I’m currently in the process of producing a makefile to compile my (future) game. However, In my interest to target as many people as possible I would link to know the following:

1. What OS are you using? (Windows / Linux – Include which version if you so desire but it is not necessary)
2. Are you using 32Bit or 64Bit? (This is the biggy)

I have successfully finished my very first LD game, The Last Man on Earth.

You play as the last survivor of an alien invasion, your goal is to avenge your species by clearing out an alien spaceship.
It is a pretty hard game, but please don’t get mad at me – I had no time to balance the gameplay.
The game has two endings… and a kitten.

It has been great fun, I would love to participate in the future, too.

Screenshots:

Tools:

• Visual Studio 2010
• XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Paint.NET
• Inkscape
• Bfxr

Download: http://attilahorvath.me/TheLastManOnEarth.zip
Source: http://attilahorvath.me/TheLastManOnEarth-source.zip
Game Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8403

Hey there, I’m Nik, and I’m a Ludum Dare first timer!

I had no idea what to do, at first.  So I started to plan. The best thing I came out of was something to do with God, as he’s alone. So I emptied my mind into Game Maker, and created… a thing. This thing is called The Almighty Annihilation. It’s a 8-bit styled game where you have to wipe out the entire population of Earth with Meteors and Lightning Strikes. Sounds fun, right? Please tell me it is.

I made the game in 21 hours, with lots of frantic rushing and developer’s block. I know it’s not the greatest, and it seems very basic, but please. I am slow and can’t be bothered most of the time. I made a game. Enjoy.

So I’m entering Ludum Dare 22. So’s my brother and friend. The plan is to live stream our desktops (or the primary screen of them at least) , take a photo every 5 seconds for a time lapse, and record the information we place on out whiteboards. And here’s where I’m insane, I’m coding in a language I only decided to start learning today: Java. In about half an hour I set up a development environment, scripts to compile and run and a base program to do my logic loop (which I won’t be using come this weekend).
My set up is as follows:

• Intel Core i7 950
• 10GB DDR3 RAM
• 2 x 22″ 1080p LED Monitors
• 1 x 19″ 1440×900 LCD Screen in Portrait.
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64

And here’s a pretty picture of it all.

Languages:

• Java (Main Client)
• PHP (High Scores or anything web based I want to implement)
• Game Maker (Fall back if Java ends up being insanely hard)

Programs:

• Paint.Net (Pixel Art and Touch Ups)
• Fireworks/Photoshop (Vectorising Drawn Art)
• Notepad ++ (Programming)
• Open Office (Documentation)
• Game Maker (Fall Back Programming)
• VirtuaWin (Desktop Management, 3 Screens isn’t enough)
• pixie (Colour Selection)

Plan is to use mainly black and white, and maybe a red or two for colours.  I’m going to be drawing and scanning my menu systems in, and then vectorising them. As for game ideas, I have a few, some that I won’t be able to do easily due to the lack of knowledge of Java, and some that would look epic and take virtually no time. Worst comes to worst I’ll make a text based adventure game and make a single nice piece of art for it.

~Mitch

Still on the fence here, as I’ve been crunching for a few weeks, currently have a splitting headache, and could use a few days off instead. But…

OTOH, the Kobo II Tech Preview is now on-line, which means that I have a working Win32 executive, making deployment trivial. (There is no game code in kobo2.exe, only EEL with SDL, OpenGL, ChipSound, physics etc.) So, I should be able to pull this off without touching glorified assembly languages, or even running a native compiler. (Well, I might rebuild the executive with a different icon. That should be safe. I think…)

So, if I do it, here are my weapons of choice:

Language: EEL (Runs on the Kobo II executive.)
Editor: KDE Kate
Libraries: Kobo II/EELBox executive (SDL, OpenGL, ZeeSpace, ChipSound, …)
Sounds: ChipSound
Music: ChipSound
Graphics: GIMP, ZeeSpace

I’m going to have an… interesting LD this time around.  First of all, this will be my second LD compo and my first LD48, as I did the Jam last time.  Additionally, I have finals the two days leading up to the compo weekend, so I will have literally seven hours between taking my semester finals and starting a 48-hour game.  But hey, it’ll probably be all right.

Language: C# using XNA

Platform: Windows (I use XP still, btw)

I plan to make the sound effects myself with a mic and sound editor, so my game will either have bad sound effects or literal onomatopoeia ones like “bang”.

Well no not ALL the things, but some of the things. Some of the things is better than no things at all.

It’s currently available on the android market and pending in a bunch of other places so I’m sitting on versions for windows, linux and osx. In all honesty I focused more on getting it ready for the igf (student edition) and less about scouting marketplaces.

“Is this the part where you tell us to buy it?” the crowd asks. Well yes actually: “Go buy it!” Or at least +1 it on the android market or tell your friends and family and that cousin George you haven’t spoken with since 3rd grade about it. Yes the one with the bigger thumb on his left hand.

Some of the features will roll out to the free (ad supported) version relatively soon (the updated graphics and music), while others will be kept a version behind(mostly new levels and such).

And here’s a trailer for you(can someone please tell me how to embed videos? the code just gets eaten up)

Thanks for reading

GAME PAGE

So, Cosmic Heist was my entry for the recent Ludum Dare compo. It was a major success by my reckoning, as it was completed in time. That aside, however, I would like to write a little about how things went.

What went right

I spent some time coming up with a couple of interesting(ish) ideas, but ended up throwing them out before settling on what became Cosmic Heist. When I designed the game that actually ended up being made, I actually cut out tons of things, and cut even more as I developed it. This is one area that I really want to improve (I, like many others, am horrible at the “cutting things until it’s right” part), and I feel I made some good progress during this compo. I was able to reject tons of ideas, some good, some bad, but all non-essential.

I had a decent personal code base to start from, and already knew all about the language, libraries, and tools I used beforehand, so I was able to jump right in.

I left some time for play-testing and bug fixing/tweaking near the end, but ended up not needing very much of it. The game was small and simple enough that it wasn’t too buggy by the end, and my wife and I tested it some as I worked on it anyway. However, I would definitely leave this buffer time again anyway, because it really kept things stress-free.

The menus ended up looking/working/sounding great, and I added a cool animated menu background near the end that I really liked. I’ll probably use some of the work that went into that stuff off into the future in other projects.

The music turned out to not suck as much as I thought it would. That was actually my highest-scoring area in the competition, and I am still somewhat unsure what to make of that. This was my first time really making any music, and I don’t really have experience playing/reading/etc. music either. But it doesn’t sound too bad, so I am counting that as a nice success.

The controls are really fluid, and are my favorite part of the whole thing by far. The way you control the ship is great, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I actually didn’t spend much time tweaking that, and by implementing everything I needed for it, I had a whole system for various enemy ship movements, too.

What went wrong

The player’s ship is a bit oddly shaped. This makes it hard to see where you are going. I didn’t realize this at all (duh! isn’t it obvious! the ship points in the direction I drew it to point!) until people began commenting on it. Certainly something that would need to be fixed.

Some people kept looking for the shoot button. I didn’t make it very obvious (at all) that there is no shooting in the game. You just pilot your ship, and enemy ships try to plow into you.

There were a couple of features I wanted to get in, but had to cut due to time constraints. I wanted enemy ships to shoot at you, and every level was supposed to start at a shipyard, from which you had just stolen a ship.

There might be a problem with the Linux build of the game, as one person mentioned they couldn’t get it to run. Unfortunately, it runs fine for me, but I only have two machines to test it on, and they are both almost identical in both hardware and software. If anyone has or can test the game on Linux and tell me if it a) explodes, b)doesn’t run at all, or c) runs fine, I would greatly appreciate it.

Conclusion

All in all, as I said, I was very pleased with the outcome, and I even got some people to play my game, so that was really exciting. I hadn’t ever participated or followed LD until now, so I didn’t have any idea what to expect. I honestly didn’t think anyone would even see my game! Thanks to everyone who rated mine. One thing that I regret is that I didn’t have time to rate any games myself. I did play a few, and they were all great. Next time, I want to set aside some time to rate a good number of games.

Links

Ludum Dare entry

Cosmic Heist on Cheese and Bacon (my website)

Cosmic Heist on Google Project Hosting (MIT License)

And is done. Play here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5234

Wish I had more time, but nevertheless, enjoy!

“Once upon a time, there was a sheep called “sheep”, The sheep “sheep” managed to escape on the great day of the sacrifice festival (Eid Al-Adha/Kurban Bayrami)”…..  yup.

It’s a collab with my Turkish friend Mustafa Colpan, for the jam. we will continue working on it after the compo (probably releasing for the iPhone and Android as well, since that would be a good excuse for making a shitty game).

Anyway, This is a crappy prototype, done in less than 12 hours with a complete disconnection from the outside world which nullified my chance of learning anything new. thank you, my main town’s central, thank you.

The game’s current state is complete shit, so play it at your own risk.hmpf, I know I I still have a whole day ahead of me to finish the game, but  I don’t think I need that extra stress thank you, -my lack of internetZ is breaking my brainS-, maybe another time when I have a proper internet connection

here’s the web version:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9047337/SheepNRun/WebVersion/WebVersion.html

Hey everyone!

I’ve submitted my game to Ludum Dare. If you want to check it out, here’s the link. Screenshots:

Anyway, my game is submitted, but not done. I’m sure there will be code that needs fixing, which I’ll do during the last few hours. I’ll post my post-mortem after the 48 hours is done.

This is the first Ludum Dare I’ve actually completed with a game that resembles finished. Ah, that first time feeling Technically, I did attempt LD 20, but that failed miserably.

After the 48 hours is up, I’ll call my game finished. Until then, I’ve got everything covered so can spend the last 8 hours with the code. And maybe some caffeinated drinks.

I was planning to do the Jam this time round, but my team are all over the country right now on holiday

See you on the other side of the 48 hours.

This is the second Ludum Dare that I’ve attempted. I’m blogging about this one because I think I’ve got a hope in hell of finishing on time.

The obligatory desk photo:

My desk - Windows laptop with the code on, Mac mini with the social networks and the entertainment

And a screenshot of my code so far:

Some of my code - in my puzzle escape game thingy, there are 6 chambers you must get through. This is the code that loads the chamber graphics.

I’m coding in XNA. I’ll learn Flash one of these days. Or Java.

So we’re getting somewhere. See you on the other side.

Okay, inspired by the 2hr warm up game idea from IRC, I made a 2hr game based on the best (but sadly downvoted into oblivion) theme “Isaiah Mustafa – The man your game could smell like”.

It was made in a little over 2 hours since I was a bit distracted and getting it all to package up took some finagling (good test of my pipeline though), but here it is:

Windows (Linux may come later)

The goal is very simple (and not terribly fun); avoid the green “Double Rainbow Body Wash” boxes, and collect the red Old Spice ones to reach 100%.

Not great quality, and as you can see I spend very little time with art assets and level editor. The video is only 1:09 long

Entry Page

Oh man, here it is! No achievements, sadly.

So I’ve tried again, and this time I think I’ve finally managed to wrestle a working Windows build into place: download it here. For some reason I had a much easier time packaging my last (non-LD) game. Suffice it to say, it is probably best for everyone involved if you don’t ask why it’s necessary to distribute SDL_mixer.dll with a game that has no sound.

Cavern Chase 1.2p*

This has more content. I couldn’t really think of more stuff to add, but it should be more interesting for those who thought it needed a bit more variety.

If you play and start to wonder “where did that background go?” Not a bug. Took it out because it was UGLEH.

*1.2p = 1.2 post LD

Cross-Compiling rocks! So here is the windows port.

I’m still to tired but tomorrow i’ll write a postmortem and hopefully give you the macosx port with the help of a good friend .

It’s been done for a few hours now, but I needed to sleep.

Page is HERE for your enjoyment.

Have fun ^^

-Devlin

Cavern Tycoon Final Screenshot

Check it out here or at its page on my site here.

Let me know if there’s any problems not known, or just send an email if you like the idea. Thanks so much guys. I’ll write a proper postmortem later. But this has been an amazing experience.