[My name is Carlos Leituga and I’m a junior Game Designer / Implementer in a Portuguese company, where I’m working on a Hidden Object Adventure for a year and a half now. So here I am again, creating a game in 72 hours with the Make A Game team for Ludum Dare #22. ]

As we were packing our stuff after making Eggscape, someone said something in the lines of “Let’s do this again in December!”, and since that day in August we’ve been talking about participating once more in Ludum Dare.

As the final week till LD #22 began, we followed the theme voting closely, coordinated our votes and shared the possibilities of each theme that interested us. Having learnt a lot with LD #21, we were confident that this time everything would work out better, even with two fewer members.

(more…)

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said that Cat: “we’re all mad here.”

So, Harry hosted a Ludum Dare jamsite in Melbourne, inviting game developers around the area to spend 48 hours cooped up in his house to make games. Here’s an account of the fun and chaos that ensued!

What went right:

• Going out and brainstorming before anything – give a chance for ideas to grow / ferment
• Being in the same room provided motivation and staved off the loneliness
• The epiphany couch (which doubled as Luca’s makeshift bed)
• There was always something to playtest, and the instant feedback was useful
• We all got semi-appropriate amounts of sleep

What went wrong:

• Pepper flavored cup noodles. Imagine noodles and pepper in a plastic cup. Yeah.
• Getting lost to the shops several times thanks to Harry’s navigation
• Temperature and computer cord control in the room was not great
• Canine interruptions; the dog would occasionally enter the room and chew on wires
• Didn’t record anything down, making this post-mortem more difficult than necessary

This is an effort of about 40+ hours total(I had party to go too and Mirage and I work at the same place so we had work as well).

We got MisitfChris to make sounds and Music but we could not get them in. But we will be making an update if that’s allowed.

We had to cut back and a lot of assets went without use.

The game ends pretty quickly but I think we got the point across.

Things that went right:

- Programming using Love2D was fun!

- Consistent Art Style

- Cooperation(Google+ Hangout was extremely helpful! The ability to look at each others screen on the fly helped.)

-Awesome Music (Look forward for the update.)

-Playing with the yarn ball is fun!

Things that went wrong:

-We lost our $6000 dollar Cheetos budget!

-We had to cut our game practically in half because of time constraints.

This was our first time participating and we had a blast! We are in for the next one!

Go play it and tell us what you think!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8306

We’ve just submitted our game!

It was our first unforgettable experience and 3 very difficult days.

But we like the result. Now we can finally relax.

And then.. We can’t wait for the next Jam!:)

Link to Jam Entry

Please rate and tell us what you think.

Thank you!

So my Jam game is done.  Well, mostly done.

It lacks some of the content I desired, but I spent time on making the other 3 levels to polish the game play to what I hope is a lustering shine.

This is my first bullet-hell style shmup, so take pity on me.

Try out my game right now!

I’m going to go for a Jam entry instead for the extra time, but I don’t know if that will be enough.

I spent far too long trying to get my idea into something workable, and I think it’s simply too much to implement. Hopefully I will produce something good at the end.

“alone I art“ is a game about spending valuable time alone with art.

You’re a shady character in a museum. You love art. You love it so much that you need to steal it. But to steal the art, you need to be alone. You can’t have anyone spot you stealing or carrying the art in your trench coat, or you’ll never be allowed be alone with art ever again.

Here you can see how some of our gameplay mechanics work. The AI and pathfinding are on their way.

We’re confident this game is going to be at least as fun as the process of making it.

…so I guess the art is done!

Leave me alone!

But the game is still a day from finish. Gameplay, level design and sound are shaping up pretty well.

We still need to fix some problems between collision detection and 22×22 tiles, but everything’s going much better than last Ludum Dare.

We even had time to pixelate the whole team for the game.

To the detail of our clothes during
development, pajamas and all

And while we still have time to finish our Jam entry, we wish the best luck to the ones who are reaching the final stretch of the 48h Compo submission. You can do it!

While the programmers are writing away the game, art is nearly finished and we already have our mockup for the main menu.

Also, the game is called “alone I art”!

Nearly one day after, this theme turned out to be very fun to develop. Can’t wait to reveal more of it, like the really clever name we came up for it!

And we made pancakes! (the game comes later)

[My name is Carlos Leituga and I’m an intern Junior Game Designer / Implementer in a Portuguese company, where I’ve been working on a Hidden Object Adventure for a year now. I was invited by friends to help develop a game for the 21st Ludum Dare event. We are the Make A Game team.]

It was around 11pm when I left my house with a 1 hour trip ahead until I met the yet to be named Make A Game team. Having memorized half of the list of possible themes, I spent the little I could of brain waves keeping my car on the road, and tried to think of quick game mechanics suited for a 72 hour game development.

I was the last of the team to arrive; I met some new faces and joined in on the ready up ritual. There were still 3 hours until the official LD #21 theme to be revealed, so we started throwing ideas around, writing them down on our white boards and linking them to similar themes.

 Look busy guys…

The awaited hour finally came, and the Escape theme was victorious. We quickly (and sleepily) gathered around one whiteboard and started discussing our previous ideas, along with new ones. Among them, the Survival Tetris game was highly praised. For some dumb reason, I went to my computer and searched if someone already had done such a thing. It existed, and in two quite different forms. In one you only controlled a stick figure, and in the other you controlled both pieces and a round character. We were bummed out.

(more…)

No more art to do ; _ ;

With all the art done, we turned our attention to the team’s logo while the programmers keep churning out code.

We are near completion of what we can do with our 72 + 4 hour time limit.

Setbacks in the second day kept us from having the game done within the original schedule but we are really proud of our overall progress.

Some stuff won’t make it to our submission build, but we’re keen on finishing this amazing project.

You can check out our Day 2 recap at http://makeaga.me. We won’t be doing a Day 3 post or Post Mortem for a couple of days.

WATCH OUT, IT’S A CODERS’ BLOCK!

That’s right, I finally uploaded the game, with 2 minutes to spare! And after trying about 5 time times, I managed to complete it (I guess a one-level game’s gotta be hard, huh?) with a score of 2605, try beat it

-Will be adding a scoreboard within the next few days

Whew! Participating in the Jam was a lot of fun but really tiring. We managed to finish our game Claustrophobia with just a few hours to spare.  Check it out here!:  http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/184445-claustrophobia

I am going to switch to the jam, as I can’t keep up with it, and finishing it now would just make it look shabby. Anyhoo, I’ve got the gun done, the movement, the sheep and the health and scores and stuff. Pics tomorrow, now I sleep.

Well, now that the server’s up, I can post a progress report on our game: http://i.imgur.com/kPVcU.png It looks bland right now because it doesn’t have blocks, powerups, particles, enemies, or soundtrack. But since it’s a Jam entry, we’ve got it all planned out for the next two-ish days and we’re right on schedule.

Good luck to all fellow Jammers and you hardcore Compo programmers!

IT’S NOT STEALING! IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!

“Oh, I didn’t see you there, crushing my path for survival and my dreams of becoming a famous paleontologist.

Do you know how hard it was to find this egg? And how lucky I am that these debris are falling in such a coincidental position that I can climb some of them? It’s like someone is throwing them with exact precision. But I don’t have time to think about it, actually I can’t do much more than panic and run around, waiting for more debris to fall.”

We’re Make A Game and Eggscape is our entry for Ludum Dare 21′s Jam. You can read our Day One Update at http://makeaga.me!

Onward to Day 2! It starts right now!

This will be my first participatement in a ludum dare competition.
I will go for the jam, because I am a little bit late.
I will be coding it in C#.
I think it will be something like escaping from the ever-nearing doom, kinda like dino run. However, I don’t know if it fits in the theme.
Wish me luck, I am an amateur coder!

I sort of got some kind of playable thing together by the deadline – more or less.

It was nowhere near what I wanted it to be; no audio, no real gameplay other than a quick boss fight, no titles, no ending… But I guess the graphics could be a lot worse.

I’m going to work on my game more tomorrow and probably enter it as a jam entry, too. I’ve also got to edit my timelapse together. But now, sleep.