So I decided to do Tower Defense type of game. Again I wanted too many in too little time. I’m happy with what I came up with. Take a look: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=5974

Sample gameplay

After thirty hours of work, I can proudly say I finished my game for this Ludum Dare.

I called the game “Nothing is impossible”. Is a platform game where you must control two characters in a split screen, each screen represent the black and the white and this create a constrat between the character and the wall.

The game consist, as I said before, in the control the two characters dodging the boxes and stakes you will find in the way, all this while they run forward.

My intention was do the game very very difficult, but at the same time do a addictive game and I think I finally achieve.

But well, let’s cut the talk. You can find the game here.

Thank for read and play!

Sorry for no add potatoes, serious, i’m very sorry

So today I posted my first entry into a Ludum Dare competition ever. How fun!  The result is Euphoria. The first thing that jumped into my mind when I heard minimalism was visuals, clean and crisp. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try make a good looking game.

So let me talk about the game before you get too bored by all this visuals talk. It is a short story about a child that gets hit be a car. While the child’s soul is trying to come to peace, you gain memories as to their final moments. Many memories of which have parallels with what the child is experiencing.

For any decent gamer who gets annoyed at the symbolism do not worry, there are puzzles. Once collected an orb, the player can “phase shift” switching between two realities in the spirit world making for a few interesting puzzles.

I couldn’t have been happier with the final product and hope to get some feed back from some of the best indie developers out there. Good luck to the rest of you!

Hello, everybody who care about this. This is my progress of my game, but I’m not sure if this is right with the theme, what I plan to do is that this Mr. Sphere shrank of size and now must fight a giant potato (because the Mr. Sphere is tiny, of course)

I think this game is going to be like an advanced platformer test

So, spent lots of time and work on the sort-of-game idea I had for the theme. Math was involved and sketching occured, evidence can be found here:

All in all, I feel pretty good about how the game is coming along, haven’t started making it look good yet. Gameplay goes first.

If you want to try it out, there are two builds available here:
Windows 32-Bit build
Linux 64-Bit build

There are a couple of command line switches you can use:
-f Fullsceen
-b Rebind all controls before starting the main loop
-r WxH Specify resolution
-m 0-100 Specify music volume
-s 0-100 Specify sound volume

Standard controls are WASD, and if you’re using -b then you can bind to both keyboard and joystick controls. It’s been tested with both an original Xbox Controller S and the Xbox 360 controller.

Also, I know that something is strange about collisions, at times they don’t seem to register at all. This is a bug that I’ve spent too much time trying to track down, and so sort of decided to leave it there until it becomes a more pressing issue.

If you happen to have a 32-bit Linux system, then you could try to build the game yourself. The source is available on Github (C++) and it uses CMake to build, you might need boost and SFML 2.0 (Don’t know if the RC works since I’m using the latest git myself).
There’s a small issue with the CMakeLists file so you might also have to set Kunlaboro_BOOST to On in your cmake cache for it to build properly.

Hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this (And maybe even enjoyed what exists so far of the game). Please comment.

This is Ace, reporting to bed.

Now even with Enemies. (They still can’t move, but you can kill them.)

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4n2acw4i3ctfuqd/NrYRK_OoOA

EDIT: They can kill you now, too. Also attatched screenshot.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/u8jr9ghqzbg5cty/sjNO5-rdyQ

EDIT2: should be also working in Wine

I ate most cookies before the coffee was done-.-

Still very useless.

Known bugs: You can Jump through most Obstacles, you can jump infinitely (double jump, tripple jump, …, infinite jump)

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/28vssnl38viy3mz/iXUaxnFHN9

EDIT: Bugs partly fixed. You just can still fall(not jump) through obstacles

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jljjvq5qzzperss/K1Pp4qGiEr

EDIT 2: Last Bug fixed, new version up. (All links are still up.)

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0cz4vyn640g2zbu/OrK9_D7ZFB

EDIT 3: Enemies

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/?p=237714

Barker Games is in for the jam!

Last Ludum Dare I(Justin Lee Barker) made The Accursed Moon. This time Jeremy Gohier will be joining me. I will work on the programming and he will work on everything else.

The problem I had last Ludum Dare was that I worked between 13-14 hours on Saturday which burned me out. All I did Sunday is fix a few bugs and publish it. My motivation was depleted

I plan on working normal work hours(8 hours a day). With Monday being the only possible exception. Hopefully that way I wont loose motivation and will feel more confident about our entry.

Our tools:

Language: C#, XNA

Art: Gimp, possibly InkScape

Sound: sfxr

Music: Undecided

Good luck to everyone!

Happy Ludum Dare 26

Starting April 19, the 5th Hack-a-Jam Game Development Competition will begin!

This competition is held every 2-4 months, and this is the approximate 1-year birthday. Because of this, I am offering a prize to the winning entry. This prize is free advertising (one month), on both of my main websites, which have decent traffic.

What is the Hack-a-Jam?

The Hack-a-Jam is a game development event/competition where you must create a game within a set amount of time. The time given in each competition varies, as it could take two days, four days, or even just 30 minutes. Different from other game jam events, the Hack-a-Jam uses a multiple-award system, meaning there is no “Overall Best Game”. This allows for us to give awards to the best games, and not make a decision between two games which are equally amazing. The theme will be a suggestion voted on from the community through many different voting sessions. Another thing you could do to win certain categories is make things such as dev logs, timelapses, etc. You can them post them or links to them in the Posting section of the Forums.

What are some possible winning categories?

Most Psychedelic Visuals
Most Deaf People After Hearing The Game
Most extra items (dev logs, etc.)
Most Rage-free
Most rage-induced
Most Suggestive Content Without Crossing The Line
Shortest Game
Best themed
Most Things On Screen Without Lag or Crash

What are the rules?

Since we are a laid back community, you could probably get away with most of these rules (except major ones, like turning in your entry a whole 24 hours late…). Here are what I would like the community to follow, however:

1. All game content must be created within the set time. Note: You can use other music, placeholder graphics, etc. as long as you are allowed to!
2. Your game is not required to follow the theme, but would greatly improve your chances of winning. Unless almost every other game is not following the theme, it is almost guaranteed that your game won’t win anything.
3. You must work alone, and you must create everything included in the game.
4. All game creation tools are permitted, such as Unity, GameMaker, Photoshop, Flash, Paint, etc.
5. All external game extensions/DLLs are permitted. If you want to make it multiplayer (if you are using GameMaker), go ahead and use 39dll.

You can visit our website at http://www.hack-a-jam.com/. From there, you will want to head over to the Posting section, and sign up for an account (you can use Google, Facebook, etc.). Good luck to everyone!

Are you picky when it comes to unzipping archived files? Do you find yourself peeking into every compressed archive to see what is inside before you unzip it? Is it just a directory? Ok then, we’ll just unzip it directly. Is it a bunch of files, well then we’ll need to unzip it into a separate directory. I hate unzipping an archive into a separate directory only to find out that all the files were zipped up inside of a directory.  Then after you unzip, you have a directory inside a directory! Bleh.  This is where SmartUnzip comes in. It does the looking for you and determines if it should unzip the archive into a separate directory or not.  It also supports dragging/dropping multiple archives on the SmartUnzip window. Handy for those Ludum dare review sessions where you’ve downloaded lots of archives.  Sound interesting? Check out SmartUnzip

So after having worked on MiLWaDS for many (As many as 48 even) hours now, I feel like a short post-mortem might be useful.

So MiLWaDS, or as it’s really called; “My Little World Domination Simulator”, don’t ask about the ‘i’ and the ‘a’.
I was in luck about the theme choice because this is a game idea I’ve been wanting to make for a long time, a sort of demake of the world domination part of the RTS Evil Genius. Using the minions you gain through recruiting efforts you’ll slowly but surely complete nefarious acts and villainous deeds on the road to complete global domination.

Decided to again make my game in C++, because I figure that using a tool I’m comfortable with is better than using a simple tool that I’ve never used before. Plus, with building it in C++ I was able to use the Yarn engine I’ve been working on for university projects, which also lead to some interesting features being available that I had absolutely no use for. Full angelscript based script engine support and google breakpad exception handling among them, I did use other parts of it though. And SFML, let’s not forget SFML.

Just like last time I was in my tools are;

• Visual Studio 2010, for writing my C++ code.
• GIMP, for all my art.
• Blender, for 3d-modeling, even though I haven’t really needed them.
• Spotify, because music helps creativity for me.

So some thoughts afterwards;

What went well?

• I love the simple but still stylish color scheme I managed to create early on in the development process, simple dark-grey with cyan borders worked well and gave the game a sort of hollywood-hacking feel.
• Loading the data from basic csv style formats worked much better than I expected it to, at point I was hoping to instead save them with JSON but decided against that to save the time need to implement something like that.

What went less well?

• The agency system ended up having far too many parts that never got used, I delegated too much work to them in the design phase.
• I never got my minions fininshed completely, each minion was supposed to gain in strength when levling up them as well as being able to specialize in different abilities.
• I ended up breaking Kunlaboro (An entity system I’ve been working a bit on) enough that I had to add triply redundant error checking to most messages. Since I was low on time I didn’t really want to try to get a clean clone done of it either.

Play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=10247

I figured out how to get Python scripts to compile in pyinstaller about 15 minutes before the submission deadline. I had already submitted my source code, so I was in anyway, but… :3 It still made me very, very happy to be able to submit exe files for both Windows and Mac OSX. As the title of this post suggests, I spent several minutes shrilly keening my delight before I was capable of uploading my files to the interwebs.

But they are uploaded. Which means I have Python source scripts, a Windows EXE, and a Mac EXE available for use. HOORAY!

So I managed to finish myself a game for this Ludum Dare, which must mean that I’m more of a villain than an evolutionalist (Considering I fell ill the last LD).

You all better test my little world domination simulator now, or as I’ve lovingly nicknamed it: “MiLWaDS”

If you don’t have windows then I’ve heard it works well in wine, and I might have a possible linux build coming of it.

Timelapse will be put up as soon as it finishes uploading, and then you’ll be free to observe me sleeping half the time away.

Read more and get the download here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=10247

So I managed to finish my super-simple game about a contract killer in a timely manner.

Here is the link for my entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=8403

The game was almost done yesterday, so I had a whole day to just polish it. Aiming really low payed off for me nicely. I just hope it won’t get too bad ratings due to its simplicity.

Unfortunately I still couldn’t make music for the game, I have to practice it before the next compo.

Here are some screenshots:

Title screen

BAM! You’re dead!

Two targets in the city

I see there a lot of games submitted already, I can’t wait to try them out!

And for those of you who are still working hard: Don’t give up! You can do a lot in 2 hours!

Just finished submitting my little game for the compo.
With 10 hours still in the clock, I could’ve probably still polished it, but some rest & laxin sounds nice since gotta go to work tomorrow

The game contains 3 minigames all of which are different criminal activities to gather money for the end goal.
I had really hard time coming up with the 3rd game (which ended being the credit card fraud one), but it worked out OK.

Not 100% satisfied with the game, it kinda needs some bigger game to wrap the minigames or give a reason for the minigames.
Now it feels bit glued on :/

Anyways happy that I finished since 2 last LD’s have been major fails on my part and couldn’t even submit anything.

The games submit page is here: link

And here’s a screenie:

Thanks everybody for awesome event, can’t wait to get my hands on all the games developed this weekend!

PS.
I had some issues with the screen capture software and Im not entirely sure if I can make a time-lapse, but atleast I will write a post mortem…

So the first day is over and I think I’ve made enough progress to be able to finish tomorrow.

This time I wanted to aim really low, because in the past I felt overwhelmed with the complexity of my game ideas and I wasn’t able to completely implement them in time. I’m also trying to improve my graphics skills, so it was better to have a game with the least amount of code possible.

I didn’t want to make a game with a stereotypical villain (aiming for world domination, commanding an army of minions, kidnapping people, etc.), instead I made the player have a villainous occupation – as a contract killer.

At the beginning of each level you get a picture of your target(s) – early in the game you only have one per stage, later you will have more. You have to memorize the targets’ appearance, find them in a crowd of people, then kill them with your rifle.

Once you fire your first shot the police will make their way to the scene as indicated by the progress bar at the top of the screen. You have to finish the job before they get there, otherwise it’s game over. The game is endless, each stage will have a bigger crowd, and you’ll have more targets to hunt down.

Here is the target.

And he’s down.

Murder in the park.

The code is almost complete, but I will still have to make sound effects, music, backgrounds, title and game over screens, etc.

Anyway, I wish you luck with your games, as I can’t wait to play them. There have already been some really cool looking games presented here.

I feel like this is really going well, drawn up russia and finland as well and started getting more gameplay-ish aspects done.

The UI still neesd a lot of work, but I’m confident something enjoyable can be gotten from this. If you want to sneak-peek a bit on the progress, a windows demo is available HERE. (Though I’ve heard it works in wine, so go right on ahead you linux people)

So this is my first attempt at Ludum Dare… so far it seems to be going okay!

I woke up incredibly late after a night of no sleep. Then I crawled out of bed and started brainstorming ideas until inspiration struck in the form of a Mitchell and Webb comedy sketch. So the overall idea for the game is that you are pitching your genius plans to a board of investors and have to ‘deal’ with people as fear and doubt gets the better of them.

By about 2pm I’d managed to wrestle with my C# classes and get my XNA game working in the most pre-alpha sense:

I’ve since then started improving how the game looks and works, I’m going to add more traps and things and put in an end-game mechanic soon… but I’m gonna take a break for a few as I’m feeling pretty knackered. Here is a video of it as it is right now – the people start to panic more when the people around them start dying.

Heck… even if the game isn’t done for the competition submission… I’m still enjoying making it.

I don’t have much time this weekend but I’ll try to find a few hours to make simple-simple game. This would be my 4th LD if I remember correctly.

Tools are almost the same:

• Programming
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
  • XNA Framework
• Graphics
  • GIMP 2.6
  • PyxelEdit
• Audio
  • bfxr
• Music
  • NodeBeat
  • Audacity
  • Or something new from LudumDare community…
• Internet
  • Google Chrome
• IRC
  • qwebirc
• Other
  • Chronolapse
  • Dropbox
  • Windows 8

And here’s my workspace. As you can see, I’m currently away from home (“studying” engineering

Good luck to you all and of course – have fun!