Ok, here is my first screenshot. I have been wrestling a lot with the underlying code, so things have been a bit slow. Plus I have to re-familiarize myself with a number of graphics tools.

The premise of this game is that you have a flying island high above a windswept planet. On your island you must gather the precious gas resource and defeat your rivals for control over it all. You have the choice of whether to build gas gathering buildings, defensive turrets (pictured), offensive missiles, or stability buildings.

The chain reaction is that when your island is hit with missiles neighboring areas begin to weaken. If there is too much weight on a weakened area from your buildings, whole parts of your island may crumble.

Ok, time for some shuteye and then the final push!

Ludum Dare 8 was my second ’short term’ game programming contest, and my first solo. The theme was ’swarms.’ I was bound and determined to do an RTS game this time, since my partners in team compos always want to do something actiony. I think I actually wanted robots or magnets or something like that.

I thought it would be nifty if instead of directly building units, you had to attract units with various buildings. So you start with a base and 1 swarm. There are resource buildings (Apple, Flower, and Metal) that you can hover over that will give you various resources. You also have a base. You can build either Apple or Nectar huts in your base. These increase your attraction rates for food or nectar. (It was originally going to be food and sex, if you read the code. I guess bees have sex with flowers or something.) Once bugs are attracted to your base, you can add them to existing swarms, or break them off into new swarms. You can also build Radar to increase your attraction range, or buildings to increase the power or speed of your bugs.

Initially this was going to be swarm vs. swarm warfare, but I ran out of time pretty quickly. (I’ll go into my mistakes below.) So instead the computer just sent a specified number of waves with a specified strength at you at regular periods, and you needed to have swarms built up and ready to fight when they came.

Obviously one of my largest problems was art. As you can tell from my screenshot, It’s ugly. Really really ugly. All the art in the game was ‘placeholder’ art that I was going to go back and fix. That never happened. Secondly, I panicked at about 30 hours. I barely had an engine, and the deadline was closing in. I actually ‘gave up.’ I came back to it, and finished up later. Thirdly I didn’t have a good plan. I know I wanted an RTS, but I didn’t have a good execution plan. I also bit off WAY more then I could chew back then.

My tips for beginners are:

1. Make a plan - Seriously, take that first hour, and may out some code to get rid of the urge. THen take the next hour or two, and make a task list. What code does your idea need? Divide it up into tasks. As you go along, check things off that you’ve put in.
2. Take breaks - This is always a newbie mistake too, but, make sure you take regular breaks. 48 hours, even with a couple of sleep periods, is plenty of time to get something done.
3. Start Small - It’s much easier to add to a simple game then it is to try and cram in everything a more complex game needs.

Battery was my entry to LD9. The theme was “Build the level you play”. Initially, the open voting hinted at a clear winner of the theme “battery”, for which Hamumu found the best explanation: Battery is a place where bats are hatched. Now, when I woke up the morning of the LD, first thing was I checked the theme, and it mysteriously had shifted. So, I decided to make an RTS where you start with nothing, then have to build up the battery you play.

The title screen.

An in-game shot. Basically, you can order bats to dig (build the level you play), and in the new cave room build different structures for hatching worker and soldier bats and providing food to them. At fixed intervals, a wave of most horrific enemies will attack the battery - so you better have enough soldiers by then.

Gnome Guard was my entry to LD1 - theme guardian. In the game, you are confronted with a horde of small gnome children, and have to safely guard them home after school.

The title screen

The gnomes will run towards the green pillar, and avoid the red pillar.

But only if they feel like it.

The original download is mirrored here - no idea if the game itself still works: download link

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).

LD48 #0 was a 24-hour competition with the theme “Indirect Interaction”. To celebrate that, I created Castle Smash, an RTS game where you have no control over your units. You just make buildings to create them, and decide where to build bridges. Their “AI” tells them what to do. Yes, it’s a lot like Majesty, which I had not even heard of at the time. This is a 2-player (at the same computer) game, with no single player option at all.

Galcon cleaned up pretty well in the compo. Here are links to my post-mortem and history. Truth be told, I’ve been making versions of this game for about 15 years now. But this version almost didn’t happen - during the theme voting for this contest I was leading a large group of people to back a different theme from swarms - I had in mind to make an Adventure Game. But since swarms won, I figured I’d try re-making Galcon again for lack of a better thing to do.

On the tech side I realized I needed to up my production going beyond what can be done with pygame. I used pyplus and swig to build C extensions for my game so that I could do some cool graphic and swarming techniques not possible within python. However this caused some trouble, I was able to submit my linux source of the game for the deadline, but due to the craziness of python extensions for windows it took me another full day of work to get it ported to windows.

After the compo I made a shareware version of the game:

Check it out.