So my first joke when I learned the theme was “My games are already minimalist.”

I was collaborating with Anand so I could have more elaborate art than I could have made on my own, and the first thought when you think of a “minimalist game” would be red wedges shooting white circles or something.

So on Friday we considered a few directions to take the idea that would address the theme, especially ones that would allow minimalist and non-minimalist elements to co-mingle.

1) A non-minimalist character exploring a minimalist world.
2) Perhaps everything is coloured rectangles until you get close to it or shine a light on it or something.
3) A strategy game that you can switch between two different modes, one with character stats and firing ranges and things, one where they are white and black pieces that move by square.
4) A strategy game of minimalists vs. non-minimalists

We started going with 4, then started thinking a Tower Defense would be easiest to finish in a weekend, ( compared to a more symmetrical strategy game, where I would need to program the A.I. ) and somehow while drawing the sketches for it, we came up with the unique aiming mechanism, which you can see here:

Note also that the towers were initially vertical boxes. The lines were meant to show where the rear towers had a clear line-of-sight, but looking at it, we thought, what if that’s how you aimed, not with a single tower, but with a pair of towers? So we seized on that as a mechanism that made the game a little more innovative than just yet another TD game, and set to work.

I programmed it in Flashpunk, because I had used it before. Anand and I hadn’t collaborated before, so I wanted to keep the number of new things under control. I looked up a lot of things on Flash Game Dojo while the Flashpunk.net site is down.

So here’s the result.

After playtesting, maybe the game is a little too simplistic, which has made it tough to balance, in terms of if you make the creeps too tough, they overwhelm you no matter what you do, and if you make them too easy, you would have to go out of your way to lose. We have a couple ideas on what would add some depth to it, but by the time we thought of them, it was too late to implement them.

I’ve spent the last 2-3 hours balancing the game, which is actually a lot of fun. It’s actually an reward in itself to get to play and tweak your creation. And I invented a few new game mechanics too while I was at it. The game is more of less done, though I’m considering adding music maybe? We’ll see.

Also, I managed to get both the Java Applet-version and the HTML5-version up and running, so that was nice. I never take for granted that GWT actually works and compiles my stuff into something useful. It’s still black box magic to me.

My game, Minimalist TD is done! Play it here.

This was my second LD (First one being LD24). All in all, it went a lot better than the first one. I’m kind of happy with my result and I think it’s kinda playable, even though it’s probably not terribly innovative (a generic TD game really). I have never done a TD game before, so I thought that’d be fun as well as a nice learning experience.

Still not quite sure about the difficulty curve. It probably ramps up a bit quickly, but then again, there’s only one level and a bit of trial-and-error can be fun. Lemme know what you think!

Here are the tools I used:

Coding:

FlashDevelop + Haxe + NME + HaxeFlixel

Graphics:

GIMP (although I didn’t need it very often, as you can tell by looking at the screenshot).

Sounds:

Bfxr and WAV to MP3 for soundeffects

Step Seq. for music and Audacity to record it (Inspired by Arkeus. First time I’ve ever created music, not sure if I’m happy with it. It’s kinda short and doesn’t loop very well… but better than nothing, right?)

Other:

DAME for tilemaps

Pew Pew Pew

So this is my first time doing an entry for LD. Decided to do it on a whim since the game I was working on this month for 1GAM was kinda not panning out so well. Decided to make a minimalist Tower Defense game. I’ve only been working on it since today so I only have the basic enemy pathing and one turret in, but progress of any kind is good. Made in Game Maker Studio

So this is the first playable demo of what was my October challenge(Clearly not finished in time). Anyways, i decided to pick it up last night and I’ve got it to a playable state(I think???) . I’d really appreciate it if some people could play it and give me some feed back as this is one of the first games I’ve finished

Here’s the link…

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/48015021/Tower1.jar

Cytokine!

[EDIT] Sorry! I’m unable to embed a video here. Watch the video on Youtubes!

I was going to do a more adventure type game.

Now, feces to that. It’s time for a TOWER DEFENSE GAME. TOTALLY ORIGINAL.

Now here’s what our main character was going to look like. I know, it’s utter crap, but it still took me like an hour.

I’m so good.

Hello my Ludum friends,

After about two weeks of development, Dusk Software is ready to announce our October Challenge game, Aegis!

Aegis is the in-development title of our upcoming tower defense variant. Gameplay focuses on deck building between maps to prepare and setup which towers and effects will be available in game. Cards are acquired through in game currency awarded at the end of maps as well as drops from boss creep.

While the game isn’t close to being done yet, we have put up an alpha build on our website and added a donation button. We’ve already received well over $1, so I figure that it counts.

Here is a heavily cropped screenshot of our Paypal account page as proof:

Here’s a link to the Ludum Dare entry page. And I’ve got an embedded video right here:

(Yes, I know everyone hates Vimeo, but YouTube just makes a giant mess of my lovely pixel font.)

Dusk Software consists of:
– Me! (fydo)
– Ken
– Ted

As always, thanks a bunch Ludum Dare!

Rise Of The Owls

It’s a TD game that takes place inside a tower. You will enjoy it if you learn the hero abilities! It’s fairly easy to win (though sometimes it seems insane) once you know how, but to get a high score requires great skill and daring.

win32 version: Click On Me (1.12mb)

If it doesn’t work for you, you can try the command line argument “opengl” to run it in openGL instead of DirectX. Probably won’t help, but hopefully it works anyway!

Can’t show a screenie since I am currently working on the offline computer, the only one with decent art programs on it (stupid Vista won’t run PSP9 or Max5).  Thusly, what I am doing now is art!  I’ve got lots in so far, though endless hours spent doing it.  Six in fact.  Still need some stuff for the buttons you click on and the title screen, and the treasure the owls are stealing, then I guess art is pretty much done.  Then I’ll need to get some challenge/point/structure to the gameplay, and some sounds.  That should pretty much do it.  I’ll need more heroes than I have to reach that point, but I’ll just reuse my existing art for those, because man, I’ve made a lot of little heroes.  I think about 8 unique characters.

I wanted the game to include a skill tree for boosting all your heroes, but I think that’s something for later.  You’ll have to be content with the strategy/luck involved in which heroes you get.  Not much luck needed at this point, since the pool of heroes currently is the same as the number of rooms at the inn, and you’re allowed to have multiples of the same.  I want to change that, but can’t until there are a whole lot more heroes.  Which probably won’t happen by the deadline.

So I’m off to do that.  I’d also like to have more than one kind of monster, but that too will have to go by the wayside.  Hordes of ordinary owls is interesting enough for now!

Progress on all fronts simultaneously (except art and sound).  This shot depicts the Inn Menu open.  As you can see, many of the bunks are occupied with clones of Archie the Archer, since he’s the only hero in the game.  The cursor you can’t see is on one of them, eliciting that handy tooltip that describes him.  At the top of the tower is a vast collection of invaluable treasure.  Hidden behind the row of bunks, you can just barely see that the owls now have life meters for your convenience.  Every few seconds new heroes come to the inn, and ones leave, giving you an endless array of heroic selections.  Of course, they’re all Archie right now.

I guess the next step is to let the owls steal the treasure.  They drop it when they die right now, but I don’t actually know that, since they can’t pick it up in the first place yet.

I felt like I picked up some speed, here is something remotely playable: http://enedahl.com/ld12/incomingfodder01.html

Going to bed now. Oh, the music is just a placeholder, a demo .mod file.

Well, by “game” I don’t mean something you can play.  But it is something you can watch as all the (temp art, in case there was any doubt…) elements function as intended: the owls ascend the stairs and even descend again if they reach the top.  The archer as you can see fires arrows at them.  He can even kill the first one before they get past him!  The excitement is palpitatious!!  Things are going well, I think, though I am dreading the actual real implementation.

My game is this: tower defense, inside the tower itself.  Eventually, there will be a pile of gold that the owls are stealing at the top.  You of course strew archers, chefs, and yetis about the tower to stop them.  The twist is that instead of buying generic units, you buy specific heroes as they show up visiting your inn (so a random element to that).  So you might dump Archie the archer after a while for Blog the barbarian.  The end goal is something with 100+ different guys (some not too different, like an archer who does more damage or fires faster than another), and a lot of wacky variety.  Don’t think there will be 100 of them by tomorrow, though.

Im going for a Tower Defence with resource and upgrade trees.

Title screen working, and filling the screen with towers works also.

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!