This will be my first participatement in a ludum dare competition.
I will go for the jam, because I am a little bit late.
I will be coding it in C#.
I think it will be something like escaping from the ever-nearing doom, kinda like dino run. However, I don’t know if it fits in the theme.
Wish me luck, I am an amateur coder!

DoomCake was my first LD entry.  It was developed in Lua, using the LÖVE 2D engine.

In making this game, I learned a bit about Lua, and a lot about cake.  Read on to find out what a sugary zombie invasion might look like…

(more…)

…that the real Advancing Wall of Doom would be the 121 entries to attempt to rate and leave feedback on in 2 weeks!

As I was thinking about how to schedule this into the next two weeks I thought up some rough stats based on how past compo playing/rating has gone:

• You should play and rate 8.6 games per day of the two weeks if you want to hit the deadline.
• If you assume an  average handling time per game of 3 minutes you are looking at 6 hours of just getting the games to the point where you are playing them.
• If you assume an average playing time per game of 2 minutes you are looking at 4 hours of total play time to get through all the entries.
• Given the average handling and playing times above you could earmark about 45 minutes of LD time per day for two weeks to finish on time.

Phew.. well, I better get cracking.  I must admit I haven’t had much of a chance to play more than a few so far.  The rating and feedback is so important though.  I know I really appreciate the time people put into playing and leaving thoughts on my game so I try and do the same.

Great compo everyone!  I can’t wait to see what everyone created…

Right, so I decided to post this as a non-entry. Reasons include laziness and stuff. Here’s my last progress shot re-used as the ‘final’ shot.

While ‘playing’, press keys 1-3 to build stuff:

1. is a tree zapper, it gets you power for nearby trees. It costs 15 power.
2. is a mini tower of darkness, it creates darkness nearby. It costs 30 power.
3. is an attack tower, it shoots blobs of darkness at the poor butterflies. It costs 50 power.

To goal was supposed to be getting everything dark, sort of. There’s not actually any winning condition, but there’s not much other things either, so that’s all right then.

Don’t resize the window (don’t tell me I didn’t warn you).

Download Something of Doom Something Something (Windows binary, uses OpenGL, should work in wine).

I didn’t get much done last night,. I work best in the morning.  must be the coffee!

You can see the “wall” collapsing in the back,. and the loosely defined pac-”worm”, that is the player, runs toward the screen in an attempt to escape it,. . Here the Advancing Wall is an Advancing Collapse of Doom.  This is going to be a bit rought, but something will be done.  I’m going to add some good/bad objects to play with on the wall, and then synth some sounds and music,. .  this all depends on how much time I get to work today,. . fingers crossed.

[ PLAY CURRENT BUILD IN BROWSER HERE ]

Well.. grabbed some sleep last night.  Just played my game this morning to see how I felt about it’s progress and direction.  Time to make the short list of goals that is so important in these compos to trying and pull off a playable and hopefully fun game in time.

I find a good trick to use is decide what makes the compo version versus what I’ll save for a post-compo version.  I’ve been pretty good about actually doing a post compo version lately that I’m not too worried that I’m using it as a fake crutch.  You can learn so much from a rapid prototype like this that it is still worth it to finish a reduced yet playable game for many reasons.

Anyway, knowing that some of my favorite features will likely still see the light of day makes me more willing to cut them for the compo version.

It is with that in mind that I am thinking about the following design decisions:

Compo Version Features:

1) One formation only of your fleet ships… the long and lean horizontal one.  This is because I am not sure if I’ll have time to code enough of what I want to justify the other formations right now.  I may have to focus on just making this a fun space avoider with the twist of having multiple lives / health built into the number of your fleet ships remaining as you fly along.  As long as 1 ship makes it you have been considered to win in that you’ve saved some of your race’s people.  The more ships you save the larger the score multiplier probably.

2) Probably not going to implement player ships fighting the enemy armada of doom.  I’m really trying to focus on not making this a shmup but rather sticking to the fact that these are light and nimble colony transport ships that are trying to get the hell away from their doomed planet / advancing wall of the enemy armada.

3) I think that since I have a simple but functional way to hand code in all the enemy ship placements and movement speeds I have the ability to build an exciting armada progression that will have some fun surprises and such along the way for the player to fly through.

4) I am worried that since these compos don’t afford much optimization time I may end up making a version that in order to look as cool as I want will likely suffer performance wise on slower computers.  I may have to go the route of a simple button to: “play high quality” and “play low quality” to turn down all the beam / particle effects I want to use.  I think that is a fine compo compromise.

Of the 16 hours remaining I fear I may have some domestic duties to attend to as well unfortunately… laundry and the ilk.

Oh well.. it’s crunch time here at LD so good luck everyone!

hmmm.
some “progress” here…
…more tomorrow.

So, I have another playable build of my work in progress available.

Play it here in your favorite browser

It now has an enemy ship wave manager so I can build out the Wall of Doom(tm) that you must escape through to rescue the last of your race.

I also took a suggestion to map the fleet pattern echeleons to the Z/X/C/V keys.. four patterns in all.

Give it a whirl if you’d like as I’d love to hear any feedback.  I’m trying to get absolutely as much of the gameplay done before screwing around with any graphics this time.  I think it is actually progressing really well for once!

The game just ends right now when all the enemy ships go by.  Also.. if you lose all your ships you have to refresh your browser to continue!

I spent the morning not doing anything, most of the afternoon playing UT2004 and Red Alert 3, but then maybe 2.5h ago I figured I should actually try doing anything. So I started out drawing some graphics (mostly vegetation sprites). Then I coded a little to get a random forest sort of thing.

And it’s doomed, you know. You are going to convert this cute little forest into a dark waste. At least, that’s the idea. We’ll see.

So.. finally got an idea I feel like running with on this theme:

First, the mockup!

(Click image to view larger)

Anyway.. the simple concept is you are controlling a fleet of the last ships of your race.  You are fleeing your planet as an alien armada of doom approaches.  You will be able to move your fleet up/down/left/right and there will also be a key that lets you toggle the density/pattern of your fleet.  Think of it as able to expand or contract.

You will move through the armada avoiding colliding with capital ships and what will surely be horrendous energy weapons fire as they attempt to anihilate your race.

You must get a least ONE of your ships through the armada to win.  The more ships you get through the larger your bonus at the end for saving a larger gene pool of your race…

Simple idea, hopefully the scope will be one of which I can get a fun, playable game out of before the deadline is up…

…sleep. Though before that I felt like doing a little drawing to get the subconscious primed on the theme before sleep.  Here’s a quick 3 minute sketch of a possible doomy world: