Well I’ve just done a little update to my jam entry Monster Production. After reading some feedback I got some ideas to add some more elements to the game to make it a little more interesting.

It is pretty hard to play the game for the full 10 day time period in order to collect your paycheque before some tedium sets in. I also realized my apartment building was so big that some of the apartments were too far to reach at your current rate of speed.

So I added random coffee stations that reset after each day. If you find a coffee station you can have a drink of java and your speed increases for the rest of the day.

The other feature I added was your efficiency the more time you spend standing around it will drop quickly. If you allow it to drop to zero you are terminated from employment.

I also added some more interactions to give you a better sense of what is going on. When your coffee breaks occur the message coffee time appears when your monster is reset to the start point. I also added some minor little silly things just to spruce things up.

The new version is 1.0.0.3 and is available here .

Well it’s friday night after a long work week and I want to start on my entry but I see the theme and  I absolutely draw a blank. So I crashed and while in bed it hit me. What if I made a game about a working monster.

So I began work on my game Monster Production saturday morning. I worked most of the day on the artwork. I took a nice break in the afternoon to spend time with my family. I resumed work  on the game mechanics.

Needless to say after a long while I started making some pretty funny mistakes like putting semi-colons on the end of if statements. I worked late Saturday and managed to finish the game up Sunday afternoon.

The basic premise of the game is you work a standard 8 hour shift with the usual coffee and lunch breaks. After working your 80 hours you will collect your Monster pay cheque.

This is my fourth Ludum Dare in a row so I’m hoping I will do a little better than my last outing.

Well I just submitted my game “Tinker Maze” here at Ludum Dare. This is my first game jam I have taken part in. I really wanted to see what it was like to have to get a game done in 48 hours. I took part in a little contest on IGM a year ago but I had a week to get my game done so doing a game in this timeline was new to me.

When I saw the theme connected worlds I wasn’t sure what I would do. But I saw my kids toys on the floor and got an idea to do a game about Tinker Toys. I decided to use Game Maker 8 as my engine it isn’t as fancy as Studio but it has some nice features and it compiles quickly on my computer.

I modeled all the wheels and sticks etc in Anim8tor that took  me a couple hours.  Then I built my first room and the idea came to me to make a maze game just moving the pieces around the other pieces that join to it.

Level design was pretty much the bulk of the project designing the 8 mazes was not unlike playing Tinker Toys with my kids. The mazes I made sure were not unbeatable but challenging enough.

The greatest challenge was getting through the day after staying up til all hours of the night working on a game. Good thing it’s the weekend but weekends are usually for recharging yourselves.