various builds after the compo and I think it builds a strong case as rapid prototyping tool geared for quick compos like this one.

Tool Set I want to use:

Flash / ActionScript 3.0

Libraries I want to use (if this seems ok par the rules?):

GreenSock’s tweening engine TweenMax / TweenLite

Looking forward to a great theme and a great compo everyone, take care!

Well I created a menu screen for this game, and decided to name it Balkor.

Thanks everyone for coming out and making Ludum Dare 10 a great success. A fitting close the fifth year of of the compo.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the results can be found here. Final entries can be found here.

Now, as much as we’d love everyone to idle with us in #ludumdare until April, we understand this isn’t practical for everyone. So, in addition, we have a mailing list at gamecompo.com.

To subscribe, e-mail: gamecompo-subscribe@sykhronics.com

To unsubscribe, e-mail: gamecompo-unsubscribe@sykhronics.com

And when in doubt, hit up ludumdare.com.

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Now, unlike prior years, we’ve tried to make it clear that the next compo will be in April. Anyone that’s stayed up with our shenanigans will know April is our magic month, the anniversary of the first Ludum Dare compo (the original 24 hour compo in 2002). If there’s one tradition we’ve kept over the years, it’s been holding a compo in April. Be it organized a month in advance, or pulled together last minute.

So the first order of business is to pick a weekend in April to hold the compo. I’m not looking for suggestions per se, but reasons to include or exclude a specific day. Our options include:

• April 4th-6th Weekend
• April 11th-13th Weekend
• April 18th-20th Weekend
• April 25th-27th Weekend

Ideally, we like to plan around such things as Game Industry events (GDC, E3, Game Connection, etc), Exam season (we love you students), national holidays, or any such event that either hinders or benefits the majorities chance to participate.

- - -

And in final, if you have any comments, suggestions or feedback for us, please do share them. Ludum Dare is and has always been about the community. Without you all, we’d just be an IRC channel.

Thanks again everyone, and have a great 2008.