As in the last compo, everyday I’m writing a post with impressions of the games that attracted me most among those I played that day. With more than 1400 games available, I hope that these posts can call to attention some gems that may go unnoticed otherwise . If you want to see my previous posts, just check my journal for the “love” series.

So, among the games I played today, I found many “cute” ones to share:

Tiny Contamination — A “dodge the enemies” kind of game where your cute amoeba has to take the right cells and flee from the wrong one. I really like that the number of lives the player has is integrated into the sprite. A strange bug might make you die suddenly.

A bathtub story — You are a cute monster inside a tiny bathtub, fighting against all the other bathtub toys. Very cute game, until you realize that EVERYTHING in that damn bathtub is deadly, and trying to kill your guts!

Pixel’s World — your first impression might be “ugh these sprites”. Then you see everything that is going on in the background, and realize the look is quite intentional, and work very well that way. A very fun platformer.

Toad Warrior — Hmmmm, a naked dude riding a giant frog may not be everyone’s definition of cute. Hell, it might be no one’s definition of cute! But the art in this game is pretty neat, and the dude looks so happy in his toad! The game is a platformer puzzle with a unique control. A bit rough in the game play, but rather fun.

Gravity Force 3 — Well, this game has nothing of cute in it. But is one of those crazily fun games that you keep playing and playing just because they’re so addictive, even if there are other games to rate

See you again soon!

Just finished the base level code and the character code. All art (except enemies) is just about done. Now I need to worry about finishing all the other levels.

This is my first time doing LD – I’m really hoping I can make it!

So I was going to make a bear-and-apocalypse-themed game earlier this month, but the fact that I could also make a bear-and-apocalypse themed game for LD has not escaped me.  So I’m going to scrap all the one image I had made for that game so far and make this game instead.  Anyway if you’re interested in the original idea or think I’m plagiarizing earlier work read after the cut.

So basically an adventure game made in Adventure Game Studio, graphics made in Inkscape, and maybe some music, if I have the time for it, made in Fruity Loops or just recorded acoustically.  The game will be primarily first-person, since animating would take a while and I gotta work tomorrow.

The jist of the story is: All your friends thought the world was ending, so they left on a rocket ship and live on the moon.  They would have brought you, but you just wouldn’t wake up!  Anyway, since you’re down here still and nothing has ended, you should find a way to contact them so they come back, since it’s pretty lonely here now.

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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

Ludum Dare, here we come! McFunkypants and son are ready to rock and roll. We’ve decided to pick an API and tools depending upon the theme, but at the very least we can say for sure that we will be using one of the following platforms:
A) Molehill (Pure AS3 for Flash11)
B) FlashPunk (Pure AS3 for Flash10)
C) PhoneGap (HTML5 on iOS/Android)

Each has strengths and weaknesses, but these are the only three choices available, mainly because we have already made games using the above. This means we won’t be using Game Maker, Adventure Game Studio, Inform7, Unity3d, C++, Lua or python.

In terms of tools, we are armed with: BSFXR for bleeps and bloops, Photoshop7 for pixel art, 3dsmax 9 for 3d meshes, Cool Edit Pro 2 for mp3 generation and mixing, my home recording studio for voiceovers and guitar goodness, and FlashDevelop for AS3 coding IDE perfection.

Like many people this time, we will probably join the JAM. Why? We like one extra day, like to sleep, like to use clipart, like to use prefab 3d meshes, like to use previous work, like to team up with other people, and generally don’t like to follow the rules.

Good luck and have fun everyone!  If you use twitter, I warmly invite you to follow @McFunkypants!

Baby McFunkypants is so in for this weekend’s Ludum Dare!

http://www.mcfunkypants.com/LD20/