Get it here.

The bad

Idea and gameplay: A few hours before the theme was announced I had an idea that I wanted to do. When the theme was announced, I realized that I could fit the idea within the theme, with a few sacrifices. Focusing less on hitting the walls and more on reaching the goal led to a few problems; for example, if you miss one shot when at the end of a level, you risk going all the way down. If this happens, you might as well start over. This isn’t good, especially from a beginner’s perspective.

Difficulty: The game ended up being too hard for many. I’ve had others saying it was too easy. I suppose the difficulty curve is to steep; I also believe that the dampening function in the game wasn’t intuitive enough. A quick tutorial and a gentle difficulty curve could’ve made this more fun.

Bugs: There aren’t many bugs that I’m aware of, but there is one that is pretty nasty – going through the walls. This happens occasionally if you hit a corner. Being pretty rare I didn’t think of this as a big problem, but I think I should’ve spent more effort on fixing it.

The good

GUI: Having controls in the bottom left isn’t all that great, I should’ve made a tutorial instead. Apart from this, however, I’m pretty happy with the little details in the GUI. I should thank the testers for this, especially GBGames in the #ludumdare irc channel. Small details like turning the screen red when you’re dampening and an additional power indicator close to the cursor helped make this game at least fairly intuitive. I’m also happy with the way the minimap turned out.

Style: I’m pleased with the style of the game, and what little textures I actually made. The graphical style works nicely for me, and I believe it makes the game look at least decently polished.

Sound: The sound effects in the game are minimal, and all made with DrPetter’s SFXR. That being said, I’m happy with how they turned out. They’re not annoying, and introducing them to the game really improved the feel, giving the balls a certain “heaviness” they hadn’t had before.

Fun: Being in the contest was lots of fun. I also think my game is pretty good fun to play.

Conclusions

With a few hours to go, I was so satisfied with the game that I didn’t focus all that much on developing levels. Or anything else related to the game, for that matter. In retrospect, I should’ve spent this time designing a tutorial and perhaps a title screen and a difficulty choice, rather than chatting around on IRC (which was loads of fun, by the way).

I’m glad I entered the contest and I’m happy with the result, and I’ve had a lot of fun participating. I’m sure I’ll be back for another LD 48 in the future!

What Went Right

• Planning – Once I found out the theme, I took a large portion of Friday night to plan out the concept for my game. It took a little while, but once I decided on an infinite procedurally generated tower platformer, the technical gears started turning, and I quickly formed a lot of the ideas for the implementation.
• Time Management – After I planned out my game, I found that I didn’t have any trouble keeping up with my goals in time. Those goals that I had imagined were realistic and doable. In fact, I ended up releasing my final version about 5 hours before the deadline.
• Implementation – On the programming side, I mostly used techniques that I was familiar with, never branching out into the particularly difficult or unknown in ways that would cost me large amounts of valuable time and effort. As for media creation, while it is not exactly a strong point, I used some clever methods and helpful tools to create it, so it was not heavily time consuming, and Tower Infinite ended up with quality better than the usual programmer art (I hope!).

What Went Wrong

• Deficiency of External Playtesting – It was unfortunate that I failed to get enough feedback from players other than myself. I knew exactly how the game worked, but such is not the case for all. While this did not lead to terribly awful problems, I could have handled it better and probably submitted a slightly better game.

Conclusion

Overall, I think things went fairly smoothly with very few exceptions, which is particularly nice for me, this being my first Ludum Dare. I definitely enjoyed it, and I hope to do it again if I have the time for it.

Tools used:

Platform: Win32 (XP Home SP3)

Libraries: OpenGL, GLEW (to handle OpenGL extensions), SDL (for initialization and keyboard/mouse input) and DevIL (for image loading)

Tools: Visual C++ Express 2005, Cinema 4D (with a custom export plugin) and Photoshop CS2

The many things that went wrong:

• Rustiness: The last time I finished a LD48 game was more than 3 years ago (with 2 additional very unmotivated attempts in the next year that I gave up quickly) and since then I have done no game development, some work related OpenGL though but not recently. So I was really rusty!
• Lack of preparation: Aware of the aforementioned rustiness, I knew I should prepare myself but I didn’t do much. I didn’t try to code a warm-up game, I barely tested that my previous entry still compiled and concluded that I had the libraries I needed installed and that was all.
• Doing everything from scratch: I spent the first day just to get the graphics working. I really need to have a kind of library to avoid going through that again. I want to have fun making a game not write a Vector class or an object loader. And I gave in to temptation and got one or two tricky but boring things from my previous entry (only very basic stuff though like the timer class to get a good quality timer on windows since SDL_GetTicks sucks, I think I’m still OK with the compo rules considering some people use engine and physics libraries)
• Export plugin not ready: During the compo I couldn’t find a compiled version of my Cinema 4D export plug-in. And it wasn’t compiling anymore due to changes in the application’s SDK. Fortunately I was able to solve those problems relatively quickly but I should really have tested it before the competition.
• Visual C++ bugs: I was really surprised because I had never had any problems with it before but it kept bugging and I had to quit VC++, reopen it and then I had to put back all the windows in their place again. How annoying.
• Things I wasted time on: I wasted a lot of time on adding fog to my shader and getting it to look just right before finally deciding it didn’t look good. Also I wasted time doing the Mario64-style camera which didn’t turn out quite alright and is not activated by default in the final game.
• No time for animated characters: My biggest disappointment. It doesn’t take a lot of time, in my previous entry Lightstream48, I had made some cool characters in just a few hours and I wanted to do the same.
• No sounds: I had Propellerhead Reason ready to make a small music and my microphone connected to sample a few noises but I didn’t have the time.
• Not enough gameplay elements: I had lots of ideas to make a more interesting game but instead had to try to make levels with only a few of them implemented. So most of the levels are based on jumping skills rather than puzzles like I originally wanted.
• Bugs: There are lots of little bugs in the gameplay like you can walk off the border of the map in some places and jumping isn’t implemented correctly so sometimes it’s difficult to control the character.

The gray area of things OK

• Is C++ the right language for a LD? I used to be quite happy with it, but this time I was annoyed by the extra typing it requires. Header files are such an annoyance. Maybe I should try an alternative next time?
• Time management: I worked a total of about 32 hours. That’s a bit below what I could have done. My plan was to start at 8am on Saturday morning, I slept past 10 and watched the Olympics. But it could have been worse.
• A bit slow on slow PCs: The minimum requirements for this game are a bit higher, but considering that some years have passed since my previous game that’s normal. Off course it’s mostly slow because it’s badly coded but still… it’s time to upgrade people!

The few things that went right:

• Per-pixel lighting: it looks real nice so I’m happy about that.
• More 3-dimensional gameplay: In my previous games it was really only 2D gameplay with 3D graphics so that’s an improvement.
• Save points: I’m really glad I included them, it was tempting to code some other gameplay elements and leave that for later but without them the game would have been too hard.

Conclusion

I’m not entirely satisfied. I wish I could have had more time to finish my game. Now what I want to do is start a library with all the basic stuff I need for a LD48 game and publish it soon enough so that next time I can use that for my game and be able to concentrate on gameplay and content.

A few tips for people testing my game:

Use the C key to test the alternate camera style (it’s very hard to play with it but it’s nice). EDIT: Also even in normal camera mode you use the END key to place the camera temporarily behind our blobby hero and view what lies ahead.

On the second level, you just have to get rid of the creature guarding the jump point. They always move in your direction so maybe you can trick it.

If everything else fails, use the cheat code: ctrl-shift-J makes a huge jump so you can skip levels or just have fun.

Thank you.

Edit: added SDL.dll to the win package, that should fix the problem.

Look at the .fla at your own peril. This was written between the hours of 3:00am and 4:30am.

Play Online (Cursor keys to affect trajectory and power, space to fire. You need to refresh the page to try again :>)

Download ZIP containing source and gameinfo

(Entry edited for repackaging and changed host)

At about hour 34 I completely restarted my project in Flash8, but writing everything from scratch in 14 hours for my main, complex idea, became obviously beyond me, so about 2 and a half hours from the end I started again with an uber-simple game that I could pass off as a submission. I started the code at around hour 47 for this.

I will upload the finished game when I get a chance, but at the deadline it wasn’t finished, so here is a screenshot instead.

My Tower Thing – Requires Python, PyGame, and PyOpenGL

Akin is a character I made – he came to me in a dream half a year ago

I made a doll out of him and now I thought why wont I make a game out of him

enjoy the game mates and dont forget to blow them up with Bounching Fireballs!!! yeeeesss

game have 3 enemys 3 shot types and a survivel mode

controls:

-use the left mouse key to shoot

-use the right mouse ket to shoot special rage drinking attacks

-hold rthe right mouse ket for attach menu and pick the attack you want

find the game here:

Edit: Mirror 1 works now just added “http://” and it fixed the problem – lol

New hotness:

Demonic Tower – Bugfix Release (Source and Win32 EXE)

Old and busted:

Demonic Tower – Source Package (.zip)
Demonic Tower – Windows Executable (No Music) (.zip)

This works fine in Linux, just run main-linux.py (or remove the SDL sound driver directive).

You’ll need PyGame and PGU to run it.

I couldn’t get the Windows exe to compile with music, so rather than fighting with it, I just took it out. Everything works fine when running the project itself, but when I compile the exe with py2exe, I get: AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘music’. The mp3 file is still in there (/jams/theme.mp3), so if you want to hear some horribly mastered, feel free to play it in Winamp while you play the game

Yes, I am aware that the connections to the theme are tenuous since The Tower is simply one card of 77 in the tarot, but I wanted to do something different. I was going to make it a plot point, but testing all the cards took a really long time…

Bugs: Enemies can’t move to the right edge of the screen (past row 10).
I’ve been able to have the same card in hand twice (The Empress).
Music doesn’t play in the Windows executable.

Go here for the bugfix release.

It is read for Linux  and Windows.

It has no known requirements for win, maybe somekind of directx, and any 3d capable graphics card. Linux users should make sure they have SDL and SDL_image packages installed.

To make this ‘killer’ game I used:

• KDevelop
• Dev-cpp (for porting to win)
• GIMP

It is 4 AM where I live. I’m not sure I will be able to go to work tommorow :/ but anyway, I hopy You enjoy this little creation of mine

Linux:

http://paj.sourceforge.net/small-proj/ld12-yezu-towerofdoom.tar.gz

Windows:

http://paj.sourceforge.net/small-proj/ld12-yezu-towerofdoom.zip

Linux Source (this is actually a full KDevelop project after “Distribution Clean”, as far as I know it is full “makable”):

http://paj.sourceforge.net/small-proj/ld12-yezu-towerofdoom-src.tar.gz

I’m going to sleep. Have fun I had

Win32 EXE: http://rapidshare.de/files/40209706/stsuwin32bin.zip.html

Source DL: http://asgerbj.dk/upload/supertower10.zip

Please leave comments.

Hopefully everything works. It’s quite short but rather polished (by my standards in any event).

Arrow keys: move, shift: jump. (no it isn’t an xjump clone )

Download:

OS X

Source (python)

Hopefully windows sooner or later

Good luck to those still working on their entry. Now ice cream!

edit: fixed link (oups)

edit2: Oups, last minute changes created a bunch of nasty bugs, lessons: don’t make big changes right before releasing; test test test after big changes. Hopefully this time it will work.

edit3: Keeyai made a Windows version. Many thanks.

edit4: Fixed windows link, thanks to Entar for pointing out it was broken.

____EDIT, 12:20 GMT+1____

Here’s an updated zip. The game is the same, but it has a slightly improved XML file for the compo game loader:
Towerball, CGL XML updated
_________________________

The final version is here: Towerball

There is also a webstart version.

For instructions, check out the readme.

7-levels in total, one featuring a somewhat dodgy owl. It’s really hard to do art on a 1/5 scale in an overly simple map editor!

Here’s a couple of progress screenshots to show how things have been coming along:

• Sketch
• First version
• Cleaner
• New look
• GUI
• Level editor

It’s been loads of fun doing my first entry for an LD 48h competition – I will quite probably be back for more!

The game looks and is a bit inspired by games like DooM or Strife. One of the reasons is that I didn’t have time to make any 3d models, sprites had to do…

I’m tired. Everywhere are cans of energy drinks. Me… Want… Sleep… … Must… Finish… Game… First… Ugh…

Windows and Linux Binaries

Source Code

The point of the game is to climb each stage of the tower, and destroy (and survive) enemies that will attack you on the way up. Be careful to conserve your jet power and get the most out of each boost, or you may find yourself in a sticky situation. Each level is procedurally generated, so there is a huge number of different possible levels to play. The gameplay is designed to get harder and more fast-paced with every level you play, in various ways like higher numbers of enemies, advancing enemy behavior, etc., so if you think the first level or two is slow, don’t worry.

A tower has colapsed due to an eartquake, and this poor little guy was standing a little too close. He can try to escape but eventualy he going to be crushed. Might as well have some fun with him. The idea was, that it would look funny as the game pauses when he trips, so the player could realy enjoy the expression on his face.

Here is the linux (Fedora 9) executable. Not sure what are the dependencies, probably just SDL.

BIN: http://ferisrv5.uni-mb.si/~ms5391/Tau.tar.gz

Here is the Eclipse project, source code, gimp files and everything i created in the process.

http://ferisrv5.uni-mb.si/~ms5391/LD12.tar.gz

The picture( a bit late ):

EDIT: Windows Port

http://www.deepflame.nl/ld12/ld12.avi

40mb, close to 1 minute long, close to 600 frames, encoded with xvid codec using VideoMach.

Enjoy.