Perfect time to post, just after theme announcement!
I think I’m gonna do a zombie game. I know what you’re thinking, been done a million times right?

ROBOTS. YOU MAEK THAEM. AND FARM. AND HAVE A KITTEH.

Then you fight some zombies. And survive. ALONE = LAST HUMAN ON EARTH.

Cosmologicon and I have been talking over at pyweek about code review and he thought that if other people looked at each other’s code during the compo they could help each other out.

So I had the idea that there should be a game compo where everyone starts making a game and then they switch code with someone else and start working on each other’s game. Every day or so they’d switch code with someone new, and at the end of 7 days everyone would have a frankenstein of a game. People would practice reading other people’s code and in turn writing readable code for others to read.

EDIT: Here’s a link to the pyweek discussion which has now become a code review event.

…almost nothing. I will be using FlashPunk for my game (yes, I decided to start a new one), and will try to get the $1 via Kongregate ads.

As for the game itself, I have a few pieces of an idea, and that’s it. I’ll post more when I’ve done more.

I think I better start working now. One way or another I aim to make a game about bank vault doors: door after door after door… and all we wanted was to go outside. It’s got to be all about fancy digital vault locks and their minimalistic inner workings.

So…..I knew in advance I’ll have VERY little time this weekend….. and I was also aware how many different things actually go into making a (playable) game…. so I REALLY had to think very well what I would do for the compo.

As I also knew I won’t have the complete weekend to work on it  (and since the theme was to be announced by Friday 10:00PM local time) my plan was like this:

• Friday night (after theme’s announcement): Think on the game concept. Shall I fail to come up with one,  I would abandon the competition.
• Saturday Morning: [Boring things to do]
• Saturday Afternoon (until 7PM): Work on the game (assuming I didn’t abandon the competition)
• Sunday Morning (until 14:00PM): Work on the game. Submit. (assuming I didn’t abandon the competition)
• Sunday Afternoon: [More boring things to do]

The critical point was Friday night…. Fail to have an idea and it’s all over…

Luckily… I think I have my idea now…and it’s not even midnight! (although the clock will probably hit 00:00 when I finish writing this).

Of course sidescrollers, shooters or anything too conventional in terms of gameplay were out of question. I wont’ have the time to do any of those from scratch (as I didn’t declare the use of any boilerplate code beforehand) so this is what I came up with……

You are the Escape Key (ESC)…. you are in a maze of rooms and doors (the keyboard perhaps?) and you need to escape from the evil Function Keys (F1….F12).

You will run into doors, and those doors will open revealing a key that is inside the room (any other key from the keyboard). If it’s a “harmless” and “friendly” key you should press ENTER to enter the room (duh!) and you will keep running until the next door… If it’s a function key you should press ESC to close the door and keep running until finding another door.

So, the game will be pretty much watching yourself approach to doors (first person view) and press ENTER or ESC according to whoever opened you the door and repeat until reaching the exit. You will have a “reaction time limit” that will be shorter as you get closer to the exit. The running speed will also increase as you progress through the game. A timer will tell how fast you managed to escape (if you succeed, that is) so you can play again trying to beat your best time (or a friend’s time if you dare to challenge a friend).

So it’s basically a reflex-testing game built upon the concept of ESCAPE and (hopefully) constraint to my current limitations.

I HOPE I can actually dedicate the aforementioned time to the game and complete it  in such time frame. Although the idea is simple I can still run into a few walls (so to speak) with it.

I’ll try to keep here a journal of any progress made into the game but don’t expect lot of updates since I’m a damn perfectionist b*stard who checks whatever I write dozens of time in order to make sure it makes sense … so making these blog entries consumes a hellin’ lot from my time. Also, I suck at writing, lol.

I’ll start working on the game tomorrow (Saturday) after I finish with everything I have to do in the morning…. so until that time comes I won’t worry about the game….. In the meantime…… STAGE ONE CLEARED!

Say, there’s a team of researchers / soldiers / civilians struggling around in the darkness. There’s something lurking in the dark, and while it is reluctant to approach armed-to-the-teeth humans in full light, still if it ever catches someone alone and separated from the group, it’s curtains. Two people can survive, but one always gets killed. Humans desperately need to get to safety, to light, while monsters are hungry: they want to eat them all.

Now the best part: you’re on the side of monsters. You can pop out of the shadows briefly, make strange sounds or make subtle alterations to the level, like suddenly turning on the lights. Doing this, you compel them to investigate or scare them away, with the ultimate goal of having at least some of them walk alone. And then you eat them, scared and broken

So, that’s my best bet for now. Maybe sounds a bit too epic, but this is it for now. I’ll go get some sleep.

Oh well, just wake up now … anyway during the wedding party, on Hard Rock Rio that was playing music from the 70s, I just check the theme and started some background thread to think about it …

Only regular stuff come up, quests, hidden objects in the scenario, find places… Then suddenly while drinking my mango juice, its not orange it’s mango trust me, came an very very agressive idea ! hide and seek multiplayer !!

I know that is too much ! I know that probably I wont finish it, but I like the idea and put together my desire of explore Unity and localization of characters together !!

I hope the little bear from the keynote help me !

Hi my game will be Dude that’s my bullet for now the basic idea of the game is that the hero is surrounded by enemies who shoot bullets, but he can’t. The only way for the hero to defend himself is to trick the enemies into firing at him, dodging the bullets so they hit another enemy. If I have time I will try to add some other interesting mechanics to the game.

This is a simple mindmap I made while thinking about the game. It is just a lot of random ideas, but maybe they can help someone who has trouble thinking of a game.

There’s an idea in here somewhere, but as usual I’m geting bogged down trying to the language I’m using (this time Javascript and the HTML5 canvas) to do what I want it to.  I need to stop messing around and just get something controlable moving around on screen.  But first to grab some festival food.

Got my basic idea in place. Since there is so little time in this competition I was looking for an idea that I believe will be a good balance of fun with ease of implementation. This theme is fun and so wide open I expect a ton of similar base ideas implemented in many different ways.

My idea is simply an arcade score or collect-o-thon based around using various types of enemies on screen as your weapons to hit the collectibles.  In the screenshot above you are the target or bullzeye player which will be mouse-controlled.

You will fly around and lure the enemies into following or shooting at you. Once they are coming at your player you can move them around to hit the collectibles.

Simple and basic but it leaves a lot of room for fun and messing around with that mechanic.

So, here is my pitch.

A sea with lots of tiny unexplored islands. You set sail with in your small sail boat, looking for an islands of your own. The ones near the shore have already been taken, you have to try in the open waters.

The game will be online. I will host a server, that will have a generated map, and a list of islands. Once you find an island, the server will tell you if it has been discovered yet. If it has, you will see its name, and the explorer who found it. Otherwise you will get to name the island and plant a flags so to speak. Also you could leave a message for future visitors.

Might incorporate fishing into this game.

Screenshot

So yeah here is first screen shot I am posting.You can see sun, two colonized planets, and 3 other planets that are not yet colonized + many moons

Progress

Unfortunately I am bit tired from long week + have many other things piled up from week so I had only some 8 hours to work on the idea… And it progresses very slowly   Also some technical parts of it gave me problems as I have pretty large maps that should be zoomed out/in a lot and still look well and do not lag… Ending up with pretty simple representation in vectors because of it. Also fog of war without lags took some time and looks very simplistic… Ahh… Anyways I almost finished minimalistic part and will probably switch to doing interface/start menu/game over/help screens soon.

Idea

As I wrote yesterday I went with space exploration theme based on my older idea for a game. It basically is based on single game mechanic of lunching rockets in a solar system with more or less real gravitation physics.

I picked this theme because it scales well and seemed as minimal part of it would not be that technically complicated. Well I was little bit wrong… Anyways at max this idea would give me kind of civilization+rocket physics combo. You have mother planet from which you can lunch satellites to find new planets and explore their environment and territories, then prepare colony ship for some territory on planet surface (say ocean or mountains or something) and start lunching probes trying to land them on the territory you want. When successful you lunch colony ship on the same trajectory, if you miss you loose the ship, if you hit you get new colony which you can then expand getting new lunch site + resources + experience etc etc. You can expand the idea in any direction like adding meteorites, aliens, etc…

And idea minimum would be some more casual game where you need in short period of time to colonize as many planets as possible without any resources/ship types/experience and level up complications. Well in the end I am going for this minimum Other things to do and damn how slow and unproductive I am this time Spending hours on some things worth 15 minutes…. Well at least I will have something playable this time.

Well back to work.

Gonna writeup my game idea that sort of synthesized while I slept last night.  I feel the fun and scope of this game will be something I can pull off in 48hrs in Flash.

What I’ve got so far:  You will literally be playing as a cavern in an action / shooting gallery type game.  Your weapons will be stalactites which you will click on to let drop.  They will regrow and be various sizes as well.  You will also be able to click on steam vents on the floor that will shoot up a rush of hot vapor.  These will also have a recharge rate and various sizes perhaps even growing in various spots as the cave floor changes across game rounds.

You will be attacking against all manner of cave life, native and alien.  There will be the usual bats, snails, blind fish etc as well as various human archetypes one might find in this genre.  The lost teen(s), the hiding criminal, the cave explorer, the national geographic expedition etc.  Eventually if you incur enough rancor with the outside world you will be visited by the demolitions expert who will attempt to blow you up by placing charges.

I want to keep this in the realm of action/arcade instead of defense genre.  I think it will be more fun to interact with the cavern and very analog based ‘reload’ concepts (like watching the steam recharge in the vents and watching the stalactites regrow from the ceiling) versus a ‘recharge bar’ artifice.

Left to figure out is just overall cave layout(s) and round / difficulty escalation.

I’m picturing a really cool looking drippy cavern. The drips could even help with guiding the aiming of your rocks and stuff by helping lead your eye at the correct gravity setting to hit your targets.  I’m thinking mouse based click-controls to launch various attacks but I don’t want it to be a click heavy game.

I think the humor element could be high in this game as well if I handle it right.

Here is a current rough mockup for color reference:

Okay, I’m going to be mixing Burrowing into my Caverns, since they go so well together anyway and I really liked Burrowing. The plan is to create a stripped down ‘tactical RPG’-style game (read ‘stripped down’ as ‘without the RPG part’), with various underground critters duking it out Final Fantasy Tactics/Advance Wars style. Lord knows if I’ll be able to pull it off.

Anyway, I’ve set up a BitBucket repository, so, time to get started on some basic groundwork before I head to bead.

Food was Pizza, Ceasar salad, and Cranberry juice.

Day 1 Dinner - Pizza, Salad, Juice

aha ! now I can go to sleep… I have the ideia to dream on Glaucon after a boring class from Plato fall in a cave and have to escape from it, but in order to escape will have to find the sequence that opens the door of the cave, the keys are around the cave, but you cant see all around because the light dont go too far … and watch out the monsters of the cave Glaucon !! throw fire on it !!

here are the drafts

Idea:

Big flame chases little hero and throws fireballs at him. Fireballs set flames to the level, so the hero must constantly run. Little hero uses supersoaker to put down an fireball, soak it with water and kick back at the big flame to put it out. He can also use it to fire-proof some parts of the level.

Deployment:

C++, STL, OpenGL, OpenAL

This is my 3rd attempt at LudumDare, all previous ones failed because i wanted my code to be too pretty. This time its kludge time, wish me luck

Update 1:

I decided to go for option 1, the ultra-simple 3d modeller.

The other options didn’t set my “ooh shiny!” reflex ablaze, although they are probably significantly more doable in the time frame.

In the same vein as Ludum Dare I have given it a Latin name – Carpe Lutum (Seize the Clay).

I have put all the woes I had with Flex in LD12 behind me – i had so much trouble because I was trying to treat it like normal Flash, and it will resist you every step of the way if you try that. Use it like an app platform and it purrs like a kitten.

Here is a screenshot of my interface as of hour 5:

I’m sort of a climber. And pondering about the teme, i stumbled upon Spiderman! The real one. Alain Robert.

You will not be Alain ofcourse, unless you finish the game. Then you get the Alain Robert award of stickyness. Or something.

The game will be something like this: You have to drag someones hands/feet to different position on the building/tower and if it’s good, he won’t fall down. During the climb there will be numerous hassles like birds, window cleaners, office workers, and policeman trying to stop your tour the force.

This might be a bit too difficult for a first game, but trying doesn’t hurt. It will also involve some physics i guess, and i wonder how good i am with that.

So this will be it. I wonder where i’ll be tomorrow.

Update: I might do something different altogether.

I’m up an about, and while the theme wasn’t something as good as say ‘pacifist’, it’s still very decent. Compared to the theme of the last LD it has super mega combo greatness. Only drawback I see is that there could be about 50 tower defense games, and 10 x-jumpy games. So I have no interest in making that, at least.

No, instead, the first idea I had was kind of like Civ., but instead of cities there are towers, and all players have only one tower. Then they need to expand the towers influence to gain more land, and then by exploiting the land keep adding levels to the tower. First I thought like these could by 20th century skyscrapers. Then I thought that perhaps it’d be better to set it in older times and make it like the Tower of Babel. First to reach the sky wins. So that’s the idea so far, yes.

For now, I’ll start by writing some hex playing field code, I believe, and do some test art. I think I will use the D programming language this time.

I finally have an idea of a game. And not only that, I have an intro for the game ready. So now I just need to make the game!

The idea is that you should drown cows. They come flying in from one side of the screen, and you must catch them, and make them bounce into the other side where there’s water. Otherwise the cows will die as they hit the ground, and we don’t want that, now do we?

The intro is a bit weird as to fit the game and the theme well. You can try it, but maybe it’d be better to wait for the rest of the game, too, so you can enjoy it all together. Here’s an image of it to inspect while you wait: