My LD12 entry, Cat Stacker, has grown up and now features assorted fruit. Also, instead of the original tetrisy controls, you can click and drag the current piece around with no time pressure (press A and D to rotate). There are 20 levels and it get’s pretty tough. Good luck! (^ _ ^)/

Cat Cat Watermelon

Shortly after the compo I fixed up the menu images, flickering graphic bug and added something to track your progress as requested by some people I showed the game to. As most of my comments here have been requesting score tracking. I thought I’d share the updated link with you chaps in case you want another go at finishing it. Usually it just frustrates you with how close you came. I still haven’t finished the game but I have it on good authority that 3 people have.

Get IT here.

Here is a current screenshot from my simple cryptozoology puzzle game.  It is coming along fairly well schedule wise.  I have 3 of 4 crpytid puzzles completed and just need to draw one more so that is good.  I still need sounds and maybe score a little game soundtrack for it too later.  Need a menu, perhaps highscores just for practice coding that and still searching for a title I like.

I’m glad that I finally picked a game scope that allowed me to have something playable early on and really gave me time for polish, tuning, and asset creation.  As this is my 4th LD (2 full, 2 mini) maybe I’m FINALLY learning something about scope.  ;)  If anything, I probably went too far on the side of simple but we shall see.

First of all, thanks so much to everyone who left feedback to me in the ratings area.  I have taken a bunch of the suggestions that people made and have worked more on improving CoMuTor in the past 2 weeks.  Here is the latest work in progress of a post compo version of CoMuTor.  The readme file contains all the changes that I made so far based on my own and others feedback.  I welcome further feedback in the comments on this post for anyone that liked CoMuTor enough to try and play it again.  I’m just having fun working on aspects of polishing and modifying this silly little game.  I look forward to more Ludum Dares!!

CoMuTor v1.1 - Post Compo win32

Changes from compo version:

- added visual score feedback and level indicators
- added 3 minute time limit
- made it harder to eat people
- points scale with faster/smaller vehicles
- rebalanced point system
- rebalanced timing / car release system
- vehicles have different speeds now
- added people to vehicle sprites
- broke out car and suv sprite body for better coloring system
- crushing gas trucks no longer counts towards crush count
- vehicles running into you no longer spawn people
- adjusted menu instructions to reflect new changes

Right, now that I’ve taken steps to correct the control irritations in Only Forward (see below for the updated version) this seems like a good time to write up a postmortem for the competition.

What I aimed for:

LD13 was my first Ludum Dare competition, and whilst I’ve previously dabbled in coding with tight time limits it’s the first games competition I’ve entered into, so it was all pretty new to me.

My goal from the start was to try and make a game that was essentially complete/polished etc.  I was less worried about managing something technically impressive, or dramatically original, I just wanted to *finish* something in the time.  This ended up shaping the majority of the game, I picked the concept I did because it required minimal simulation, the graphical style because I wouldn’t need to make too much etc. etc.

What went well:

I’m really happy with the direction I took, and particularly my choice to bite off as little as possible.  I ended up being able to get the core gameplay, graphics etc. down very quickly, and that left me with a lot of time to polish and polish.  Were it just a prototype (say what I had at the end of day one) I’m not convinced it’d have been very good, but I’m pretty happy with the fleshed out version.

Following (not quite to the letter, but not far off) the Survival Guide paid off to, it’s a very good set of advice.  I think even the time I spent blogging/on irc/or cooking all ended up helping me keep sufficiently distanced to be able keep polishing and improving something despite being so close to it for such a short length of time.

What went badly:

The controls!  I was a little bit worried about them from the very start, and with all the time I spent polishing the rest of the game I could have easily taken the hour or two I’d have needed to do something less frustrating.  I think the problem was that by the time I had the free time to deal with such things I was so familar with the controls I’d put in earlier on that they just felt natural to me.  I should perhaps have got more feedback during development (and listened more to that I did get).

The other issue was that I couldn’t really see a simple solution and I didn’t want to spend time faffingiaround on something that might not have even worked.  The solution now seems very trivial with the benifit of hindsight, you just allow directions to be pre-selected before the junctions.  It’s the only thing I’m *really* unhappy with in the game, and as such I spent a little time fixing it.  The updated version can be downloaded from http://jwhiting.nfshost.com/coding/onlyforwardfixed.zip it is perhaps worth mentioning that the only thing I’ve changed is the controls, and also that if you’re still judging entries do play the genuine entry instead. The updated version for the unlikely event that anyone wants to play a better version after they’ve made their mind up.

Conclusion:

Wow, that was a bit more epic than I was expecting, congratulations if you’ve just struggled through all of it!

Overall I really enjoyed the competition, I’m definitely looking forward to the next one (fingers crossed I’ll be able to enter it).  It was all a lot of fun, and some extremely impressive stuff was done (just not by ’safe option’ me).  I’m quite looking forward (only forward, har har..) to seeing the results tomorrow too, I never thought I’d care about that side at all, but it’s kind of exciting nonetheless.

Here is a link to the updated post compo version that will stay current. ** NEW **

Here is link to win32 binaries only final compo version

Here is link to Mac build of compo version (thanks to jlnr!) ** NEW **

Here is link to full source and media archive of compo version

Gameplay:

You are a monster who has decided you will take out your aggression on the morning commuters.  You can  crush cars and SUVs with abandon as long as you land squarely on them with your jump move.  You must be mindful of the dangerous GAS trucks!   Keep away from those at all costs and let them safely leave the screen.  Every car or SUV that escapes your wrath and flees the left of the screen costs you the same amount of negative points as if you had crushed them with a fatal jump move.  After each vehicle is destroyed it’s inhabitants flee in panic.  You can chase them down and eat them.  Don’t let vehicles run into you though as this will also cost you score as well.  The game speed will continue to increase with every 10 vehicles destroyed.  Since you are an invincible monster you are merely playing for a positive score until you retire from your activities.

Managed to cram some form of “game” into it but it definitely didn’t turn out how I meant it given all the triage and feature cuts I had to make both in programming and art.  I had an awesome time though just the same.  Can’t wait to play everyone’s entries!

Hi, all! I’ve made a small post-LD12 fix of Breaking the Tower, and I’ve included a high score list.

Click here to play, or check out the highscores here (although at the time of posting, there are none. I hope it works. ;))

Okay. Well first two days i was mostly getting feedback and trying to restore my brain to usable state Yesterday started to implement all changes that i hope will make game more fun.

You can still access old version and sources trough links in my Final journal.

And here is new version:

(more…)

Well it’s the end of the day for me.  I’ve got a pretty solid chunk done, and at this point I’m implementing game logic.  I’m stuck on a weird memory bug, but I’m too tired to process it, so to bed!  Let’s aim for 6-7 hours tonight.

Tomorrow’s tasks:

Finish up game logic (75% done with this at least)

Implement user-interaction (simple probably)

Sound (potentially time-consuming)

Some kind of intro/title screen

Owls?

Firstly, I’d like to thank everyone who voted for providing kind and constructive comments in the voting area. They’ve really encouraged me to continue developing this game. Keep in mind when reading my comments that I too am trying to be constructive, and I’m not trying to come across as a complete butthead. In my mind anyone who even got half a final entry completed has done an amazing thing in such a short time. Secondly, let me apologize for including a few levels that were far too hard …. actually I’m almost certain now that they were impossible.

So, I’ve prepared an updated version of Mondrian for those who’d like to play it. I thought I’d leave this release until after voting, to ensure that nobody could accidentally judge based on the non-48 hour version. You can get the latest version a my OMGWTF Games !!1! page. This new updated version includes: (more…)

I would have posted this version earlier but I just took a week off to tour a college and didn’t bring my laptop.(which was a stupid mistake on my part considering all the free wifi.)

There Is No Screwdriver

Version 1.1

Bug Fixes:
Fixed an error of being able to leave the first room without actually opening the door.
Cleaned up the code slightly.

Download

If there are any other bugs or if anyone has comments feel free to leave a comment for me.

I’ve changed the font-rendering in my game as to avoid GLUT and letting me build a working package you guys can run.

Nothing even remotely related to gameplay has been changed, only font rendering is different.

Here it is: PewPew Laz0r

And here’s an uptaded source version

This doesn’t really have anything to do with the competition, but I thought I’d let you guys know. Thanks to Hamumu’s suggestions I made a quick update to my entry M3 - Molesting the Match-3 Market.

The most drastic change is in the way the checking for matches works in the game. Now the game lets everything fall down first and then checks for matches (as suggested by Hamumu). I also changed the colors of the blocks so that the contrasts between them is higher now.

You can download the new version from here: M3_release2.zip (2.3 Mb) (Release 2).

The infection risk of the Crabs was depending on the CPU, now it’s constant for every CPU. The Game should now be much easier.

Furthermore the speed of the crabs is no more increased from level to level, because fast crabs are really hard to kill and move. The first level starts with a number of 50, the second with 100 and so on.

I updated the mouse controls and hope it is better now, soon I will include some Options, where the mouse sensitivity can be adjusted.

Please try it again, thanks for reporting the bugs.

Download TheCrawlyCrab_a.zip

Finally I built a binary of the game with py2exe. I had trouble with pyopengl since it used a .egg file. I dont know how it was fixed, but Samiljan supplied me with a modified source code file for pyopengl and it works now. A few words to py2exe authors: include .egg support.

I was tempted to add game pad support, add sound and tweak the game play more. I dont think thats fair though =p

download - binary executable for windows
download - multi-platform source and art files

Some people are having trouble running the XNA games some of us built. If an XNA program crashes, it’s probably because you need to install the latest XNA and DirectX redistributable. These are not installed automatically. My game even crashed on an up-to-date install of Vista until I manually installed the latest DirectX.

I have updated my binary to include the DirectX and XNA redistributables.

BTW: To restart a level (if you mess up), stop the ball with the spacebar key, then click on the screen.

Marble Bomb Binary 8.55 MB w/ Redistributables.