Well then, Ludum Dare 22 went past quickly and silently. The theme was “alone“, which I didn’t like too much. I had a coupla nice ideas, but as often happens in games of mine, the one I chose eventually proved out to be too ambitious.
My concept was to procedurally generate an island, and then put the player onto it and allow him/her to wander freely, trying to explore and find cool stuff. A concept like this quite much *cries* for feature creep, and that’s quite much what happened. I lost my motivation/inspiration towards the end of the compo, but managed to get it back in order to add some more meat to the thing. In the end I was left with something called “Incomitat”.
As it stands, the game is kind of confusing. There’re surprisingly many things to do, and I enjoy playing around by myself, but for anyone else it’s probably a thorough mystery. For example, there’s a hunger meter in the game that the player can fill by eating things. However, due to the time limit I managed to cram only few foodstuffs. The result is that any normal player will probably starve due to not realizing that they have to find a gun from a random abandoned house, then some ammo and then go shoot some bunnies or birds.
The concept is something I’ll absolutely want to return to later on; it fascinates me and I’d really like to make a game where the island was genuinely full of cool stuff to find. However, as it stands, I’d have to tweak a lot of the code and try to make that cool stuff available for all players instead of those who manage to think the exact same way I do.
On other news, Ludum Dare 22 just began, with the theme “Alone”! I’ll see what I can create this time; the theme isn’t really one of my favourites but it’s somewhat inspiring and allows a whole lot of different concepts! Here’s a level you can test with the editor.
Oh well, so Ludum Dare was last weekend, with the theme ‘Escape’. Wasn’t really my cup of tea, and in the end I didn’t manage to create anything of interest, just a simple engine for a possible future game (I spent so much timing finishing parts of the engine that I ultimately didn’t need).
On other news, I’ll be moving away from my parents’ soon, which’ll mean a pause in any updates whatsoever. Not that big a deal, but it’s pretty exciting for me! And then for the games: Beyond the Black Hole: Yep, still not given up on this! The engine is old and horrid, but I hope that inspiration eventually strikes and I can get it done. Masjin: I think I’ll make an update to fix the currently existing bigger bugs and then take some time off the project in order to pursue other stuff. Paradise Fort flash: I recently found a much easier way to handle certain stuff, so expect to see some updates on this eventually!
Then there’re various smaller things I’m working on or at least planning to work on. As Usual, I’ll wait until they’re a bit more ripe before announcing ‘em.
So hey cool, Officer Alfred was fourth in the recent Ludum Dare #20 contest. It also got to the top 10 in the categories Overall, Innovation and Fun (I think).
First of all, I’ve noted that the anti-spam filter has been removing some completely OK comments! That’s a bit annoying. I need to start looking through them more carefully.
Ok, Ludum Dare 20 was last weekend. 48 hours with the theme “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this!”. I can’t say that I’d have liked the theme very much, it was one of the ‘funny’ themes added in by admins and somehow it did make it after all. Anyway, I did finish something even though I was horribly preoccupied with silly nuisances such as partying. The result is Officer Alfred, a simple and silly puzzle platformer that has serious inspiration from Portal and uses a game mechanic I’ve already used before (in Timerocketxby). Fully flash also!
Here’s also the timelapse and full playthrough vidja:
So, after 3+ weeks of daily updates to Masjin, I’m having a break from it in order to work on other games. And study. I doubt anyone is reading this blog at this point, but let’s have a summary of projects: Beyond the Black Hole: Kinda frozen again. I’m stuck in level 14, but I’m quite sure I’ll eventually finish this. It’s a frickin’ cave: Frozen as well. The code is very sloppy and buggy so in order to keep working I should recode big parts of it. This makes me not want to continue.
Currently I’m concentrating on making Paradise Fort fully flash. I’m currently doing it as a collaboration with Jeanes, a friend(?) of mine who’s really good at graphical design and has done several really good games and would-be-games. As far as I know, he’s had a bit of problem with finding a coder, though.
I’ve kept working on this LD game, hopefully I’ll get it finished in a few weeks. I’ve added a ton of stuff, but there’re still another five tons to add.
Here’s a small graph of the level structure I’ve intended:
Cliché? What cliché?
The Netherworld would be like a bonus area, something you’d sometimes find portals to. In the Netherworld you’d find a lot more portals, each either sending you further to the Netherworld or sending you to some level in the other areas. To avoid looping, it’d probably always send you to a later level than the one where you entered the Netherworld. In the end of the Netherworld you’d find some pretty difficult boss; I think that’d be pretty rewarding.
Each area lasts probably about 5 levels, the last of which contains some kind of a boss. There’d also be a chance to get some cool special areas, such as an ice area or an area with all the enemies brandishing a certain variation – currently I’ve implemented ice and fire variations of each enemy, but there’ll be more to come.
I’ll be blabbering about this here in the future, and below this paragraph you can play the game as it is currently; I’ll keep updating it. In case you don’t want to play the game in this blog, use THIS LINK
Herp a derp – I’ve been quite silent for some time but I can assure you that I’m working on stuff! Anyhow, Ludum Dare was this weekend and after some stressed pondering about a game idea I came up with one and actually finished the darn thing!
I made a silly little roguelikeish called It’s A Frickin’ Cave, and I think I’ll work it further since it plays quite nicely and just needs more content. The theme was ‘Discovery’, but I kind of forgot that during the action.
Play the game through THIS LINK! It’s all flash so don’t worry about downloading stuff!
I also made a neat timelapse of the game. There’s some gameplay footage in the end, too, so jump to 4:28 or so to see it!
I looked back through my ‘finished games’ -folder and found Apocalypse Adventure, a Ludum Dare entry I actually made some posts about on this blog! So not THAT old. Anyway, the game had a similar fate to Excavatorrr – it was way too hard to control and play, so everyone nodded their heads in “yes neat game, quite huge for 48 hours” and then turned away. So in order to get some people actually see what kind of buggy craziness I had going in the game, I recorded a full playthrough. There’s also the old, non-full playthrough at vimeo, but it’s bad quality and overall stupid.
Anyway, here they are in order:
enjoy!
On other news, I submitted the demo of BtBH to the Independent gaming festival’s student showcase competition, and the entry list has been published. IS THIS AWESOME OR AM I DESPERATE
So, Ludum Dare 18 was last weekend. Sadly, I couldn’t make much for it. There are a couple reasons for this, though. Firstly, I spent last week in hospital due to certain reasons, so I wasn’t in the best of moods during the weekend. The theme also didn’t inspire me much (enemies as weapons). However, due to the new rules of LD, there was also a 3-day game jam going along with the compo, so I took my time and prototyped an idea I’ve had for a longer time. It came out very well, so I’ll extend it to a full game now that I’m ok.
Play the game at this link. Luckily, the game mechanic is simple enough to work with the flash export, so this’ll be my first flash game, too! You can’t ‘win’ the level as it is, i.e. there’s no message for you for winning, but you sure can still bring the orb to the pedestal. The one level I managed to finish is rather hard, so prepare to pull some hair.
