During the compo, I ran into a bug that made two pushable box (which should collide and stop) run over each other.  I’ve been trying to fix that, but now nothing makes sense anymore… The gif bellow can better show it (and also show a new stage! ).

As you can see, the first time it collides perfectly… but the second time (which should be the exact same situation), they overlap each other… One thing that I was able to notice (after dumping some frame-by-frame information to a .txt file… >_<)  is that there may be a relation with their order in the object list (FlxGroup, if you’ve ever used Flixel).

Ok, this gave me a (stupid) idea. I’ll check which is the left most one and pass that as the second object to the collision method (FlxObject.separate). I’ll post soon with results. Obviously, it didn’t work. ¬¬

Below is a fairly accurate account of how my weekend went while making F*** This Job

Day One

0830 Got up, had porridge and a cuppa, got dressed
0900 “Minimalism? Bugger.”
0930 Lots of Googling, etc. “Minimalism…Do more with less”
1000 “I’ll make a one-button roguelike!”
1030 “Screw that.” Decided on a one-button platformer instead
1100 Drew complicated sketch of how the game will play

1130 Guy is now running and jumping back-and forth
1230 Basic level loading and tiling done
1300 Wife asks what happens if you hold down the jump key. Turns out the guy starts flying. I assure her it’s a feature…Not a bug
1400 Added spikes and player deaths
1500 Went to ‘Burger Off’ to refuel

1730 Back to work, added the stegosaurus thingy which would later become the mutant rat enemy
1830 Added exits – levels now have a start and an end!
1900 More enemies that look nothing like they’re supposed to (except the gun turret…That sort of looks like a gun turret)
2100 “It would be awesome if I could add Super Meat Boy-style replays…”

0000 Somehow added Super Meat Boy-style replays

0200 More enemies, tile types and general bug fixing. Added just about all the mechanics and elements so I can focus on polish and level design tomorrow

Day Two

0830 …SNOOZE…
1030 “Oh **** it’s still Ludum Dare!”
1100 Fixing up the main menu and level select screen
1200 Found my dusty Wacom tablet…Time to make an intro
1400 Finished the intro and outro. His fingers look weird but whatever
1500 Designed a few tutorial levels
1530 Ran out of bacon, went to the shops
1630 More levels, bug fixing the replays
1930 Redid a lot of the art for the enemies, spent ages trying to make a decent run animation in 3×3 pixels (didn’t work – he looks like he’s moonwalking)
2200 Added sounds – thank you AS3FXR!
2230 Added a poster to the intro and main menu (bonus points if you recognise it)
2300 Home stretch! More levels
0100 So many ideas for levels but they take *ages* to tweak and get right! Oh well, 24 will do for now
0130 Compiled and submitted
0200 Final tweaks and fixes… Need to get up for work in 5.5 hours, better go to bed

My long silence is broken! I have finished Red Swarm, my game for hypothetically the minimalist theme. Maybe. Not sure what went wrong there.

(no potato D:)

 

Go play it!

My rogelikelike is coming together somewhat, got a few different enemy types in now. I can’t deny the theme is really helping with that. I haven’t drawn a single walk-cycle and for that I am truly grateful. Also starting to wind my twisted narrative theme into it. SPIRITS.

To do: bit more interface, weapons, couple more enemies, sound/music, bit of polish if time!

My game, Minimalist TD is done! Play it here.

This was my second LD (First one being LD24). All in all, it went a lot better than the first one. I’m kind of happy with my result and I think it’s kinda playable, even though it’s probably not terribly innovative (a generic TD game really). I have never done a TD game before, so I thought that’d be fun as well as a nice learning experience.

Still not quite sure about the difficulty curve. It probably ramps up a bit quickly, but then again, there’s only one level and a bit of trial-and-error can be fun. Lemme know what you think!

Here are the tools I used:

Coding:

FlashDevelop + Haxe + NME + HaxeFlixel

Graphics:

GIMP (although I didn’t need it very often, as you can tell by looking at the screenshot).

Sounds:

Bfxr and WAV to MP3 for soundeffects

Step Seq. for music and Audacity to record it (Inspired by Arkeus. First time I’ve ever created music, not sure if I’m happy with it. It’s kinda short and doesn’t loop very well… but better than nothing, right?)

Other:

DAME for tilemaps

Things I achieved on day one:

• Wasting the entire day on broken pathfinding code I realised I wouldn’t really need to use

Things left to do:

• All the rest of the game code
• All the graphics
• All the sound

Panic mode: yes.

Potato inclusion: unlikely. :C

…there’s always plan B if I really can’t finish what I’m working on in time.

Finally finished the five first levels. Still not much of a puzzle, but it’s something.

Move with the arrows, jump with ‘x’ (if you have the powerup) and restart with ‘r’ .

Play it here!

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks! =D

I’ve settled on making some sort of abstract roguelike-like. Here we see the player, an enemy, and the exit to the level below.

Movement and progression through levels is in, and not a lot else. Hopefully a resistance to adding graphic detail thanks to the theme will give me a better chance at making something of the rest of the game. And also the Dreamhack Open has finished now, that’s going to help…

I’ve already loaded the level editor with every (I hope) object, and some of them are functional! Just gotta polish the graphics, make sounds… and create every goddamn level. >_< Since it’s going to a puzzle, that only make things harder… >_<

Oh well, I hopefully can do this. xD

It’s been over twelve hours and I’ve only now finally managed to get a working A* pathfinding thing in Flixel.

…I do not have high hopes.

of which I dearly hope will change

You are some kind of bug alien queen thing. You need to make more bugs to protect you from a horde of… (rolls dice) snake aliens. Why this? Well, before I drew up any plans, I managed to make these my bonus objectives for this compo through various conversations with people (which I am sticking to with more gusto than the theme, apparently):

• No blue colour anywhere
• Use the colour red
• Insert potato into game
• Non-humanoid characters

Have some totally illegible scribbles (and angry rants) on graph paper! I’ll update everyone with more progress when it has been made.

 

…I forgot to add potato. Well, I’m sure I’ll find a way to add potato down the line.

When I first entered Ludum Dare, it was April of 2011. 2011 was a good year for making games for me. Throwbots, Aphelion Incident and Blue Moon were my creations for 2011, and I still feel that for all their flaws they are still reasonably solid entries.

2012 was not so good. This time last year I came down ill. In August I was busy with preparations for an academic conference. In December? In December, my only excuse was absolutely hating the theme. (If “You Are Your Enemy” wins I will go mad. MAD)

Let’s hope things go better this time around!

IDE: IntelliJ

Library: Flixel

Map/Level Editor: DAME

Image Editor: Photoshop/GraphicsGale/Paint Tool SAI

Sound Generator: BFXR

Music Editor: SunVox

Timelapse: Chronolapse

Streaming: Open Broadcaster Software

(disclaimer: some of these tools might not end up being used at all)

 

 

 

Click here to view my LD entry.

Or click here to go directly to the game.

 

This post contains a few spoilers (sorta), so I suggest playing before you read on.

 
Phew!

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What a hectic, fun, stressful, and exhilarating weekend this was. I’ve never participated in a Jam before, nor have I ever actually completed a game, or made something beyond the game I’m still working on.

That first game has been (slowly) in development for almost a year now, so the idea of creating a game in a weekend was very appealing to me. Almost like a “right place at the right time” moment for me, as I’ve been struggling to have the motivation to continue development on my first game. Turns out that LD was exactly what I needed.

All the lessons and techniques I’ve learned from working on that first game really helped me create Shadow Possession in the short amount of time I had. I’ve also learned that if I can make 8 decent levels in 60 hours, there’s no excuse for my first game having only 5 levels in 9 months! It’s been a good wake-up call.

 
What’d I miss?

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I have a good list of things that I didn’t have time to get into the game.

Off the top of the list: more sound effects, an increasing difficulty curve, and new rules/additions to the mechanics.
 
Sound

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Sound is something I always had in mind as I developed Shadow Possession. I imagined “darkness-y poof” sounds when you would flip and land, a “searing, burning” sound when you were hit with light, and the appropriate sounds when the lights begin to flicker on and off. They really would have added to the atmosphere, yet I simply ran out of time. A few more hours probably would have been enough, as I had gotten footstep sounds into the game, so it was only a matter of having the time to find the other appropriate sounds I needed. Fixing nasty bugs that appeared in the last hour or two took priority, unfortunately.

 
Increasing Difficulty/Additional Mechanics

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I had wanted the difficulty in Shadow Possession to eventually start escalating, after the player had time to learn the mechanics I continued to introduce. I set the flow of the levels in a calculated way – You learn to flip before you learn that light hurts, you get used to avoid light to continue before you learn that some lights have switches, and so on. The final level in SP should hint at what I wanted to do next with the mechanics – mobile lights via people/creatures/machines/whatever made sense. My plan was to have some AI that would wander in certain areas, and if the spot you with their flashlight, they’d chase you. They’d be either random strangers or perhaps friends of “The Gentleman” (the guy whose body you possess). I also wanted to make the light kill you quicker (and perhaps not push you out as much), but balancing the difficulty with that would have taken more time, so I went for more of a timing approach.

 
The Result

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Despite not getting more sounds and menu in, I’m still very pleased with what I turned out. It was a lesson-full, motivating experience to take part in. I’d like to compete in the next LD again, and do something with procedurally generated levels/content. I’m not sure what takes longer – hand-crafting levels, or letting your systems do that for you (and working out the bugs), but I’d like to take a crack at it, as I’ve never done proc gen before.

 
The Future

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If you liked Shadow Possession, look forward for a new version in the soon future. Now that I can take my time and really give it some finesse and challenge, I’d like to see where the game can go. I plan on setting deadlines to self-motivate like I did for the Jam, so development won’t take years. I won’t try and estimate a release time this soon, but I plan on seeing what I can do in a week or two, and take it further as needed.

 

All in all, I feel a good kind of different from before I participated. A pretty tired kind of different, but a good one nonetheless.

What Went Right

• Having the best artist/roommate ever.
• Flixel – I’d never used it before, but I knew it by reputation.  It’s definitely a Game-Jam Tool – not a tight, cogent application framework, but a giant box of features thrown together and made as available as possible.
• Tight concept.  As soon as the idea of a reverse-schmup was well-articulated every design decision was easy.
• Boids/Flocking-Based AI.  It creates a natural motion that’s still very easy to control and constrain.

What Went Wrong

• FlxGroup Object Pools.  I was constantly leaking and spent too many cycles trying to puzzle it out.  I yanked it and replaced it with a linked-list solution in less time that I spent pointlessly poking variables in the debugger.
• Alpha-Beta-Pruning-Based AI.  Before flocking, my first attempt was to create a “perfect” AI that would only get hit when cornered, never by mistake.  The code was very complex and didn’t work very well, and the motion was jerky and unaesthetic.
• No threads or coroutines in ActionScript – lots of switches and ad hoc state variables.  What is this, the 90s???

Thanks for reading – now go play it!

Special thanks to my roommate Freddie “blob” T for the opportunity to make a sexy-looking game!

 

Harold is now available to execution all over the place, and oh look if it isn’t a goat…

Play here if you like! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=1626

My first LD entry

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=19456

Here’s my submission – Dracula’s Treasure, I hope you guys enjoy it! I started off this jam with an idea for a “Dracula Dating Sim” which would place Dracula in high school, where he would try to win the heart of some incredibly stereotypical high school girl by dressing as an incredibly stereotypical high school boy. All in all, I don’t think I knew enough about dating sims, dialog trees, or high school to get it playable. Here’s a peek at what I had gotten done by Saturday morning:

So on Saturday afternoon I set out on making a new game based loosely on Flicky and City Connection where you play as Dracula trying to protect your valuables from impending eviction:

Anyway, I wanted to do something a little different – and even though this is closer to my M.O., I tried a lot of new things and learned quite a bit.

Great LD! The theme was great (even though I’m not advanced enough to tackle some of the better ideas I had for it) and the company was great!

 

AAAAAAAAAA okay got that out of the way, progress is steady. The executioner, under your direction, will leave for work, go kill a dude then come back to bed. Plenty more stuff needed in-between but a game loop is finally emerging…

Time to stick some food in the oven. Screenshots for your troubles:

I totally said I wasn’t going to enter this weekend but I’m going to do my best to work around social obligation and get something done for this very interesting theme!

So here’s my initial concept: you are an executioner. Each day you get out of bed, go to work and as commanded, kill people in cold blood. Will you mercilessly perfect your murderous art, for which you will be rewarded by the City? Or is there another way…

It’s rather dark, so hopefully I get time to flesh it out and do it justice. And I’m using Flixel for this once again. Good luck everyone!

Hi! I’ve entered a few Ludum Dares before (none this year due to illness and deadlines, ugh) and this time last year I made Blue Moon, one of my most well received games in general.

I’m going to use the following tools, and aiming for the compo. But it is the end of the year, when burnout is high and holidays creep ever closer, so perhaps I might go for the jam this time.

• Flixel
• IntelliJ IDE
• DAME for level editing if I really, really have to
• SAI for illustrations
• PyxelEdit/Photoshop, the former I don’t know as well and the latter I do
• Sunvox for music
• BFXR for sound

That covers everything, I think! See you then!