I’ve managed to add an energy pickup to the game. I had plans to do several versions and sizes, but time is short and this is all I can do. They are randomly generated somewhere in the sky and randomly find a home on the ground. If they fall into a hole or miss the terrain entirely, they’re lost forever!

CODING ERROR!!! SPAWN RATE TOO HIGH!
ABORT ABORT ABORT

Here’s what I have so far, this will probably be the win condition.

The planetoid is probably going to stay, graphically speaking. The caveman, less likely (from an open source sprite library).

Target name: Accretion. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

We finally got a name for our game! (The beta name was Tiny Takeover, but we decided to move on from that.) It’s officially titled Pow! Pow! Pow! aka; The Game About a 16mm Hero Who Fights Off Invading Aliens From Supersizing His Home Planet.

Cake got some music edited and ready for implementation thanks to Otomata, and she’s going to eventually figure out sound effects later. She also got a Pause menu and a Main Menu designed, and Zeik has most of the game logic programmed. Our next major step is to 1.) Get Dinner, 2.) Get some music and sound effects figured out, and 3.) Build out some level designs.

Cake’s screenshot of the main menu….

and Zeik’s screenshot of his work with the game and the additional texture overlay we have going on.

Ludum Jamming to: Mazzy Star – Flowers in December

Just finished the base level code and the character code. All art (except enemies) is just about done. Now I need to worry about finishing all the other levels.

This is my first time doing LD – I’m really hoping I can make it!

Yeah, I know it looks like nothing it’s all placeholders :/ But actually quite a bit of work is done with the game rules implemented (at least good enough) and I just need to add GUI and graphics and polish oh and I forgot… AI!! (argh that’s going to be tough, but I need a min-max algorithm). Also I started late, wasted probably 5h I could have used before I got started. But I’ll call that day 1 and there should be more time tomorrow to finish it.

I’ve competed in plenty of algorithmic coding challenges (ACM ICPC, Google CodeJam, Stripe’s CTF, Google AI Challenge, etc). But this is the first time I’ve competed in Ludum Dare. I first heard about it during LD21 when Notch streamed making prelude to the chamber. I was completely psyched and stoked to learn that such a competition existed at the scope that it exists. It’s crazy.

When LD22 came up I payed a little more attention and got into the nitty gritty details of some of the entries, but I just wasn’t ready to give it a shot.

I knew since January that I was going to try to jump into LD23 arms flailing if nothing else. Without further ado, here are my ideas and progress thus far:

Name: Nibble

Genre: Top-Down, Dungeon Crawler

The main character, Nibble, starts with 4 bits of memory. His memory can hold/store programs of varying length. As you kill monsters you gain experience and when you level up you gain additional bits of memory. Every monster is made just like the main character, made up of bits that represent their programs. Some programs provide sight, strength, speed, defense, size, shape, color, ranged attacks, elemental attacks, and splash attacks (the list is subject to change as new ideas develop and more time is lost). So, naturally, the higher the level the enemy the better programs he will have and the harder it will be for you to destroy him. Occasionally monster deaths will drop programs that you can use to mix and match with your memory. The kinds of trade offs, less sight for more strength, less health in favor of speed, etc. It’s up to you to decide how you want to configure your character as long as you can find the programs. There will, hopefully, be some pretty awesome special programs, like ones that can sense your enemies sight or attack ranges.

If I get enough time there should be locked doors which require you to be a specific color, a specific shape, have a special elemental attack, or kill all enemies in the local dungeon room. There are some fun neat ideas that I really hope work out. Fog of war… possibly the ability to place breadcrumbs of some sort so you can remember how to get back to a specific door or something of interest.

Ok, so what do I have so far?

Below is a screenshot showing off automatic dungeon generation of floors and walls (so far no chests, doors, enemies, etc). I have the initial version of Nibble who can explore the dungeon. He properly handles collisions against the environment. It probably doesn’t seem like much, but it’s taken forever to get where I am. I’m writing all of my code in Scala. Using Gimp to create my art resources (no I’m not an artist at all). And I’ve made a few fun sound loops in fruityloops.

Feel like looking at the current demo? Check out http://nbauernfeind.github.com/

Hi all,

I started today… In this opportunity I’m using Haxe (http://www.haxe.org) and NME (http://www.haxenme.org).

The game is about an astronaut who has to save the Haxe Planets (small planets that have Haxe: the fuel of intergalactic ships).

Today I ported a platform library and improved it to Haxe/NME (I added camera support, improved jumping, etc.), I made a small tool that turns Tiled maps into Haxe classes, created some graphics, and a first level to try the engine.

I pretend to use the engine in touch devices like smartphones and tables, that’s why I chose HAXE NME, so the game is a ONE BUTTON PLATFORM... with a couple of twists I haven’t seen implemented in any one button game game I know.

All the “art” is work in progress (as usual in my games all graphics are in gray scale)

Home screenshot

Gameplay screenshot:

TRY THE CURRENT FLASH VERSION HERE

Good luck to all!!!

Well, I spent a lot of time working on the core mechanic, and now I have to find a way to make it FUN. Right now, it just feels like a tech demo.

I added two enemy types… they will hunt down the player and occasionally pause to destruct the terrain.

They basically work the same, but one is faster than the other. I will add another of the same type that is even faster AND has a larger destruction radius.

So this is what I spent most of my time on… THE TERRAIN GRID SYSTEM of ZUNZANDA:

The white blocks represent negative space. If you step into these areas, you will fall into the unknown. The other tiles change dynamically based on the neighboring tiles. If a section of ground is destroyed, then the tiles surrounding the new negative space will change form.

The white areas will obviously be invisible in the final game, as seen in the first screen that I posted.

Now I just have to figure out how to handle game progression and make it fun… then add SFX and music. I think I’m gonna have to cut a lot of features out, as usual. I had so many rad ideas and the terrain system just took too long.

AH WELL.

I ain’t goin to sleep, yet. I’ll be up for the next 10 hours or so… then I’ll get about 4 hours of sleep and finish it all up tomorrow afternoon/evening.

The 4 enemies are moving like they should along a curved line. (With a lot of simplification… sadly.) The selection of which enemy will be deployed is continuous and not random – i implemented the pseudo-random number generator though. (This will be the next task.)

4 Enemy moving

I need 2 hours of regeneration now. I started to do silly mistakes and these are just keeping me up… After I’ll continue with the implementation of the defender (player) because I don’t want to ru out of time with a pile of crap code that doesn’t do anything. Last I make the shooting and hit testing and that is really the bare bones of the action.

If this 2 thing is finished then I’ll start to add the droped out features one by one.

- lifes

- score

- mothership

- bombs from mothership

- title screen

- sfx

- better gfx

Anyway CamStudio keeps crashing so I’ll not make any animation. Maybe if someone make a detailed tutorial on how to do this properly.

Spent the first ~20 hours of my first LD without a good idea, but I’m on-pace for day 2!

This is as pretty as it's getting. :/

It’s a two-player one-keyboard puzzle game, and it looks like I’ll be spending day 2 making puzzles/audio.

I have a few more items on my task list and then the game is “Play Complete.” That gives me all of tomorrow to polish, which was my goal!  I’ve never been so far at this point. I think two critical factors have made this possible:

1. ChevyRay’s code that he gave away with the Keynote!  Thanks ChevyRay!
2. I’ve spent the last month or so learning Flash and FlashPunk instead of waiting until the contest to learn!

How it looks at this point:

Decided that I would add rats instead of going to sleep. Spilled my drink in my keyboard and so far the keyboard hasn’t given up. If it does it’s no big loss. I’ll have to resort to type on the laptop or buy a new one(it was the cheapest usb keyboard that I could find so it shouldn’t be so hard to find a new one).

Anyway… I added a rat enemy and decided that I wanted to add mario like jump-on-enemy-to-kill-them behavior, but before I added the code to remove them I tried out the change in velocity feedback and realized the rats was more fun as a superpowered jump pad instead of a enemy, so that is what they are right now. Changing the rat to be a enemy would mean that I have to rewrite my respawn system and I don’t have time for that at all

The player jumping on a rat, the temporary art for the rat cam be seen at the bottom

Stuff to do for day 2

That’s the end of day 1. Time for a sleeping and tomorrow is polishing time.

Biome Testing. The left is volcanic, the right is an island.

A couple hours later, and some palette testing, and I have created my 8 biomes. For debugging purposes, they are selectable using the arrow keys (I test everything constantly when developing!)

Here’s a link to the current build, because I am hungry for feedback: http://feyleaf.com/downloads/ld23-test3.zip

Ok, I’ve been up for almost 16 hours now, and been developing roughly 13-14 hours active (excluding food pauses). I have found (and reported) a bug in the hardon collision library that I use, and added a spike/thumbtack thing that kills you when you collide with it, and a instant respawn. I would like to add some enemy that you can jump on, mario style, but I don’t know if I’ll have the time considering I need to polish the game. On the other hand, jumping on crazy lab rats sounds fun

Player and deadly thumbtack

More rose hip soup

Candles with a scent hides the cigarette smoke from my neighbors below, unfortunately I ran out and have to survive with normal candles

Maryland chocolate cookies and festis still soft drink with a taste of strawberry and yumberry

Here’s a comparison shot of an example of the terrain before and after destruction in ZUNZANDA.

LOTS OF WORK TO DO TODAY! Slept for waaaay too long and now I’m gonna be in a rush to finish this… although I’m still sorta torn on a few things. Not sure where to take it because I have 2 great ideas, but they both contain serious challenges. LUDUM DARE!!!

There's a pink thing chasing my blue thing!

So, I woke up about 10 hours ago, and have gotten to work most of the day on the random map generator in my game.

Boy was that a struggle! It’s something I have never coded before, but have wanted to try out. Honestly, the Ludum Dare is good for taking those kinds of leaps, but it’s unforgiving if I spend too much time learning something new and testing, testing, testing.

Anyway, I don’t think I have lost too much by doing random maps. It will add the depth I want to this tiny world concept.

Just added a simple monster chase AI, of course he’ll be running into walls a lot in the game, but that’s okay.

Current task list before the night is over:

• Map themes, there will be 8 “biomes” on this little planet.
• Textual help and fanfare. As it stands, there are no words in the game yet.
• Main Menu and game states.

If anyone would like to leave comments about the current testing demo, you can download it here: http://feyleaf.com/downloads/ld23-test2.zip.

Day 1 is finished already :O
I got a lot of work done today. I have a (kinda) working platformer game right now. Collision detection took a lot of time to do, and its still very buggy..
Coming up with something for the theme was a bit tricky, but i think that my idea could turn into a cool little game if i get enough done tomorrow.
I’m off to bed for a few hours, see ya!

Screenshot because my game is christmas themed (still some placeholder art):

Looks like our little disembodied friend’s got some items!
Not much going on, but hey, I can start on the gameplay now.

Here is a screenshot from my current game build. Basic concept is you are a loose electron lost in various circuit board levels trying not to touch anything that will short you to ground. This screenshot represents a current proof of concept. You can’t touch those solder points or wires and you can use the ramp to reach that safety zone.

I’m just focusing on having fun this compo and learning Unity by using a simple and small enough game idea that I might be able to pull something off.

Cake’s update! I’ve got a screenshot of what I have as of right now. I just woke up about an hour and a half ago, and started working an hour ago so I think I’ve made good progress on enemy design.

Here’s a shot straight from my Illustrator workspace. I decided to zoom in a little and give you guys a clearer shot on the details. (It’s at 150% right now.) I still have lots to do, but I’m pretty pleased with the enemy design as of right now.

Ludum Jamming to: Hot Chip – Made in the Dark (album)