Trust me, this looks awesome when in motion with zombies attacking from all directions

DOWNLOAD LINK (.exe file for windows (should work in xp/vista/7), also includes source code (copy data/ directory to src/ and run MLD_10.py))

Alternative download link (in case first one doesn’t work: megaupload, so this might not be a very permanent link)

You are the lone survivor of… Uh, an zombie attack.
Stay alive for as long as possible! Beat your record!

Aim for the head for massive damage, shoot to the body to slow Zombie down and shoot to the legs to cripple them.
Don’t forget to conserve ammo!

Controls: A/D for movement, W or S for moving up stairs/ladders (hold down when you want to use a stairway/ladder), mouse1 fires pistol, mouse2 throws records, ESC quits, enter toggles fullscreen (800*600 pixels only)

Bonus controls: F prints fps, C counts all the zombies and prints their types to console, N adds MAX_ZOMBIES zombies (300), M adds one zombie, K kills all zombies that aren’t roaming (only zombie dogs can roam)

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Finally! I spent three hours figuring out how to use py2exe, fixing a problem with fonts and trimming the package (py2exe created files worth 40 MB (exluding the temp build/ directory), I got it down to 8 MB).

Second and third house added and fully functional, including a line between the two houses (with corresponding semi-stupid Zombie AI). Also added health pack, 5 new sounds and re-wrote 600 lines of code to make it look better. Also did some simple docstring documenting. Difficulty is now well-adjusted, getting over 300 seconds is really hard: my record i 327 seconds. How long can you survive?

This is my first LD, and I must say that I have enjoyed it very much. Not so much for the community feeling (which is really bad: I guess it’s because this is just a mini-ld) but for the forced time limit (…which I broke by 7 hours. Oh well!). I have spent around 28 of the 48 hours (well, 34 of the last 55 hours) actively working on this game. I started with nothing but a 40-line code skeleton for pygame (which I had created some weeks ago). I didn’t like the theme domestic violence, but it gave me inspiration to use a house.

I made the game with following:

SciTE - Text-editing

MS Paint - Creating images

Python 2.5 - Language

Pygame 1.8.1 - Graphics and sound library

Kebab, bananas and water - Little time for eating

Work has been going along just fine. I wish I made more journal posts… Oh well.

*Added Feet damage system: shoot the zombie in the foot and it’ll move slower (both short-but-high-slow and low-but-permanent slow). Slowdown for player when attacked is permanent unless you heal it with band aid

*Added items (ammobox, records pickup, band aid, beartrap) + itemspawner

*Added sounds (right now I only have sounds for firing the gun and getting hit/hitting zombies)

*Added different types of zombies (”fat” and “dog”, I might add “bat”) + zombiespawner

*Added “stumble” functionality. Zombies are slowed down at random intervals

*Added roaming functionality. Right now only dogs roam, starting randomly (and lasting for 4-20 seconds) when the player isn’t on the same floor (dogs can’t walk up stairs).

*Added patrol functionality to dog. If the dog isn’t on the same floor as the player, the dog will go to the nearest stairway and patrol there (moving back and forth randomly)

*Added bullet collision

*Added player/zombie wall collision

*First house 90% complete (yes, it doesn’t get any better than this when I only have 48 hours). Added new floor, stairway down to ground floor, small cellar (not the best camping place…)

*Added health and feet status meters, also shows how much more ammo/records you have

*Added time attack. Try to stay alive for as long as possible! Right now items doesn’t respawn, but zombies do, so getting over 170 seconds is near impossible

Download current version HERE (beta, this’ll be final only if I die or something. The third house has no working ladders/playercollision)

(previous version HERE)

Python 2.x and pygame is needed (I’m using Python 2.5 and pygame 1.8.1). Unzip everything and run MLD_10.py

Controls: A/D for movement, W or S for moving up stairs/ladders, mouse1 shoots pistol, mouse2 throws records, ESC to quit

Bonus controls: F prints fps, C counts all the zombies and prints their types to console, N adds MAX_ZOMBIES zombies (right now it’s 350), M adds one zombie, K kills all zombies that aren’t roaming

As probably a good portion of LDers were contemplating, what to do about the theme? I decided to go with a mixup of being the domestic abuser and saving others.. but the whole “saving others” and future AI cop system, is well non-existant.

Here’s a screeny of the game so far:

Ah yes, plain graphics. Even though using premade graphics is allowed in this miniLD, I don’t have any premade so it’ll have to do.

It’s got walking, jumping, bouncy pads, enemies, and destructible objects.

22:43
Continuing sprites.

01:25
All boni have sprites. The ice and the sea are colored too. The bullets now have trails of smoke.

02:15
There is an island and a bunker on it. How come that took me 50 minutes??

Here stops the log because I clearly had something else to do than write a log… But this is what happened:
I drew the sprites for the collectible boni, which took a while. Then I made the seal sprite. I realised it was so small that I could cheat and rotate/flip it to make 3 other directions. Then I made the sprite used for the last two direction, and the code to take care of the drawing depending on the angle.
At that point I was supposed to do the same for the bears, but I realised it would take me took long, so I delayed indefinitely. Instead I made the opening screen.
Then some sounds, really fast with sfxr. I decided not to lose too much time with that. Actually I *was* fast. In maybe 20 minutes it was done.

Came the terrifying moment of parameters tuning and play testing. I must confess I didn’t do too much of this, so there is a chance the game is too easy, or too hard.

Then I had one hour left, and thought it would be awesome to make music while checking nervously the clock and all the people on IRC saying that they were done already. It went pretty well too.
Now five minutes before deadline, it was time for packaging. Which, with Löve, is supposed to be as simple as zipping stuff up and posting it proudly on the dev blog. Heh, something *had* to go wrong. The “compiled” game didn’t run. Cause: I used Lua modules to divide the game in several files. Worked OK as long as the running directory actually contains these files. Once inside the .love file, you can access them only with Löve’s special require function. So OK, I changed that. But then something else broke. The game half worked. Some stuff was there, some was not. The biggest weirdest Heisenbug I had ever produced. After half an hour of not finding the problem I still posted the game, instructing to run it unzipped (which forces people to install Löve, which I knew for sure would discourage 90% of them).
When I still didn’t find anything, I went to bed, at about 8:30.

A good day’s sleep later, I tried again to beat the beast. And it took a while. Finally, the problem was as follows (non Lua people, you may skip). At first, I used modules to separate my app states (menu and game), so every variable created inside of them was stored in the corresponding table. When I had to switch to non module separate files, almost nothing changed: instead of being table members, all new variables were simply global. Since I did happen to have no variable collision, it didn’t change anything. Except that one variable did collide, “debug”. debug is a standard Lua table, and overloading it with my debug boolean switch did screw everything up. I suppose that Löve uses these debug functions.
So all this time I just had to rename debug to debugmode and tadaa.
Packaging followed.

Now I have to play the 122 other games.

17:46
Ice drawing is almost complete. The ear-clipping algo had mega bugs. Now optimisation (dropped to 5 fps…)

18:11
Ice drawing is *really* done. Or at least I hope, because it’s starting to piss me off.

19:56
Bullets have sprite and particules. So cool.

22:11
Eating. Have starting producing sprites and arranging the interface of the game. It is taking too long. TOO. LONG.

Mmm, pizza ham-pineapple, an apple, and some of the best chocolate in the world. I am now ready for the last 7 hours. With Queen as musical background I can win this compo. Definitely.

I was going to post this maybe two hours ago, but some stuff turned up.

You can build stuff, and the stuff do things, but you can’t win, there’s no enemies that actually attack, it’s not balanced, there’s no levels, and it all feels sort of meh.

I could probably turn it into a pretty bad game with two hours of work (it’s pretty much all I’ve got left), but I’m not all that supportive of bad games. I’ll probably just post a non-entry.

02:44
Have a menu, and more importantly a working “game state” thingy to switch cleanly from menu to game and back, and possibly a help screen or prefs. Not always obvious since Löve don’t let you control the game loop (you overload functions like draw(), update(), mousepressed(), etc, and they are called by the engine). Also, it’s late and I should sleep a bit. Game mechanics are almost complete.

02:51
Yeah, going to bed. I’m affraid I’m now useless.

09:40
Allright, it’s a nice morning to make a winning entry. *Back to work, lazy ass!*

10:38
Now with a goal, a winning condition, and two game modes.

12:16
Added the critters. They just walk around and wait to be blasted away. Oh yeah

14:05
Face sorting is working. Took three different algorithms… And I’m pretty sure this one doesn’t cover every case either. But it seems to be quite OK anyway.

16:26
Just lost two hours researching and implementing an ear-clipping algorithm. Cause: opengl (and thus Löve) can’t draw non convex polygons. And I really need to draw one. I must admit I had fun coding that. But still, two hours…

I’ve added mini dark towers (is the prime thing used to spread darkness) and also finally decided on a dark vs. light (perhaps earlier mentioned as decay) thing.

Here’s a shot with lots of mini dark towers, so almost everything is dark, except where the butterflies fly. So in a normal game, you’d need to eliminate those.

Still need to add some sort of attacking unit to the light side, adding building interface, winning conditions, and a few levels. It might need a few others things too before it feels like an actualy game, but we’ll just have to wait and see. I probably won’t have time to make it a good game, honestly.

Good morning sunshines. It’s time to code again. List of priorities is as follows:

1. Single/Multiplayer XML setting
2. ASSPLOSIONS (particle system)
3. Removal of walls on dying (assplosion related)
4. Start countdown
5. Camera fixes (still some problems when player can’t see why he died)
6. Sound
7. Speedup as you ride along wall of other player to catch up on him
8. Best out of 10 rounds highscore system
9. Death cam replays
10. Player names in XML
11. Networked multiplayer (as opposed to split screen that is now)
12. AI, if there will be enough time.

And here is some breakfast of champions:

Battled with a stupid bug for maybe an hour. Turned out I had written an asymmetrical comparison operator which crashed sort. I’m not so great at debuggin D yet, at first I didn’t get the debug info, and when I finally did and found a debugger, it wasn’t so helpful. Funnily enough, I ended up solving it with traditional writefln debugging instead, which just took a couple of minutes. Hmm..

Anyway, what I had done before the bug was adding attack towers, which charge up blobs of darkness and fire them at the butterflies.

It mostly just looks like chaos, becuse I just randomly place everything.

They look better animated! Also, the tree zapper aren’t actually supposed to attack the butterflies.

Good morning. A little update. Yesterday I added The Dark Tower (player starting base) and tree zappers (drain trees for power and for simply draining trees).

After that, I wasted a lot of time on how the wall of decay etc should progress, only to ending up with something that wouldn’t work. So I’m still thinking about that. I could spend some time describing what didn’t work, but I’m not going to. Instead here’s a screenshot showing how the decay thing for the ground would look (the tree decay in this shot is just for testing purposes).

Now I have some thinking and showering to do. And breakfasting.

16:50
Bullets! With gravity and terrifying blast damage!

17:51
Going to a dampling making/eating party at a friend. I guess I can use a break, my mind is starting to show me weird stuff.

(Too bad I didn’t take my camera, it would have made a nice food photo…)

22:00
Back to work.

23:34
I have boni/powerups on the game, and the effects of the boni are applied with timers that have callback functions. It may be the usual stuff for most people, but I had never used these before, and it feels really cool. “oah it works”

In my original plan, I was supposed to have finished coding game mechanics by day one, to have all the time in the world for graphics and sound. Technically, my day one ends 14 minutes ago… I’ll try to have at least 5 hours of sleep, though.

Breakfast, hurrah, including all the essential nutrients that every Ludum Dare participant needs. Orange juice, pancakes with berries, and of course, an ample supply of syrup on those bad boys.

And of course, we can’t forget this masterpiece:

Back to work, I suppose. LET’S GO LUDUM DARE!

Oh yes, I will mysteriously reveal my progress, in a very mysterious way. This way, you can all see what I’m up to, but not! Anyway, the gameplay is working pretty well now, and it’s not turning out too badly. There are still a few things I can add, but I’m pretty happy with the progress so far. Here’s a screenshot.

I spent the morning not doing anything, most of the afternoon playing UT2004 and Red Alert 3, but then maybe 2.5h ago I figured I should actually try doing anything. So I started out drawing some graphics (mostly vegetation sprites). Then I coded a little to get a random forest sort of thing.

And it’s doomed, you know. You are going to convert this cute little forest into a dark waste. At least, that’s the idea. We’ll see.

08:12
Decided to go with some kind of destroyable wall of doom. Throw stuff at it to detach pieces, and thus slow the progression. For now I’ll try to work on the geometry bit.
10:03
Stupidely made my own vector library in Lua. Didn’t like the others I found, but inspired from those. Now the fun begins.

11:35
I can has destroyable geometry. Just a line and you dig holes in it.

12:03
Corrected lots of bugs and made the computations more general: more case are covered, includind when you “cut” a bit by drilling all around it. Hungry now. Food now.

I had breakfast, it was mostly toast. I would have posted an image, but you can just check out all the others, and you’ll get a good idea. Though there was a cupcake too. Nom nom.

Anyway, some ideas
You use an advancing wall of doom to crush cities. This could either be a puzzle game (use your wall in the most optimal way!), some sort of RTS (gather resources etc, expand your wall), or RPG-like, you only actually control one character, but it’ll need to go out and gather power to advance the wall. Or something.

Also had the idea of not crushing cities, but rather have two elements that fight, one being for example a jungle and another the desert. The edge would be the ‘wall’, and both strive to doom the other. Would probably work best as some sort of RTS.

Then there’s of course the tower defense sort of thing, but it’d be wall defense. Could sort of work from either side — either you build the wall (wall defense!), or you need to defend against the wall.

And there’s a lot of ‘run away from the wall’ kind of games, but I’m not interested in those because I don’t usually find that kind of games fun.

Don’t yet know what I’ll do, the RTS ones sounds most fun, but would probably require a little bit too much work. So I’ll ponder some more.

So I’ve settled on an idea for my project, and I think it’s going to turn out reasonably well. I’ve made a lot of progress on the actual game code, but there’s still a ways to go. Luckily, I’ve done some artwork too, so there’s actually something to see! Now you’ll all try to figure out what the game is about, and I can go ahead and make it!

My plan is working, isn’t it?

OK, I’m started. Advancing Wall of Doom, you say? I think I can work with that. I already have the necessities going (pretty boring so far, so no screenshot yet, sorry) and things are coming along smoothly. I even have a food photo already!

Exciting! Yes, that is rainbow jello, as well as turkey and mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes. OK, back to work.

06:45

Back from a refreshing walk. The morning air and the surrounding environment gave me some ideas. Now back to mind mapping and brainstorming.

Took a few pictures too:

Journal:

05:40

Waking up after about 5 hours of sleep. I’m feeling peachy. Can’t wait to go o__O at the theme and lose a few hours wondering why the hell I did even bother going up at such an ungodly hour. LD, you gotta love it. Also, breakfast.

Go go go LDers!

Notice how I skillfully include both a desk photo and a food photo at the same time! And notice the tinyness of my EeePC 901 under Ubuntu. And the mouse. The touch-thingy just drives me mad.

‘nough said.

I finally got around to create a primitive edit mode. So now I can start building the level.

A shame I have no good ideas for it.

OK, time for a journal entry for this fine mini ld.

I’m doing a game where you controls a spidery thing. I’m not sure exactly what’s the point is yet, but I figure that you should a) collect something, b) evolve more legs and c) get to the top of the level. I might have scoring based on time/things collected or whatever.

It looks cooler in action!

I selected the Evolution theme just for the leg stuff, but I later realized Climb would be better really. But by that time, Climb was sadly taken. I don’t have an awful lot of time, so not sure how much evolvment I will have time to implement.

Currently I’m trying to get decent jump and foot attachment sounds, but it’s kind of tricky. Maybe better without sounds.