My game is finished. I’m done. Deployment was my biggest problem, I hope to be able to fix that tomorrow. You know, give a proper web version.

But anyway, I give you: Revolvolution

Hope you enjoy. No mac version because of my aforementioned deployment problems. Also, I just decided to continue this into something more than a Ludum Dare game.

My entry was pretty much done about 2 hours ago, I’ve just been polishing since then.

I’m very pleased with what I accomplished this year!

Anyway, my entry: Game-Age: A visual evolution of gaming

Okay, the project is done now. Not the thing I wanted it to be, but working no matter what. The player character evolves to gain legs for jumping and a gun for shooting. Also added a level editor to the project, but didn’t have time to add more levels (due to a bug that appeared after last build). Anyway, it is up for testing. One day, I will finish it to be something better. Pretty good for a short 20 hour job

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3210

Okay, enough. I am done. You can see Micro Beat’em Up here. It’s far from finished, but I won’t have more time now to spend on this. I will definitely try to explore the general idea of beat’em up mechanic in the near future, but for MiniLD#34, this is it.

I consider this a nice progress, because along with some new things I tried (specific coordinates system, camera movement, parallax background), I AM REALLY SATISFIED WITH THE ART. Ironically, implementing general game mechanic was rather easy – I spent most time on things like pause screen (push ‘P’ to SEE it) and problems connected with low resolution graphics.

Unfortunately, it’s not that fun, as there’s not that much gameplay. Also, the AI is kinda simple, but it should be easy to create something more out of the code I currently use later.

Go on, check it out:

Oh, yeah – this was my first MiniLD! Woohoo! I had a lot of fun! \o/

Aw, yeah. Wunderworld was finished in time.

It’s more of a tool than a game, because you can build your own dungeon with it. Put a sword and some enemies in it and you can fight. Place a goal, and it’s winnable. Unfortunately it lacks some premade levels, so I made a trailer to show the features and work-/play-flow:

It’s inspired by Ultima Underworld, thus the name (I even wanted to name it “Wultima’s Wunderworld”, but I just couldn’t justify the “Wultima”, as you don’t play a character).

I recommend the standalone version (Windows). The Mac version has Mouse controls too sensitive, so I’ll hae an update ready in some days. And the webplayer version works, too, but it doesn’t save your levels as a textfile, unlike the standalone, so you can’t trade them with others.

Please play and rate Wunderworld!

Well, that weekend was a crazy 48 hours. A lot of it is a blur (Im going to enjoy watching my own timelapse since I cant remember 75% of everything I went though)

The best thing though – Success!!

This was my 3rd Ludum Dare to date, yet the first where Ive actually finished an entry. I was cutting it close too, last night I got to sleep around 4am, and at that stage it was T-8 hours, and I still didnt have a proper level or any puzzels to solve. So after sleeping 3 hours I had a very compressed burst of productive work to get the final level design and features down (I was still finishing off a pretty important feature at T-10mins) O_o

Either way, it was an enjoyable experience and I was very glad to get something finished which I could call a ‘game’. I might venture away from a 3D game for the next LD however… So-much-work…

Im keeping this post quick, cause Im actually struggling to stay awake at this point.

You can check out the entry with the link below (Windows 32 & 64bit versions only atm) Ill have a linux one up soon hopefully, and mac potentially soon as well. And a timelapse soon too!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=3467

Title screen

And now for voting! Good luck to everyone, I look forward to playing a bunch of games

And w00t! – For LD getting 1000+ games on its 10th birthday

Submission link

Direct SWF link

Whew! Glad that’s done! This won’t be a post mordem, just a post announcing that I’ve finished.

So, the game’s called Flea Circus and it’s much better than what I was expecting out of my first Ludum Dare! In general terms, it’s an action game. A better description is a frenetic, simplified extreme sports game. If you test it out, I recommend trying the tutorial first, there’s good stuff in there.

What I would like to use this time for though is just a quick comment about how great the community is! The book, the keynote, the chat room, the reddit – all of it is fantastic! Game design is my creative outlet and it is such a joyous feeling knowing that there are so many others as passionate about it as I am.

Thanks to all of you guys in the chatroom for the company and the laughs and the bug testing! I’ll definitely be doing this again

O.M.G.

I finished. I’m pretty sure death will come to me a few years earlier, but goddammit, I’ve done it. “Synthesis” is ready.

I learnt A LOT, and I hope the game will work well on every machine because I didn’t have time to test it, but even if not, it’s beyond me to fix anything now. I am horribly tired, but also very satisfied.

Needless to say, the timelapse and a post-mortem will have to wait at least until tomorrow, but for now you can check out my game:

Link: http://www.kongregate.com/games/marudziik/synthesis

Entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=5431

Putting the game on Kongregate was done in just last minutes. I know that for some of people here this is very simple, but I’m actually satisfied with my effort here (I registered on Kong just today).

Enough. Too. Tired.

Well it’s finished in the sense that I’m stopping working on it.  It’s a bit fiddly to play but I am quite happy how it’s turned out. I’ve just submited it here and I also did a quick blog post here.  Hope you like it and good luck finishing your games if you haven’t finished them already.

Done !

Here is my game page.

I’m a little bit proud of it. Because it’s my first Ludum Dare, but also my first release “game”. Of course it’s short, and not really a “game” but I’m really proud of some of the work I made to get this.

Thanks everyone, Ludum Dare team, the ones who support me these past 48h or so.

Thanks again !

Finally I am getting around to writing a postmortem for “Into the Dark for You”.  ITDFY can be obtained here. It is recommended that you play it, if you can, before reading too far as I’m just about to ruin the whole game for you.

(more…)

Although I finished this yesterday at the deadline, I’m posting it now because the site isn’t (as) super laggy.

Proudly presenting Volcanox:

About

Volcanox is platformer that takes place on a distant planet, coded entirely in my own programming language. Our hero is stranded alone with a volcano in his path, and he must find a way out! There’s only one level and enemy, but it’s a fairly long level and the enemies are annoyingly hard. So plenty of replay value. There is an end for those brave enough to get there. It also times you, so you can share results with your friends.

I put up a small homepage for the game as well, so it’s not lost in this blog.

Install directions

Windows:

Extract and run the executable: volcanox.zip

Other Platforms:

Install the LÖVE game engine as directed on their site. Download the .love file, and open it with the game engine.

Source

The source is hosted on GitHub.

Issues

After speaking to some Windows players (after the deadline) I’ve found out that some of them have a problem with moving, where one direction is faster than the other. I also have heard of an issue where the sound effects break after playing initially. I was unable to reproduce any of these problems on my development machine (linux) so my apologies to those who encounter these problems during their playthrough.

My first crack at the LD48 and I have….Dead Party!

Dead Party was originally going to be a dungeon crawler, where you play the sole survivor of a raid gone wrong, but during playtesting I found that NPCs that followed you did so in an amusing manner, and I though “I should make a game around that” so I did. And there’s lots of cats.

I describe it as “Ico meets Diablo meets SmashTV” but with none of the quality.

Play it here!

quick post mortem

what went right

• I knew the game library, and I had made games with the language before

During the warmup weekend I had tried to learn more about Love2D, and while I managed to make half of a game it didn’t sit well with me. A friend of mine suggested I stuck with what I knew, which was AS3 and Flixel. It turned out to be right, I spent nearly the entire period making stuff rather than trying to wrangle technical issues or learn a new library. I also used Flixel Power Tools, which made several things, including bullet managment and aiming, exceptionally easy. Flixel is great at taking care of a lot of game related things, and the Power Tools made things even easier. I’m used to code structure more than I am with other scripting langauges, so I could structure (or not structure) things to work.

• I knew what to cut and when

Originally the game was going to be and RPG, complete with an overworld and a dungeon level, plus a battle system. Then that just went to an overworld system. I was also going to have multiple weapons, plus melee weapons, each with different characteristics. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out that way. I had to cut 2 levels and a few more features near the end too.

• The Level Editor!

Probably the biggest help is the DAME level editor. Normally I would have to hand-code where certain things are, or have to create my own level editor, or make my own CSV for things. This time I was able to build and design levels with ease and get them into the game quickly. Granted the workflow process was really weird (I’ll get to that later) but I was able to make non-super-ugly maps quickly.

• Got some sleep

After 3am I hit a brick wall when it comes to productivity, and continuing on doesn’t make sense. A friend of mine said that I wouldn’t win if I slept, but I beg to differ. The last 5 hours were the worst, and I began to make simple mistakes while fatiuged, had those happened earlier on it would have made the rest of the dev process much harder.

• never give up, never surrender!

With 24 hours to go I was still working on the dungeon crawler, but I felt really crappy about it since I felt it wasn’t a very good game. All I had was a level loading at that point and it was just shooting enemies. And then I thought “It may be crap, but I basically made a Smash TV clone in under 24 hours, so be a little proud”

WHAT WENT WRONG

• Making levels

Oh God. I mentioned this in an earlier blog post, but to make a level and put it into the game, I had to do a 7-8 step process. I had to make a new .dam file for each level, re-import all the sprites and tiles, draw the map, rename the groups, export it, fix certain .as files, and make a whole new playstate for the level. If I had made a saner structure and had just 1 playstate for all the levels, I could have simplified things and made more levels. I was mainly interested in making things work, rather than make things easy, and in the end it was probably 5x more work to import the levels the way I went about it. It also meant that I had to cut off features at a point, because i would have to add them all to the seperate playstate files and test them induvidually. Real smart, me.

• The theme

I had trouble with the theme, since I could only think of sad things, and I was so concerned with starting I didn’t really take time to consider another idea, just “start coding right now OMG” and, maybe if I went with something else, I could have skipped a lot of headache and felt better about going with the stated theme.

Well, that’s it for now. I’m really tired so, I’ll probably go to bed *before* 3am. ha!

I submitted my first ever Ludum Dare entry: Into the Dark for You!  I’m really glad that I decided to do one this time. It was a great experience, knowing what I can do in just two days

Here have a screenshot:

Whew! Participating in the Jam was a lot of fun but really tiring. We managed to finish our game Claustrophobia with just a few hours to spare.  Check it out here!:  http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/184445-claustrophobia

My game for this compo was Black Hole, a game where the objective is to escape both the horde of Drones who cornered you, and the black hole which they cornered you against.

Fortunately for you, a long-dead alien race left a platform here, which feeds off of the emissions of the black hole and broadcasts energy to all nearby ships. You have moved in close to this platform and the black hole itself, and thus avoided the gigantic Drone Mothership which was chasing you. However, the smaller Drone forces can and did pursue you, so now you must hold out against them to recharge your Jump Engines, allowing you to jump to beyond lightspeed and escape to your home.

The coding process was quite frantic. I had to write the entire game engine, and at one point ended up re-writing and re-integrating the entire collision engine, as I had failed to discover that my method of detecting overlapping rectangles was not accurate if they were rotated. Fortunately, I’m quite skilled with circle based collision, and it only took about 20 minutes to switch and integrate.

Another thing to note: I was high on Oxycodone and other painkillers the entire time, having gotten my wisdom teeth removed on Thursday. This caused many dumb mistakes, the majority being simple math related. I persevered through it though, and ended up coming out with what I think is a fun game!

Plans for the future: to continue to develop this game. I want to add more enemies, powerups, and new game modes.

Timelapse Part One is here.

Timelapse Part Two is here.

I’ll be writing a Post Mortem at some point… Thanks for the fun times all! Cheers!

Edit: 1814 lines of code, for those of you who care.

This Ludum Dare was a bit hard, I got a zero originality idea and that demotivated me over the process, so I tried to finish it quickly but almost without love.

The game name is Vampire Runner, like Canabalt, you control a guy who runs forever and runs faster and faster but instead jumping to avoid obstacles, in you have to activate your super skill to move through obstacles. The main objective remains the same.

Here are some images:

Running happy while there are no walls near

Using his move through wall skill near a wall

Lost all the skill energy while moving through a wall.

Despite I put almost no love to the game (well, I did for the graphics) the game is funny, so give it a try and I hope you like it.

P.S.: I will add the timelapse when I finish processing it.

I got my entry submitted at about 2am BST, which makes a change from the 2-minutes-before that I usually end up doing. So here’s my entry, VOLCANOWNED!:

DOWNLOAD

I was pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s a very simple game but I think I did a decent job with the graphics. Next time I’ll leave that little bit extra time to record some proper sounds and music.

I’m going to put my timelapse together later and write a full post-mortem soon. And oh man I can’t wait to start playing all the other entries – I swear they just get better and better every time!

This was my first time doing anything like this, and I’m actually pretty happy with the output.

There are a few minor bugs, but nothing killer (I think/hope)

I decided to go for a more story-based game than I have before. The gameplay could be better, but I will continue to work on it after Ludum Dare.

I also eventually try to port it to other platforms, namely Linux.

Check it out: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5267

Red buttons and red doors

I finally got around fixing some major bugs that were discovered when I was about ready to submit the game (most of which were Windows related…).

While the game is nothing to write home about I reached my goal and finished a “game” in time from scratch (with almost 8 hours remaining on the clock) so I’m rather happy.
Had great time and will definitely enter again, most likely with more ambitious game designs =).

Cant wait to try out all the great looking games!

Oh and the game can be fetched from: here
(windows and Linux version available)