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:

Here are all the things I can remember of the million I considered for this ridiculous theme (Weird/Unexpected/Surprise):

- Plan a surprise party. The challenge is getting it all done and everyone hidden before the victim returns from being kept out

- Whack-a-mole variations. One of them a surprise party one (wife’s idea): Kids you have to keep whacking into place so they aren’t visible when the surprisee arrives, as they constantly fidget and want to get up.

- A mountain goat hopping around on a mountain, trying to scare birds. No, I don’t know why. I just thought controlling a mountain goat that hops around would be fun.

- A stealth game where your goal is to sneak up on people and give them presents or some other surprise. I realized after a moment that this is that one Burger King game.

- A web version of Scattergories. You’re given a letter and a topic (“Actors that start with A”). You can enter 5 things that fit, and you get points for each one you pick that nobody else did. See how that fits the theme? It’s quite clever. The real challenge here is incorporating peer review so that you can’t just enter “GHJDKHS” and win.

Anyway, I have settled on a web game, sort of similar to Andy Schatz’s conversation game. It’s a text adventure where you roam around a maze, and when you get to an empty room, you can add your own on. That will undoubtedly result in weird, unexpected surprises. Each room can contain a riddle to open one of its doors, the content of which is entirely up to the room builder.

Obviously, verifying the appropriateness of submissions will be a high priority.

Checked the winning theme this morning (around 7 hours after the start of the competition) and my mind was just blank. I opened up GraphicsGale, drew a bomb which I was quite pleased with, and that was it. No ideas popped into my head, and aside from deciding I wanted to use the bomb I’d drawn, I had nothing to work on or with. I then went out for the afternoon.

I got home 3 hours ago and started doodling around, until about an hour ago I finally have an idea.

It involves trying to detonate all of the bombs on a level by sliding them around so that when one explodes, it ignites the fuses on any unlit bombs next to it. At the start of the level one or more of the bombs will already be lit, and to make things more interesting, the bombs can have different length fuses.

I’m hoping to be able to come up with a range of levels of varying difficulty, but there’s only just over a day left, I want to get at least some some sleep tonight, need to get to bed early tomorrow, and I’m in the mood for coding rather than working out level designs, so I’ll just have to hope I can get the bulk of this written tonight and in the morning, to leave me a couple of hours early evening tomorrow to put together some levels.

I’ll be coding this in FreeBASIC and just using the standard graphics library, so it’ll be cross platform and work without any dependencies, unless I also find the time to add sounds effects and music of course,  in which case it’ll need FMOD.

Got to pop out for an hour now, but when I get back I’ll put together a quick mock-up screen.

agh! i’ve got crap-all so far and i can’t seem to think of anything that hasn’t already been done already! if i can’t think of anything decent by tomorrow morning i’m going to have to play my Come From Behind Desperation Game card.

 http://www.slayradio.org/home.php for the win!

Perhaps not much of a reaction though. Here is my first sketch, I haven’t decided if I’ll do this yet.

Im thinking of using a physics lib on this one.