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.
So, I got tired of the whole thing and decided to just pop it out. Here you go, description a lá taken from TIGsource:
“I enjoyed the latest Ludum Dare so much that I decided to create a post-compo version of my entry, Paradise Fort. However, during working on it I started to realize how confusing and silly the game was, eventually sucking the motivation out of me. I still wanted to release what I had got, so here it is – far from being finished, but definitely more meaty than the original.
One of the particular things wrong here are the controls, I didn’t bother changing them from the original ones. You can change the mappings, however, through the “settings.txt”.
The game tries to help you with the controls through a silly info text, but be warned that the controls are slightly weird.
Also be warned that the enemies start appearing only after you’ve built 2 cannons!”
Yes, just like that. The game isn’t all bad, but somehow I started seeing more and more things wrong and was overwhelmed. My apologies.
Hum, took suspiciously long to write about LD here.
Anyway, Ludum Dare #17 was last week as I mentioned, and I’m really happy with how my entry came out. It’s called Paradise Fort, and it is some sort of weird mix of Minecraft and Tower Defense. Ludum Dares always manage to motivate me mysteriously, so I was able to get almost everything I wanted in. I’m going to expand on the game now that the compo is over, to create a more finished game (much like what happened with Excavatorrr).
Here’s a timelapse of the creation process. The Ludum Dare rules encourage recording the course of the creation, so I thought it’d be a cool thing to look at later on.
It’s once again time for the wonderful competition that is Ludum Dare! 48 hours of wonderful game creation with the theme “Island”. There were a couple nice themes around this time, like “Annihilation” and “Ecosystem”, but I’m quite glad about this one, too. At least it inspired me a lot! The spirit of the LD is to post steadily about your game to the official blog, so I wont update this blog until the compo has finished. Then I shall reveal whatever crap I might’ve come up with by then. Exciting!
After 3 weeks of voting, the results of the Ludum Dare are out. My overall score was apparently the third best, tied with Dock’s PenguinAgain. My game was also sixth in the Theme-category and seventh in Fun. Also I earned a gold medal for Coolness, because I rated every game submitted (121, phew).
Currently, I’m working on one game “actively”, and pondering several different games to work on as side-projects. I’ll post screenshots of this bigger project when I get far enough. That wont happen very soon, though, I fear.
Had an amazing weekend! Luckily the theme didn’t end up to be Twilight fandom but instead Exploration, so I could actually get some proper ideas. The development went mostly nicely, so that I had time for other things too, except for Sunday night when I suddenly found out a Huge, Game-Breaking bug which I then spent around 1½ hours fixing. The result of my work was Apocalypse Adventure, a Fallout-esque action adventure that I quite like; the gameplay is quite good and there are not THAT many bugs.
I had seen the trailer of cactus’Life/Death Island some weeks earlier, and when I saw the theme suggestions “apocalypse” and “exploration” getting high scores, I started to ponder something based on what I had seen. My idea was at first an adventure game with lots of emptiness and some arbitrary puzzles here and there, but it eventually turned out more action-based. Also, when I started working on the game, I decided to keep it fully top-down to make spriting easier (just rotations). By making this decision I also subconsciously changed to the jwaap-drive, which may explain why the game characters ended up looking like something ripped from 4hRPG. At some point I also changed the large empty areas to be on a separate map to avoid it becoming boring and to make navigating easier.
When I had the basic engine running, I started to design the map. This proved out to be kinda hard, because I had little time to really plan things out and had plenty of area ideas for the map. I chose 13 of them and after some pointless scribbling made a simple map with the locations of the areas you can visit. Eventually, however, one of them (a “secret” underground temple area) had to be left out because of the time limits. I could’ve spent more time designing the areas so that there would’ve been some order in which to visit them, or some puzzles that require getting items from several places, but bleh, didn’t want to, and I think I managed to get some of that in anyway.
Hum, perhaps I oughtn’t write a full post-mortem here, I’ll just link the screenshots and put a download link.
Download it through this link.
Do visit the Ludum Dare entry http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=491
I guess it’s better stop posting about some arbitrary plans and games that probably wont get made, so let’s take a more realistic topic.
I’m sure going to participate The Ludum Dare 48h game making competition that will be held next weekend. I’ve participated twice this far, and while my first entry was a terrible game, the second turned out to be Excavatorrr, which I thought to be certainly successfull in some sense. The atmosphere in LD is always friendly and the blog-form of the compo offers the competitors a possibility to tell about their progress (and post info about what they’re eating, hehe).
The only thing that worries me a bit that the theme suggestion “Twilight Fandom” made it to the final theme suggestion poll. I am not really interested of making a game about the romantic relationship of a girl and a pale-skinned boy. Of course that theme wont probably be chosen, and the other themes look rather good apart from some less interesting ones. Overall, I think (and sure hope) that the weekend will be rather interesting.
