I decided to take the theme of minimalism in the direction of minimal interface: try to make a game that can be played by audio alone!

What went right:

• Framework: I used love2d again, and this time I had even more experience. I used the collision library I learnt about in LD24 and without it this game would not have been possible for me to make in the time frame.
• Idea: I think this was a really interesting idea, and a lot of people agreed. I’ve never played such a game before, though I have heard of a few. I’m really interested in making similar games and seeing what can be done with audio games.
• Visuals: I think I have managed to achieve a visual style is simple but elegant, and fits the theme quite nicely. It’s quite neat that the player’s route overlaid on the map looks like minimalist art itself.

What went wrong:

• Sound: I made a similar mistake in LD24 – having really irritating sounds. Some people reported the feeler noise hurt their ears.
• Playability: I really had no idea how to design an audio game, and it shows! I’m not entirely sure the directional sound for the goal works properly, and I think the theramin-style feeler is a very good interface for blind navigation. I don’t think I made it clear enough what the static meant, especially since the grid scrolls even when you aren’t moving! That said, I was pleasantly surprised by how many people enjoyed the game and actually made it to the end!
• Dead ends: I spent a lot of time playing with dead end ideas – namely trying to do levels made of constructive solid geometry (way too fiddly to implement in the time frame). The sound element of the game is very stripped down from the weird stuff I was playing with, and the levels are nothing like I wanted them to be originally!

Like last time, in LD24, it was great fun to participate. I’ve made an interesting game that’s like nothing I’ve ever made before, and really has me thinking about new possibilities for other audio-games.

PROUDLY PRESENTING MOONDAR

You’re stuck on a runaway moon buggy speeding across planet Moondar. Enemies attack from above while obstacles come from ahead. It’s your job to stay alive by steering the moon buggy out of harm as you destroy the alien invaders! It’s got cool dual mode gameplay, awesome soundtrack, and sweet minimalist graphics (lol).

Click here to play and rate Moondar!

Finished my entry for the compo just a moment ago.
The game is simple runner type game in which you can flip the physics.

The idea came from VVVVVV which imho is king when it comes to simplistic mechanics (and graphics for that matter!) combined with bit.trip runner(s).
The whole game is played with single button and the only goal is to get as far as possible.

Unfortunately the game doesn’t save high scores (even though there would be time to implement it, I’m just too tired to do it) which is bit of a bummer.

Go check the game out if you’re interested: in here

Thanks everyone for great event, can’t wait to get to judge your creations, but now, it is time for me to eat and sleep so that I can actually do something at work tomorrow

Just two levels and I couldn’t be bothered to upload windows and mac binaries. So if you happen to have love2d installed, this is for you.

http://gamejolt.com/games/arcade/where-is-pixel/14281/

I’ve come up with a name for my game, it’s called Moondar. Here’s the title screen I laboriously painted before going to bed last night. Now I just need to try to finish the game.

Click to zoom in.

This is what my game looks like right now.

With my good foundation of previous games in love2d (all of them on github for you night-time reading) I managed to get a great start. Some brain went into abstractions so that the level files. Now they are filled with anonymous classes and methods and do everything from generating a random background to entities to the moving character called Pixel. I’ll have a Doctor Who break now before writing the code for end-of-level and some other game elements like a timer and a score counter. Tomorrow will be all about new levels and putting living things into them.

I had this idea of Where is Pixel? a few week ago and it fits the minimals them perfectly. It’s a search game and you have to find Pixel who a 3×1 figure on a terribly big screen.

I’ve done a 10 minutes draft of four levels but that’s not all as the levels will get some animation like nebulousflynn has done with a map.

Since I’m a person who doesn’t break rules, here’s all the code I may or may not use for the Ludum Dare.  Here’s what’s inside:

• A minimax library in Lua
• An A* library for Lua which includes a binary heap and an AVL tree library
• Spoon, which is just a collection of helper libraries I use for LÖVE.  It contains a message passing library, a state manager, some math classes, and some other things I can’t remember.
• A breakout clone that I’ll likely use as a base for my Ludum Dare entry.

I should probably use this time to pimp my somewhat neglected gamedev blog.

I’m in…kinda. I haven’t been feeling very motivated lately, but I feel like I must redeem myself after my last Ludum Dare entry (such failure).  And this is my 4th LD in a row!  I can’t break the streak.  I think I’ll just try to make something, very, very small this time.  I’m going to come up with a plan on what to spend my limited time on (which will likely fall apart).

• Code: LÖVE + Spoon (my personal code library) + assorted freely available libraries = Quality game?  I’ll have to post this sometime.
• IDE: Geany.  I might try ZeroBrane, but I had so much trouble trying to change the syntax highlighting.
• Graphics: Gimp, Aseprite, and Pinta.  Probably more Aseprite than Pinta.
• Sound: Sfxr, Audacity, and possibly my mic
• Music: Ardour, Hydrogen, my mic, and my instruments.

I can’t do any worse than last time.  Also, I really hope potato wins.

I’m back for a third go at Ludum Dare. After a first rather successful (in the personally fulfilling sense) and second substantially more successful entry, I feel. I will be entering with very similar sets of tools as the past two times but this time I will entering with ROCK-HARD DETERMINATION. That determination, of course, is to make something that makes me happy.

Tools:

• Language: Lua
• Framework: LÖVE
• Code Editor: Sublime Text
• Music Writing: MuseScore
• Audio Editing: Adobe Audition CS6
• Image Editing: Adobe Photoshop CS6

Existing Code:

• Ussuri Engine

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

HELLO EVERYONE. The moment you have been waiting for is finally here. X-Moon is eager for you to play and rate it! It’s a fast paced tank omni-directional shooter with infinite levels, 4 enemy types and a sweet soundtrack. Destroy all the colonists on a remote planet, then blow it up after stealing their energy.

Click Here To Play And Rate X-Moon 

Thanks!

Progress is great, missing parts are: some pathfinding for the invading Hero, some stats on him, a win/loose condition, sounds and if I got time for it: A proper intro scene.

Here’s the annotated screenshot and I got a first build for ya to download: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jnmvjpqtu6m01eu/SasCaG41gA?m (windows, mac, and löve2d)

So me and my brother are taking a go at the jam, and it’s been going rather well. I’m using Löve+lua to do the programming and he’s doing the artwork in photoshop I believe. This is a day summary of all of our activities.

First off we brainstormed ideas for around an hour and 20 minutes. We thought of a rather unique idea about a thief who doesn’t murder but finds clever ways to incapacitate enemies and meet the objective mission. All of the missions are randomly generated, as it’s intended to be in arcade-game style.

Second I ate dinner and took a photo for all of you guys to see. Oh yeah, and I set up an awesome tea tray:

All of it was damn awesome.

And then began the creation of the “engine” for the game. It’s more of the deep internals than anything, as you can see in the screenshot below. The graphics are really nice, and as you can see I haven’t split the character’s image slices yet. Animation should be simple with a side-library called anim8 however. Since this is the jam I’m confident I’ll be able to get all the features in by the deadline (which is Monday 6pm of course.) The main game elements I hope to have together by the end of tomorrow, and then I hope we piece them together on Sunday and really polish and finish the game on Monday.

Progress

Time to go to sleep now.

Even though I posted about being in around October, I’m here to say that I still am, and to update some links.
I’ve learned a lot from last time (this is my second time) and hopefully I can make a game that’s not a maze full of paper this time.

Toolset:

• Language: Lua
• Framework: LÖVE
• Code Editor: Sublime Text 2
• Music Composition Software: MuseScore
• Audio Editor: Adobe Audition/Encore
• Image Editor: Adobe Photoshop

Existing code:

• Ussuri Engine written by yours truly

Best of luck to all, and most importantly: have a good time! See you on the other side with a (hopefully) finished game!

HELLO EVERYONE. I finished my game for the jam, but never posted here. So I’m here to deliver a public service announcement, you should play my game (and rate it)!

Play and Rate ExoSlime

There were a couple performance issues at first, but I’ve fixed them. If you tried to play before and it didn’t work, please try again.

Thanks!

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I really enjoyed it! From what I read, it’s traditional to do a little write up of what happens, so here is mine for SURVIVE:

What went right:

• Framework: I learned love2d a while back, then I started a warm-up game before TIGJAM UK 7, and made a game in it there too. This left me with a pretty good understanding of the framework, which made programming it a breeze. The only thing that could have gone better here is if I had tried the HardOnCollider library before Ludum Dare; it made collision detection so easy post-compo, and really improved the game.
• Idea: Regardless of  anyone else’s opinion, I thought the idea was strong; which meant I was quite motivated to make it. Originally I didn’t know how I would turn the simulation of these organisms into a game; I had some ideas, but none were very good. As often happens, better ideas emerged as I played around with game and developed the other aspects, and lead to what I have now.
• Visuals: The game practically started as a screen-saver. It looked pretty, and that was really motivating. When it came to the point that the gameplay just didn’t work, and I had some horrible changes ahead of me, I decided to make the start/win/lose transitions for the game instead. This was a nice distraction: fun and rewarding – the game felt more like a game, even if it didn’t play very well.

What went wrong:

• Sound: This was a complaint from a lot of people. I thought I could make the game a little more interesting by throwing in some sounds that related to what was going on – a sound where the higher the pitch, the better the event was for you. In theory this sounded okay, but in practice sound is not so simple, and I should have picked the sounds more carefully. I ended up with lots of  dissonant bleeps and bloops that really annoyed people. This wasn’t helped by a bug that the each loss added a looping warning sound to the background!
• Playability: The game was difficult to figure out, even with instructions (especially since some people will ignore them – I know I often do). It’s a frantic game and near the end death often results in gaining control of an organism that’s about to die soon too. This leaves your camera jumping about a lot with no real way to get back into the game – very frustrating! Someone suggested the level should start with fewer organisms, you have a chance to work out what’s going on – this is probably a good idea, but I’d have to put in some controls to stop them winning before the difficulty kicks in!
• Organism behaviour: The AI was not very smart, which was one of the main causes for the bad playability because you find yourself taking control of organisms that have practically committed suicide already! I didn’t have collision detection in place and I really should have tried to do it – post compo I added it in just a couple of hours, and it made a vast improvement. Firstly it stops too many cells occupying the same space, which makes it easier to see what the hell is going on. Secondly, it made it much easier to detect nearby organisms in code, which meant I could improve the behaviour a lot – in those same couple of hours I added behaviour for the organism to try and create their babies in relative safety, and to attack closer enemies with priority; this really improved the game!

Overall, it was a very positive experience, and I’m left with a game that both looks great and is something I’d like to keep working on. I definitely will participate again! Please give the game a try. Rating it would be great, and comments are greater! If you like my game, there’s a post-compo version with improvements to organism behaviour.

hi all, i guess i’m a bit late this time, sorry about that. 2nd ludumdare for me and of course Löve2D framework again =) Obey!

(+gimp, sfxr, scite, github)

When searching around a bit i already found over 40 people using löve : https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10645

Btw, according to the ludum-dare rules “porting” is allowed after the deadline, so if you’re interested in the experimental web-player for löve and get stuck with something, there are a few tips in the above thread, and i’ll also try to help if you ask questions there, but it prolly won’t work for all games due to some technical restrictions. See thread for details.

Last ludumdare i was in jam with hagish and science, this time i’m gonna try solo =)

So far the idea is :   Death is part of the game! no means to restore hp, and the “upgrades” for attack and defense you can collect don’t help yourself but only your offspring. Assuming you can reach the next nesting ground before dying that is =)

I’d also like to play around a bit with random-dungeon generation, at least in a simple form with random rooms, so it might become a bit roguelike, hence the current working title =) Not sure if i’ll get around to that tho.

So far not much to see except a few programmer-art-like graphics :

Hello everyone. This is my third Ludum Dare. I am really excited about this one because I haven’t made a game since LD23! I’ve already been working for the past 3 hours (wow it’s been 3 hours already!), but I figure I should post I’m in before it’s too late!

Here’s a little teaser of what I’ve got so far:

I have no idea what I’ll be making yet! I’m quite intimidated by the theme to be honest. Going to try to get some basic graphics and movement working before going to bed tonight, then figure out the rest tomorrow.

Sadly, I have to go to a wedding Saturday evening, which is going to take a huge chunk of time. So I may have to bail on the comp, and do the jam instead. I took monday off from work just in case

Follow me on twitter as I post updates and good luck to everyone!

The Tools

Language: MoonScript (compiles to Lua)
Editor: gvim
Framework: LÖVE
Library: LoveKit
Graphics: GIMP
Music: Renoise
Sounds: as3sfxr and Audacity

I made this because there is some bits of code in my warm-up that could be reused for others projects .

Yes, it’s called lfspm . It stand for LevelFontSoundParticlesMusic . this lib for the love framework permit you to :

• Load a tile based level with a collision system .
• Load a bitmap font and print it.
• Play sounds.
• Have a particle system.
• Play a music.

I basically copy-pasted code from my Warm-up in a single file.

Download : Here

Note that :

• The level format is a bit complex . You have a img/tileset.png, a img/tilesetdata.png who is the size of img/tileset.png divided by tilesize, and define properties for the tiles, and some lvl/number.png which use r and g for x and y of the tileset…
• You need SECS to use this lib.
• You must have defined scale and tilesize .
• You are totally allowed (and encouraged) to modify, improve, and distribute this code .