It would seem that I will be another heretic not using Python. I’m not a fan of scripting languages, so I’ll be using good old C++ with OpenGL I will be trying to do something in 3d and I’ve prepared myself a small framework using SDL (loading models, loading images, window initialization etc.) Apart from that I will be using only free ( as in freedom ) tools, so no Visual Studio or Photoshop for me. But that’s ok, I always prefered KDevelop and GIMP.

It’s still a couple of hours till the compo. I just can’t wait. It’ll be my first LD actually. I tried to participate in LD10 but due to some circumstances I wasn’t near my computer through the weekend.

I hope I won’t be the only one developing on a Linux powered machine Good Luck!

Hello again! The linux binaries (and source) are up! These are post-deadline versions where nothing except the necessary has been changed. In order to get the game working on linux I’ve changed the following things:

• Reference parameters in the Vector2 class has been set to const

• One _itoa_s() call has been changed to a sprintf() call

• The time function has been changed from clock() to (clock() * 1000 / CLOCKS_PER_SEC)

Nothing else has been changed (in order to not cheat!), so there’s still a couple of bugs in there which can be used to get higher scores etc. I’m not going to tell you where though

Linux binaries and source:

http://gustav128.googlepages.com/sailor_linux.tar.gz

I should probably mention that you can move your boat using the arrow keys and repaint it while sailing! (people often ignore the readme for some reason :D)

Windows exe + source (compo version; if it crashes, get the post- compo zip below)

Windows exe + source (trivial post-compo fix edition, see below)

Timelapse video

Updated with a fix version above. The game would crash if run at a bit depth lower than 24bpp, use the fix version if it does! The fix also removes a comma from brygge-s.lua to fix a copy/paste bug that prevented turning around/right when looking away from the wharf, this isn’t required to beat the game or even much noticeable though.

Tools used: kate (text), gimp (graphics), sfxr (sound)

Libraries used: SDL, SDL_image (png), SDL_mixer (ogg vorbis), Lua

Update: The Windows port is a no go.  I’ve tested the below package on Windows and it works provided all the libs are installed, but py2exe simply mangles it.  Too tired to worry about it.

Update 2: Moved photos to flickr to minimse murder on my site. Why I just didn’t upload them I’ll never know.

Only two-ish hours left, and I’m feeling sick and tired (in a literal sense).  I’ve created a game called Billy and Casey.  It’s about programming robots.

One can download this monstrosity here:

http://www.nfirvine.com/wiki/uploads/Projects/casey-0.1.0.tar.gz

If the .tar.gz extension didn’t tip you off, this one’s meant for Linux only at this point.  I’m going to spend the rest of the time trying to whip together a Windows port.  We’ll see how she goes.

Hello all … I’m a LD first-timer, intending to give it a shot this time around. I suspect I’ll only really get ~24 hours of actual LD-time, due to inconvenient timezones clashing with the “Day Job”(tm) … but I’m prepared to give it a red hot go. I’ll almost certainly be using Pygame (1.8) and Rabbyt (0.8.1) … unless for some reason the theme makes me want to write a text adventure

Since I typically develop on Linux, I’ve done some preparation by making sure I can actually produce Windows executables (the catch: still requires a Windows installation somewhere). My personal py2exe and cx_Freeze ‘tutorial’ is here … it’s actually painfully detailed for something that turned out much simpler than I expected. It would be great to compare notes on crossplatform Python/Pygame experiences/successes/pitfalls with any other Ludumdarers that code on Linux.

Bit of a late entry for me, but oh well, here it is anyway:

Download: cubetendo.zip (Updated with trivial fix for ATI cards)

Windows exe and source code included (compiles in Linux). Requires OpenGL 2.0. If it crashes, try running it from a console (updated the zip with a bat file that does this).

Shrapnel!

Downloads (both have windows exe + source code and Linux makefile):

• Compo version
• Post-compo: Smaller zip, sound latency fix (no code or data changes) (new)

Uses SDL, SDL_mixer and SDL_image. I used kate for code/text, gimp for graphics, sfxr for sound effects (thanks DrPetter!), and pxtone to make music.

If the Linux version crashes when you run it on 32-bit x86, use this SDL library (contains a fix for a bug in SDL_SoftStretch)

Edit: Figured out the Windows sound latency issue! Seems the SDL.dll I used was buggy. Replacing it with one from libsdl.org fixes things.

Ok, here is my first screenshot. I have been wrestling a lot with the underlying code, so things have been a bit slow. Plus I have to re-familiarize myself with a number of graphics tools.

The premise of this game is that you have a flying island high above a windswept planet. On your island you must gather the precious gas resource and defeat your rivals for control over it all. You have the choice of whether to build gas gathering buildings, defensive turrets (pictured), offensive missiles, or stability buildings.

The chain reaction is that when your island is hit with missiles neighboring areas begin to weaken. If there is too much weight on a weakened area from your buildings, whole parts of your island may crumble.

Ok, time for some shuteye and then the final push!

I ported DrPetter’s excellent sfxr (info) to SDL, so it can now be compiled and run natively in Linux!

Download: sfxr-sdl.tar.gz

Just type ‘make’ to compile. You need SDL and GTK 2.

The theme for LD 9 was “Build the level you play”. The premise is that you’re some god or something whose sole purpose in life is to control the path of some space fish, guiding them through gates that changes their colour, and get at least some set number of fish to go through the spectrum in each level. You control their path by creating planets, of course. Planets attract fish using the laws of gravity.

This is actually the first game where I’ve used OpenGL, apart from some small fiddling. (This also made it easy to make the game window freely resizable with hardware scaling, and I made sure the window always keeps the correct aspect ratio by inserting black borders where appropriate. Incorrect aspect ratios are always annoying.)

That aside, this one didn’t go very well. I spent a lot of time just fiddling around with insignificant things and not getting any parts of the game done, and about midway through I changed the aesthetics from creepy-ish paper-cut-outs floating around — something which at least looked somewhat interesting — to badly drawn space fish, and also inverted the planets, for reasons which completely escapes me. I had also coded up an in-game level editor that I used to create the included levels, but this was disabled for the compo release. For a compo where the theme was “build the level you play”. WTF?! Why did I do this? I have no idea.

The gameplay itself also had its issues. I think I made the gravity a bit too “realistic”, since inserting a planet subtly effects everything — so it doesn’t really matter if you’ve fine-tuned your existing planets to perfection if you have to insert a new planet or even move an existing one, the new gravity will upset the fish and you’ll have to fine-tune again. So, while the gameplay can be fun-ish for a little while, the constant required adjustments can quickly get annoying.

After the compo I played around with visualization of gravity by using a GLSL shader, which made the game somewhat more interesting (not to mention extremely colourful). Another thing I tried, both during the compo and after, was making the planets be effected by gravity, so they’d float around too (until they collided and launched themselves at light speed off the screen), and also make the fish generate gravity, attracting other fish and planets. Somewhat fun to watch and play with, specially with gravity visualization enabled, but the game was pretty much impossible then, heh =)

Download [ Windows/source code ]

My entry for Ludum Dare 8.5. LD 8.5 wasn’t a 48 hour compo, we only got 24 hours to make the game in, but the start time was flexible so you could choose the 24 hours of the weekend the compo was held that was best for you. I managed to use exactly 24 hours on my entry =)

Themes were Moon (actually “But even if you doubt their overwhelming findings, the Moon will never be the same to you again. Never will you raise your eyes to look at her without wondering: IS IT OR ISN’T IT AN ALIEN SPACESHIP WORLD?”, but everyone interpreted it as just “Moon”) and Anti-Textmode, no text at all in the game.

The story, which you have to guess at since there’s no text (and the readme is rather sparse), goes: You’re a rabbit, minding your own business on the moon, when one day a butterfly comes flying from somewhere. It flies straight into a crater, which happens to lead to a huge system of caves beneath the surface. Curious rabbit as you are, you follow it, and so the game begins.

When I started making this I actually intended to make one of those bullet hell shooter games, but for some reason the game evolved into this cave-flying exploration game in stead. Or, well, calling it an exploration game might be a bit of a stretch since there’s only 5 rooms in the game, not counting the exit room (which is a very quick drawing of what’s supposed to be me in my bed, getting a good night’s sleep after 24 hours straight spent coding and drawing), but it would have been if I had spent less time fooling around with the code. For such an art-heavy game you’d think most of the time was spent drawing things (all the rooms are just bitmaps, there’s no tiles), but I actually spent most of the time on code. So, the art didn’t take much time, which kinda surprised me, though of course everything being lores greyscale had something to do with that, and I did rush it a bit too. Anyway, doing the art was a lot of fun.

So anyway, you fly around in this cave system, collecting flashing ring things to open gates while avoiding monsters and projectiles and such. It’s a shame the game is so extremely short, because I really like it and think it could be a good game with some more work. Maybe I’ll get back to it sometime =)

Download: [ Windows | Linux/source code ]

This was my second Ludum Dare entry, for LD#8. Theme was swarms. This time you’re playing the Master of Fireflies, out for revenge against some mushroom-dwelling things who didn’t invite you to some insignificant party last week. So you send your swarm of fireflies after them to torch their mushroom homes. That’ll teach ‘em! The mushroom-dwelling things doesn’t take kindly to this though, and starts spraying water around, which unfortunately kills your swarm and stops the mushroom fires. The battle is on!

This was the first time I made something with a swarm-like behaviour, which was nice. The game turned out ok, though not really finished — those mushroom-dwelling things only ever face right, for example, and the levels weren’t supposed to be that flat. There should have been platforms and stuff. Still, there’s a win condition and level progression and such, so that’s something at least. Anyway, it’s kinda fun-ish for a little while, torching mushrooms while those poor guys losing their homes at your hand try to kill off your swarm, but it gets boring and repetitive after a while.

Oh well, I had fun making it, and learned some new things in the process, so I choose to consider it a success regardless =)

Download: [ Source code ]

For the LD4 in 2004, we did a series of preparation compos. They were much shorter as a real LD, and as theme had the remake of an agreed upon classic game. One of them was Robotron (the others were Sapce Invaders, Frogger and Spy Hunter). In the Robotron one you had 4.8 hours for the game. My entry turned out to be a much better game than the one I actually wrote with 10 times as much time for the real LD. Oh well.

The game is rather simple. One directional input (cursor keys) controls the movement of the pink blob, another one (ASDW) controls the gun. Just like in the original.

There’s 30 partially random levels, and quite a lot of different enemies with unique behaviors.

Some of them, like the crab and the spider, were added in a post-compo version. Those are really hard (but fun, this is one of the few of my games I play through occasionally), as is the final boss. The crabs circle you, and the spider tries to aim ahead when shooting - back then I was still good at calculus, apparently The final boss doesn’t shoot you directly, but takes a lot of hits and spawns random enemies.

The People was written for the Growth theme, and in many ways it resembles my first two LD games—there’s the tiled world, and you can build things on it. Only in this case it looks more fancy due to some clever tile rendering. Like my two first LD games, it’s a puzzle game.

There’s seven levels of varying difficulty, with goals such as ‘reach a population of X’ or ‘get Y huts’, a sandbox mode, and a tutorial mode. While you build stuff, a simulation is going on where new people appear and so on. A good description of what you actually do is, as someone put it, playing a planetary engineer.

My ‘post mortem’ for the game was pretty much the following:

So how did the game turn out? Good, and bad. My first idea was a kind of God game where you created land and such and people appeared. And there was supposed to be a kind of currency, that I called belief. So I coded the tile system and the simulation first, then I started to try to get it into a game. Well, it didn’t work, or at least it didn’t work without very much job, so I dropped it (the game idea, not the simulation and that). So I figured out another game: You have a limited supply of different kinds of land, and you have objectives to complete. Then there’s supposed to be interesting levels that are fun and challenging. I fixed up a tutorial mode, and a sandbox mode. These are pretty cool. Then there was the levels. I managed to come up with a few OK ones, but then it went downhill. So I ended with 7 levels, of which some are OK. Most are pretty easy, you just have to wait a while. I’m not very happy about them. But on the whole, the game’s pretty OK.

If you’re to believe the unofficial results from my own vote counter, The People did indeed turn out OK, and placed first in ‘fun’ and second in ‘innovation’ and ‘production’.

You can get the Windows compo version, or the Linux port version. They require OpenGL with multitexture support.

Uplighter was my entry for the Light & Darkness theme. It was a puzzle game centered on lighting up levels to certain percent by, among other things, placing lights, breaking down walls, and removing light sinks.

It’s was my first entry to feature 3D, although all gameplay and lighting is really in 2D, and it was also my first entry to not use Allegro. Instead it used GLFW, which is more lightweight, and I really didn’t need all the extra stuff from Allegro.

Uplighter is probably my best and most innovative LD entry so far—it placed first in ‘innovation’, second in ‘fun’, and also won the ‘Best In Show’ award.

You can get the compo version of Uplighter. It’s for Windows, but there’s a shell script (kindly provided by alar_k after the compo) that will fix stuff so it will compile for linux. You’ll need GLFW, GLFT, FMod and FreeType2.

Small notice: After the compo, it was reported to run very slowly on 3.0+ GHz machines. I’m still not sure what that was all about, but it has been reported that this can be fixed by compiling it in VS. If this is still much of a problem, I might get around to fix it myself.

Photon was my entry to LD6. The theme was “Light and darkness”. I still remember all the time I fiddled with shadow calculations. In my game, each light source does exact shadow calculations with all the level geometry - and in order to still have it all run with < 1% CPU, this was quite some work. Now, there’s nothing special about this except, I wanted to do things in the most simple way possible, this being an LD. And I had to admit utter defeat when I later saw bluescrn’s entry. Instead of spending half of the 48 hours on it like me, he went for a dead simple approach - with the only difference that his was not 100% accurate. Which would have made no visual difference in my game whatsoever. In fact his shadow method would have worked a lot better in my game in just about every respect

I still managed to do quite well. Here’s some screenshots from back then:

The title screen.

The goal of the game is to send all the photons coming from the lamp to the prism, but the problem is, you only can see the areas of the map which are lit up by the moving photons.

To control the photons, you can place mirrors - to light up more areas of a level, and once you have found the prism, send them all to it.

Seems the original submission is still up: original zip at original site

This was my entry for Ludum Dare #7, which was the first LD I entered. The theme (growth) eventually gave me the idea of growing a maze.

So, you create the maze as you walk around inside it. When the game begins, the maze is just a set of disconnected squares. Each of these squares can be linked with a set number of its neighbours (how many depends on the square, from none to four), and you create new links by walking from one square to another where there’s no previous link. Once a link is created it can be walked on as much as you want, but a link can’t be removed once created, so you have to be careful when creating your maze so you don’t get stuck.

Once I had that working the deadline was looming close, so I threw in some keys and locks and made the objective to clear all locks of each level, to make the thing resemble an actual game. In the end there was four levels, a random level generator, and also a level editor.

I wrote in the original README that I’d continue to work on the game, something I haven’t done. I still like the general idea behind the game, but it has this tendency to degenerate into just staring at numbers, which isn’t very fun at all, and on top of that it’s easy to get stuck, having to restart the level if you don’t pay attention. Perhaps some of the extra elements I didn’t have time to put in the game for the compo — more tile types, powerups, bombs, enemies — would have made it better (more varied if nothing else), but I think the interface is the main problem. It should be more obvious what tiles can connect, how many exits are left, etc, so there’s less guesswork, no number tracing, just puzzle solving. Since the levels are so “dynamic” getting that to work would be tricky, though.

Download: [ Windows | Linux (x86) + source code ]

Swarm was my entry to LD8. The theme of was, well… “swarm”. I know, I know, I’m no good with coming up with names for my entries. Anyway, for this game, I coded an entire 3D engine (octree based) from scratch. So, I spent most of the 48 hours debugging octree code, and crammed in some gameplay towards the end. Since I never spend more time on gameplay - it still should be as fun to play as most of my games

This is an in-development screenshot, showing some octree debugging going on.

That’s how the game looks like. Shoot down all the pink, eyed balls to encounter the uber-cool-final-boss-with-superior-AI. (I got feedback suggesting that at least one person actually played long enough to encounter the boss - so I consider the gameplay aspect successful.)

Here’s a mirror of the original submission: Swarm

Hydra was my entry to LD7. The theme was “growth”. It’s a top-down shooter, where you play a growing hydra.

At the start, the hydra is merely a small worm - and even a single knight who has set out to kill you is a dangerous foe.

Some levels later and after eating lots of knights, the Hydra has reached quite some size. But, there’s now also more knights, and they also got bigger and stronger.

The final form when you win the game - I doubt anyone ever has encountered this without using cheat codes.

Download: original LD7 submission (no idea if it still works on modern systems)

Battery was my entry to LD9. The theme was “Build the level you play”. Initially, the open voting hinted at a clear winner of the theme “battery”, for which Hamumu found the best explanation: Battery is a place where bats are hatched. Now, when I woke up the morning of the LD, first thing was I checked the theme, and it mysteriously had shifted. So, I decided to make an RTS where you start with nothing, then have to build up the battery you play.

The title screen.

An in-game shot. Basically, you can order bats to dig (build the level you play), and in the new cave room build different structures for hatching worker and soldier bats and providing food to them. At fixed intervals, a wave of most horrific enemies will attack the battery - so you better have enough soldiers by then.

Insanity was my entry to LD4. The topic was “infection”. My idea was somewhat far-fetched and only in the story - the home town of Ian the janitor is befallen by an infection of insanity - so he has to beat up all the scientists at his workplace to find the cause of the infection and a cure.

Since I messed up the base engine (tried to somehow stuff the 3D into 2D), I wasn’t able to finish. There’s just one level with place holder graphics, but the level can’t be won and so the story never reaches its conclusion.

Gnome Guard was my entry to LD1 - theme guardian. In the game, you are confronted with a horde of small gnome children, and have to safely guard them home after school.

The title screen

The gnomes will run towards the green pillar, and avoid the red pillar.

But only if they feel like it.

The original download is mirrored here - no idea if the game itself still works: download link