Spent the last couple of days (off and on, due to injury) working on this!

Player flies a hover ship (green) over a wrapping procedural landscape and has to battle enemy drones (red), haven’t thought of a name for it yet! (ehm!)

All guesses on a postcard and the winner gets Kudos or an old age pension ;o)!

..Now if I build a flying Giant Monster Angry Cyber Kitten model, hmmm!

PS I’m in!

Here it is:

Kittenswarm

It’s quite interesting how the swarm algorithm behaves. It’s totally deterministic about the kittens’ movement. But the starting positions and movement are random which gives fully unpredictable results for swarm behaviour.

This could probably become a full game with nicer graphics, sound and more levels. So far it was a great warmup for the next weekend.

Grab that fish!

So this weekend i have mostly been playing lava survival. But i need some practice for the upcoming ludum dare.

Because i have never coded sound before. So i am thinking of a simple game that is like whack-a-mole.

Just to get started.

Also.. I’m in. I will be using Java w eclipse. And paint.net for graphics.

I am also livestreaming this as livestream.com/petterroea

Here comes a first screenshot:

The kittens are able to follow the mouse while maintaining to keep the swarm and stop at the screen border. Probably I’ll implement a test level with some deadly areas and a goal to reach.

3-year-old daughter off to bed – the evening is mine, all mine!

My warm-up is going to be to finish my sorely neglected xmas challenge game. So far I’ve done a lot of tweaking the landscape generation code, but no gameplay at all. Older readers may find this looks suspiciously familiar, if a bit murky…

This weekend’s task is to get the gameplay mechanics and main game loop working. I might have time to improve the landscape and presentation a bit, if things go well. It certainly needs it…

Well this is my first LD, so I intended to do a prep weekend. I’ve never tried to code a game before (from start to finish). Though I program every day at work, it is mostly data analysis and portal websites. What I didn’t know was that LD warm up is something of a tradition and a damn good idea. It even comes replete with a random theme assigner.

So, I got Narration.
Game Ideas

Employing KISS principles, I think that I’ll do a simple puzzle game based off a the idea of enacting a story.

• Player is a ball which can push other objects round a maze
• There are various coloured exits to a level
• When the level starts the ‘Narrator’ will say something like “Then our hero pushed the red block through the blue exit’
• Level is complete when the red block goes out the blue exit

That should cause me to use the basic tools and skills I’ll need for next week end.

O Ludum Dare, how dare you?

Initially I wanted to make some progress on my TIGSource compo game for December. But this warmup seems like a great idea as I have some swarm-algorithm code ready for some weeks now I wanted to put in a game. And guess what the generator for theme picked for me:

Kittens!

So I’ll try to make a game with a kitten swarm for warmup this weekend.

Quick warmup sketch made in Cherrybrush:

Radio tuned to the Secret Sound Service. Take care, everyone! Here’s wishing a fruitful and productive LD48.

Edit: a nearly-pointless “song” made in Musagi a few days ago: Jungle Exploration Theme (ca. 1996)

Also, I may or may not be twittering about the process.

managed to do a 24h warmup game with the javascript library i’m gonna use.

didn’t turn out too bad.. i say: when it displays a score, its a game

works only in firefox3.5+ and safari4, though. and takes a while to load i hope that won’t kill my game in the competit.

http://gamejs.nekapuzer.at/tyround/

oh and hi, all! it’s my first time.

I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with Flixel in preparation for the Big Compo next weekend. Really psyched about it!

I wanted to focus on atmosphere, and this included music. Hopefully, I won’t be scrambling to figure out how to do basic things this time around (as opposed to last time). The goal is to spend time on content, playability, and completion, instead of “getting a game working”.

Along with Flixel, I will probably be using my HSB color utility class (adapted from somewhere on the internet).

You can play my warm-up game-like thing, “Distant Chimneys”, on my blog:

blog.megastructure.org/2010/04/distant-chimneys/

Cloud Game warmup mostly done.   You shoot the clouds.   I didn’t really have an idea, I just started coding..

I was going to do something where you were the God of REAL Twilight fans, and you had to make clouds to shield your followers from the sunlight…. But it seemed a but too involved.

play it here…

Since there is some confusion.. this is an actual flash game I coded as a warm up in the 2 hours leading up to LD14 theme announcement.  It isn’t just a screenshot..    When the game loads, click in the screen and use your keyboard to win!

As though this weekend weren’t going to be masochistic enough, I whipped out a hour-and-a-half warmup Towlr. Download Towld, written in python+pygame+chipmunk.

Sources tomorrow.

towlrdf(screen);

Now includes source.

just to let anyone who feels like warming up for the main compo with a little towlr action and who wasn’t hanging in IRC.. there is a little towlr precompo going on… you’ve been warned. 

and for those of you who have been spared from towlr so far… here is the link: http://www.towlr.com

Hi all, looking forward to my first ever attempt at Ludum Dare, should be a learning experience at the very least

In the interest of upfrontness, and because it seems to be the done thing, have a link to the *extremely* primative base that I plan to use mrpiglet_base.zip.  It does very little, just provides a bit of a wrapper around some SDL + SDL_Mixer and OpenGL functionality.  Can’t imagine it’ll be of any use to anyone, but use/abuse as you wish anyhow.

Now I think it’s time to try and sleep off the Friday beers, see you all tomorrow for the event itself.  Cheers!