Ludum Dare 30 | Ludum Dare 29 | Ludum Dare 28 | Ludum Dare 27 |
Ludum Dare 26 | Ludum Dare 25 | Ludum Dare 23 |
 Hacker Newser Awarded by udo on August 29, 2013 |  The 7-Way Tie Award Awarded by JesterBLUE on January 9, 2013 |
Along with a scoreboard and lives I’ve now got a little ticker that tells you which planets you have rescued:
The spiders chase you down if you get caught in their web now:
Sometimes you can get away … 
If you have any ideas for planet names leave them in the comments (I don’t think that would be against the rules?!)
Ouch!
Now you can shoot at the cobwebs to free the planets.
Well, squares They’ll look like spiders soon …
They’re floating around connecting the planets together.
I’m pretty much done with the collision detection. You bounce off the planets if you hit them and you can get stuck to the “cobweb” holding the planets together. Up next, giant space spiders 
Now the worlds are connected 
Still a long way to go before this resembles a game though. Collision next (bleugh).
My progress so far
I suppose it’s going to be a space game. The circles are the “connected worlds” (although they aren’t connected yet).
Tools I’m using:
I did it! I turned the simple physics concept into a game! I’m pretty happy with this one. The pace of the game is a lot slower than I originally planned. It’s pretty hard to have things all your own way when it comes to physics libraries. The game is pretty fun, I think. It takes a lot of patience to keep the carts from spilling everywhere but you can’t go too slowly as there is a timer on each level.
The graphics turned out OK. I think they’re a bit grungier than I would have liked but our hero is down a mine after all.
I didn’t have time to add a lot of polish I would have liked:
But that is always the case when I enter LD
Here’s the submission page if you want to try it out
Spent the morning plumbing in images. All placeholder for now. I should really start with images from the beginning rather than just drawing primitives.7
Still need someone to drive this crazy minecart train! And something to put in the carts …
Started a bit late (about 10 hours ago) but I’m in. I’m going for a minecart game where the aim is to traverse the bumpy mine rail road without spilling all the gems you’ve worked hard to mine.
I’m using Java with Java2d and JBox2d. I’m also using engie, a small 2D engine I wrote in Java for doing LD entries.
I’ve spent most of the time so far (literally hours) optimising and tuning the physics. If I’d imagined it would have been so time consuming I perhaps would have hacked together my own sketchy physics code, although perhaps that would have taken even longer.
Building the terrain from splines and then converting it into discrete concave polygons for JBox2D was a fun challenge.
I guess I’m pretty behind schedule. There’s still no art whatsoever so I’ll have to slap something together pretty quickly tomorrow. Then there’s actually building in a win condition and tuning the level difficulties. First – sleep!
I didn’t make a post last night when I finished so here’s one now. Singulus is finished and I’m pretty happy with it.
There is Only One sword and Only One shield to be shared around the gladiators. You use the arrow keys to move and space to fire. Aiming is automatic, it locks on to the nearest player.
Click Here to Play It and the entry is here.
The gameplay is simple but quite fun andthe graphics aren’t too bad. The sound is pretty basic (bfxr) and I couldn’t find the motivation to make some music despite having plenty of time. Perhaps next time if I’m better practised with the right tool I’ll feel more inclined. It’s just always an afterthought for me during LD.
Perhaps I could have tweaked the gameplay a bit more (size of the arena, speed of the players etc.) I’m not sure if it’s optimal as it is. Some people complain that the sword is too hard to dodge although I have to say that is the point. The aim should be to get another player between you and the guy with the sword or grab the shield to protect yourself.
I achieved things a few things that I’d never done before with this game:
Made a networked multiplayer game.
I used nodejs for the server and communicated with the client via websockets. There’re a lot of things I probably did wrong technically. For example the network messages are very inefficient and there’s no client side simulation so when there is lag the game just freezes up. However the result is a reasonably playable game.
There’s also no limit on the number of players. I’m not sure how the game would play if a lot of people joined at once. It seems like 4-6 players is about the optimal number. Thanks so much to everyone who helped playtest the game over the weekend. It’s hard to work solo on a multiplayer game so the few times people volunteered their time to help me test were very useful.
Made some AI well balanced and smart enough to substitute for human players.
I knew when I started that a multiplayer game would be tricky because there often wouldn’t be enough people online playing it to be enjoyable. I didn’t think I’d be able to make bots which wouldn’t either be so smart that they were unbeatable or so dumb that they’d be a walkover. It seems like you always get one of these extremes when building AI. However these guys seems pretty well balanced. It’s lucky the bots worked out because I discovered playing with less than 3 people is pretty dull. Now the bots make sure there are always at least 3 “players” at once at all times but they log off again once there are at least 3 human players.
Here’s the link to Play It Again
I fixed some bugs and added a crowd to watch the gladiators. I also added (only one) shield. As long as you hold the shield the sword can’t hurt you.
It’s multiplayer so you can help me playtest it here:
http://www.heychinaski.com/ld28/game.html
Move with the arrow keys, fire with the spacebar. The aim of the game is to grab the sword (You Only Get One) before anyone else and fire it at another player. Aiming is automatic. First person to a score of 5 wins.
Make sure to click on the canvas to give it keyboard focus … need to fix that
