Progress! The main menu and connectivity is done. Now for the randomly generated stuff and game itself.

In case you wonder, this started from the idea of books being tiny worlds. Then somehow went into Twitter, with writing smaller than any other.

About one hour and forty five minutes later than I would have liked, but, hey, what can you do? Figured getting some good sleep was better than rushing up and being bleary and empty-headed for nearly two hours anyway. So as an update, have my command and control centre. I need to go eat and think of some ideas, fast.

It took longer than I will consciously remember to get these things set up properly.

Best of luck to you all, and I’m going to go attend to my food-related needs now!

Progress! After about an hour of brainstorming, and an hour of Cake going to a company happy hour (Sorry Zeik!), here is a screen of our first 5 hours of progress.

So far this is Cake’s screen. Lots of Illustrator-ing going on. It took her a good 20-30 minutes to art direct the mood and theme for the game, but so far she’s got character design completed, a few obstacles, and the background. Before the end of the night is over (+ a large cup of coffee) she plans on having most of the world created and brainstorm a few level ideas with Zeik. But the main goal for now is to have most assets created and dive in to the main screen.

Zeik is trying to keep up with the art, since Cake is “pumping out more art than [he] can keep up with”. Despite that, the game is somewhat playable. Still trying to integrate a flux capacitor (har). No, but seriously, we have some game mechanics to hammer out. That’s the goal for tonight….sort of? He’s just trying to do work.

Our current work station and dinner. Not pictured is the giant Starbucks cup that Cake is gulping like water with blearly eyes and the moleskin she relies on like a life-jacket. Ya, we both really enjoy hot wings.

So that’s our progress so far! We’ve set pretty good goals for ourselves for tonight and tomorrow. Neither of us really plan on sleeping before 3am.

Ludum Jamming To: Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros – Up From Below, possibly going to switch to Cake’s fabulously 80′s mix.

Left it a little later than usual but, eh, what can you do. Hi! I’m Cirrial, more frequently known around the internets as Cirr. I’m not exactly a known name to many, but this is a special Ludum Dare to me as it is to the community in general. While for the wider community at large this marks the 10th year anniversary, this for me marks the one year anniversary since I decided “Oh, why the hell not, then” and took the plunge into this wonderful competition.

My personal challenge to myself, should you be interested, is to not make a platformer for the fourth time running. For too long it has been something of a crutch to fall back on the good old well-established grammar of the 2D platformer. I am, however, keeping my toolset as before. I will leave it to next LD to go truly out there.

Tools:

• Framework/Libraries: Flixel on top of Flex (I know, I know, Flash, but it’s really good for rapid development like this!)
• IDE: IntelliJ IDEA
• Level Editor: DAME, if appropriate
• Graphics: Any combination of Graphics Gale, Paint.NET and SAI Paint Tool, depending on requirements
• Sounds: BFXR, because it’s SFXR but better
• Music: SunVox, if I have the time
• Screen capturing: Chronolapse
• Streaming: Livestream Procaster

I believe this covers most of it. See you during the compo!

10th anniversary? Of course I’m in! And this will be my… 5th entry into the main compo.

I’ve umm-ed and arr-ed about my choice of framework for a while. But being the anniversary and everything, I’m going to take it back to where I started with Flixel and make something awesome in an environment I’m comfortable in. Yeah!

So in summary:

• Code: Flixel, FlashDevelop
• Art: GIMP
• Audio: FL Studio (and maybe bfxr)

Oh man, this one was a little bit of a killer for us simply because we barely had any time to work on it consecutively without reaching deep into the night and waking up with bags under our eyes for work. But it’s done, huzzah!

The game was built with a custom engine that Zeik coded (and will later regret to do, as we’ve decided to move onto Flashpunk for our official LD jam). The art and UI was created by Cake in Illustrator and then Photoshop. Music was originally JakesFables from Newgrounds, and edited by Cake and Zeik.

Check out our post HERE or play it directly on my site HERE

Hey there guys,
I pretty much liked the PoV’S post about software being free for Ludum Dare. However, what about software that is always free?

I encourage everyone to add their favorites in the comments

Don’t forget to read the Rules and check out this page too!

Graphics

PhotoFiltre 6 – Take it as a worthy paint upgrade. This editing software got your basic tools plus some nice features if you don’t own a PhotoShop license or have no patience to go through GIMP.
PhotoFiltre 7 – Adds layer support.
GIMP – Saw that coming? Pretty much a free PS equivalent.
Paint.NET -It’s Paint but .NET and that means better.
Inkscape – Vector graphics editor.
Blender – Ludum Dare isn’t all about 2D art so get this 3D editor to work.

Sound

as3sfxr – Generator for sound effects. Link to online version. sfxr is Ludum Dare old school stuff
MilkyTracker – Solid tracker software to write your 8 bit inspired songs. Supports at least .wav export.
GoatTracker 2 – Another good but hard to learn tracker software.
SunVox – A modern tracker i’d say. Gives you pretty output for dirty input.
Audacity – Your favorite free audio editing software.
Linux MultiMedia Studio (LMMS) – Fruityloops alternative for your Linux. (by dertom)

Level Editor

DAME Editor – Though it’s intended for flash games you can use this 2D level editor for pretty much every programming language as long as you are able to use two for-loops.
QuArK – QuArK is a map editor for games of the Quake Engine. You may ask why the hell Quake? Because most open source engines do support the map format of the Quake Engine or there is at least a plugin for it. It’s just famous and old school and awesome.

Engines

Irrlicht Engine – 3D engine running with C++.
OGRE – Ogre 3D engine supports C++, Python, .NET and Java. It is so open source!
Flixel – For the flash addicts.
FlashPunk – For the flash addicts.
jMonkeEngine 3.0 – Some Java 3D stuff.
RPG JS – For those familiar with the RPG Maker this one is a HTML5 version.
OpenGL – Choose your favorite language and go!
Allegro – “Cross-platform, open source, game programming library” for C and C++ (by Folis)
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) – “Cross-platform multimedia library” written in C but can also be used with several other languages. (by Folis)
SFML – Yet another multimedia library for those C++ geeks (by Folis)

Code Editor

Notepad++ – This text editor supports most programming languages and their syntax. Pretty good for a beginner that is confused by IDE’s.
Eclipse – Java/C++ IDE.
FlashDevelop – Flash/ActionScript IDE.
Codeblocks – C++ IDE.
MonoDevelop – C#, ASP.NET, etc. IDE.
VisualStudio – You could also use free Microsoft software< if you got a Windows computer.

Resources

Check the rules whether you are allowed to use the stuff from below!
48h Compo:

• “Photos and recordings you make of people or things are acceptable content, just you must acquire them during the competition.”
• “Fonts, drum loops, drum samples, and sampled instruments are allowed IF you have the legal right to use them.”

C64 font collection – For your retro dialogs.
Freesound.org – Remember to put everyone in your credits.
mayang.com/textures/ – Free (placeholder) textures. Give credit! Limit: 20 per day.
cgtextures.com – Free (placeholder) textures. Give credit! Limit: 5 per day (as far as i remember).
spriters-resource.com – Free (placeholder) sprites. Yet again: give credit!
staticvoidgames.com – Place to upload your game to or learn a few things. (by KevinWorkman)

Enjoyment

Lasf.FM – How could you possibly not know this website? Free music dude!
9GAG – No time to keep up with 4chan or reddit?
z0r – 0M61 It’s so random

10 Hour Torture

Epic Sax Guy
Nyan Cat
Amazing Horse
Dwarf Hole (Diggy Diggy Hole)
What is love? (feat. Jim Carrey)
I’m a banana

What framework are you going to use for LD23? Why not try Pixelizer?

Pixelizer is an AS3 entity and component based game framework and today I pushed version 0.4.2. This version holds mostly fixes and tweaks to the 0.4.0 version, but a few new things as well, e.g. visualising colliders.

In order to make it easy and fast to use I’ve written a lot of components already so it should be super easy to get started. The whole thing also comes with a lot of examples that show you how to work with components. Read all about Pixelizer here.

I’ll also take the opportunity to say that Pixelizer is now on GitHub. Join the fun!

First, I want to thank for all the good feedback I got since last release. It’s been really helpful, so keep it coming!

Now then, with version 0.3 Pixelizer is really starting to shape up IMHO. Switch scenes, play sounds, add components and entities like there was no tomorrow. Feature list now looks like this:

• easy extendable component based framework
• nestable entities for easy manipulation of groups
• lots of premade components and entities
• fast 2D rendering
• automated collision detection and response
• spritesheets, animations and tilemaps
• automatic panning and volume of moving sounds
• exact mouse and keyboard input
• fancy text rendering
• handy math routines
• effective object pools
• useful logging

Code, docs, examples and all you need available on the project page: http://johanpeitz.com/pixelizer

And if you have any thoughts, feedback, or ideas. Let me know! Thanks!

I just released version 0.2 of my framework Pixelizer:

Pixelizer is a component based framework for writing games in AS3. That means that you have base entities and that you write little behaviors for them. Behaviors can be anything from game logic to rendering to whatever you can imagine. As most standard behaviors are already in the package, it is very easy to get started and getting your game on to the screen should be a breeze. I am aiming to make it really flexible, reusable and extendable. The main rendering technique in Pixelizer is currently blitting. Blitting is a fast way of displaying hundreds of objects with virtually no slow down.

I’ve been inspired by Unity3D, Flash Punk, and Flixel and added a my own philosophy into it all.

Code, example, and even a demo on the project page.

I would very much appreciate feedback on the whole thing. Very much! Thanks!

I have never participated in a Mini LD and wanted to give it a try, besides the theme seemed quite intriguing. Instead of the whole weekend, I have dedicated just around 6 hours to this Mini LD. I have completed all three of my personal goals: make a game in haXe, create sound effects from recordings and complete the prototype.

The game has 4 stages and is controlled just by the SPACEBAR.
I have thoroughly enjoyed making monster sounds

Looking forward for other entries!

A bit late announcement, but I am in. I am using Haxe, GIMP, Audacity and Flixel.

Here’s a simple one-button game I have got so far:

Two stages now, another two might come tomorrow.

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…

Play It | Rate It

Origin

When I heard Alone was chosen as the theme, a set of bizarre ideas immediately appeared in my mind. I really wanted to explore about the feeling of being alone, about the psychological effect of it. Also, I had read The Knock recently so I wanted to explore more about that subject.

Development

The tools I used included:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Lightroom
• Adobe Flash
• Flashdevelop / ActionScript 3
• as3sfxr »
• Aviary »
• A standard Digital Camera
• Some burned papers
• A friend (lol)

The art is rather simple, I took some photos of my house and I asked a friend to model for me. We did some shots of him walking, but because I lack equipment (tripod, marks, etc) the result looks a little bad. I did my best to correct the photos in Photoshop. The room is a part of my house, that isn’t even a room, but I couldn’t take a picture of a real room because the camera angle was too short. I applied Exposure and Posterize to all the images.

The programming was done entirely in ActionScript 3, using some features of my own library, but the vast majority was to be made from scratch. I used Flashdevelop because I’m really fast with it… Just press Ctrl+Shift+1 and it’s like magic!

What now?

I think I’ll work more time on this game. I’ll add more puzzles, make an easy mode, add language support, and maybe more rooms to explore, or explore more about the story. For example, what happened upstairs?

This was my second time on Ludum Dare, and I think it was a really good experience. I don’t think there’s something that went wrong, maybe next time I’ll add more features to my framework, like effects, sound support and embedding support; but at the end I managed to do what I intended to do.

What are you serious???

For over 6 hours I have been fighting to figure out why I’m getting NOTHING displayed on my tiles. I mean the arrays are right on spot, so what gives. I am also being thrown off since I have never built a “game” before in flash and I have NEVER EVER USED CLASSES. Yeah you heard me. No classes. Ok so that was completely lame, but I found that I was setting the tile back one frame too many. There is no freakin 0 frame. What they hell, such a stupid noob mistake. The only reason I found it is because I decided to push past it and keep working blind as if I knew that it should actually work. Well it was working EXACTLY as I programmed it to work.

So I most likely wont meet the deadline, but I am obviously learning tons and tons that I wouldn’t have had I not participated. Which to me is efffing awesome. Having a blast with my primary level game and happy that I am getting somewhere with it.

Cheers

I have completed and submitted Super Animal Friendship Club:

PLAY ONLINE

Total coding time: 5-6 hours

Enjoy!

I had other things to attend this weekend, therefore I have set aside a few hours for LD. Thinking vaguely about the theme yesterday and coding now for about 4 hours, it’s my pleasure to introduce you Super Animal Friendship Club:

PLAY ONLINE

TODO:

• sounds and music
• difficulty

Piss in my grits

Seriously!! WTF???

So… yeah… I know that my skills LAG far behind many of the guys and gals here, but gessh power supply and HD troubles on top of it all. Good nite this is ludacrsipy-cream-donut-loving-anarchy. I am frustrated and I am not going to quit, but I did want to vent a little if anyone cares. I am trying to keep a log of progress (which isn’t s#!+ at the moment) through camtasia. However everytime I load my game and it’s assets one of my HD’s fails. I think it’s been traced back to a power supply issue. Can’t get one big enough to fix the issue in time, but I’ll just keep trying to power through and see if I can make due on my due date. If not I will still try to finish the game.

The decision on the game is to make a tile game that has 49 pieces. The lone hero only need make it to the door on a “randomly generated” side. Up to 10 tiles will be randomly “decayed” at game start. The hero will then score by picking up artifacts (up to 5 per level) and getting to the door. A 15s timer will count down for each level. This timer will decay random tiles increasing with time until 15sec is up. If the player doesn’t make it to the door or the 15s timer runs out the player DIES! As in Rougelike. As in not to come back or start a new game type. No save game bs. Each level boosts the score by it’s level number times the type of artifact gathered during that level. So if you get a 700 point artifact on level 3 you score 2100 points for the level.

By the way I am still in basic build time due to the issues so far. So nothing is even working at this point (LAME) .

Yes thats right, I have submitted my entry for the Ludum Dare.

Now I’m going to hide under a rock… =P

You can check it out here

-KunoNoOni

So I’ve spent the first day setting up Flixel, searching for map editors (found DAME), making the hero run animation (Export from flash to png with Zoë). Compile all this into something playable-ish:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/848324/ld22/v01/index.html

Hi everyone,

This is my first time here, and I haven’t write code since a long time (except some PHP/SQL for some clients… Awesome, I know).
Need an example of how old fashion (some like Gib would say retarded but whatever ^^) I am ?
Well I am doing this Ludum Dare in AS2.
Yeah !
So, to be quick, I’m currently trying to make a comic strips game. Each “level” is a strip in 3 cases. The two first cases are gameplay, the last one is the result of the “level”. If you win it, you can turn the page and do the next one, else the book will closed (if I have time to do it) and you have to start from the beginning again.
Actually the first page/level is ok, I’m working on the second.
I hope I could do 4 pages/levels for tomorrow.

The theme is “alone” of course, but I try to transmit or exprim a certain life’s vision

First screenshot here :