Ludum Dare » winner

How to Win: The Tools

Rolpege — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:49:25 +0000

Here’s how I’m going to win:

Language: Actionscript 3

Library: Flashpunk

IDE: Flash Develop 4.0

Graphics: Photoshop CS5.5

Sound: sfxr and Audacity

Music: FL Studio 10

Timelapse: Chronolapse

Here I go!

I AM A WINNER!

Luthwyhn — Mon, 02 May 2011 02:22:48 +0000

I GOT MY GAME SUBMITTED! WOOHOO!! I think it was technically 1 or 2 minutes late, but that’s because I was having upload troubles. At any rate… I did it! It’s not complete! It’s not perfect! It IS playable though! I had to disable a couple half-finished things for the submission version, but there’s still enough there to see where I was going, I think.

Also, I’m entirely too exhausted. And I have work in about 9 hours. I’ve gotta go to bed, which sucks… I’d love to hang out with the festivities on IRC and here on the blagosphere. Tomorrow, though, I’ll start looking at everyone’s stuff! Good job, y’all! It was an amazing experience for sure!

The People

jolle — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 17:04:09 +0000

The People was written for the Growth theme, and in many ways it resembles my first two LD games—there’s the tiled world, and you can build things on it. Only in this case it looks more fancy due to some clever tile rendering. Like my two first LD games, it’s a puzzle game.

There’s seven levels of varying difficulty, with goals such as ‘reach a population of X’ or ‘get Y huts’, a sandbox mode, and a tutorial mode. While you build stuff, a simulation is going on where new people appear and so on. A good description of what you actually do is, as someone put it, playing a planetary engineer.

My ‘post mortem’ for the game was pretty much the following:

So how did the game turn out? Good, and bad. My first idea was a kind of God game where you created land and such and people appeared. And there was supposed to be a kind of currency, that I called belief. So I coded the tile system and the simulation first, then I started to try to get it into a game. Well, it didn’t work, or at least it didn’t work without very much job, so I dropped it (the game idea, not the simulation and that). So I figured out another game: You have a limited supply of different kinds of land, and you have objectives to complete. Then there’s supposed to be interesting levels that are fun and challenging. I fixed up a tutorial mode, and a sandbox mode. These are pretty cool. Then there was the levels. I managed to come up with a few OK ones, but then it went downhill. So I ended with 7 levels, of which some are OK. Most are pretty easy, you just have to wait a while. I’m not very happy about them. But on the whole, the game’s pretty OK.

If you’re to believe the unofficial results from my own vote counter, The People did indeed turn out OK, and placed first in ‘fun’ and second in ‘innovation’ and ‘production’.

You can get the Windows compo version, or the Linux port version. They require OpenGL with multitexture support.

Uplighter

jolle — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 13:51:49 +0000

Uplighter was my entry for the Light & Darkness theme. It was a puzzle game centered on lighting up levels to certain percent by, among other things, placing lights, breaking down walls, and removing light sinks.

It’s was my first entry to feature 3D, although all gameplay and lighting is really in 2D, and it was also my first entry to not use Allegro. Instead it used GLFW, which is more lightweight, and I really didn’t need all the extra stuff from Allegro.

Uplighter is probably my best and most innovative LD entry so far—it placed first in ‘innovation’, second in ‘fun’, and also won the ‘Best In Show’ award.

You can get the compo version of Uplighter. It’s for Windows, but there’s a shell script (kindly provided by alar_k after the compo) that will fix stuff so it will compile for linux. You’ll need GLFW, GLFT, FMod and FreeType2.

Small notice: After the compo, it was reported to run very slowly on 3.0+ GHz machines. I’m still not sure what that was all about, but it has been reported that this can be fixed by compiling it in VS. If this is still much of a problem, I might get around to fix it myself.

Random Dungeon Exploration

jolle — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:29:32 +0000

Random Dungeon Exploration is the result of trying to push the Random theme as far as possible. It got random levels, random enemies, random quests (well, a little bit random!), random items, random player names, and random events. I guess it could have been even more random, but time was a limiting factor.

As for the actual gameplay, it’s fairly simple step based dungeon crawling. And a ‘town’ screen where you can shop and select dungeons. It felt pretty solid, but there were a lot of balancing issues that you’d notice once you reached some higher levels.

The game was well received, placing second in the ‘Fun’ and ‘Production’ categories, and also getting the ‘Best In Show’ UBER prize.

You can get the slightly improved post compo version, or the compo version. Both are for Windows and OpenGL.

The Destruction of the Sheep

jolle — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:30:58 +0000

Having learnt some great lessons from my previous LD48 entry, Save The Hut, I decided to not include as much boringness, confusion and frustration in my next game. Together with the theme Construction/Destruction, and a cosmetic theme of Sheep, it all became so obvious: I was to make a game where you construct traps to destruct sheep. And lo and behold! there was The Destruction of the Sheep.

I decided to use pretty much the same tech as for Save The Hut, but used it better to get some fancier stuff, like sub tile precision movements, rotated sprites, pseudo 3D particle gibs, and paintable background.

The game was supposed to be a puzzle game, but in the end only a few levels were puzzly, the rest was just mindless, but entertaining, sheep destruction with lots of gore. All in all, it worked out very well, making me a winner in ‘fun’ and ‘complete’ categories, and third in ‘gameplay (innovation?)’ and ‘overall’.

There’s an improved version available, adding some fixes, and a 2x time speed-up button (but there remains at least two bugs and a lot of spelling errors). You can get this version of The Destruction of the Sheep as a .zip archive or as an installer. They’re for Windows.

The original compo version is also available, both for DOS and for Windows (the Windows .exe was kindly provided by Hamumu during the compo). There’s also the source.