Hey, everyone! Green Pixel’s artist here! Ludum Dare 26 was a blast and we came up with our Jam entry: Eternal Journey

If you’ve played it and rated it, thank you so much for your feedback! If you haven’t, check it out here and we’d appreciate your thoughts!

We made Eternal Journey with mobile devices in mind (as we have released an iOS title in the past) and we’re happy to read that a lot of the feedback seems to welcome the game – albeit a more finished version – on smartphones

This was our second LD Jam and one thing I realized from LD25 was that I didn’t really learn much artistically – besides learning how fast I could work under a time constraint. So, this time around, I decided to experiment. Why not, right? When I heard that the theme was Minimalism, I thought of triangles and, inspired by games like Vlambeer’s Ridiculous Fishing, I came up with the art for Eternal Journey. Below is a handy screenshot if you don’t have time to play the game

Triangles galore, eh? Now that we’re going ahead with the fully-featured version of the game (that we’re hoping to release before the next LD ), I’m wondering if I should continue with this triangle-istic style. As a game artist, I’ve only really ever worked with pixel art and it’s the most comfortable style for me. I whipped up a quick mockup of what the mobile, pixel art version would look like (note that the background is largely unfinished ), seen below:

See the huge difference? Gameplay aside, which style would you prefer? Do you think pixel art still appeals to the masses or is it played out? Would the semi-abstract triangles fare better in the world of apps?

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Thanks and happy gaming!

We finished on time!! UNBELIEVABLE!! For the first time on our ludum dare history, here we are, publishing a game 1 hours before the deadline. Also, we are very satisfied with the results, the “Minimalism” condition really helped us to get the project on time. Gods Will Be Watching is a minimalistic survival/adventure game with multiple ways of completing it and failing. We hope you enjoy playing

My first ever Pixel art !! xD !!

This is so much fun!! I’m going to participate in all LD!!!

Thinking about how I want to do my gfx for my LD25 game.

Since LD24, I took some time to work on my art techniques.  I’ve got two approaches which I think are viable, both of which I like equally.  So I’m trying to decide.  I don’t *think* that they’d blend together well, but there’s always the option of doing something really creative that does blend them.

Idea 1: Pixel art.  I have a good technique, that I can use consistently to create appealing pixel art quickly.

Idea 2: Hand-drawn, photographed/scanned art. I’ve been doing a bit of sketching with pen on paper, for the first time in years, and am finding that I enjoy it. I’m not sure how well I can animate hand-drawn sprites, but I can at least draw static sprites.

I know I want to do both types of graphics in some project or other, eventually. I’m just not sure what I’ll pick this time.  It’ll either be a decision that becomes obvious when the theme is announced and I come up with my game concept, or else I’ll flip a coin.

Here’s one of my pixel art sketches, of the Marvel Comics villain, Venom:

Pixel Art “Venom”

Here’s a quick sketch I drew from a photo, to give you an idea how I am with a pen:

pug in a bunny costume

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

Pyxel Edit is a pixel art/tileset editor I put up an early version of before the last LD. It was rushed and pretty damn broken in many ways but people still seemed to find it useful.

All the positive feedback I got made me want to fix it so I decided to take the version down to do it right. I have been working on it since then, rewriting  a big part of the code base and adding a lot of features. There’s now also a site for the project at pyxeledit.com where you can download it.

It’s made in Adobe AIR so it runs on Win and Mac, not Linux, sorry. (I have been told it runs in WINE though)
There is also a captive runtime version at the site if you don’t want to install AIR.

I’d love to hear what you think, and if you have any suggestions for features or anything else (maybe I can add it before the next LD!).

http://pyxeledit.com

Ludum Dare is a great place to know more tools for game development, so I’d like to share the tools I used to make Micro World.

Programming:

Flixel - Open source game-making library for ActionScript 3.

FlashDevelop - Open source code editor. Supports ActionScript (2 and 3) and haXe .

Graphics:

GraphicsGale - Animation graphic editor. Good for pixel art.

Music:

Guitar Pro. Tabulature editor software. I used it to write the song and export it to MIDI.

GXSCC - Automatically converts a MIDI to 8-bit chiptune. Just drag and drop your MIDI to this window, then click Authoring to export it.

Sound:

Bfxr - Generates manipulable sound effects with 8-bit style.

Free Audio Converter - I used it to convert WAV to MP3.

We’re entering in the 72 jam, so we still have about another day left. =D However, we’ve just about got everything wrapped up although a few features were cut do to the time constraints such as persistent worlds. Yet, all of us are quite pleased with what we hav eso far and hopefully everyone who plays tomorrow will be too. Here are some screen shots from today:

Well it’s taken about… 18 hours? Like 18-20 hours. By the time I had finished up the map, mouse scrolling, forests, mountains, houses, roads, skyscrapers, and the bulldozer, I felt like there was more than enough in Simini to justify its release into the world of Ludum Dare #23.

So here is the rundown. Simini is a miniature Sim City-esque game, though at the moment not nearly as deep. You have three kinds of structures you can build: Houses, Roads, and Skyscrapers. Houses generate resources based on what’s around them. So, for instance, if a house is placed near a forest, it will generate 1 wood per second.

Roads are basically like… the Zerg creep. You can only build houses, skyscrapers, and other roads within the vicinity of a road. To alleviate the obvious problem of “well crap, what if I destroy everything?” the player can place one free road anywhere on the map if there are no other roads. Roads are also the only structure that can be built over water and are therefore the only way you can access the other islands… for now. Airports are on the list for buildings I want to include in the future.

Skyscrapers generate money. Money doesn’t have any use yet, but I’d like to think in a future update it could be used for other kinds of buildings and potentially even public projects like parks or random events. Skyscrapers need to be placed near houses, so essentially they’re a resource generator that you build.

The other two icons you’ll notice on the bottom are the hand icon and a bulldozer. The hand switches you back to the default pointer. The bulldozer lets you destroy anything you’ve built and get back 50% of its resources. Will be handy later on when I can figure out resource destruction. I’d much prefer it if resources ran out after a specific amount of time, making them more limited in the world. The bulldozer will also be great when there are more building types and you feel like redesigning a town.

As per the rules of Ludum Dare, the source “code” is included, but as it is an MFA file you will need Multimedia Fusion to open it. The game itself currently only runs in Windows. I made a Flash test version and, trust me, you don’t want to play a 62×78 game with mouse scrolling in Flash. With the standalone version, however, you can hit Alt-Enter to fullscreen for a much less frustrating experience.

I will definitely keep picking at Simini as the year continues and get it into a form good enough for the IGF Pirate Kart. For now, hope you enjoy what I managed to whip up in well under the Ludum Dare time limit!

Download Simini Here

- Dan

(This is my last post about Pickle, I promise.)

Just wanted to let everyone know that Pickle 1.0 has been released!
Thanks to everyone who tried the alpha and helped with suggestions and feedback.

Try it out: www.pickleEditor.com

And be sure to let me know if you use it make anything cool.

Follow @pickleEditor for updates.

The public alpha release of my cross-platform pixel editor Pickle is now available for download.

The app features animation preview, seamless tile preview, and terrain preview—all live updating as you edit.

I’m trying to get feedback from the game dev community to help make it better. So if you have a few minutes to try it out and let me know what you think I’d really appreciate it. It would be great to have a more full-featured version complete for people to use in the next LD.

Download Pickle at PickleEditor.com 

Follow @pickleEditor for updates

I’m not even remotely an artist, but I do like my pixelz in this lil’ prototype!

And so my first LD entry comes to a close!

Play it at http://davidrlorentz.com/files/cryptidia.html. Also posted at Kongregate. 

I would describe this game as a cross between mad libs and the Spore creature creator. Emphasis on the mad libs. Everything is randomized, including the number of arms and legs and the position and rotation of everything. I didn’t get a chance to network it (I was going to hook up a database to pull in random parts from other players online), because the outside world intervened. So you’re just gonna to have to keep drawing all those arms and legs yourself.

If by some miracle you manage to create something attractive or at least entertaining with this ridiculous tool, please post screenshots! I doubt it will happen.

This game was coded from scratch in ActionScript 3, with art created in Flash and music performed with Anvil Studio. Full source code is available here. A windows executable is available here.

Enjoy!