This is (was) my entry to LD #08 48hr challange. I wanted to post it earlier but constraints of time and space delayed it. I wanted to update it a bit but I am posting it ‘as is’ back then. It was done during the contest.
I am glad that I took part in this contest and very glad to the experience I achieved thru it. I also liked it a lot to interact with all the contestants during the actual time and how things worked out. There was no intention to score but the only task was to be able to complete it in that duration which I did. Since it was one of my firsts I simply could not stand the stress after the compo though! I had a lot of headache’s hehe. But since then I became more strong physically. Later I did a lot of such “night stands” dusk to dawn to noon for other tasks in life.

LD48 CHALLANGE.

Hello!

Final Release of my LD48 Entry.

GamePlay:

1 Use key W A S D to move around

2 Use key R to Reset the Game

3 MOUSE to Look Around

4 Esc to quit(Dont Quit!)

Playing

1 Goto the Rolling pillar to to Improve Health but be carefull, the pillar will
throw you away if you go too close to it.Just stay close to it to improve health
and dont stick to it

2 Goto the Exit Post to goto the next Level. Exit Posts change their
position every time level changes so you have to find its location.

3 When Level changes,Position of player changes

4 Stay away from swarns they eat you like crazy.

5 Dont foget to look around for the new position of exit post

6 Use Less Brightness and Contrast as possible

Suggestion: Tryto play upto 25 levels.The 25th level is most difficult.THe planes will lock you up you you go close to them

FeedBack Nessary!

StartTheGame by going into Folder SaurabhSwarm
and Clicking SaurabhSwarm.exe

This game was made in DXSDK 8.1, VC++6.0,Jim Adams dx libraries.

All Coding & Artwork Done by me Groundup including 3DMeshes and Textures

Art Softwares Used: Photoshop and 3DMax5.Panda .Xporter

saurabh <AT> ITnauts.com

DOWNLOAD http://www.itnauts.com/LD/SaurabhSwarns.rar:

Best Regards
Saurabh!

This was my second Ludum Dare entry, for LD#8. Theme was swarms. This time you’re playing the Master of Fireflies, out for revenge against some mushroom-dwelling things who didn’t invite you to some insignificant party last week. So you send your swarm of fireflies after them to torch their mushroom homes. That’ll teach ‘em! The mushroom-dwelling things doesn’t take kindly to this though, and starts spraying water around, which unfortunately kills your swarm and stops the mushroom fires. The battle is on!

This was the first time I made something with a swarm-like behaviour, which was nice. The game turned out ok, though not really finished — those mushroom-dwelling things only ever face right, for example, and the levels weren’t supposed to be that flat. There should have been platforms and stuff. Still, there’s a win condition and level progression and such, so that’s something at least. Anyway, it’s kinda fun-ish for a little while, torching mushrooms while those poor guys losing their homes at your hand try to kill off your swarm, but it gets boring and repetitive after a while.

Oh well, I had fun making it, and learned some new things in the process, so I choose to consider it a success regardless =)

Download: [ Source code ]

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.

Probably my least-finished LD entry (not counting ones I didn’t even start), Termites is the adventuresome tale of a small band of termites on a very small screen. All you can do is wander around and chew up grass, making termite babies with which to devour the couple of buildings onscreen.

It’s kind of entertaining to enjoy the simulation a bit. This ‘game’ cannot currently be downloaded anywhere in particular.

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.

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands is a game made within 14h for the LD8 Swarms compo. However, it was never really entered into the compo, because I felt it wasn’t quite enough, but also couldn’t figure out how to make something more of it. In the end, I abandoned it, and instead used it as a base for Ultra Fleet, which I did enter. This might not have been the best of decisions, but no matter.

You navigated your hat swarm around islands to destroy dancers that tried to defend the islands, while at the same time trying to avoid the deadly dances that was danced at you.

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands prime features was an intro, an island generator (that I later used as a base for rather prettier islands), the famous Hoids algorithm that simulates hats in groups flocking behaviour (later adopted for the fleets in Ultra Fleet), stick figures, and a lot of dancing. Strangely, it was also my very first LD game (together with Ultra Fleet) that didn’t use tiles.

There’s no dedicated distribution for The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands, but you can get it as the bonus in the Ultra Fleet compo version. It’s for Windows, but if you’re a bit clever, you can probably compile it for Linux. It requires OpenGL with 512×512 sized textures support.

Theme Swarm. I did a shoot em up, sidescrolling thing. Play the game online

Ingame screenshot

LD48 #8 theme was “Swarms”. It also occurred right around the initial release of the Nintendo Wii. Thus, you get Wee Ninja, a game where you are trying to beat an insanely large horde of other shoppers to the last remaining Wees in stock during the holiday season. It’s fun to play, simple, and includes achievements to unlock bonus abilities. One of the more complete entries I’ve ever done (possibly because the gameplay was so incredibly simple!).

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.