FLEEDOM FLIES - by HybridMind - April 17th-19th, 2009
Created from scratch for Ludum Dare 14’s 48hr game competition

Story:

An unstoppable armada of alien warships is approaching your doomed homeworld. Your only hope is to see how many of your race’s precious colony ships you can save! Flee through the armada for freedom, your fleet flies for it’s lives!

Controls:

• Use the arrow keys to move
• Use Z/A/Y to contract your fleet’s ship spacing
• Use X/S to expand your fleet’s ship spacing

How to Play:

The more expanded your fleet the larger your score multiplier!  Watch out though as this will make you more vulnerable sometimes.  To score high you will need to balance when you contract and expand with how you move through the alien armada.

• Also features Online Leaderboards for some friendly competition!

Tools used:

• Coded in ActionScript 3.0 using the Flash CS4 IDE and using Dr. Petter’s sfxr for sound effects.
• MochiAds Leadboard v3.0 API used
• Greensock TweenEngine Lib used

Got Feedback?

Leave a comment below or in the voting feedback area, or email me at dave [at] hybridmind.com

I’ll be working on this game some more so any thoughts or suggestions will be taken into consideration for the post-compo version!  Thanks for playing and I hope you have a good time with it!

Files:

PLAY THE FINAL VERSION HERE IN YOUR BROWSER!

NOTE: If it seems slow or laggy, Flash can sometimes have issues when you view it with your browser.  I recommend downloading one of the links below to play on your desktop for maximum performance!

WINDOWS EXE HERE

SWF FILE HERE (Right-Click Save-As)

SOURCE AND ASSETS HERE

[ PLAY CURRENT BUILD IN BROWSER HERE ]

Well.. grabbed some sleep last night.  Just played my game this morning to see how I felt about it’s progress and direction.  Time to make the short list of goals that is so important in these compos to trying and pull off a playable and hopefully fun game in time.

I find a good trick to use is decide what makes the compo version versus what I’ll save for a post-compo version.  I’ve been pretty good about actually doing a post compo version lately that I’m not too worried that I’m using it as a fake crutch.  You can learn so much from a rapid prototype like this that it is still worth it to finish a reduced yet playable game for many reasons.

Anyway, knowing that some of my favorite features will likely still see the light of day makes me more willing to cut them for the compo version.

It is with that in mind that I am thinking about the following design decisions:

Compo Version Features:

1) One formation only of your fleet ships… the long and lean horizontal one.  This is because I am not sure if I’ll have time to code enough of what I want to justify the other formations right now.  I may have to focus on just making this a fun space avoider with the twist of having multiple lives / health built into the number of your fleet ships remaining as you fly along.  As long as 1 ship makes it you have been considered to win in that you’ve saved some of your race’s people.  The more ships you save the larger the score multiplier probably.

2) Probably not going to implement player ships fighting the enemy armada of doom.  I’m really trying to focus on not making this a shmup but rather sticking to the fact that these are light and nimble colony transport ships that are trying to get the hell away from their doomed planet / advancing wall of the enemy armada.

3) I think that since I have a simple but functional way to hand code in all the enemy ship placements and movement speeds I have the ability to build an exciting armada progression that will have some fun surprises and such along the way for the player to fly through.

4) I am worried that since these compos don’t afford much optimization time I may end up making a version that in order to look as cool as I want will likely suffer performance wise on slower computers.  I may have to go the route of a simple button to: “play high quality” and “play low quality” to turn down all the beam / particle effects I want to use.  I think that is a fine compo compromise.

Of the 16 hours remaining I fear I may have some domestic duties to attend to as well unfortunately… laundry and the ilk.

Oh well.. it’s crunch time here at LD so good luck everyone!

So, I have another playable build of my work in progress available.

Play it here in your favorite browser

It now has an enemy ship wave manager so I can build out the Wall of Doom(tm) that you must escape through to rescue the last of your race.

I also took a suggestion to map the fleet pattern echeleons to the Z/X/C/V keys.. four patterns in all.

Give it a whirl if you’d like as I’d love to hear any feedback.  I’m trying to get absolutely as much of the gameplay done before screwing around with any graphics this time.  I think it is actually progressing really well for once!

The game just ends right now when all the enemy ships go by.  Also.. if you lose all your ships you have to refresh your browser to continue!

So.. finally got an idea I feel like running with on this theme:

First, the mockup!

(Click image to view larger)

Anyway.. the simple concept is you are controlling a fleet of the last ships of your race.  You are fleeing your planet as an alien armada of doom approaches.  You will be able to move your fleet up/down/left/right and there will also be a key that lets you toggle the density/pattern of your fleet.  Think of it as able to expand or contract.

You will move through the armada avoiding colliding with capital ships and what will surely be horrendous energy weapons fire as they attempt to anihilate your race.

You must get a least ONE of your ships through the armada to win.  The more ships you get through the larger your bonus at the end for saving a larger gene pool of your race…

Simple idea, hopefully the scope will be one of which I can get a fun, playable game out of before the deadline is up…

Since the music to my game, Space Reactions, has become a little bit popular, I figured I’d tab it out for any fellow guitar players here. I haven’t got a guitar in front of me right now, but I think this is pretty accurate. I’ll update this post if I find anything wrong with it


---------------------------------------------------------
-------12~~~-----5/8\5~~-------12~~~---------------------
------------------------------------------7/9-----5/9----
----14---------7------------14----------9-------7--------
---------------------------------------------------------
-12----------5-----------12----------7--------5----------

Sounds good with some light distortion and little bit of tremolo. Enjoy!

Shrapnel!

Downloads (both have windows exe + source code and Linux makefile):

• Compo version
• Post-compo: Smaller zip, sound latency fix (no code or data changes) (new)

Uses SDL, SDL_mixer and SDL_image. I used kate for code/text, gimp for graphics, sfxr for sound effects (thanks DrPetter!), and pxtone to make music.

If the Linux version crashes when you run it on 32-bit x86, use this SDL library (contains a fix for a bug in SDL_SoftStretch)

Edit: Figured out the Windows sound latency issue! Seems the SDL.dll I used was buggy. Replacing it with one from libsdl.org fixes things.

Hey everyone!

I’m happy to announce my final entry, Space Reactions. The aim of the game is to destroy planets using the pieces / fragments of other planets, which you ‘asplode using rockets! Bam!

There are 9 gutwrenching levels to tease your gravity-lovin’ brain, and it also features a totally original soundtrack! (special thanks to DrPetter, as I used his sfxr to generate the sound effects for this game)

SCREAMshots:

Game download (includes both win32 executable and python source) right here:

http://fydo.net/programming/spaceReactions-fydo-LD10.zip

edit: Updated the zip to include a missing source file (check the dates, I didn’t cheat! )

You don’t need to re-download unless you’re interested in looking at the source, or playing on a non-Windows machine

If I had known that ludumdare would actually end, I’d have started earlier!!!
Here’s another picture of my game. I have updated the graphics a lot (and I think that these would do for my final submission unless I need more), what I still have to do is gameplay, sound and levels.

Things look nicer now, but I plan to make them look even nicer in the final version

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.

Ultra Fleet was my entry to the LD8 Swarms compo. For a bit of background information on it, please read about The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands.

Set in space, you controlled a fleet of virus ships that could convert enemy ships. Fleets of enemy ships kept on attacking, and you needed to keep your fleet alive so you could go on fighting, gaining points while doing so.

The game was, if anything, more pretty than fun, but it really was playable once you got into it. Although you probably got bored within an hour or so. Don’t know how it placed, but it received OK scoring, and also got praise such as ‘The game I’m supposed to be reviewing is more like a screensaver’, ‘I liked Hat Swarm better, though’, ‘Without a doubt, Hat Swarm is WAY better’, ‘I honestly would have given the hat swarm a higher score though.’ But seriously, some people (including me!) actually seemed to like it.

You can get the Ultra Fleet compo version. It requires OpenGL and is for Windows, but I’ve been able to compile it for Linux, although I have no idea where that port went, but it should be pretty easy if you want to try yourself.

LD48 #8.5 was an unofficial competition with two themes: Moon, and Anti-Text. “Moon” was actually some insanely long thing about how you’re looking at the moon and suddenly realize it’s an alien spaceship or something, but we just called it Moon. So I created probably my favorite of my own LD48 entries, Moon Invaders. There’s no text whatsoever in the entire game, which makes reading the manual rather necessary, since it’s a strategy game. It’s basically a tower defense game, but instead of monsters following a path, they descend Space Invaders style. I greatly enhanced this game post-compo, working obsessively for a week. I just like it!