So I’ve heard of this “Ludum Dare Gamejam-Competition” and I thought I’d enter my own jam.

To create Game-Jam of course only the classic ingredients of Grapes, Apricots, Mango and Elderberries would do (I know, I’m a comic genius).

Here is the fruit. I had to fall back on elderberry-preserve, as they are ridiculously hard to come by.

Turns out cutting grapes is totally fun, and not at all tedious or complicated.

It also turns out that Elderberries have a very strong color that overpowers everything else. Or it’s the food-coloring I added. Not quite sure.

And here it is! Finished Game-Jam!

Quite tasty. And extremely sweet.

-Matthew

Main idea: An astronaut finds himself all alone in boundless Space. He must reach his spaceship before it flies away.

Used: Inkscape, freesound.org, sfxr, Monkey, Paint.NET, Audacity

We were very excited to take part in our first LD and create our first ever game.

We tried to prepare for it as hard as we could. That’s what we ate.

And that’s where we have been creating «Stand Alone».

What went wrong:

Idea. From the very beginning we haven’t worked enough on our game concept. Therefore, changes in the game have been made during the development.

Art. It takes as a lot of time to create art. More than we’d expected. We had to refuse some game objects due to lack of time to draw it.

Some art in progress.

Sound insertion. There were some bugs with sound in Monkey. It was very annoying.

Performance. Flash-version works not very well in browser. Have to deal with it later.

Time. We did not have enough time to add everything that we’ve planned.

Tiredness. Despite the huge amount of fluid, good nutrition and healthy sleep it was very difficult to concentrate on any task.

Despite this we managed to submit our game in time and got a lot of fun!

And we’re going to finish and improve «Stand Alone» according our plans.

Ludum Dare 22 Entry – Stand Alone

OK now it looks like a game. But less than 6 hours are left on the counter to make some levels.

I need the sugar

I finished my game. I’m a bit disappointed with how little actual gameplay that made it in, but it can be considered complete, working and not too shabby.

Here are a couple of traditional pictures for your entertainment/annoyance:

Desk:

Food:

Ok final version uploaded, libraries updated with the bugs found during the weekend, some donuts eaten … time to rest for the week to come !!

don’t forget to play the final version here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=825

cheers !!

… or what kept me busy instead of LD:

As a final touch, cookies are supposed to be joined with a strawberry jam.

Rice with tomato sauce and cheese. Beer.

Definitely behind, but implementation is nearly finished to a minimal requirement. Some sustenance to set me up for the final panic-crunch.

Meanwhile baby is burning up the place:

Definitely going to change the wall texture soon…

So things are going very slowly this time.

I still don’t have a game but I have my animated zombie that can follow and attack the player. The AI is not too great of course but this is a zombie so it might be realistic

Time to eat a pizza!

The staple food of geeks

Pasta today, the cupboards are empty, all that I could find was milk, spaghetti, flour and cheese, oh well.

I also have a lack of ideas, that sucks too. I’ve finished all the mechanics and music scares me.

I don’t know if my game is any good, but my eats are!

After spending half the night with some Horde3D issues, I have decided to start over. While I’m being able to render the 3D scene, the 2D stuff on top of that is rendered without textures. It’s probably something trivial I missed and I’m still baffled why it doesn’t work now, because it did work in the past.

Two lessons learned so far during this LD:

1. Don’t consume too much alcohol the day before LD starts
2. Be absolutely certain that your tech works (Also I’m kinda kicking myself now that I didn’t do a warm-up game)

Anyhow, I’m now doing a game about an adventurer who is exploring a pyramid and he is alone of course. I’m back to making a 2D game and for that I’m using my typical 2D iso look.

Here is a what I ate:

Self-made wraps with some salad, onions, olives, cheese, kidney beans, corn, pepper and a spicy paprika dip. I can’t cook really, but I’m quite good at making wraps and sandwiches. (Maybe that means I should work at Subway if being a full-time indie doesn’t pan out. )

Spaghetti with cheese sauce and parmigiano-reggiano over them!

So hey, I finished up my collision code (right at the 24 hour mark). I have a bunch of functions for checking for the nearest point on an AABB, as well as triangular shapes I’m nicknaming “wedges”. So now, with that, I have all the collision tests I need. Phew! Math!

The nearest point on a wedge is always in the direction of the normal... except corners

To celebrate, I whipped up something nice for dinner.

Chicken a-la-King. Rice, chicken pieces, topped with Salsa. Bon Apetite!

Hey look! A FoodPhoto! It’s totally like I’m actually doing an LD again.

Very impressed with all the work so far!  I’m even farther behind than I’d hoped, but that’s what happens when you have a plan for half the possible outcomes and something you never anticipated gets voted into your lap.  I wasn’t thrilled with the theme announcement (my “randomly generated” game featuring gun-toting vampires, predatory aliens, superintelligent cyborg bears, and a bandana-wearing killing machine named John Randbo would’ve been awesome, you jerks), and rather than diving into coding the first terrible idea I had, I dawdled, watched Notch tackle the problem with more ease than I could manage, irresponsibly spent a few hours accidentally brainstorming a great way for the writer and musician I’m trying to start a studio with to get their work noticed before learning some soulless capitalists had somehow retroactively stolen my idea, and justified eating dinner and sleeping by telling myself the best seed of an idea I had needed to germinate.  And it has germinated; whether I can put down the proper roots in only 24 hours remains dubious at best, but I’m prepared for a marathon coding session.  My working title is Omnicider – the idea is to turn the theme on its head and discard the notion that being alone is somehow a “bad” thing and make it the goal.  My protagonist is a mad scientist-type whose only desire is to be alone, even if he has to kill everyone else on the planet to get there!  Killbots, an orbital death platform, and shooting down pesky Earth-borne missiles with a particle cannon are the gameplay elements; part RTS, part Missile Command, all fun?  I may have to fall back to the Jam if things don’t proceed smoothly, but I’m not giving up until my failure is entirely obvious.

I’ve never been actively encouraged to generate anything resembling a food blog, so I produced a suitably epic vegan breakfast to start my coding session:

Clockwise from the top left, you’re looking at unsugared grapefruit with pineapple, off-brand Gloomios with thawed blueberries and soymilk, hot miso soup with potatoes, leeks, deep-fried tofu, wakame, and soba noodles, a large cup of home-roasted Sumatran coffee AKA “the strong stuff”, soymelet with steamed broccoli, fried mushrooms, and green onions, and margarined toast.  Hearty and perhaps a little extravagant, yes, but don’t ever let anyone tell you that vegans can’t be foodies.

Hey there,

We’ve got the code to 70% and art at 40% done.
We’ve made a little screenshot with our hero in it.

The story is about a hermit who survives on his own and wants to be left alone.

Here’s our dinner:

Our little guardian has just devoured an intruder entering our danger room:

That’s bread with tomato (typical catalan dish) and a bit of cheese (it’s common to have cheese, jam, etc. on top of that – but I don’t like meat) – it also has salt and oil (and usually garlic but not this time).

There’s also beer, so I can get a bit of inspiration!

While thinking of what to create I made a chicken wrap !