This was a great first day for my first LD! I made to Pixel art animations for the first time!!

Hmm i’m using Stencyl to try to take away the programing of the way but i’m having huge problems to try get the distance from 2 actors … bah that’s for tomorrow

\o g’night everybody

Good day! I’ll be using Stencyl for my game, which allows people to use others’ creations. So yeah, I’m doing Jam. Sfxr’ll be used for sound effects (if needed), and Newgrounds Audio is used for music.

I’m wondering if my real life/ time zone difference will wreak havoc. Hopefully not.

Well, my first time participating in an actual Ludum Dare was interesting at least.  I was  just coming back from vacation without internet so I had no idea about the theme or enough battery life in my laptop to get started until Sunday.  A minor setback I suppose.  Hah.  Anyway, I threw around a bunch of ideas, which all resulted in failure, until I came upon the idea for Tiny Archaeologist, which you can play here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=8229 Originally the ending was supposed to be a section where you are chased by water, but after two hours that still wasn’t working so I scrapped it and put what is there now.

Anywho, let me start with the theme.  I loved it.  It fit with so many ideas I’ve had floating around my head for a while now so coming up with an idea was easy.  Of course I made up a new one, but that’s besides the point.

Now let me talk about my game.  In my opinion it’s a solid meh.  I think it came out okay, but it could have been way better.  Let me start out on things I liked about it.  Firstly, I liked the idea.  I love games with tiny characters and huge worlds, so it was awesome to be able to make one myself.  I also am moderately pleased with the graphics, while they could have been better, they are some of the better pixel art I’ve done.  One of the best parts of this was I got the opportunity to work with Stencyl 2.0, and this was a really great crash course on some of the new features.

Now for the negative. I spent most of the time on the graphics, but I still don’t think they were varied or bright enough.  They seemed a little dull to me.   The music was just a simple loop, but I didn’t have time.  And putting music always gives me difficulty because of the long process of getting it from pxtone to Stencyl, so the ending got a little chopped off.  The gameplay is barebones and incredibly simplistic.  I wanted to add more, but since I started late, there was no time.

I’ll end this on a positive note: I had a really great time working on this, and I look forward to more LD’s and more games in the future.

Until then, see you,

toaster

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?

Like the title says, we now have a falling cupcake! Our main character is a cupcake, and I have been working on the “code” for his behavior this morning. While testing his walking and falling in Stencyl, I found this happening (Click the picture!):

(http://youtu.be/ihaaIKQIdUw)

As hilarious as this is, I’m fixing it now. So far I have the basic code set up for the main character to allow for walking and jumping, and the camera is set to follow him. Now I’m going through and testing everything, and will be fixing anything that doesn’t work right. In the meantime, Alissa has been on an art roll! She’s finished all of the art for the main character, who has a different look for each level. Next, we’re going to be talking about the level design for our first level, and knock that out of the way. We’ve also got a pretty nifty little design doc, so we’re feeling pretty good about what we’ve got thus far. Still, it’s only day two and there’s so much more to do!

Well, back to fixing that falling bug!

- Pralie (@kaocleyra) & Alissa (@EtherealFox)

Not only does an uber low-res art style give me “indie cred”, it also cleverly distracts you from the fact that I couldn’t draw anything to save my life!

I’m using a few premade behaviors from StencylForge. I asked on IRC if that was okay with the rules, and he said it was because they’re publicly available. I’m going to believe him for now because that makes things a lot easier for me.

Still not sure what exactly I’m going for here. I’ve got a nice atmosphere in mind, but that won’t matter if I don’t have any actual gameplay to go with it.

Also, I’m ridiculously tired and need rest, so I’m gonna sleep on it. Good night everyone!

Hey everyone! My roommate, Alissa, and I are participating in the jam together. Alissa’s an artist, and I’m a designer. We’re looking at using either Stencyl or Game Maker – whichever one we find works best for what we want to do.

At first when we heard the theme, we weren’t quite sure what to do with it. After voting earlier, there were a couple of other themes that we were really excited for, but we couldn’t think of much for alone… But then we took a drive to pick up some snacks and energy drinks! On the way, we passed by a bakery, which gave us the idea to make a game about a lonely little cupcake. We got back, started writing down ideas, drawing some concepts, and now we’ve got a pretty good direction.

I’m starting work on level design, while Alissa is continuing work on her cupcake art. Oh, and we’re thinking about ways to incorporate a kitten easter egg, as well…

Good luck everybody!

- Pralie (@kaocleyra) & Alissa

Seeing that the competition date of the mini LD is also the GMC Jam’s competition date, I may enter this time. I couldn’t get an engine up for the “ALL TALK” miniLD. It seems Game Maker does not like text-based games. But I’ve expanded my horizons to Stencyl, so I hope those game creator software will be accepted.

I’ve polished up what I had, though it’s exceptionally short. I found tarting up the background an excellent displacement activity to avoid actually writing content. Play “White Flag” here.

I’ll let it rest a few days, then add to it. The dialogue system was intended to have internal variables, but I ran out of time – only managed to spend about 12 hours total on this, much of which was learning Stencyl and ActionScript. It’s been good fun though, and I’ve got a good solid template to build a more advanced system on…