Hi LD25!

This time I don’t have any new hardware to learn and I’m not really interested in HTML5 games – right now – and I don’t want to mess with Angie – it would produce a lot of bugs and code mess. However in the last weeks I used Processing a lot so that will be my tool for sure.

code: Processing
gfx: Gimp2
sound: sfxr, musagi – never done any sound before though…

I’ll reuse code from my previous game GotEL if needed – not likely though. You can find it at StaticVoidGames.com.

I’ll certainly try to use my NES Framework  - for Processing – made during the CharityGameJam. Sadly no game was made based on it then but it developed more since so if you want then feel free to download the latest version here: YouTube video of it. Read the description for updates!

I wish lots of fun and plentygood experiences for the weekend!

p.s: My internet connection having problems in the past weeks and my PC does wierd things so I’ll may not be overly social during this jam.

Ever since I was a kid I had something with video games, whether it was making silly card games with pieces of papers or making lame interactive stories in power point, I always looked for a way to create them…bla, bla bla! I don’t have time and nor do you to read the story of a 16th year old who always has dreamed about being a video-game designer, and has gone through everything form Modding to Unity 3d (which I guess is the case in many of us!)  so I’ll go to my point

When the charity game jam was first announced I told myself “Cool I’ll give it a try”…and finally, the day arrived,  November 24th at 12:00 A.M. I hadn’t read the rules or the jam’s theme until that moment. When I found out it was a NES theme I got excited and started working immediately.

After some minutes of thinking about my game, I found this book called “Mitos y Legendas de Guatemala”  (Myths and Legends from Guatemala) which is a compilation ghost stories and urban legends from my beloved country, Guatemala There I found this famous legend of a diabolical dog called “El Cadejo” who wanders the streets at midnight looking for drunken people, whose souls he devours. But there is another type of Cadejo, the white coated one, who instead of having a feast on it, protects the human soul from being cursed or stolen by demons and other supernatural beings. That’s how I came out with the simple story behind my game: You’re a white Cadejo who has to protect the soul of a drunken man from incoming hordes of  black Cadejos who are trying to devour it. 

Since I’m not good at 2D games in Unity, I decided to use an old tool called Game Maker. Everything (except the music and sound effects) was made from scratch for this game. The music is from ‘Retro PC Games – Tokyo Japan’ and for the sound effects I used SFXR. The barks and growls are from Nine Tails and Venusaur from Pokemon I would have loved to use my own FXs but I don’t know a thing about creating 8-bit sounds!

At the end of the post there are some screenshots of my game. You can look for it at the funkytron as “El Cadejo: A Guatemalan Horror Story” or if you don’t feel like it, go directly to the mini-site where you can download the game (just a simple .exe ) and watch the first five minutes of gameplay! I’ll be adding more levels and a boss fight at the end. If you are interested, follow me on twitter (@Hyde_WS) so you can know when the update has been done.

In conclusion, I LOVED the Charity Game Jam. It was a great experience and I learned a lot, I’m definitely in for the next Ludum Dare. I hope you enjoy my game and If you feel like giving some feedback and constructive critics, please do it

The Charity Game Jam was a huge success. Our initial fundraising goal was $250 and as you can see, we destroyed it! Mission accomplished. Achievement unlocked. Boss battle won. Princess saved. THANK YOU VERY MUCH, EVERYONE! I’m humbled and grateful for all your enthusiasm, hard work, and generosity. Should we do this again next year?
Play The Games Here! | Keynote Video | Announcement Post

But close enough!

Certainly didnt get around to a few major features that Id really hoped for (like being able to steal a car – kinda important in a game that references Grand Theft Auto)

But I’m certainly happy with what I did get done over the weekend. ‘Super Theft Auto’ is a good start for an interesting little mini game.

You can play the current version of the game at the following link after installing the plugin (links/instructions are on the page- the only major OS not supported is OSX):

[LINK] (youll also find it on the CharityGameJam games submission screen of course)

Theres also a link on the page to a .blend download of the setup for the computer VideoTexture scene, youll need Blender 2.64a if you want to mess around with it.

Features:

• A game within a game – You start in a 3D world with a 3D computer, the (kinda) NES style game plays on the screen of the Funkytron computer (press space to zoom in and focus on the screen to actually see what youre doing)
• Large city area to explore (sadly only on foot at this stage)
• Pedestrians wander around the city (they make good target practice)
• Cars driving around (rare and very basic implementation)
• Gun ammunition to pick up
• Basic scoring system (you can score points for killing people)

Either way, this was a fun miniLD to participate in, was great to see the charity fundraising goals surpassed! (for a second time) Now I look forward to playing some of the other games

Fatality!

got this game done just at the deadline, and overlooked a very simple error that caused me to stress for the last 5 hours lol, figured it out, and have the game submitted! enjoy, and I look forward to checking out everyones games!

Controls:

Arrow keys,

*Wanted to use gamepad, but unfortunately my usb gamepad wouldn;t work with chrome

Play Lock N Key!

I just submitted the 48 hour version of my Charity Game Jame game, “Dolphin Story”. I followed Ludum Dare compo rules – all graphics from scratch with the Gimp, engine is Unity + Orthello 2D. It uses the NES palette.

It looks awesome inside the Funkytron … but in reality it’s not really finished yet. There are still two scenes to be made to finish the mini-chapter of this mini-adventure game, and sound is still to come. I plan to do this over the next two days.

I went against all sensible advice and used Orthello 2D for the first time for this compo … as a result I ended up wasting some time wrestling with it, but now I have the simple ‘point-n-click’ adventure base code written expanding it should be easy (famous last words ).

You can play directly it here, or find it in the list on http://www.charitygamejam.com. If the Unity plugin starts flickering (like an old TV with bad vertical hold settings – authentic !), blow on the cartridge then try reloading the page. I’ve no idea what’s up with that.

Im about done for today’s work on the game. Made some progress, theres a player sprite which runs around, and a basic environment (road with buildings either side and an intersection) along with some cars that randomly spawn and can drive into you (blood splatter included), now I have other things to tend to

A friend of mine might be getting involved with the game while I’m away for the next 10-20 hours, so progress might be made (hes been working on music for it today). Then tomorrow will be time to sit down and start finishing things! Ive purposefully aimed pretty low with this game, I’ll just get as much done as possible and enjoy it.

Either way, the game Ive been wanting to make for this is effectively ’GrandTheftAuto re-imagined for the NES’. I hope to have at least 1 gun, cars to drive/steal, blood to splatter and sidewalks to drive down, maybe even some simple kinds of missions. We’ll see!

Some screens:

Car driving past

Might also mention, I 3D’ized the gamepad texture recently released as well, so now theres 2 controllers in the scene (which adds to it nicely I think!)

UPDATE: www.charitygamejam.com is LIVE!

See also: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/10/25/charity-game-jam/

Rusty Moyher here. I’ve participated before in Ludum Dare, but Super Clew Land is my first experience entering the Jam or working with Shaun Inman and Matt Grimm. After this roller coaster weekend, I know I’ll be doing both again.

A week before Ludum Dare, I asked Shaun if he wanted to make a Jam game. He was interested, but concerned how we’d break up responsibilities. Shaun and I are do-it-all guys, so we didn’t know of a good way to split the work. We decided to sleep on it. (Which actually meant not making a decision until the last minute.)

Day 0

We met up on Skype an hour before the jam to finalize plans and workflow. Before splitting responsibilities we’d wait to hear the theme. Shaun had worked with Matt before and we sent him a Twitter DM in hopes he’d join us.

At 9pm EST we received the theme: Evolution. We came up with a dozen bizarre ideas including a colored vine puzzle game that the player would grow through to proceed. After four hours of brainstorming both of us were wearing thin. We almost slept on it (again), but finally chose the idea we’d spent the most time fleshing out: an evolving Metroidvanian puzzle double-game.

Imagine a split-screen or Nintendo DS double view. Players would encounter a platforming world above and unlock new abilities in a top-down gene sorting game below. Even as we shrunk the gene sorting into a HUD minigame, the idea seemed ambitious for 72 hours.

List of evolved abilities

To make the creation manageable, we made a last minute framework switch. Shaun and I were both eager to try out Futile, a new 2D Unity framework. But the scope of our idea required tile map support. Rather than trying to roll our own for Futile, we chose a framework more familiar: Flixel.

We also (finally) decided on the responsibility split. Shaun would design and I would develop, but we’d switch things up as needed. We heard back from Matt too. He would do music and sound. 8-bit Voltron was formed.

Shaun came up with our hero’s name, Clew, before heading to bed. It wasn’t as late for me in California, so I spent my last four hours awake setting up platforming physics and a TMX level loader.

Day 1

I woke up to find over a dozen animations in our shared Dropbox folder.

Hizzah! Clew was real.

I started building the “Protein Puck” minigame as Shaun drew food and enemies. Shaun and I communicated almost entirely through FaceTime on our iPads. (He found it useful during a previous collaboration.) This made it easy to bounce new ideas around while working. By using our iPads as dedicated video devices, we never had to manage a floating iChat window. It was so helpful we left the stream open throughout the entire jam.

By the end of the day we had most of the character animations done, a pretty-much-working minigame and an fun retro soundtrack from Matt.

Recombination MP3

Day 2

All three of us live in different timeszones, but by the second day this seemed like a plus:

Working with a dev in another timezone is awesome. Go to bed with an idea, wake up to a working implementation. Could get used to this.

As Shaun finished up animations and wrote the Flixel animation timing, I started implementing the player, food and enemies. Halfway through the day Shaun switched to code and implemented autotiling to make world building faster. About this time I started adding Matt’s sound effects.

Puck Match MP3

Puck Poof MP3

Death MP3

When the autotiling was ready, Shaun started building the world in Tiled. The pieces were coming together, but a mountain of polish remained. As the day grew long we came to an unspoken understanding: there would be no sleep tonight.

Day 3 (I think)

While the sun rose, I squeezed in a few good playtest sessions. Shaun programmed the enemy pathing behavior and then kicked level design into high gear. Matt had to leave for his day job, but was able to write a few final sound effects in his off hours.

Nearing the end of the Jam, we we’re all exhausted. At some point I took a shower to try to clear my head. Picking the game’s name took near an hour, but this was mainly due to our exhaustion. In the last thirty minutes we added a title, an ending, and Matt’s final piece of music. And….submit!

Epilogue

Working with Shaun and Matt was a blast. Each Ludum Dare I’ve participated in has been more rewarding than the last. I’m not sure I can stop now.

We’re all pretty happy with what we pulled off in three days. If you haven’t checked out Super Clew Land yet, what are you waiting for? Go play it now!

Cheers,
-Rusty

Angle Isle is my second Ludum Dare game. Here’s how it happened.

Friday

The theme arrived at 6pm PST. After throwing out the first 60 minutes of work on a bad idea, I started sketching in Photoshop for inspiration. Soon after I developed a 45 degree angled art style. It seemed interesting enough, so I spent the rest of the evening creating tilemaps and characters.

Saturday

During the morning shower I tried to figure out what the hell I was making. I liked the world, but most of the characters didn’t fit. I only liked this angled bird and before I dried my hair, the bird became the hero.

After a quick cup of coffee I started the code. Angle Isle was coded in Flash Builder on top of the excellent Flixel engine. I don’t have much experience with Flixel or Actionscript, so I was often reading Flash Game Dojo and the Flixel documentation.

I hoped to create the levels in Tiled Map Editor, so I first worked on importing TMX files. This took longer than I anticipated. By the time I got a test level loading, I needed to break for lunch.

In the early afternoon I coded and animated the player. The desktop playtesting was done with an Adaptoid and my original black N64 controller. Once the bird’s flapping felt pretty good I started thinking about levels.

A large chunk of time was then spent on level transitions. I could have made it simple, but I wanted the levels to change dynamically. The player would seamlessly fly between one level and the next. It took awhile, but I think it was worth it.

At this point it was late. I needed to start designing levels, but there was much to tie up including touch controls, the breeze, and the shark. (More on this later.) I was delirious by 4am and went to bed a half hour later.

Sunday

I slept two hours and awoke a bit groggy, but anxious to start. First task: writing music. The gameplay theme was written in Textmate with MML. The tunes didn’t flow, but In four hours I had a passable melody.

I moved on to sound effects and finished them with six hours remaining.

The levels still weren’t designed. I set a twenty minute repeating timer and tried to make, playtest, and finish each new level before it went off. This was a tall order. I spent extra time in the early levels trying to figure out what the player should experience and learn. I also found the tileset incomplete and had to spend more time adding tiles.

Halfway through level design I stopped to create the title and ending screen. This took another hour. When it was time to submit I had squeezed in 8 levels.

What Didn’t Happen

I had started to add an antagonist to hunt the player in later levels. The shark would jump out when the player was trying for the lower hanging berries. But time grew short and the shark was cut.

I also hoped to add a continuous day-night cycle with parallax stars. Ran out of time.

Clearer Communication

When the player collects more than half of the fruit on a level, a wind appears to the right and the player can ride it to the next level. A bird chirp sound effect signifies the “exit wind” is available. Although I like the chirp sound, it doesn’t communicate a connection between the berries and the wind. I should have used a wind visual and sound effect instead.

Mobile Port

I submitted an iOS port to Apple the morning after Ludum Dare. But as I’ve been playing it more, I’m less satisfied with the performance on older iOS devices. Instead I’m looking into porting to Axel or perhaps Objective-C for the post-compo version.

Conclusion

Ludum Dare is awesome. I’m amazed by the results of some good ol’ pressure. Angle Isle blew away my previous entry and I’m pretty happy with the results.

If you entered the competition, please take a chance to rate my entry. I’d love to hear your feedback.

Twitter: @rustym

A tiny NES puzzle game. Read the postmortem here