Due to the fantastic packaging advice post now stickied to the page, I created a web applet wrapper for my game so that it could be played in browser, for those who don’t want downloads cluttering up their desktop.

I tested it in Chrome and in Firefox, please let me know if another browser is having trouble.

It is a little buggy because it is just a wrapper and is still trying to process the executable code, had I had this in mind from the start I could have segmented it better.  Something to keep in mind for the next one.

“Lost in the Woods” entry page.

I finished my first complete game ever in this Ludum Dare!

Screenshot dump!

I’m afraid I had more fun developing it than anybody will get by playing it (it’s sad but realistic). If you to give it a try I’ll leave some links:

• Play/Rate the game here (link).
• Game source code in Mercurial repository (link).
• Development blog in Posterous (link) (I didn’t want to saturate Ludum Dare’s blog posting there, but now I realize that was a mistake).
• Timelapse of the entire process (link).
• Some Link I found on Internet (this pun cost me the 10 game-developer followers I had in Twitter)
  

Just in case anyone makes a kitten compilation of LD 22 (wink, wink) I leave mine here to make free use of it (it is really ugly and small though).

If you were trying to play my game in the past few days and were met with “Could not find main class alonegame.AloneGame”, please upgrade Java to version 7.

Everybody loves a good timelapse, so here’s the timelapse (24x) of my entry in LD22 H.O.P.E

The source and level files are included, so feel free to hack up some more inventive levels

This was my first entry, but definitely not my last! Good luck everyone!

I managed to complete the Ludum Dare! Amazing!

Maze Explorers!

I didn´t quite know what to expect when I decided to join this LD, two weeks ago. I had never made a game from start to finish. But the time limit pressure, and watching other people do the same thing as me gave me a lot of motivation.

Also, I learned a LOT. In my job I have to make java programs to solve optimization problems, and they never involve things such as states, interfaces, resource management, etc. If nothing else, Ludum dare was worth it just for the learning experience alone.

That said, I´m actually rather proud of the game I´ve submitted. Granted, there are a lot of planned things that are missing (just note the huge blank space in the bottom of the playing area). But it went much much farther that I would have guessed. It has half-decent old school graphics! It is multi-platform! It has levels! And I can even add more levels easily in the future.

So, to celebrate, here is the obligatory time lapse. Sorry for the lack of sound!

A shout to MME, who did the dare in parallel with me. We shared a lot of ideas, questions and lols in these 48 hours.

And make sure you find the secret kitten in the game!

Ok, I have managed to complete the Kitten Challenge! Good luck trying to find it in my game :3. It is there, I promise! Dont give up!

Now three more hours before submitting… I wish I could have finished the transitions, but I think that will not happen this time. I will probably spend this time improving the character sprites and maybe adding a few extra levels.

Nyan! Nyan!

So I´m trying to pretty up my game, but I can´t get Slick2D to render fronts using the UnicodeFont class. (So I can´t use some of the fancier functions from that class)

using the Graphics Class, I manage to:

g.Drawstring(¨foo¨,x,y);

But when I do:

UnicodeFont font = new Unicodefont(new Font(fontname, Font.Plain,20);
font.draw(x,y,¨foo);

Nothing happens.

I have tried to add a font effect to UnicodeFont, but it is still not displaying

Halp, please?

EDIT: Thanks for all the help! It turns out that I have to font.loadGlyphs() at every render cycle to get my font to display.

After a short night of sleep, time to write some levels to my game. I´m a little afraid that I may have made the game too hard, and that only luck will carry you through without dying at least once.

But if I think again, not that this is a bad thing, is it?

Or maybe it is the day two blues of not believing in your own creation…

Well, time for coffee and graph paper.

My game after 24hrs!

After 24hs, I managed to mostly complete my game engine. There are a few features missing, but I got all the mechanisms that I need to make my game:

• Controls are all in.
• Victory and Defeat conditions are in.
• Level Selection and Unlocking are in.
• Reading levels from text files is in.
• Placeholder graphics and animations are in.

This means that tomorrow I can mostly concentrate on adding levels to make the game fun/challenging, and adding bells and whistles like images and sounds. I feel hopeful that, for someone who has never made a video game before, I will not embarrass myself

My code, on the other had, is a complete mess. Hardcoded stuff all around, hacks to make the player and the world talk to each other. Very few comments. Objects and world tiles mashed together. Ugh Ugh. I must say that these first 24hrs of LD were great for me to learn some lessons in programming.

Anyway, here is the game. There is no content, but you can get a feel of how it works. You are an explorer, who has to find your way out of mazes. You can do it by yourself, or help people stuck in the maze. Some of them will give you powers, but they will also get in your way, and eat your food. Sometimes it is better to go alone…

Maze Explorers!

PS: If anyone could give me some hints of what exactly I should put in my manifest to make java skip all (or some) of those nasty warnings, I would be very very happy

So i decided to enter this LD – finishing is another matter though since i was never good with deadlines . But there is always the Jam i suppose…

Anyway!

I decided to use the code i wrote these days for viewing/walking around maps made with my 3d world editor in Java and LWJGL. So, as advised by the sages in #ludumdare, i declare here that i will use this codebase. I’m not sure what i’m supposed to do about the 3d world editor, so although i got told that its ok i decided to make an emergency release since the latest one doesn’t include the lightmapper or entity support. Unfortunately i don’t have a Windows or Linux box available at the moment so i can only provide Mac OS X binaries. In any case, in the file below you’ll find my “ld22-devkit”:

http://runtimelegend.com/tools/world/extra/ld22-devkit.zip (4MB)

The devkit contains:

• Runtime World 1.0 alpha 2.99, special ld22 build (this is a full build, including the docs, example textures, world files, etc)
• Runtime World Walker for Java/LWJGL (which is now mutated beyond a simple walker and is a -awful- codebase for making 3D games with RTW files)
• Example code in RWW (Walker.java) for picking up coins and stuff.
• Prelightmapped rtw file, model, etc for the code above
• LWJGL binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (so that the example can be tried right out of the box) and scripts to launch the “game” from Windows, Linux or Mac OS X with proper parameters, etc

Even if you don’t use my codebase you might find the last one useful if you plan to distribute your LWJGL game and have no idea how to do that . If you just want to try the example/test “game”, you can find it here (this is what i’m going to use as a base anyway):

http://runtimelegend.com/tools/world/extra/ld22-jwalker.zip (1.8MB)

And you can watch a video of it here. If you use Runtime World you’ll probably want to use your own entities – for these, modify the entities.lil file from the scripts subfolder. The format is register-user-entity <name> <group> <size> (size can be actually two or three arguments for width/depth and height or width, height, depth).

My personal set of tools, etc is:

• OS: Mac OS X Lion (iMac)
• Language: Java
• Libraries: LWJGL, own codebase (mentioned above)
• IDE: Eclipse (with some MacVim for non-Java editing)
• Graphics: Pixelmator, Blender, Runtime World (mentioned above)
• Sound: ….eh, what ?
• Video Capture: custom BASH script to make screen captures
• Video Tools: ffmpeg, iMovie
• Other Stuff: Colloquy for IRC, Cyberduck for FTP, Slayradio for background noise

Just releasing a quick library I plan to use in Ludum Dare, consisting of a maze generator and an implementation of A* in java.

https://github.com/xSmallDeadGuyx/SimpleAStar

Hey!

Found out about this new Ludum Dare yesterday and for some reason thought it would be a good idea. Now I’m beginning to realise how badly prepared I am, but what’s the worst that can happen?

Language: Java
Framework: LibGDX
I’ll worry about everything else if/when I get there.

Good luck everyone.

So I’m entering Ludum Dare 22. So’s my brother and friend. The plan is to live stream our desktops (or the primary screen of them at least) , take a photo every 5 seconds for a time lapse, and record the information we place on out whiteboards. And here’s where I’m insane, I’m coding in a language I only decided to start learning today: Java. In about half an hour I set up a development environment, scripts to compile and run and a base program to do my logic loop (which I won’t be using come this weekend).
My set up is as follows:

• Intel Core i7 950
• 10GB DDR3 RAM
• 2 x 22″ 1080p LED Monitors
• 1 x 19″ 1440×900 LCD Screen in Portrait.
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64

And here’s a pretty picture of it all.

Languages:

• Java (Main Client)
• PHP (High Scores or anything web based I want to implement)
• Game Maker (Fall back if Java ends up being insanely hard)

Programs:

• Paint.Net (Pixel Art and Touch Ups)
• Fireworks/Photoshop (Vectorising Drawn Art)
• Notepad ++ (Programming)
• Open Office (Documentation)
• Game Maker (Fall Back Programming)
• VirtuaWin (Desktop Management, 3 Screens isn’t enough)
• pixie (Colour Selection)

Plan is to use mainly black and white, and maybe a red or two for colours.  I’m going to be drawing and scanning my menu systems in, and then vectorising them. As for game ideas, I have a few, some that I won’t be able to do easily due to the lack of knowledge of Java, and some that would look epic and take virtually no time. Worst comes to worst I’ll make a text based adventure game and make a single nice piece of art for it.

~Mitch

I will not be making a 3D game this time around. I simply don’t have the time to learn the basics while doing the compo, so I’ll just be making another 2D game. By basics, I mean all the 3D math and stuff needed.

That doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t use jMonkeyEngine for 2D though. Its integration with external libraries on the scene graph is phenomenal and I’d like to find a way to utilize, say, Bullet nodes/controllers in a 2D environment. Plus, I find wrangling with LibGDX to be un-fun and rewriting boilerplate code for Slick again is not in my sights. I spent way too much time on simple crap like entity management on the Discovery game from LD19.

I’m guessing using jMonkeyEngine for 2D stuff the hacky way would be switching the camera to Orthographic view and just using objects with lots of volume in the Z axis, since I am terrible with physics.

In addition, there are a few new tools I may use:

• Tile Studio
• The Games Factory/Multimedia Fusion (total last resort, if I’m just not feeling up to speed)
• PXTone definitely, though I mentioned FamiTracker earlier I absolutely loath tracker interfaces and PXTone is like a really, really simple FL Studio to me.

There was some talk between my friends and I about doing the Jam instead, but one of them may be having travel conflicts that’ll prevent them from participating. Oh well. Dare it is.

I’m in, checklist:

Take saturday off work: [ CHECK ]
Warmup with theme SURGURY: [ MOVED ] //have planned for this week
Foods & drinks: [ CHECK ]
Motivation: [ CHECK ]
Health status: current: [ OK ] | predicted: [ UNCLEAR ]

Weapons:
Java, Gimp, Audacity & Microphone

This is my second LD, but I hope to finish it this time (last time I failed because of bad planning and code breaking )

I’m down for some Ludum dare fun times.  This will be my first attempt and hopefully my first success.  I will be using java and be voting for evolution.  I think it is time.

My choices:

• unfinished visual novel engine (android) – I believe I misplaced the source
• unfinished bullet hell engine (android) – Needs everything except the actual bullet engine
• LD21 entry: Urth - Needs about 2 tons of polish
• MiniLD29 entry: Redeye - Needs about 20 tons of polish
• Something completely new – no

Urth had a little head start on the android market, so I’ve fixed it by strapping beta to the end. How does that fix it you ask? Well it doesn’t really fix it actually, but I’m October challenging with the non-beta (gamma? ), which I intend to have for non-mobile platforms as well.

I am currently teaching myself java coding, (believe it or not I’m in Elementary School) so I would be pleased to know any tips. In fact, I recently commented on Notch’s PoC about using one image for multiple GUI’s. That would be an answer I really want.

After finishing my game I noticed that I had plenty of spare hours left so I decided to add a scoreboard. Unfortunately that meant communicating with a web server, which to my knowledge meant I had to sign the thing.

Signing applets involves some console work, but most importantly it involves an annoying popup asking people to let the thing run. In my mind that’s nearly as bad as a installer and I didn’t want anything of the sort, besides I tried that on a previous project (which come to think of it was also a 48 hour game) and that resulted in people not playing it a all.

From some android work I’ve done I remembered I can call links to pages even if the app has no permissions(the browser handles the links), and I wasn’t too surprised when I found out that an unsigned applet can do the same.

Basically what I did was call

link(“http://example.com/scores.php?name=Andrew&score=asdfg”);

(processing function, no Idea if it’s the same in reglar java) where ‘asdfg’ was an encrypted version of the score.  This coupled with making each score unique prevented floods on the scoreboard.

The function spawns a popup window, and I’ve noticed that even if chrome blocks it, it still preloads the score page causing the score to go through. This may or may not be a security issue.

If anyone knows a better, or just different way to have an applet share its internal data I’d love to hear it.

VIEW GAME PAGE

Someone playing Elastic Prison

Alright so here go my final thoughts.

Game Mechanic:

I’m pretty happy with how everything went. The first day I spent a lot of hours just brainstorming, trying to come up with a really cool and simple concept. I’m a big fan of generated content and simulations that give the player something interesting and new to play with. Something that encourages the player to experiment instead of just running through everything completely deterministic. And I came up with a concept that was just way too abstract, and I wasn’t able to fill the blanks with working/realistic ideas. So about 10 hours in I somewhat hit a wall and was feeling quite stressed out. So I remembered to keep it dead simple and came up with what turned into my final entry. Elastic Prison, a game where the player controls a ball that is attached to an elastic band that keeps pulling it back to the starting point. And for the player to free himself, he has to cling & swing himself from one floating hook/ball to the next to maybe reach something that will remove this rubber band.

First I focused on how the player controls this ball and how the elastic band attaches itself to these hooks. I had something running pretty quickly and felt satisfied with the controls. Then I started to focus on the actual level creation. I knew there needed to be some variation so I created different kinds of hooks. I also put a few minutes into improving the performance so I could just throw everything into one big level.  The next step was creating the level. I did so by making one challenge at a time for me. Every time I tried to make it different from the previous one, or even so that it builds on the skills that were acquired earlier. I tried to make later parts of the game really hard as I hear people are complaining a lot about games being to easy these days. So I could just barely play through these final stages that I created. Still it’s not impossible and after uploading my submission I recorded a 12 minute play through.

Tech:

Using LWJGL was a pretty straight forward decision but looking back it might have been smarter to choose libgdx because it’s LWJGL + more nice stuff (mp3 support). It’s been smooth sailing with LWJGL though. Currently I’m working on porting my game to libgdx to maybe have it run on android or as an applet.

Sound and Artwork:

Those were the things I was most confident about and surely enough I was really quick. Ableton and Photoshop did their job well. The sounds turned out a bit quiet though.

Feedback:

I have to say I was quite surprised with the feedback. Yes people liked the concept, art and sound but had a gripe with the controls, expecting them to behave differently and not really being able to figure out how to master them. And they were quite frustrated about how checkpoints work, as they won’t keep  you forever from going back to the beginning. Well I can see now how people expect the controls to work and it’s too bad that I didn’t hear that kind of feedback before I uploaded my final submission. While working on it I was told it is hard but fun, which is what I was going for. Now to the checkpoints. I guess the problem here lies completely in not communicating well enough how they work. The funny thing is that it is a really simple concept. Every hook behaves the same way. But some might hold you longer, depending on their size. You won’t end up at the beginning if you understand this concept and make sure to reattach yourself to these large hooks again when they stop glowing.

Once you get it it’s a challenging and interesting concept. And I thought it goes quite well with the theme. The player is trapped and tries to escape. Once he stops struggling he is in danger of being back where he has started.

Future:

I look forward to the next Ludum Dare. I’ll make sure to get more feedback while working on my game, and to keep it simple straight from the beginning. As for Elastic Prison, I’ll make it available as an Applet and maybe do some more with that concept sometime in the future.

My Entry