so I couldnt think of what else to do with theme, so here is a little puzzle/score/maze-em-up.
[ This here is the download link ]

sorry its not as funny as my other games

and heres a final desk shot, make sure to note the almost finished pack of hobnobs, the hardcore biscuit for hardcore people

Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av6esGTALq4
Source: http://sophiehoulden.com/randomstuff/ludum/minimalist02.fla
Browser Version: http://girlflash.deviantart.com/art/Dot2doT-83299341

My game is done now. You can download it here, enjoy

http://d.skalle.googlepages.com/ld10_final.zip

This zip countains source code and linux executable. Windows executable should come whenever I have the time.

Checked the winning theme this morning (around 7 hours after the start of the competition) and my mind was just blank. I opened up GraphicsGale, drew a bomb which I was quite pleased with, and that was it. No ideas popped into my head, and aside from deciding I wanted to use the bomb I’d drawn, I had nothing to work on or with. I then went out for the afternoon.

I got home 3 hours ago and started doodling around, until about an hour ago I finally have an idea.

It involves trying to detonate all of the bombs on a level by sliding them around so that when one explodes, it ignites the fuses on any unlit bombs next to it. At the start of the level one or more of the bombs will already be lit, and to make things more interesting, the bombs can have different length fuses.

I’m hoping to be able to come up with a range of levels of varying difficulty, but there’s only just over a day left, I want to get at least some some sleep tonight, need to get to bed early tomorrow, and I’m in the mood for coding rather than working out level designs, so I’ll just have to hope I can get the bulk of this written tonight and in the morning, to leave me a couple of hours early evening tomorrow to put together some levels.

I’ll be coding this in FreeBASIC and just using the standard graphics library, so it’ll be cross platform and work without any dependencies, unless I also find the time to add sounds effects and music of course,  in which case it’ll need FMOD.

Got to pop out for an hour now, but when I get back I’ll put together a quick mock-up screen.

It’s got MOON, it’s got NO TEXT, and it’s got blocky pixels, chirpy audio and all the other essentials!

This was a strange “compo”, but several interesting games came out of it and I had a good time working on mine. The 24-hour time limit was rather severly busted, but that’s fine I suppose. DQ means surprisingly little around here, especially since this compo had no voting.

As usual for me, the main idea was a technical one and involved using a sphere-mapped rectangular playing area. As one theme was “moon”, this seemed easy enough to work in. The actual game concept was undetermined until rather late in the process. At first I was thinking that maybe you’d drive across the moon in some vehicle, collecting things… but that didn’t happen, so I changed it. The final game is pretty cool imho, where you drop/stack colored chips onto the moon to make them disappear.

This all sounds very lame and boringly puzzly in theory, but the main challenge is the hideous control scheme. You don’t control your position directly, or even your speed, OR the acceleration - but the next-higher derivative! Tap right and you’ll see very little happen at first, but after a few seconds the moon starts slowly rotating in the chosen direction, and then it goes faster and faster unless you compensate in the other direction. It’s very easy to overcompensate and end up in an oscillating back-and-forth motion where you have no real grasp of what the hell you’re doing, but play the game enough and you can enter into a sort of zen state where you can “feel it” and get along pretty well. This is really essential, since you need to position yourself very accurately over the chips to avoid missing (and thereby creating a new stack which needs to be completed and removed).

Unsurprisingly, most people that tried the game hated it. Once I realized where it was going I pretty much tried to make it as evil as possible, much like a lot of old C64 games which you find in some old dusty drawer without a manual and have no idea whatsoever what to do with. You’d start a game and almost instantly die, and the controls weren’t obvious at all or severely broken. Ah, the heritage.

I’m really happy with the music though, sets the mood nicely. Imho the game is worth playing a few minutes for that aspect alone if you’re a retro geek.

Scroll down to the bottom of this post to read some instructions (that you shouldn’t really get if you want the full frustrating experience).

Download: Windows version (575 kB)

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Quick instructions: Arrow keys to move/rotate, Z to drop chips. Do not drop like-colored chips on top of each other.
There’s a small cheat which might make the controls a tad easier to grasp - type “showyou” at any point to bring up an acceleration graph in the top-right corner.

This was my second entry, and the first time that I got something playable. This is still one of my favorite games from LD, even though the graphics are a little simple.

TIE is a puzzle/platformer, where must build a roadway across a series of ice floes, while avoiding the exploding sheep.

You can find the game here:

http://www.vickijoel.org/ldgames/TransIcelandicExpress_U1.zip

The People was written for the Growth theme, and in many ways it resembles my first two LD games—there’s the tiled world, and you can build things on it. Only in this case it looks more fancy due to some clever tile rendering. Like my two first LD games, it’s a puzzle game.

There’s seven levels of varying difficulty, with goals such as ‘reach a population of X’ or ‘get Y huts’, a sandbox mode, and a tutorial mode. While you build stuff, a simulation is going on where new people appear and so on. A good description of what you actually do is, as someone put it, playing a planetary engineer.

My ‘post mortem’ for the game was pretty much the following:

So how did the game turn out? Good, and bad. My first idea was a kind of God game where you created land and such and people appeared. And there was supposed to be a kind of currency, that I called belief. So I coded the tile system and the simulation first, then I started to try to get it into a game. Well, it didn’t work, or at least it didn’t work without very much job, so I dropped it (the game idea, not the simulation and that). So I figured out another game: You have a limited supply of different kinds of land, and you have objectives to complete. Then there’s supposed to be interesting levels that are fun and challenging. I fixed up a tutorial mode, and a sandbox mode. These are pretty cool. Then there was the levels. I managed to come up with a few OK ones, but then it went downhill. So I ended with 7 levels, of which some are OK. Most are pretty easy, you just have to wait a while. I’m not very happy about them. But on the whole, the game’s pretty OK.

If you’re to believe the unofficial results from my own vote counter, The People did indeed turn out OK, and placed first in ‘fun’ and second in ‘innovation’ and ‘production’.

You can get the Windows compo version, or the Linux port version. They require OpenGL with multitexture support.

Uplighter was my entry for the Light & Darkness theme. It was a puzzle game centered on lighting up levels to certain percent by, among other things, placing lights, breaking down walls, and removing light sinks.

It’s was my first entry to feature 3D, although all gameplay and lighting is really in 2D, and it was also my first entry to not use Allegro. Instead it used GLFW, which is more lightweight, and I really didn’t need all the extra stuff from Allegro.

Uplighter is probably my best and most innovative LD entry so far—it placed first in ‘innovation’, second in ‘fun’, and also won the ‘Best In Show’ award.

You can get the compo version of Uplighter. It’s for Windows, but there’s a shell script (kindly provided by alar_k after the compo) that will fix stuff so it will compile for linux. You’ll need GLFW, GLFT, FMod and FreeType2.

Small notice: After the compo, it was reported to run very slowly on 3.0+ GHz machines. I’m still not sure what that was all about, but it has been reported that this can be fixed by compiling it in VS. If this is still much of a problem, I might get around to fix it myself.

Photon was my entry to LD6. The theme was “Light and darkness”. I still remember all the time I fiddled with shadow calculations. In my game, each light source does exact shadow calculations with all the level geometry - and in order to still have it all run with < 1% CPU, this was quite some work. Now, there’s nothing special about this except, I wanted to do things in the most simple way possible, this being an LD. And I had to admit utter defeat when I later saw bluescrn’s entry. Instead of spending half of the 48 hours on it like me, he went for a dead simple approach - with the only difference that his was not 100% accurate. Which would have made no visual difference in my game whatsoever. In fact his shadow method would have worked a lot better in my game in just about every respect

I still managed to do quite well. Here’s some screenshots from back then:

The title screen.

The goal of the game is to send all the photons coming from the lamp to the prism, but the problem is, you only can see the areas of the map which are lit up by the moving photons.

To control the photons, you can place mirrors - to light up more areas of a level, and once you have found the prism, send them all to it.

Seems the original submission is still up: original zip at original site

This was my entry for Ludum Dare #7, which was the first LD I entered. The theme (growth) eventually gave me the idea of growing a maze.

So, you create the maze as you walk around inside it. When the game begins, the maze is just a set of disconnected squares. Each of these squares can be linked with a set number of its neighbours (how many depends on the square, from none to four), and you create new links by walking from one square to another where there’s no previous link. Once a link is created it can be walked on as much as you want, but a link can’t be removed once created, so you have to be careful when creating your maze so you don’t get stuck.

Once I had that working the deadline was looming close, so I threw in some keys and locks and made the objective to clear all locks of each level, to make the thing resemble an actual game. In the end there was four levels, a random level generator, and also a level editor.

I wrote in the original README that I’d continue to work on the game, something I haven’t done. I still like the general idea behind the game, but it has this tendency to degenerate into just staring at numbers, which isn’t very fun at all, and on top of that it’s easy to get stuck, having to restart the level if you don’t pay attention. Perhaps some of the extra elements I didn’t have time to put in the game for the compo — more tile types, powerups, bombs, enemies — would have made it better (more varied if nothing else), but I think the interface is the main problem. It should be more obvious what tiles can connect, how many exits are left, etc, so there’s less guesswork, no number tracing, just puzzle solving. Since the levels are so “dynamic” getting that to work would be tricky, though.

Download: [ Windows | Linux (x86) + source code ]

Having learnt some great lessons from my previous LD48 entry, Save The Hut, I decided to not include as much boringness, confusion and frustration in my next game. Together with the theme Construction/Destruction, and a cosmetic theme of Sheep, it all became so obvious: I was to make a game where you construct traps to destruct sheep. And lo and behold! there was The Destruction of the Sheep.

I decided to use pretty much the same tech as for Save The Hut, but used it better to get some fancier stuff, like sub tile precision movements, rotated sprites, pseudo 3D particle gibs, and paintable background.

The game was supposed to be a puzzle game, but in the end only a few levels were puzzly, the rest was just mindless, but entertaining, sheep destruction with lots of gore. All in all, it worked out very well, making me a winner in ‘fun’ and ‘complete’ categories, and third in ‘gameplay (innovation?)’ and ‘overall’.

There’s an improved version available, adding some fixes, and a 2x time speed-up button (but there remains at least two bugs and a lot of spelling errors). You can get this version of The Destruction of the Sheep as a .zip archive or as an installer. They’re for Windows.

The original compo version is also available, both for DOS and for Windows (the Windows .exe was kindly provided by Hamumu during the compo). There’s also the source.

We cheated! We were two ppl working on SokoBomb me (drZool) and dr Elak. Yes, but we told so up front when we begun. Anyways the compo game is a randomly generated sokoban adventure… minus adventure. And the postcompo game is a puzzle/action adventure, without randomly generated rooms. But with whitty npc’s and melting icecubes

The original entry with random levels are here

The post compo beta/demo of the game with hand made levels can be found here including a video of the gameplay. We did enter Swedish Game Awards with it, but did not place.

Here are screens from compo entry:

First random generated level. Note to self: improve difficulty.

Dr Zoolak in a mean mood. Random-generated level.

A visit to cubicle hell, random style.

Here comes post compo screens:

Soko showcasing the latest in weapon sprite fashion.

Refraction in action.

Who farted?

Better put your shades on, those are real hardshadows.

No smoke without fire. Creeping features abound!

Pathfinding up and running, so are the conveyor belts.

Save The Hut was my very first entry into the world of ‘make a game in a low amount of hours’ compos. It was all about The Hut, and how to Save it from the hut-hungry alien invaders. The player had to make sure The Hut survived for a certain amount of time. To achieve this, stuff could be built, but there was a limit set by the amount of credits available. It played as a mix of RTS and puzzle.

Featuring 10 levels, 8 bit palette graphics awesomeness, developed for DOS using Allegro and DJGPP, it placed about 14th. Its shortcomings seemed to be that people had trouble figuring it out, had real trouble passing level 3 (The Holy Cactuses, which was pretty hard), had trouble running DOS games, and also found ‘hold out for X seconds’ extremely annoying (because it sucks to fail at ‘2 seconds left’ and have to replay the level).

You can download a newer, slightly improved version (for Windows) of Save The Hut as a .zip archive, or as an installer. Or, you could get the old compo version (for DOS).

Lunar Chickens was quite a fun game to make I really enjoyed taking pictures of my rubber chicken in different poses to get the stop-motion animation used for the character. It was quite a challenge to pose the chicken though, I had to stick wires all through its body to hold it in various poses. The game itself is a puzzle game and fairly “just-ok”. The best bit is the chickens running around.

I don’t think I have this game available for download now, but if you really want to see it, get ahold of me and I’ll put it somewhere.