So here it is… “Saving his code” 2d mini platform game. I managed to cut my ideas and move on. I had a lot of gameplay features, but it would take a lot of time, that i don’t have right now.

MY ENTRY

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The secret phrase is...

MiniLD #27 is officially a go!

The SECRET PHRASE is:
“I think we can work something out…”

All games that include this phrase will be awarded a golden Ludum Dare achievement trophy that will appear on their profile page. Good luck and have fun!

Happy summer vacation, everyone!  Are you ready for June’s Ludum Dare miniLD game jam? This month’s mini will be held on the weekend of the 25th. I think you will love the theme. It is sure to get people talking… due to popular request I’m releasing the theme early so people on vacation can dive right in and get started early.

The theme is: ALL TALK - conversation trees and dialogue choices.

On Friday June 24 at 4pm PST (midnight GMT) a secret phrase will be announced. Your entry must contain this phrase in the dialogue!

This month’s MiniLD #27 is designed to be fun, low-stress, and relaxed. Perfect for vacationers. The rules this time are going to be very chill: you can use any game engine you like, premade art, and people are welcome to form teams. Instead of crunch-time cramming, you are allowed to start now and work up to midnight on Sunday June 26th. There will be no disqualifications whatsoever. The only rule is that there are no rules. Take your time – use whatever tools you like – just have fun!

Crimson Gem Saga

Ren'Py

June’s “all talk” theme is perfect for plot-heavy, deep philosophical discussions between the player and a cast of NPCs.

Ideal for z-machine text adventures using Inform7, ultra modern HTML5 literary gaming powered by engines such as Undum or the Choice of Games engine. There’s also RPGmaker and Doglion’s RPG engine.

I recommend the ever fantastic Ren’Py visual novel engine.  A complete sample Ren’Py game source code is available here to help you learn.

If you are using Flashpunk, I recommend using Draknek’s upgrade which has an amazing text engine.

Another fantastic engine you might enjoy working with is Jake Elliot’s Visual Novel engine from this game that uses Flixel.

I’ll be creating my own HTML engine for this, using pre-rendered 3d avatars. Since we don’t have to care about tech or rendering performance, HTML5 is the perfect choice since it is great for low-power mobile devices. Heck, you could write your game using youtube, regular html4 or even hypercard.

L.A. Noire

Fire Emblem

Think NPCs, CYOA, multiple choice, text, plot, voiceovers, speech synthesis, prose, humour, conflict, debate, love.

Make a murder mystery or a political scandal. A dating simulator or a talk show. A news report or a bedtime story. A love story or a heart-wrenching breakup. Beat poetry or freestyle hip-hop. Whispers or screams. Secret school flirtations or code-words between spies.  Hardcore RPG, Ren-py visual novel or pure text IF (interactive fiction), the choice is yours.

No matter what the genre – from AAA rpgs and shooters to puzzle games and everything in between, virtually every videogame ever made uses dialogue to progress the plot. Repetitive battles and grinding are sometimes seen as mere filler between the NPC dialogue and missions.  Which is more exciting? Killing your thousandth giant rat or encountering the next major NPC who gives you a quest?

Fallout 3

Alpha Protocol

This low-stress, relaxed rules MiniLD is a fun way to get away from worrying about framerate, animation or incredible 3d graphics and instead focus on the plot. The characters. The story. The soul.

Perhaps you will invent an epic storyline and a cast of interesting characters that are so cool they make it into your next action title! For now, just remember: focus on dialogue and characterization. On personal conflict, emotions and tough decisions.

Valkyria Chronicles

Final Fantasy II

Will this be a fun breather between more intense programming projects? Will your game be easier to program than something more graphics-heavy? Will it be deeper than your last brainless shooter? More artistic? Less work? More original? Discuss.

Read this wonderful article for ideas: [part1] [part2] [part3]

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Ok, I’ve gotten things done! Feels good.

The character now moves correctly and can shoot laser beams. (Thanks to HyrdroKirby in #pygame and cafesofie in #ludumdare)
I’ve also given the clouds a thicker border to make them look *nicer*
Here’s what it looks like:

Laser beams!

Too bad it only gets a terrible 16-26FPS.
I’ll have to optimize it somehow. The code is extremely rubbish at the moment.
Next up: citizens and tanks.

A long time ago in a not so far away land called MiniLD#20 I attempted to make a game. It was called Conquer The Planet and it completely failed. This time, hopefully, it won’t. The theme was greed, which I’m still going for, but I’m screwing the “only one of an object rule” because that’ll add a whole ‘nother level of complexity I don’t want to deal with.

Here’s the original concept idea if you’re interested: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/07/16/my-brilliant-idea/
As for the game code, I’m too embarrassed to show anything from that.

Wish me luck! (and follow my progress and give me inspiration and motivation and stuff!)

You can play this game in your browser (warning: sounds will play)

Concept:
It’s time for your final exam to graduate from your UFO school. Only problem is you were a complete slacker. You have no idea how to fly your ship. You have 3 minutes to impress your commander by destroying as many humans, cars, helicopters, tanks and jets as you can–or suffer the consequences!

All you can remember is to use the keys 1,2,3,4 and 7,8,9,0

Tools used:
* Coded in ActionScript 3.0 using the Flash CS4 IDE and using my mouth and microphone and Audacity to process the sound effects. I composed the music loop in Reason.

Here is the latest flash build of my game (you have to click on the game before it will have key focus)

Starting to get collisions and scoring in.  Still need to implement time over conditions and enemy ramp up at various time points.  Need to get jets and tanks in now too.  You can get points now and be killed though.  Tons of balancing will have to be done once I get all the game elements in.  Oh and also hopefully add music, sounds, and more then rectangles for all the objects too! 9 hours left…

I wanted to finally post a link to a playable prototype of my flash game in progress.

Make sure to click on the flash game window to give it focus or the keys won’t work!

It uses all 8 control keys (1,2,3,4 & 7,8,9,0) and they are currently mapped to 8 random UFO actions right now.  WHY?  Because you are playing a slacker alien that wasn’t paying attention in your UFO Academy and now it is time for your 3 minute final exam to see if you graduate.  You slacked so much you have no clue how the crazy thing operates.  You’ll have access of four directions of movement, an energy shield, a death beam, and two different particle attacks.  You must try your best to figure out how to annihilate as many humans, cars, tanks, jets, and helicopters as you can to see if you pass.

Currently using boxes for object art, no collision detections or scoring yet, and I’ve only implemented humans, cars, and helicopters behaviors.  I’m quite happy with how they are moving around though.

Mini LD 16 is fast approaching!

It will kick off this Friday, February 19th at 9pm EST (GMT – 5)

The theme of this competition is Constraints.

Major goal:

• To explore what game designs we are able to create given a certain set of arbitrary constraints

Minor goals:

• To have the games share a common control scheme
• To have the games share aspects of look and feel
• To have total designer freedom of genre and topic

I won’t be announcing the final constraints until this Friday at 9pm EST but I’d like to provide a teaser of some of the things you may encounter.

Possible constraints:

• Must work with a specific color palette
• Limited to specific control inputs/keys
• Music length limits (looping allowed)
• Numbers of sound effects
• Specific screen dimensions
• Sprite or game object size requirements
• Background graphics
• Text limits
• Levels / Waves / Rounds requirements

As I mentioned in my minor goals above–I have no intention of specifically limiting the topic or genre of the game you create. I want there to be at least that one axis of complete freedom for the designer as they work within the constraints.  I’m looking forward to this weekend–see you all soon!

EDIT: 9 pm Constraints posted

Hey there folks–I’m hosting the Mini LD for the month of February and I wanted to announce the date!  It will take place the weekend of the 19th-21st.  I’ll have more specifics as the date approaches of course.

EDIT Feb 16th: More information posted!

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.

The official time is up, but if you haven’t even started yet, now’s the time! It’s a long weekend for those of us in the US, so take as much time as you need on this. I’ve tried a few of the entries and was super impressed; can’t wait to try more. Thanks for playing and I hope you found this as enjoyable as I have!

Tired of a tetris that give you headaches ? tired of a tetris that show fancy pics as background ? tired of question ? play timeTris ! a tetris that clocks are the pieces, and in the hard mode … hummm not sure you can handle …

click here to download.

screenshots

this wont help you to manage your time … =)

Just a reminder that you have 5 days to finish your research for Mini-LD #9. The rules are:

• You may use any code you write between now and Friday, May 22nd at 9:00pm EST, but ONLY if it pertains to playing or processing sound.
• You will be provided with a resource pack containing sound assets for use in your game.
• Sounds will be provided in the following formats:
  • MP3/OGG
  • XM
  • WAV
  • General MIDI songfiles
• Due to the size of the resource pack, I will make all sounds available on a webpage so that you can preview them and select the ones you want.
• All other code for your project must be written from-scratch, during the compo.

Here is the original announcement. Good luck, and see you on friday!

Hi there I’m just getting ready for my first Mini Ludum Dare this weekend, just setting up the blog and going to get some code and drawing practice in to limber up, not sure how I’m going to get a game done in 48 hours but let’s go for it!

I’ll be mostly using BlitzMax, some art packages and lot’s of caffeine!

My current games can be found here, but they took me a lot longer than 48 hours!

Right have I got enough caffeine, milk and healthy snacks!

As LD12 was my first entry and I started with no tools or pre-conceptions (and failed quite spectacularly!) I have several smaller ideas which I can play about with instead of aiming for one big one.

Ideas:

- Ultra-ultra simple 3D Modeller for very low-poly models

- Asset Management and loader (Graphics, sound, models)

- Maths libraries (I suck at maths though)

- Multiplayer server? (already written the main guts of this in PHP, just need to get it finished and working)

- Tile/map editor for my RetroRemakes entry.

You can know enter the shop and upgrade your weapons at the end of each round. Still need to add the ability to buy sentries and repairmen.

Spent way too much time on the gun graphics (not including the rocket launcher and cruise cannon) and doubt I will have enough time to finish the game since I have to work tomorrow and will have to get a good sleep and wake up early. :\

Thought I would make a post before I got some sleep.

I decided to do a “defend your castle” game where you have to help Tom Cruise protect the Church of Scientology from “Anonymous”. I’m still not sure if Anonymous is allowed, but if it’s not I can easily change it to Oprah.

WARNING: Programmer art…

So far I just have the bare bones of the game (killable enemies and a killable castle) but hopefully tomorrow I will have time to add a weapon upgrade system and a few other goodies.

So I’m going for Retro DOS epicness! Commander Keen vs. Captain Comic! I’ve never actually played Captain Comic, but Commander Keen is one of my favorite game sagas, and I’ve always wanted to make a fan-game of him.

The game is going to be an RPG (hopefully). You’ll explore a planet (Mars, I guess?) in search of Captain Comic, who has raised the Vorticons in revolt against Keen. (yes its lame, and I might change that later on) When you touch an enemy, it will go into a battle mode like Mario & Luigi (GBA and DS) and Paper Mario (GC).

I started drawing the graphics last night, and I’ve got most of the “overworld” graphics done. Here’s a screenie of my progress:

And yes, everything is collidable and there’s a camera that works I’m using my Flibber game engine to make it.

Anyway, I’ll see ya all around. Good luck with your games