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!

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!

And don’t forget to play and rate my game!

PLAY CLOSE MY SIDE

Thanks!

Hi guys!

It was a great time for me (and I hope for you too)!
Quite a bit, I want to talk about my LD25 game. The first day I did not do anything. I sat and tried to think of a visual style (at this moment I have not thought in any genre will game). I have not been able to come up and went to sleep. Came the second day and I woke up in the afternoon. Yes, I had very little time. But I ran out of time and I finished the project. Game (not really a game) was very short. But I had time to do it. Art, music, and animation.

And I was working in the bathroom. The house was very cold.

I hope you enjoy my game!
Everybody all the best!

PLAY CLOSE MY SIDE

It’s been many hours since Ludum Dare #22 started. To be honest, I was really hoping for teleportation.

So, just a recap, i’m doing a browser game using javascript/canvas. I want to do something darker than i’m used to.

This is where i’m at at the moment http://www.stickymill.com/alone/alone_v0.01.html

Screenshot gallery http://imgur.com/a/6jLGr

Instead of copying and pasting my post from my own blog, I will write one just for LD!

The most important fact, as with any Ludum Dare, is that I was able to finish! I originally thought I wouldn’t have enough time to get it done, so I threw in the towel roughly 8 hours before. I had second thoughts a few hours later and quickly rushed back into coding. Thankfully I had just enough time to finish it!

Even though this was my first time making a platformer, I’m feel that it isn’t just another run of the mill platform game. I wanted the torch to be part of the player so those moments are more intense when you aren’t holding the torch. I think this worked quite well, but sound effects and a sound track really would have helped the atmosphere.

I usually use 8bit graphics, but I wanted to simplify them further so I wouldn’t be hung on graphics during the competition. I wanted to be spending more time with the actual level design. So I opted for 8×8 sprites scaled to 4x times their size. While it gave the game a cutesy feel, it made text feel awkward as it looks huge on screen. The furthest I’m going to go next time is 2x or I will scale the graphics in my image editor instead of doing it through code.

As I said before, this was my first time making a platformer and I was worried about it being too easy. From the feedback I’ve been given so far, I’ve found that it’s far from easy. There was also an issue near the end of the level where players thought they need to make a blind jump, when in reality they had missed the hidden passage. I’ll make it more obvious in the post-compo version. ;]

Speaking of post-compo, I’ve already added/fixed a bunch of things. Notably I’ve fixed the physics for both the torch and the player so things should be much smoother. I also added much needed particle effects to the torch. I should be releasing it sometime in the next few weeks!

Until then…don’t drop your torch.

>>Torch Play and Rate!<<

Cancer Wars 3D – WIP

or playtest it here…

I have this much finished. See if you can find the fan pack to jump higher!

http://megaswf.com/simple_serve/87754/

Good morning. A little update. Yesterday I added The Dark Tower (player starting base) and tree zappers (drain trees for power and for simply draining trees).

After that, I wasted a lot of time on how the wall of decay etc should progress, only to ending up with something that wouldn’t work. So I’m still thinking about that. I could spend some time describing what didn’t work, but I’m not going to. Instead here’s a screenshot showing how the decay thing for the ground would look (the tree decay in this shot is just for testing purposes).

Now I have some thinking and showering to do. And breakfasting.

This was my first attempt at a Ludum Dare, and in some ways my best entry. I still think I aimed too low for the game, I think this may be why I havn’t done so well in others, I’ve aimed too high overcompensating for this one.

The competition version of the game required two players on the one keyboard to play, limiting the number of people who could use it. It turned out that, after the compo, it only took an hour or two to make a workable AI player. I should have pushed for it in the 48 hours. Instead I had a go at network play, I did get a sort of game running networked but it ran like crap. I played a game against a friend in australia during the compo 48 hours but I was still on dial-up so it was never going to be a good look. I ended up stripping it all out again.

The game itself was quite simple. There is a dark player in a light universe and a light player in a dark universe. You can shoot at the walls of your univers to make it larger (while reducing the enemy universe). The object of the game is to get your ‘gribblies’ home. The gribblies have an incredibly basic movement behaviour that everone complimented as being far more clever than they actually were. You help the gribblies home by cutting paths for them to travel.

A post compo version of the game with AI and a few more features is available here

All up this game was qute fun to play, I still play it from time to time. My daughter, fiance, and nephew all like it so I’m happy.