I hate it when this happens. You create this universe. You come up with these characters. You twist this game mechanic and run with it. You end up falling in love.
And you swear up and down that it’s time to move on, you’ll do something new, something exciting and “innovative.” Something that’s different for the sake of being different in some futile attempt to break some hypothetical mold.
And it never happens. Because you’re in love.

Yep, I’m remaking an old contest entry.
All melodrama aside, this is going to be awesome. So awesome, you may want to take a knee.

Oh, wait, it looks like our little blue protagonist already has. Because he can duck now.

Also, I figured out how purple works.

This time around, you’ll be immersed in the universe in the way I had it visualized from the start. You’ll follow a storyline and get to know the characters just as well as I did. You will be tested and you will be challenged and you will like it and you will fall in love.
Oh, and you get a cookie if you remember this guy:

You won’t remember this guy, though:

These vids are old! It’s coming along like crazy. I hope I impress at least one of you guys, because this is going to be the biggest, most elaborate game I’ve ever made.

I started to work in “No Time To Stop” near the Ludum Dare 26 and my idea was enter with it but unfortunately no arrived with enough gameplay, still i’m to slow to code :S

At first the game was made using a 16 color palette with a resolution of 120×80 and scaled later to 8x, all very minimalistic, here the first game style.

Now my idea is try to do something more colorfull with shadows/lights and glow but keeping the 8x pixel-art, here a screenshot:

To see the game in movement:

Some info about the game:

Resolution: 960×640
Genre: Arcade/Platformer with some logic/puzzles
Platforms: Win,Mac,Linux – Android/iOS – OUYA and maybe GameStick
Engine: Multimedia Fusion 2

For complete info you can check the official website or if you want to follow the development check the Tigsource Devlog .

And a few days ago the game was uploaded on Greenlight

And well I hope code more fast for the next compo or at least enter some fun-playable!.

I’ll just leave this here;)

HINT: You can’t kill the Destroyer when it is moving fast or slamming the ground. Also – click / drag to use catapult!

Click here to play/view my ENTRY

What do “Reich 18″ means? Well, it’s from a minimalist music masterpiece:  “Music for 18 musicians” (1974) by Steve Reich cf. http://youtu.be/zLckHHc25ww  There are only 4 musicians on the game screen because the screen is small; … I’m wondering if controlling 18 buttons/musicians  could be possible! So you have to press the right key (X,C,V or B) when the range of notes is full; 5 bonus points if the maestro is vertically above.

It’s not the greatest gameplay (it’s pretty boring after 1minute…) but I think the feeling is similar to the old 1980s game & watch.

so yea, I am doing an Atari VCS/2600 game, though I have to work this weekend …

Story:

You are Carl, you are a crackhead, its 10 days before Christmas, and the only gift you can think of is a gigantic rock that will “send you to the moon” . Of course no one in their right mind will give that to you, so you make your own holiday spirit … by stealing enough crap to buy the boulder via breaking and entering.

At first it seems too easy, as the decent folk of the city are out shopping, or at plays n whatnot … but since you live in a small town you quickly run out of new targets, and the owners of the houses you already hit get wise… and more defensive of their property, nothing will stop you but a number of bullets into your drug tweaked body.

Items finished:

• Multicolor Title Screen
• City Map
• Play-field Collision
• Carl’s sprite (non animated atm … depends on time)
• Controls
• Atari Missile collision with Carl, fired from enemy
• Enemy collision with Carl
• Java port of “Stella” emulator setup on my personal site so people dont have to find a emulator to check it out

My two screenshots ATM:

The Charity Game Jam was a huge success. Our initial fundraising goal was $250 and as you can see, we destroyed it! Mission accomplished. Achievement unlocked. Boss battle won. Princess saved. THANK YOU VERY MUCH, EVERYONE! I’m humbled and grateful for all your enthusiasm, hard work, and generosity. Should we do this again next year?
Play The Games Here! | Keynote Video | Announcement Post

But close enough!

Certainly didnt get around to a few major features that Id really hoped for (like being able to steal a car – kinda important in a game that references Grand Theft Auto)

But I’m certainly happy with what I did get done over the weekend. ‘Super Theft Auto’ is a good start for an interesting little mini game.

You can play the current version of the game at the following link after installing the plugin (links/instructions are on the page- the only major OS not supported is OSX):

[LINK] (youll also find it on the CharityGameJam games submission screen of course)

Theres also a link on the page to a .blend download of the setup for the computer VideoTexture scene, youll need Blender 2.64a if you want to mess around with it.

Features:

• A game within a game – You start in a 3D world with a 3D computer, the (kinda) NES style game plays on the screen of the Funkytron computer (press space to zoom in and focus on the screen to actually see what youre doing)
• Large city area to explore (sadly only on foot at this stage)
• Pedestrians wander around the city (they make good target practice)
• Cars driving around (rare and very basic implementation)
• Gun ammunition to pick up
• Basic scoring system (you can score points for killing people)

Either way, this was a fun miniLD to participate in, was great to see the charity fundraising goals surpassed! (for a second time) Now I look forward to playing some of the other games

Fatality!

Im about done for today’s work on the game. Made some progress, theres a player sprite which runs around, and a basic environment (road with buildings either side and an intersection) along with some cars that randomly spawn and can drive into you (blood splatter included), now I have other things to tend to

A friend of mine might be getting involved with the game while I’m away for the next 10-20 hours, so progress might be made (hes been working on music for it today). Then tomorrow will be time to sit down and start finishing things! Ive purposefully aimed pretty low with this game, I’ll just get as much done as possible and enjoy it.

Either way, the game Ive been wanting to make for this is effectively ’GrandTheftAuto re-imagined for the NES’. I hope to have at least 1 gun, cars to drive/steal, blood to splatter and sidewalks to drive down, maybe even some simple kinds of missions. We’ll see!

Some screens:

Car driving past

Might also mention, I 3D’ized the gamepad texture recently released as well, so now theres 2 controllers in the scene (which adds to it nicely I think!)

Find retro inspiration here: http://www.slayradio.org

For a game that was all about contrast – I gave myself the challenge of working to a high-contrast, 16 colour palette, arrows, and one other button.

I started out with really quite over-the-top expectations for this mini LD. I’d planned out a game with 10 levels, with cutscenes in between telling a story. But in the end I only really got started on Thursday/Friday, and only had a working level by this afternoon. So this is the stripped down, gameplay only version of the game I’d planned to make.

There’s something about the old EGA palette that just takes me back to playing Alleycat/Commander Keen (I can’t even look at that blue/purple combination without drifting off), and I made it a little hard/tricky to try and get that feeling of nostalgia to shine through in the gameplay as well as the graphics.

Matt (@brainfed) provided music, and although he initially struggled with getting the ‘french’ sound, I think he came up with a great ‘sneaking’ theme, and two other tracks that I’ll work into the game when I finish the rest as I originally intended it. Josh (@joshuatreee) helped out too, providing in-between frames for the walk cycles, and the Eiffel tower painting. Both were great collaborators to bounce ideas off, and we might go into LD24 as a team.

This is my third Ludum Dare game, and in each one I’ve hit a massive memory management stumbling block on the last afternoon. This time, entire levels failed to unload properly, which resulted in the game running faster for some reason. Eventually I fixed it, but on the way created one of the funnier bugs I’ve caused making games – A second player would spawn in, standing on the head of the first one. You could then knock this unresponsive doppelganger flying into the oncoming guards. Matt and I both enjoyed playing around with it, so I make work that mechanic into something else down the line.

Play the game here. We’d all love some feedback, and I’m really keen to hear if any colourblind people are able to play the game and if they have any problems with the colour mechanic.

For LD23, I decided to go full-retro, and make a z80-based game that runs on Pac-Man arcade hardware. I’m not going to lie to you, I didn’t even come close to completing it, and I’m totally fine with that. You can see the “finished” product here. From there you can get the romset (mspacmab – bootleg spaceman, for reasons I won’t get into), the source, and the link to the google code repository that has my Z80 kernel which I used for it. Fact of the matter is, I wanted to do a Z80/Arcade rom game for LD, I did it, and I’m happy that I did. I think I may do this for future LDs as well, learning from each (failure) along the way.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish something in time for either the regular compo or the jam, but I wanted to see how much I could get done in time, without going out of my way to devote all 48 hours on it.

I was coming home from a work trip, so if you watch the time-lapse off of the link above, you will see that I’m actually working on it in an airport (in Atlanta, Georgia) as well as on an airplane, along with on the couch at home and at an office desk. I squeezed in as much time as possible.

The main thing that prevented me from getting (a little) further is that I was planning to spend evenings on the work trip i was on, in re-aquainting myself with the tools (assembler, z80 kernel, etc) that I haven’t really looked at in about 5 years. I also wanted to add support in my “Llemonide” z80 IDE/emulator, for building and better debugging. Instead, for various reasons, I was unable to have any downtime at all on the work trip to devote to this project. I was essentially going in to LD completely green on the subject. I spent a lot of time creating the project, remembering how my z80 kernel works, basics like that which should have been old-hat.

So what did I learn? Spend A LOT of time getting familiar with your tools. Do practice jams. Try to minimize the amount of boilerplate stuff you’ll be recreating to save time. You need to spend your time making your game, not fumbling with your tools.

Better luck and progress next time!

As a sidenote, all of the source for mine is available at the page for Tiny World ’82, along with links to the tools/kernel, and the romset. I have included instructions to running it within the Google Chrome browser, in case you don’t have MAME handy. Check it out and review it if you like. I’m just hoping for an non-zero score on this one.

In the past, I’ve made a few arcade ROM hacks, new Z80/Pac-Man hardware ROM code, as well as writing some tools that quite a few people have used over the past 15 years or so (AGE and Turaco). Being that this next LD is notable as being the 10th, I figured I’d celebrate by attempting to do an LD entry that is “retro” to the fullest extent that I can think of.

I’m going to do a 16kbyte “Ms Pac-Man Bootleg” (mspacmab) romset entry. I will provide an emulator so that you can play it in a web browser (or at least via Java) or you can drop the romset into your MAME emulator port of choice to try it out. (Note: This means I’m targetting that cpu (Z80) Memory Map (Pac-Man Arcade Hardware), Color PROM (MsPac-Man), etc. You will be able to burn the roms, and drop them onto real hardware to play this!)

I’ll be using my z80 kernel (some routines to simplify screen drawing, handling a coindrop menu, that kind of thing) which is available on google code here: http://code.google.com/p/bleu-romtools/ . (Also there are the graphics tools mentioned before (Turaco), as well as a slightly modified Z80 assembler, adding some things that simplify use in a constrained ROM memory map)

It should be pretty fun and very challenging! I invite any of you as insane as I am to pick your retro platform of choice (Commodore 64? PET? Amstrad? Sinclair? Atari 8-bit? Amiga?) and go for it for this one along with me!

I haven’t really been in a Z80 headspace in a couple years now, I’ll be starting this on the end of a work business trip ,coding in a hotel and airplane, then working on it while helping care for a toddler, and that the tools aren’t as advanced as for other platforms…

I’m sure my entry and effort will go down in a blaze of failure, due to so many things being against me on this, but I’m going to give it a try anyway.

Hey there, I’m Nik, and I’m a Ludum Dare first timer!

I had no idea what to do, at first.  So I started to plan. The best thing I came out of was something to do with God, as he’s alone. So I emptied my mind into Game Maker, and created… a thing. This thing is called The Almighty Annihilation. It’s a 8-bit styled game where you have to wipe out the entire population of Earth with Meteors and Lightning Strikes. Sounds fun, right? Please tell me it is.

I made the game in 21 hours, with lots of frantic rushing and developer’s block. I know it’s not the greatest, and it seems very basic, but please. I am slow and can’t be bothered most of the time. I made a game. Enjoy.

I went full retro this time, I love that style of gfx.

4 different ambient “songs” made with renoise to set the mood.

An end with a twist, which I hope will make ppl remember it.

Should take about 5-15 minutes to finish.

Play it @ http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=1087

Made with Ruby & http://ippa.se/chingu

So I’m going for Retro DOS epicness! Commander Keen vs. Captain Comic! I’ve never actually played Captain Comic, but Commander Keen is one of my favorite game sagas, and I’ve always wanted to make a fan-game of him.

The game is going to be an RPG (hopefully). You’ll explore a planet (Mars, I guess?) in search of Captain Comic, who has raised the Vorticons in revolt against Keen. (yes its lame, and I might change that later on) When you touch an enemy, it will go into a battle mode like Mario & Luigi (GBA and DS) and Paper Mario (GC).

I started drawing the graphics last night, and I’ve got most of the “overworld” graphics done. Here’s a screenie of my progress:

And yes, everything is collidable and there’s a camera that works I’m using my Flibber game engine to make it.

Anyway, I’ll see ya all around. Good luck with your games

Maybe this is what I should have been doing for the last LD… It took me two days to make and it’s based on the code of my LD11 entry (I didn’t even miss Felicity!)

Download over herely

Making “just a game” was kind of enlightening, since I didn’t have any real technical challenges to overcome and could just get on with content and putting in simple control logic to make it all come together. It’s pretty much an unthinkable project viewed in terms of what I’ve been doing the last few years, but since both development and result were enjoyable it’s a pretty clear hint that I should be doing it more often.

However, I ruin that immediately by having a natural impulse to make some kind of convenient editor/engine which would reduce the need to write copious amounts of replicated-but-slightly-modified code for instance when I want new enemy types etc. I have made these before, and each time I end up spending weeks or months working on it and then never really use it because I get increasingly unhappy with how it’s built. Still, I couldn’t possibly make a game of say 10x the complexity/scope of this one without using more structured code at the very least. And defining animations, scripted events, enemy patterns etc would quickly get tiresome and repetitive to do in code+Photoshop if you have more than one or two types to deal with. The grunt of this game (discounting image loading and input code) is a 1500-line C file, where almost all logic is directly in the main loop – wonderfully spontaneous way to work but of course breaks down with increased program size due to convoluted value/flow dependencies, loss of overview and the need to repeat code.

The fact that I did manage to create this in just two days though, and that I didn’t run into any major hickups along the way, probably says something about suitable code vs application complexity. If I had gone and made “a perfect design” with fancy classes and streamlined algorithms for everything, I would most likely not be done yet. More importantly, I probably wouldn’t even have started since such a small project doesn’t really justify that kind of work. Not without the prospect of a larger product coming out of it, and if there was one I would probably be too intimidated by the thought of that and keep trying to out-think myself in terms of what stuff I’d need to make that “great big thing” work eventually.

I think Derek Yu recently said something about coders being able to “doodle” games like artists sketch with pencil and paper, and that’s probably an important thing. A sketch is never meant to be used for anything substantial, it’s just playing around with the tools of your trade to make something spontaneous and fun. If it turns out nice then you could potentially do it again from scratch but “do it right” and expand on it if you wish – but you should definitely not be doing it the roundabout way to begin with since that would destroy the spontaneity and make it a laborious task instead of a free-minded sketch. When sketching you can only use whatever skills and processes that come natural to you, without considerable planning or conscious mental effort. Of course, with increased experience this set grows larger and some people could probably do advanced class hierarchies without thinking too much about it. All the more power to them.

Since I made this thing in such a short timespan, I have a pretty good overview of all the techniques I used and the bare-bones code needed to make them work. This could provide some extra value when designing larger game systems as I might be able to target my efforts more carefully, and not get overly general or implement pointless things. For trying out pure game ideas though, I still feel that it would be sensible for me to “sketch” in a more streamlined tool… a kind of game maker for sure, but definitely not Game Maker (for the simple reason that I’m incapable of using any tool that is close enough to what I could potentially build myself, which is a most unfortunate condition in terms of productivity… but creating a tool to fill some (possibly imagined) need of my own is just so very rewarding)

Some more project additions on my shiny new site. New design really makes adding stuff a lot more convenient compared to what I had before. Actually one of the updates is a project entry on that very system; SPCMS (the morbid can have fun looking through some source code on that one)

Mainly though, I finally got around to releasing Nitro Butts – an old game from 2005 that me and my brother made out of oldschool boredom. It’s actually quite a bit of fun and you can even do co-op if you have a gamepad and additional human around.

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.

Ah, great compo this was. Tons of sweet games. Unfortunately that also meant fierce competition, and I only managed to snag a best position of 3rd in Fun (which is unusual for me, as I normally do better in the technical categories).

Base idea for the game was to have the level be “swarming”, for an unexpected approach. I figured there could be loose platforms drifting around in space and you’d try to jump around between them, doing… stuff. The gameplay part of it was sketchy at best.

I suppose the better part of the first day was spent getting the platform movement and interaction working, and then I think much of the second day I just sat and tweaked it, fixing bugs. The gameplay elements and final graphics/audio were added in the last two or three hours.

Windows download: 128 kB zip (exe, data, source)

Linux port: 16 kB tar/gz (needs above file for data)

Arcade build a’la Lerc.

My first LD entry, for the #7 compo in December 2005.

Story, according to readme.txt:

You’re kidding right? Uhm… Control
Jackie as she tries to escape from her
sugar-induced nightmare by climbing an
ever-growing flower. Flying pigs are
attacking and she needs to feed them
candy until they burst.

Collect delicious pig eggs for score,
and keep a look-out for hearts to boost
your health should you need it.

What more is there to say? You jump around, throw candy, collect eggs and try not to fall into the water as platforms appear and disappear from the randomly growing flower. The flower itself was the most advanced piece of code in this one, and the first thing I started working on. Generally I seem to go about LD compos that way – think of some cool technical concept, then implement it and try to turn it into a retro platformer somehow…

Download, WIN32 binary+src: jackiebs.zip (1.24 MB)

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Just starting out, no platforms have grown out yet.

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Flower has grown a fair bit and there are tons of platforms.

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White pig has eaten too much candy, burst is imminent.