Hi there,

This is the first Ludum Dare that me and my team are participating, it’s been quite a ride, literally, we started the day traveling to another city in another state where we would be present at a games and anime event, so, obviously, we started thinking in the idea of the game in the middle of the road! YAY!

As we’ve made lots of platformers in the pasts GGJ, we were looking for to make some top-down-ish game, soooo…

Our game will be called RED, which stands for Red Eyes in the Dark! (and we thought about it right before lunch, minimalism in the title, way to go!)

It is a game about a kid who is in his house alone and there’s a power outage in it, leaving him in the dark and only with a flashlight to guide his way to the outdoor moonlight.
The thing is, when he is in the dark, he starts to see glowing red eyes coming at him! OH NO!
However, when he aims at them with his flashlight, he is able to slow them down, giving him time to avoid them and make it safe to the light.

As if there wasn’t trouble enough already, it turned out that his batteries are drying out and his has little time to reach the light before they run out.

I am doing the game design and programming, Joao is making the assets and Pablo is having its way with the level designs.

We have some prototypes that somewhat work already, here are some pics of them:

RED ScreenShot

In this first screen we see the player moving and the red eye creature following him, the flashlight is not hitting the creature, so it is at full speed!

RED ScreenShot

In this second one you can see that the creature is illuminated by the flashlight, so its eyes close and it gets slower.

This jam is being quite the ride so far, we plan to get more assets done and stuff before tomorrow, where we will be in the event again and things get a little bit noisy there (btw, oh yeah, we are making the game while in the event, live! No stream though, what a shame… but here is a pic of us there, with the Ben Powell keynote in the background, so people will know what the hell we are doing there).

Our booth at Saga

Thanks for reading until here! More updates tomorrow! Have a good Ludum Dare!

With the exception of one of the animations, I think I have all the coding done. The graphics aren’t great, but they can pass if I don’t find time to sharpen them up tomorrow. If necessary, I can put in the levels / character speeches and call it a game. Of course, tomorrow I’m going to try to add some polish:

1.) Smooth out the controls a bit.
2.) Intro / Finish Screen
3.) Sound Effects
4.) Polish the UI (rounded corners, amirite?)

If I can do all this, I’ll be happy. If I knock these things out, I can try working on…

5.) See if I can spice up the graphics some more (there’s only so much that I can do )
6.) Music

Progress on our game has come along quite well.  Most of the core mechanics are set in place and most of what’s left is to create art assets and design levels.

We decided to take Minimalism in a direction other than “No Gameplay or Graphics” by making a game about a boy whose world is being tainted by extradimensional horrors.  He must defeat these creatures and stop the tide in order to return his world back to the 8-bit monochrome place it used to be.

Not sure how much of this plan we can complete, but we’ll see.

I just finished implementing a random  dungeon generator for Babel

Yello wizard needs food, though.

So, 2AM here and I am up since 8am… Weird I am not dropping dead yet.
Though I was making breaks and clocked something like 10 hours behind computer so far.

Anyways, satisfied with progress so far, almost all tech stuff done, adding sounds and stuff.
Basically for tomorrow tuning sounds and making tutorial levels is left, + there is bunch of bonus features to try to add.

Also as I use Adobe AIR both Android and Web version coming up fine and without slowdowns.

Good luck everyone and till tomorrow ;)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8332206/Temporary%20Links/MinimalistMayhem.swf

Starting to look awesome.  And yay, I drew demented christmas tree monsters.  woohooo~

It’s still clunky. oh well.

At least it works!

I’m using it to create the levels in the game right now.

After the first day, we’ve got quite fun game coming up:

It’s a minimalistic food chain ecosystem simulator, with you being its lowest part. However, thanks to pheromone distribution, you can control bigger creatures and keep the races from going extinct and thus the whole ecosystem in a balance.

There are no sounds yet, no title screen. The rules are explained at the link above.

We are Eatacay (concept, graphics) and Jarnik (gameplay, programming).

You Lost!

It’s the end of a great day. My game is quite done so tomorrow I have a full day for polishing And most important, the game is fun!

I managed to implements all my ideas, I composed some music for the game for the first time and I really like the result and the live stream was really fun (big thanks for my friends and family ).

Live Stream

Watch my live stream: http://www.twitch.tv/galman33

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/galman33

yes, it’s a raycaster

Okay, it’s midnight local time – enough for today. I made good progress, but I’m not sure about my concept. It’s basically a mixture of Wolfenstein and Paint. Or something. I don’t know. It’s not really playable, yet.

It does fit the theme very well, though – minimalism implies “only a minimal amount of fun”, right? Also, my game makes only minimal sense.

So this is my current state. Possible to peel Potatoes!

I’m having quite a hard time to make it fun but I’m just trying to finish things up to make sense at least.

First Screenshot

Not bad for a few minutes of work. Raycaster rendering is a go!

Progress! Also, there is a Fullscreen mode, and a Tutorial, too.

So, yeah, this game’s based on an idea I got some times ago.

The idea is that you’ve only one big pixel to know your surrounding.

Currently, I just have to put sound, window title and actually implement the “easy mode” which will print the pixel value(r,g,b)

I have bullets.  I have strafing.  I have a weapon.

After a bunch of trepidation, since I haven’t had good experience with map editors and tilemaps in the past, I seem to actually have something working.  Woo!  I have collision detection too!  The sprite here for the player is just placeholder graphics ripped from my warmup game.

The real question here is if I can get the tilemaps to dynamically change.  hmmmmmm.

17.5 hours in and I have done….okay, I haven’t even really started.  But that’s mainly because I went to a weekly dance thing for a few hours, and then I got a good healthy night’s sleep after that

Before I went to bed though, I was brainstorming and stumbled upon the idea for my game.  See, the thing is, everyone’s gonna be making minimalistic games this time.  But you know what–screw that.  Before the theme was announced, I said I wanted to make a hyper-awesome twitchy colorful fun arcade-style game, and dammit, I’m sticking to that.  So, okay, the theme and “plot” of my game is going to involve minimalism, but the actual game is going to be anything but minimalist.

Working title: Minimalist Mayhem.

I’m thinking something along the lines of Hyper Princess Pitch.  Shooting, weapons, powerups, all of that good stuff.  Probably the same perspective, and also a shooter like that.  The game’s protagonist will be…Mr. Minimal, or Mrs. Minimal, or something like that.  His goal?  To eliminate the evil aliens that are (for some reason) hell-bent on bringing color, liveliness, extravagance, and vivid music to the world.  Oh, and he wants to paint all the rooms white too.

Ridiculous?  Yes.

Let’s get started.

Slow but steady progress on the game.
Working on the stealth puzzler section next.
Drop by to watch on http://twitch.tv/kimau

Hi there! Me and my comrades are working on minimalistic first person shooter on this Ludum Dare. I almost implemented base FPS system now. Here is screenshot.

Nothing better then getting inspired from incredible D&D monster book drawings to draw my own minimalistic…. eeee… pixels! -_-

Actually just drawing to help me understand conversions from one space to another when zooming in weird engine I am building

Progress has been made, but is more of an internal progress. I know what I’m working on and it should be done by the end of the comp.

I also have found nourishment in liquid form… It’s called beer and I recommend it for the over 18s/21s. Good luck everyone else on their games,