The title says it all. Before starting my SOPA/PIPA protest game, I decided to release a new version of EpiCat.

Play it here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27464471/EpiCat/EpiCat-1.1.0.swf

It’s mostly art improvements, with some bug fixes, a new enemy, and gameplay balancing. Please let me know what you think!

Things still to do:

• Add music
• Add more enemies
• (Maybe) Add a better intro to tell the story

I made a post-compo version of my entry, with modifications suggested by commenters:

• added sound effects
• added music (ambient sounds, actually)
• small fixes in walking animation
• small fixes in gfx: exit doors became orange/red, also you see part of the room when the door is open
• gameplay fixes: player health was replenished at the start of a level, now it is maintained through the game

You can play it here. If you want to rate it, here is the original compo entry. Enjoy!

Thanks to  CplMustard,  merthsoft,  jfroco, dr_soda, Thomas, Benjamin for their insightful suggestions!

Merry Christmas – Happy Holidays! Just for fun, here is the snowy SANTA version of my LD22 game, Greeble. Can you revive all your Santa Claus clones? Can you find the Christmas Kitty? It was made in HTML5 and runs at 60fps in all recently updated browsers. Enjoy! Hope your holidays are filled with friends, family and fun!

http://www.mcfunkypants.com/LD22/xmas/

For those that get stuck, can’t play the game, or just don’t have the patience to experiment… I’ve created a game guide / mini walkthrough for my Ludum Dare 22 game, Ab-Alone.

You can check it out and rate the game HERE.

I’m also working on compiling a list of some of my favorite LD22 games for a future post.

In the end I spent too much time researching possible engines and didn’t get anything finished. A lot of time was wasted trying to figure out how to make Slick2d work in an applet. But really I didn’t have a game to applet…ize.

Game Name: Kitten Alone

Language: Java

Libraries: LWJGL, Slick2d, MarteEngine

Completion: 10%

I ran out of time leading up to the event to do the kind of self-education that would have made this possible. My current plan is to continue working on the game (and changing the title…) so next event I’ll have a better idea what I’m doing. And if for some reason my Java skills aren’t up to snuff by the next Jam, I may need to make the next entry in Basic. Or ActionScript 2.

Way back when before LD#19 I decided to build a game engine for doing LDs quicker and better. I had not actually done an LD to that point, but I knew that my speed in C++ coding wasn’t going to get me working quick enough. I started building an engine in Lua so that I could code super quick. The reason that I didn’t just use Love2d is because I wanted to be able to easily port my games to iOS, and at that point love2d didn’t support iOS. I called it blud as a tribute to love. Seemed opposite and the same in some ways.

So the first game was soundman stepper, and it was super fun to build! Lua is awesome to work in, super fast, the entire reference for it fits on three pages.

After that compo, I realized that you really need to enter flash games to have a small chance of your games being played, so I switched over to AS3, and learned enough of flixel to get by. In the meantime I kept developing blud, and started borrowing more and more features from flixel into the framework. For mini28 I did a game for iphone called pyoing, and released it on the app store the next day.

I kept developing blud, and for LD21 I did a game called martin vs monty. That one is yet to be released on the app store, but hopefully I will get back to it and polish it up and such.

In between these things, I actually started getting paid for being a game developer. The first fruit of these labors has finally popped out. I am still using the code that I developed during and for LD to some extent, and the lessons that I learned during LD to a large extent.

Pugs luv beats is a music composition game, and it is available for the iphone and the ipad. If you want to read some superlatives, you are going to have to go elsewhere, because I am not too good at writing them myself. Luckily create digital music did a nice writeup of the audio side of things.

I decided to be lazy and write it only once, so come see it here.

Just wanted to tell that I did some minor updates to my LD21 game, “Bunnies, Back Into Your Cage!”. This is something I don’t do often (working on a post-compo version always was a timewaster to me) but this time it felt like it was worth it. Even though some people really HATE the controls.

Well, at least I had some fun with it.

Updates include bug fixing (no invisible blocks anymore, also no double level loading), rebalancing (especially the last level) and a new control scheme (picking/dropping blocks only with shift key now, WASD added). The latest enhancement is the addition of text which serves the purpose of a tutorial and a “story” alike. Also, someone didn’t like that falling out of the level resetted it, so this was removed too.

The updates are for the Kongregate version only, so play it there.

The Ludum Dare entry page is here – please rate it (the unaltered LD version, of course), if you haven’t already! Thanks!

I’ve added an updated version of my entry, fixing some of the problems with the competition version. Please don’t vote based on this version.

These are some of the changes:

• Added minimap
• Grid on the floor
• Rotate avatar towards enemy on collision
• Change movement speed
• No more horizontal scrolling in sequence list
• Added an easier introduction level
• Added loading bar

Play the updated game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=3796

Not that my game is that interesting, or have some kind of potential, but I spent a few hours today adding some of the original planned features and touched up some of the graphics.

Unfortunately it has pretty much 0 replayability so it might not be so interesting for those who already solved it (unless you really like monkeys with their arms swaying hypnotically).

Still no sound effects though

I found out today that the last level was impossible in the game I submitted last night. This was due to some last minute changes that I thought were too small to merit testing.

Oh well! It is at least good to know that players made it that far in!

I fixed that level; CLICK HERE FOR THE UPDATED VERSION.
Or CLICK HERE FOR THE SUBMISSION PAGE – the update is linked on there as well.

The leaderboards are growing, and I am both sad and happy to say I’ve been dethroned on all levels – except of course that last level on which hamburger holds the first and only score.

I decided to write a little postmortem about my first Ludum Dare while it still was fresh in the memory.
It how ever got bit longish so I posted it to my own forum and decided to link to it here (so I don’t whore up all the front-page).

So if you’re interested you can check it out in here.

There’s some screen-shots from the progress included =)

I’m making good progress on an improved version of my game: thinking of lots of new gameplay elements and drawing lots more Zelda enemies.

Here’s a screenshot showing some of the new things I’ve added:

Entry page here

I promised a lengthy post and I guess this is it…

This is a screen of my post-compo game, a few things changed. Play, comment and read the full list of changes here.

Today I spent most of my day sleeping and making the post-compo version with a few bugfixes. Next compo, december probably, I’ll use my own chronolapse that will rock, and will be out of my way. I’ll also write a tool or two that compensate for actionscrip not having templates/generics, and add a few base classes that make the flixel game development even faster.

I’ll probably do food shopping on thursday/friday instead as that is taking up too much precious time

The only other bad thing I did was not making the graphics at the start, and instead used temporary graphics for most of the compo. The good thing about this is that I focused on gameplay early on, the bad side is that I spent too much time tweaking and playing the game. With these changes I might have a showable game earlier, allowing me to get feedback from irc/other people instead of post compo feedback; and this good folks, really is the only thing that I want

Food photo times, you know you want to hit more… (more…)

Post-mortem, being something we may analyze after its untimely passing, strikes me as being the wrong approach. I would like to present a short living analysis; an ante-mortem, if you will.

yippppp yip yip yip yip yip yip

Building You are me now was wonderful, mostly because it had closure, but I do not consider it complete. The central idea, using the Islands metaphor as a physical mechanic, falls short of my initial thoughts when considering the theme when it was announced. While walking around Tel Aviv’s Neve Tsedek neighborhood, I chanced upon some graffiti that seemed to fit the idea of making islands stop being islands. (Continued…)

(more…)

I’ve released a post compo version of Cave Ninja. Nothing exciting, it just fixes two bugs:
1. Win check for last level corrected.
2. Divide by zero error fixed that occurred for certain OpenGL implementations.

To be honest, for most people there’s no reason to update. But for those that got the divide by zero (might also seem like it just shutdown at once), it might be worth it.

Windows binary (should run fine in Wine).

I made some changes based on the feedbacks !

• fixed animation, to animate only when the char was in movement
• add some instrunctions of how to fire
• increase the distance of the border of the screen to avoid zombie-suprises
• changed the torch throw to allow multiple torches
• fixed level 3 and add a level 4
• criated a windows exe
• fixed some screen flickering
• reduce the maximum speed of the zombies
• generated some random textures for the ground

thanks all for the feedbacks !! this helped a lot to enhance the Java engine that Im building.

glaucon and the cave  v2

Well, I’ve done a bit of work on a post-compo version of my game, adding blood splatters and improving the A.I. and the number of different armies you can fight such. I have quite a few other ideas for things I could do, although I don’t intend to implement all of them. A few ideas include:

A limited number of people in your village, that increases as new people are born or join you from the outside. These people could be assigned to operate the buildings that you build (also everything would be rebalanced, then). You would also need one house per person (or maybe family? I dunno…).

During battles, your men would be knocked out, when they run out of hp, instead of being outright killed. The A.I. (or you) could ‘stabilize’ knocked out men, which means that they would survive the battle instead of dying. If one of your men isn’t stabilized in time, then they’d die. Obviously this would rely on the previous point being implemented, otherwise it would be pointless.

Exp/Levels/Skills for your main character, allowing things like a cap on the number of men that you can take to battle with you (Leadership skill), along with other things.

Removing your character from the battles (possibly… although this idea could also function while leaving your character in the battle. I really don’t know.) I’m thinking of implementing a very limited real time strategy interface, that would work like so: Your army has a specific number of ‘officers’ (which might also be able to get exp and upgrade, though that seems a bit excessive as far as scope goes). Probably 5 max, I think. Your soldiers are automatically divied up between your officers. You can select officers and give one of two commands: Move here and hold this position (self-explanatory), Attack at will (the officer follows the normal A.I. to move towards and try and attack an enemy). An officer’s men would automatically try and stay within a certain distance of his commander, attacking enemies that get within a certain distance. If these changes were implemented, it’s likely that the pace of the game would be slowed down a bit, and the playing fields made a bit larger, so that it’s not too frantic. Of course, that’s not certain.

Greatly enhanced village management: Require food for your people to survive over time, ability to make equipment, using several types of resources, which lets you make different kinds of characters to take to battle (spearmen, axemen, ranged — javelins or throwing knives or bows, perhaps even black-powder style guns.

Mission structure — A basic storyline and set of missions (which would probably all end up being arena battles, but with new styles of terrain, instead of just the highway). This would be complimented by randomly generated sets of side-missions so that you can level-build if you want to. Major missions would possibly also provide special equipment to make special soldier types (military rifles, grenades…?) The special types would run out of ammo eventually (perhaps you can only use them once…), so they’d be best used against ‘boss’ type battles. 

3/4 Overhead art – To make it easier to figure out who is who, and to just make it look prettier.

U.I. ‘Improvements’ – Improvements might be an overstatement, because right now there is none, during the battles. But I think that some information about what’s going on would probably be helpful.

Those are all the ideas I have so far — obviously I won’t implement all of them, but I’d appreciate it if the people that played and liked my game could suggest which of the improvements they’d like to see most. If you read this post before you review my game, maybe you could also suggest there which of the improvements you might like to see (or mention others).

So now the mad rush to finish is over and I’ve caught up on lost sleep, here’s all my progress shots that I didn’t have time to write journal entries for.

Project setup, and boring game init / display init:

A tile map and a hardcoded bulldozer sprite:

I added bulldozer controls here, plus rocks to dig for resources:

Placing roads via the bulldozer:

Adding code and graphics to properly make road curves and junctions:

Added hard-coded buildings and cars, plus a hud for better feedback. I should probably have had a screenshot in between this and the previous one but I was on a roll.

Adding in proper building placement, city growth and car spawning:

Compared to previous LD48s I didn’t get much journal writing done during the competition, probably because I only had a single day so was much more focused than usual. Also the game was largely based on logic code (like getting the building placement and car AI correct) rather than lots of visible gameplay elements, so at times where I would normally have taken a picture I skipped it since it looked identical to before.

I’ve decided to leave my post-mortem ’till after judging had finished / nearly finished, so I can see if my list of things to improve matches what other people think.

Also, project source and images are here. It won’t compile as-is because I took the LWJGL and Slick libraries out to cut down the size, but you can browse through my spaghetti code and see how hideous it all is.

I made a post compo version, fixing the typo in my name and adding an easy mode.

Get it here.