Check it out: Light and Dark

So once again I had to submit my game with a limited number of levels, no music, and no sound. On the plus side, I’m pretty happy with the graphics, even if they are relatively simplistic.

This time around I did all my coding at my treadmill desk, either walking or just standing up. I had the treadmill mostly set at an incline, since I made my desk too high to type comfortably, so I need to be higher to use it. It’s a better workout, anyway, so no loss there. Here’s my stats from the treadmill (I kept a spreadsheet):

Time: 9:15:05 hours/minutes/seconds
Distance: 16.88 miles
Calories: 3436 (almost made it to a pound of fat)
Vertical gain: 7329 feet

Not too bad I guess, but as you can see… there’s a lot of slacking off in there (only about 19.27% of the time spent programming (assuming I only programmed and didn’t surf Bandcamp, cause I totally surfed Bandcamp for new tunes)). I had my graphics station elsewhere, and I spent a lot of time there too, but that’s also my gaming laptop… which accounts for more slacking off. Still, I got up to around 1100ish lines of code (really basic code count, like “find src/ -iname ‘*.hx’ | xargs wc -l” type stuff here). That does pale in comparison to my previous LD entries (I think my first Love2d entry was around 2500, but I had to add a lot of boilerplate stuff that HaxePunk handled for me).

Though considering I’d only done a few tutorials with HaxePunk prior to this, I’m happy with my progress. That’s a good mark for HaxePunk in my book… I only really had to search for help a few times. And I didn’t really have to pull my hair out getting collision detection to work properly, so there’s that.

I did the graphics in Inkscape, and had some semi-rigging going with the little avatar, which was nice. I think the graphic style fits good, but that’s probably because I made it, so of course it looks good to me. Better than some of my other Inkscape ventures at least.

I’m also really glad I decided to just go with Flash exporting. Really easy to get that packaged up and going, and then you can just play it in the browser. Kinda sucks though cause I couldn’t get it to not fill the screen (supposed to be 640×480), but it doesn’t affect gameplay much. It would work better if I had a place to host the files, but I’m too lazy for that.

Well now, off to play some Dishonored for the rest of the night (five bucks on Steam, can’t beat that). As long as WINE cooperates, that is.

I haven’t really prepared for this, and I’m going to try and use a framework I haven’t really used much (other than the tutorials). I’m planning on doing all my coding from my treadmill desk, on a Thinkpad Twist, and my graphics in my room on a much bigger laptop. Probably just going to use my phone for music and sound effects.

Code: Haxe + OpenFL + HaxePunk (and maybe some other libs if needed)

Graphics: Inkscape, Gimp, Synfig Studio (if I can figure it out)

Sound: Really not sure… maybe nanoloop and a voice recorder

Editor: Vim, maybe Tiled for maps

Source Repo: GitHub

I’ll probably be using ideas from other stuff in my GitHub, but mostly just the API and tutorials for HaxePunk. Definitely not aiming for anything fancy this time… just gonna aim low and have fun.

This “I’m in” post is a bit late. I hadn’t really planned on doing LD this time around, but then it ended up I wasn’t doing anything this weekend, so I just decided to roll with it. The theme was also pretty tempting, since “10 Seconds” is a pretty open ended theme. So after a bit of thinking over ideas, I picked one that sounded fun and went with it.

Last time (LD25) I tried using Haxe/NME (now OpenFL), but I set my sights too high and didn’t quite make it. I couldn’t decide whether this was due to me picking a game idea that was too complex for 48 hours, or whether I just couldn’t program as fast in Haxe/NME as I can in Love2D. Probably a mix of the two. Anyway, this time I went back with Love2D. My code is terrible… I couldn’t remember how to do classes and didn’t feel like looking it up, so it’s a bit of a mess. Some of the code really made me cringe, but I did get a few chances to refactor some of it. That all went out the door when zero hour approached, of course.

I really didn’t get to spend a lot of time working on this one… I ended up having to chauffeur some people around and be away from my computer for longer than I wanted. And also doing some skateboarding. Couple that with the fact that I started completely from scratch (well, some of the code started from the physics tutorial on the Love2D wiki), and it is safe to say that this game is a little rough around the edges. The physics for the grocery cart are the Love2D physics, and the physics for the cart guy is just a simple if doing this action will result in this point going into a shelf, then don’t do it. Which makes them a little squirrely, but it works alright.

The graphics this go around were done almost completely on my Samsung Galaxy Note 8, with Sketchbook Pro, and some tweaking and refining with Gimp. A bit of a break from the pixel art I did for the last few LDs, but I think it came out good enough.

Audio wise… well, there is no audio. Ran out of time, and audio always gets last on my list.

I do like the concept and how it turned out (for the most part), so I’ll probably keep working on it and post a post-comp version.

So here it is: Swipe the Roast: A game about groceries

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=11192

And yes, I did get this idea from Supermarket Sweep 😀

I’m supposed to be pretty busy this weekend, and I really won’t have a free moment until Sunday, but I think I’ll still try. Obviously I’m not going to aim to high… but anything is better than how I did last time (didn’t finish). Luckily I’ve gotten a lot better with Haxe, and I’ve got a lot of good code to build off of (see below).

I’m also going to be doing probably all of this with just my laptop. It’s a convertible, and hopefully that will help in the art department.

Code: Haxe/NME

Code Bases:

Fingrid: A game I’ve been meaning to finish…

Haxeart: My pixel art editor in NME

CobraUI: My own minimalistic UI system for NME

My LD 25 Code: Might be able to harvest some code from there.

Editor: Vim!

Art: Grafx2, Haxeart (aw yeah), Gimp, Inkscape

Sound: Sfxr, Audacity… I might just beat box for the music…

OS: Arch Linux

Good luck to everyone! Don’t give up!

This is a fairly late “I’m in” post, but I’ve not really been able to prepare for this one like I have for the others. I just got a new laptop at the last minute, and I’ve spent too much time fixing some bugs getting Linux working just right on it.

I’m going to attempt to use Haxe, which I’ve only just learned… but I’ve been messing around with it and it seems like it should get the job done.

Code : Haxe/NME
Code Bases :
Helper Libary (which only really has an animation sheet thing that doesn’t work quite right… it was a last minute effort).
HaxeArt (which is my attempt at making a pixel art editor with HaxeNME… I’ll be using it as reference)
FlickBlocks (my first game attempt in HaxeNME)
And my code from the last two LDs
Editor : Vim
Art : Grafx2, Inkscape, Gimp
Sound : Some sfxr thing, Audacity
OS : Arch Linux all the way

Good luck everyone!!

Well, I didn’t get nearly as much done as I had hoped. I spent way too much time Saturday working on a tile based collision detection system, and in the end, it is still a bit glitchy. I was also a lot more distracted than I was last time… not sure why.

I am very happy with my object based collision system, though. It ended up being very easy to work with and very handy closer to the end.

I never managed to get around to the sound part. That’s always the first thing to cut for me, cause I’m not much of a musician anyway.

I slapped together what I had, threw out my testing level, created a tutorial level (the only level), and drew this gnarly title screen:

Anyway, you can check out what I managed to get done here: Check it out . I’m a lot more proud of the code itself than the actual game, though. Also, Tiled is a wonderful tool. And Grafx2. And Lua and Love2D. And of course, VIM.

Just got my final small changes to my library done, and my workspace is all ready. Just, I didn’t get a chance to tidy it up first…

I’ll probably be doing a lot on my laptop at my treadmill workstation too. That’s always fun.

Also, here’s a link to my Love libraries, if anyone wants to use them.

40 minutes to go!

I might not be as ready as I was last time (which was my first time), but I think I’m going to give this a shot once more. I was pretty happy with my LD23 entry, but there was a lot of room for improvement.

Code: Lua/Love2D ( with my custom library I used last time )

Graphics: Grafx2, Inkscape (with my new tablet)

Sound: Sfxr, Audacity, and not sure for music yet

Well, time to study my code and library from last LD and figure out how my library works again, and hopefully rework the collision detection so it is nicer, and rework the keyboard handler so it supports key combos (in case I want to do a fighting game).

Good luck everyone, and rock on!

So glad I actually finished!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11192

I had a pretty good time, but I wished part way through I had gone with a different idea. It was somewhat refreshing trying to do everything with a polar coordinate system instead of Cartesian, though.

And now I have an even better library of Love2D code! Hopefully next time I won’t have to spend as much time on the engine, and more time on gameplay code. I had an engine setup before hand in my library, but since I went with polar coordinates, I had to scrap most of it.

Good luck to everyone!

Here’s an initial shot:

I have most of the ideas I need (story-wise), and I haven’t hit any major ruts yet, so hopefully I can get this done today. I aimed pretty low, because I didn’t want to fail on my first Ludum Dare. Here‘s the Github if anyone wants to check out the code.

I might bump it up to 640×480 instead of 320×240 (pretty simple using ImageMagick), haven’t decided yet.

I’m going with the tiny world as in a tiny planet type interpretation. I imagine it will be done a lot, but it will be fun to make (and easy, I hope). I don’t want to try anything too crazy, because I want to actually finish in time. So it’ll be an arcade game, with a story that makes no sense.

Unfortunately, a lot of the library I had worked on beforehand won’t be of much use (designed with a platformer in mind), but that was fun stuff to write too. I have my ideas all sketched out on paper… maybe I’ll put up a shot of it later.

This is just a basic library of things that will make getting up and running in Love2D a lot easier. There’s a tileset manager, screen handler, camera, collision thing, vector class, and a bunch of other stuff, along with a simple (and messy) example of how to use it all together. Use what you want from it… I’m sure there are other implementations of the same things elsewhere, but I wanted to use all my own stuff (except for the XML parser).

Am I allowed to continue to edit stuff in the library until the contest starts, or will I have to make another post if I change stuff and want to use it?

Access here

Hopefully nothing comes up next weekend…

This will be my first Ludum Dare, and hopefully the first time in a long time I actually finish a game. Last time I finished a game was back when Palm Pilots were popular, so yeah…

Code: Lua/Love2D

Graphics: Grafx2

Sound: Some variant of Sfxr (probably the as3sfxr I have open now) and maybe MilkyTracker for music

I have a simplified Tiled reader for Love2D that I should have done next soon, so I’ll post that to github and throw it in a blog post so I can use it. I’m going to try to prototype a game in Love2D this weekend if I find the time, just to make sure I’m comfortable in it. I’m fairly new to Lua (about two months I think), but it’s a ton of fun and I’ve already written some short games in it (in LOAD81).

Let’s do this!