Having been away and sick I didn’t get a chance to write this, but I’ll do so now(with a little over 24 hours to spare)

Let’s get started then. Not with the beginning, that’s what is expected, let’s go for a random order.

“A form of monotheism” a silly name, thought of in the last 30 minutes as a better-than-nothing name. It surprisingly works and fits the mechanics of the game. You’re an exterior force with equal control over everything in the game world. You can chose sides, be impartial, have some work for the benefit of others and so on.

The original idea was to have the player be some fellow that clones himself amd tweaks said clones to accomplish some end (repopulate the planet, fight off aliens/ zombies/ in-laws) but someone already  had that idea. Can’t remember who.

The second idea was to make a platformer and beat the theme into it with a stick. Since I forgot to make a platformer framework before the compo, I decided that’d take too long so I dropped it.

Back to square 1.

I wanted the player to start with one individual, and have the ability to spawn more and breed a populaton.  That took too long, so I ended up spawning a whole bunch right from the start.

Species and similarity

What you’ll notice is that creatures are divided into specias: humins, cats, rats, and llamas (the llamas were supposed to be centaurs but I gave up on that) . Each individual also has an empathy-o-meter/ similarity-rating, the color under them. The more you interact with an individual the more that changes. New creatures get one based on their parents.

Breeding and killing

Creatures of different genders and the same species will produce an offspring if they are similar enough AND one or both of them are assigned as breeders. This is mostly to avoid population floods encountered in early testing.

You might wonder why breeding and killing are in the same subcategory. Because they both depend on similarity. If two creatures are too dissimilar they’ll want each other dead(regardless of species). If you keep a similar population confined and breeding you’ll notice that eventually they’ll start killing each other to keep ‘strange’ ones away. Much like history isn’t it?

Social commentary much?

Yes. The only time when you can be sure things won’t be killing each other is when there is only one left. Hence alone. After I finished the game I was left disgusted. I unwillingly made a game about racist intolerant cartoony critters that strip the land of resources and kill eachother because the color under their feet is different. You know: like real people. The relative accuracy of my ‘simulation’ was even confirmed by someone who actually bothered studying these things.

Anyway

The good is working with processing and making html5. A lot easier than I thought.

The bad was not getting to add sound effects, which I knew how to do, and making a cheap hack to loop music. Uneven distribution of resources and a lot of other gameplay and balance tweaks.

The achievements: The end game, when you have a single individual left, a single species left, or one individual of each species. A total of 7. I don’t think anybody got any.

Want to give it a try? knock yourself out:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=5432

Hi!

In the middle of the bad things I’ve been through the weekend. I decided to keep my game simple and tought that I could make a game out of my work. I’m alone at the night every thay and keep telling Windows that he should work becouse he used to. But I have leaved out the programming and stuff like that and added the fun parts and some problems to solve and watch out for.

Basically you sit in front of the monitor and try to find a way out of randomly generated 2D mazes to get score. But you have 4 stats – awakeness, stress, hydatation and bladder – as well to watch out for. If they reach their limit than you loose – fall a sleep, going mad, get dehydratated or be in shame at work place. These stats can be easily controlled with a mouse click. You can make coffee to drink to stay awake or water to get hydrated and you can go to the toilet.

The problem is their effect on eachother. Becouse if stress go high, then you are getting tired quicker and start to see hallucinations that couse more stress. Bladder goes up from water and coffee too, but you need to drink to reduce stress and to avoid dehydratation. And while you can make more coffe, you can’t replenish the water resource.

Hallucinations are coming when you are doing your job, but gets more intensive when you go alone to the toilet or the make coffee. So watch out. The ghosts are building up your stress…

The game made entirely in Processing becouse I needed to learn it. So This was my first time I’ve wrote a line of code in it. Sadly other things have gotten in my way, so the game is about half finished. It need some features and some graphics. There isn’t even support in the code for sound – I’ll add it tough. But the main engine is working pretty well.

This concludes to myself that I’m f***ing awesome and have to work hard on things like game making. Instead of the DAQ programs for foundries and the likes…

Anyway have fun with it. The source is up with the release. Feel free to use it. To play the game, click on the first screen, use wasd to move in the mazes and try to go out at the bottom as many of then as you can. Click on the coffee or the water to drink. If you run out of coffee, then click on it once more to get another one. (This minigame isn’t working yet!) To go to the toilet, click on the Bladder stat. (This is a similar minigame and it’s in the state like the other with the coffee…) There are no scores, but I wanted to do it like “how many mazes in wath amount of time, but maybe there are more possibilities than this. I’ll consider them too.

Here is the entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=5167 Try it out!

Hi LD#22!

Tonight maybe I can talk to my boss and get to know if I’m in this round or not. My work here at the university is done from my part and if my boss say that I don’t need to be here next week, then I can tell my fater to help me move back home on friday or saturday. So I can make something in the short amound of time I’ll have.

BattleToys for time critical developing:

Gimp, sfxr, Processing and if it’ll have sound, than some freeware tracker.

Oh brother I can’t wait for my boss… XD

Looking forward to LD#22. Day job release date of Dec 2nd was missed and moved to Dec 19th, so it will be fun to have more than one thing to stress about that weekend.

Tools:

Processing
ChucK
IanniX
Inkscape
Personal FOSS libraries (Piccolo2D, dishevelled.org, various Processing libraries)

After finishing my game I noticed that I had plenty of spare hours left so I decided to add a scoreboard. Unfortunately that meant communicating with a web server, which to my knowledge meant I had to sign the thing.

Signing applets involves some console work, but most importantly it involves an annoying popup asking people to let the thing run. In my mind that’s nearly as bad as a installer and I didn’t want anything of the sort, besides I tried that on a previous project (which come to think of it was also a 48 hour game) and that resulted in people not playing it a all.

From some android work I’ve done I remembered I can call links to pages even if the app has no permissions(the browser handles the links), and I wasn’t too surprised when I found out that an unsigned applet can do the same.

Basically what I did was call

link(“http://example.com/scores.php?name=Andrew&score=asdfg”);

(processing function, no Idea if it’s the same in reglar java) where ‘asdfg’ was an encrypted version of the score.  This coupled with making each score unique prevented floods on the scoreboard.

The function spawns a popup window, and I’ve noticed that even if chrome blocks it, it still preloads the score page causing the score to go through. This may or may not be a security issue.

If anyone knows a better, or just different way to have an applet share its internal data I’d love to hear it.

VIEW GAME PAGE

Hey all!

I can’t figure out a way to search the games by the technologies used to create them, and I’d love to see what else other people have created using the same languages as me.

It’s really inspiring to see the awesome things people can do, so if you used Java or Processing, I’d be really happy to take a look at your game!

Edit- Here’s a link to my game, available as an applet, web start, runnable jar, and OS-specific executables: Escape from Monster City

Hullo, I’m Scio. Nice to meet you :bows:.

This is actually my third Ludum Dare, but so far I have been totally asocial and never even introduced myself, let alone post the games, of which there was only one that was even remotely playable. Don’t ask.

But motivated by the trivial coincidence of this being LD #21 and being 21 years old myself, I have finally braved an intro. I am quite proud of that.

Let’s see if I can make a game too; shouldn’t be too hard. No pressure…

I will be working with the following tools, depending on how far I manage to go of course:

• The ever lovely LÖVE, if making a desktop game. This’ll mean lua.
• The ever…scripty…Processing.js, if making a web game. This’ll make it sort of javascript, sort of Processing.
• Inkscape, GIMP, and Mypaint for graphics.
• Blender for CGI: I won’t be making a 3D game.
• Sfxr (yay) for sound effects, and possibly Neil if daring to make music.
• My snazzy, Compiz-y desktop running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.
• Certain other non-computational implements.

I will, almost certainly, not be able to make the competition deadlines, so I’ll focus on Jam instead. And I will try to come up with something fitting the winning theme, but if I can’t…I’ll just choose another one I like and roll with it >.>

As for participation: I will silently stalk the IRC, and try to visit the Hangouts if my connection holds. I don’t have enough bandwidth (or courage) to livestream my work, but I will set up gLapse which was thoughtfully made for this very occasion!

Furthermore, I promise not to get too nervous and go into zen-procrastination-mode like I usually do during rushes.

[Also: Did I go overboard with the tags?]

Looking forward to LD#21, though (as usual) I won’t have much time to spend this weekend, am going up north to the lake.

I was hoping Looping would win for the theme, now I’m leaning toward Immortality.

Tools:

Processing
ChucK
IanniX
Inkscape
Personal FOSS libraries (Piccolo2D, dishevelled.org, various Processing libraries)

Finished LD14, started LD18 but didn’t finish, had work on that weekend.

This weekend is looking clear, except maybe a few breaks for Christmas shopping. I’ve been getting into Processing, so I’ll probably try using it this time. It’s super-quick to get things up and running so I find it very motivating. And it’s suitable for my new netbook, serious 3D seems to be out of the question.

Tools may include Paint.net, sfxr, musagi, and anything else I need.

It’s been a fairly shitty year of professional game development for me, just need a politics-free creative weekend to get the love back.

This isn’t an official entry, since it’s way too late. You can see what I was trying to achieve and why I missed the deadline here and here. I thought I’d post what I’d made, just for fun. This is the product of about two laptop battery charges (~2.5 hours), and one hour to polish, fix the odd bug and package .. so in total it’s about a ~6 hour game made using Processing.org. The game takes 1 min to play, and I’d say most people will be able to beat it on their first or second try.

Chances are, everyone is far too busy judging the record number of on-time entries this year .. but if you are curious, you can see the details and play the game here.

Badass Frog postmortem – the ‘meh’ factor

After my LD #11 ‘Minimalist’ entry was voted “most innovative” game, I’ve been trying to pride myself as “that guy that makes innovative games”. So I thought long and hard about the theme for LD #13, “Roads”, trying to come up with something innovative. But the creative juices just weren’t flowing, and it didn’t happen (I’d also just bought Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip for Wii, which was taking time away from ‘designing time’). After 12 hours, with no good ideas for a game I was actually enthused about making, I decided to make a simple Frogger clone – at least this way I could hone my Processing skills, and learn the ins-and-outs of Mobile Processing.

Some thoughts about developing for mobile devices

Turns out there is a whole “other world” of mobile development that I just hadn’t really thought all that hard about. (more…)

I’m a big fan of Python and of PyGame. But I’ve been doodling with Processing for several years now, too, and it’s idea of “sketches” kind of lends itself to a competition like this. For anything more substantial, I’d definitely rock it out on Python… and I still might. But the ease of getting simple things up and running on Processing is really appealing, as is the rock-simple cross-platform capabilities. It’ll depend on the theme and the concept that comes out of it, I suppose. We’ll see in about 35 minutes from now.