One of the things that took me a lot of time during LD23 was level design. This is partly because I didn’t have a tile map editor that I was familiar with and it seemed like working with the CSV data was good enough.

I decided I wanted to have a more visual editor for future LDs (yes, I’m definitely doing this again!) so I made one. Of course, it’s in JavaScript since that’s what my game was made with and I’m trying to improve my JavaScript programming.

Please, give it a try and let me know what you think in the comments below. I’m currently hosting it via Dropbox, but I may provide a more permanent home if needed. Also, if there is interest, I’d be glad to put up a bitbucket repo with complete source.

It has been tested thoroughly in Chrome, and minimally in Firefox and IE9. I recommend using Chrome for now.

Here’s a simple screenshot to give you a feel for it:

Not sure where I’m going with this. Pretty much leaning on roguelike, but it may become something else?

Well hello there!

I have almost finished my level editor. It currently saves the world data to the models folder using jME’s BinaryExporter (wow, that saves a hell of a lot of time), and you use the mouse to place tiles, and the scroll wheel to cycle between tiles and objects. Right clicking removes the top-most tile (basically, the first one the picking ray hits).

I’m going to try using the lighting system to add some moody effects next, after I create some more graphics. It turns out, making nice tile graphics really isn’t that hard after all.

There’s a controllable character, but it’s not shown here.

Since yesterday I couldn’t submit the pictures and the progress of my game, but meanwhile I did a lot of progress in my game and even drew a cool caption for ludum dare:

Meanwhile the game has temporary graphics and levels:



By now you can move and push stuff around, and now I’m starting to work on story and graphics maybe sound later.
p.s THE SITE IS SUPER SLOW!!!!!!

Implemented tiles. Okay, it’s still at the stage where everything is boring. I think after this one, I won’t post until I have something a little more visually stimulating.

So I’m back at it after a solid eight hours of sleep. A little under twelve hours left and I still can’t “Spawn” units. I can make them randomly appear, but somehow I think that won’t be enough.

Here’s a foodshot of Breakfast

On the other side of things, I am getting closer with the RTS game. You can select any number of units, and right click to have them move wherever you want. Once I can make units spawn I’ll release a beta. More to come!

Well didn’t do much, still don’t really know what i want to do. Quickly made some road tiles, and a road landscape pic, which i am not sure anymore, how i want to use. Maybe a menu.

I’ve been working like mad since my last post at trying to mock up some CoMuTor animation tiles to have something to work with the soon to be written game logic.  I always forget how long animation takes and am hoping that these placeholders won’t become permanent as far the deadline goes….  we shall see!

Here is a detail of my Tile Studio CoMuTor project:

Here is the larger image of even more tiles:

I have to draw some final frames of a CoMuTor attack where you reach down and fling cars up into the air and/or a smash attack as well.

I’m finally finished with a version that both runs and could be classified as a game. So here it is. All important information is available in the game, really, if you just pay a bit of attention. I might include play information here later when I don’t need to sleep so much.

If you want another screenshot, here’s after having won.

The Tower of You, Windows binary download + D source.

Update after deadline: I’ve updated the above link to include zlib1.dll which was missing. The original package is still available.

This is it! Pretty darn complete. Download here: shortfuse.zip (1.1mb)

I tried making music, and that was a bad idea, so I didn’t put it in. Love those SFXr sounds, though!

Note: If it runs way too slow, or just if you prefer, you can use the command line argument “opengl” to run it in openGL instead of directX.

Lots of visual progress, a little bit of real progress.  All new pixely graphics all around, and a new HUD at the bottom.  The game automatically zooms the display in to cover the portion of the map that actually has stuff in it, so instead of scrolling, it just gives you a wider view on larger levels.  That’s good because you need ot know the whole layout to make your plans.  This zoom feature is currently very questionable, I seem to have to manually tweak exactly where it goes, depending on the level layout, so I’m missing something there, but it mainly worksish.

Currently, you can’t win or lose, but if you could be killed, boy would it be hard.  Thinking ahead is a must, and it all goes quite fast.  Each level has a percentage required to complete it, and you also need to stay alive, and the main gist is to get the best score you can, provided you blow up enough and avoid dying.

Now there are sounds courtesy of SFXr (just the fuse burning and explosions, at the moment, but that’s really all that can HAPPEN at the moment), and your fuse burns, and if it goes next to a barrel, the barrel blows up.  The barrel explosions chain to neighbors.  There are also a few assorted items visible on the screen – x2 and x4 score multipliers, and gold.  The gold and multipliers are intended to entice you into taking risks you shouldn’t.

Still all temp art, but I suspect the flame particles will stay like this.  They shoot up super vertically, looks like the barrels are practically launching into orbit.  Initially an accident, now a favorite feature.  I’m going to do art now, because I need to have the style down before I do the font stuff, which I feel is sort of next on the list.  The core gameplay is done, you just can’t lose.  And since this is a game of score, I need to get that score tracking up so I know what is happening there!  Art’s definitely the biggest portion of what’s left, so let’s get on it.

Like so many, I have a random screen of tiles up and running now.  Guess I’ll make the editor, because this game will NOT work with random levels!  Well… hmm.  Better not.

The People was written for the Growth theme, and in many ways it resembles my first two LD games—there’s the tiled world, and you can build things on it. Only in this case it looks more fancy due to some clever tile rendering. Like my two first LD games, it’s a puzzle game.

There’s seven levels of varying difficulty, with goals such as ‘reach a population of X’ or ‘get Y huts’, a sandbox mode, and a tutorial mode. While you build stuff, a simulation is going on where new people appear and so on. A good description of what you actually do is, as someone put it, playing a planetary engineer.

My ‘post mortem’ for the game was pretty much the following:

So how did the game turn out? Good, and bad. My first idea was a kind of God game where you created land and such and people appeared. And there was supposed to be a kind of currency, that I called belief. So I coded the tile system and the simulation first, then I started to try to get it into a game. Well, it didn’t work, or at least it didn’t work without very much job, so I dropped it (the game idea, not the simulation and that). So I figured out another game: You have a limited supply of different kinds of land, and you have objectives to complete. Then there’s supposed to be interesting levels that are fun and challenging. I fixed up a tutorial mode, and a sandbox mode. These are pretty cool. Then there was the levels. I managed to come up with a few OK ones, but then it went downhill. So I ended with 7 levels, of which some are OK. Most are pretty easy, you just have to wait a while. I’m not very happy about them. But on the whole, the game’s pretty OK.

If you’re to believe the unofficial results from my own vote counter, The People did indeed turn out OK, and placed first in ‘fun’ and second in ‘innovation’ and ‘production’.

You can get the Windows compo version, or the Linux port version. They require OpenGL with multitexture support.

Uplighter was my entry for the Light & Darkness theme. It was a puzzle game centered on lighting up levels to certain percent by, among other things, placing lights, breaking down walls, and removing light sinks.

It’s was my first entry to feature 3D, although all gameplay and lighting is really in 2D, and it was also my first entry to not use Allegro. Instead it used GLFW, which is more lightweight, and I really didn’t need all the extra stuff from Allegro.

Uplighter is probably my best and most innovative LD entry so far—it placed first in ‘innovation’, second in ‘fun’, and also won the ‘Best In Show’ award.

You can get the compo version of Uplighter. It’s for Windows, but there’s a shell script (kindly provided by alar_k after the compo) that will fix stuff so it will compile for linux. You’ll need GLFW, GLFT, FMod and FreeType2.

Small notice: After the compo, it was reported to run very slowly on 3.0+ GHz machines. I’m still not sure what that was all about, but it has been reported that this can be fixed by compiling it in VS. If this is still much of a problem, I might get around to fix it myself.

Random Dungeon Exploration is the result of trying to push the Random theme as far as possible. It got random levels, random enemies, random quests (well, a little bit random!), random items, random player names, and random events. I guess it could have been even more random, but time was a limiting factor.

As for the actual gameplay, it’s fairly simple step based dungeon crawling. And a ‘town’ screen where you can shop and select dungeons. It felt pretty solid, but there were a lot of balancing issues that you’d notice once you reached some higher levels.

The game was well received, placing second in the ‘Fun’ and ‘Production’ categories, and also getting the ‘Best In Show’ UBER prize.

You can get the slightly improved post compo version, or the compo version. Both are for Windows and OpenGL.

The Destruction of the Viruses was a fairly ambitious (but not very innovative) game written for the Infection theme. The player had to clean out the insides of a computer by killing all the viruses that resided there. The viruses could clone themselves, so it wasn’t always that easy.

It played like a top-down shooter, with FPS controls, and used OpenGL to draw a level that could be rotated around the player.

There were many good intentions, and much love for the number 5 (there being 5 levels, 5 enemy types, and 5 weapon types), yet the game failed badly. The biggest mistake was a bug which made some parts of the game framerate dependent, leaving it extremely hard if you had a low framerate (it played as intended at about 180 FPS). It’s hard to say how it would have fared without the bug, but as it were, it placed about 23th.

You can get the compo version, or its source, if you want to, but I really must urge you not to! Better to get the ‘made working dist’ released a few days after the deadline. Both of them are for Windows and OpenGL.

I have an even better version around somewhere, that I haven’t packaged and released yet. I’ll do that soon, and then I’ll include it here.

Having learnt some great lessons from my previous LD48 entry, Save The Hut, I decided to not include as much boringness, confusion and frustration in my next game. Together with the theme Construction/Destruction, and a cosmetic theme of Sheep, it all became so obvious: I was to make a game where you construct traps to destruct sheep. And lo and behold! there was The Destruction of the Sheep.

I decided to use pretty much the same tech as for Save The Hut, but used it better to get some fancier stuff, like sub tile precision movements, rotated sprites, pseudo 3D particle gibs, and paintable background.

The game was supposed to be a puzzle game, but in the end only a few levels were puzzly, the rest was just mindless, but entertaining, sheep destruction with lots of gore. All in all, it worked out very well, making me a winner in ‘fun’ and ‘complete’ categories, and third in ‘gameplay (innovation?)’ and ‘overall’.

There’s an improved version available, adding some fixes, and a 2x time speed-up button (but there remains at least two bugs and a lot of spelling errors). You can get this version of The Destruction of the Sheep as a .zip archive or as an installer. They’re for Windows.

The original compo version is also available, both for DOS and for Windows (the Windows .exe was kindly provided by Hamumu during the compo). There’s also the source.

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).