So, this is my first Ludum Dare with all the tools set up RIGHT, last time I always had an isue that didnt really allowed me to FULLY enjoy the beauty of Ludum Dare, but this time, there is really nothing stopping me from participating in the whole thing. excpet.. *drums* WORK!

Other times I either didnt had internet, or my screen got busted and had to use my 32″ TV (ouch to me eyes), but now I even have a brand new desktop PC, so I CAN NOT be out! I may have a liiitle less time to work on the game during saturday because of work, but hopefully it wont be as bad as my brain thinks it will be. We shall see.

Soo, declaration of tools; Not any different than past LD’s, I am thinking to learn something different for the next one, maybe Ubity, but it really scares me to use a different set of tools, given that my speed at making prototypes and overall poolishing with GMS is excellent, unlike Unity or AS3:

• GameMaker Studio for the prototype, engine and everything
• Increpare’s BFXR for the sound effects
• CorelDraw for graphics (vectorial art)
• PyxelEdit for pixel art (if not GMS built in editor)
• Sublime Text for any other codes outside GMS.

Mandatory setup pic:

Screw the Neus 7 camera..

Thats about it, best of luck to everyone, and rock on! >:D

When the theme was announced I was actually expecting something like ‘Dreams’ or ‘Ancient Ruins’ to the the winner, but I was susprised by the majority, as usual.. Altrough it took me by surprise (I had Minimalism voted as neutral, havent even considered it), it wasnt a bad theme, unlike past LD’s.. It gave a more broad range of stuff I could do.
Basically, in my head, any game can be minimalistic’d, with the proper approach. Minimalism isnt a restrictive theme at all, au contraire; Its so broad that you can make practically anything, and had it fit the theme somehow.

So, after that my idea was to make an isometric game or a shoot em’ up. I went with the Isometric idea first, and having made only one little isometric game in my whole life, I found it exhausting. Too much little stuff that just dint worked the way I expected, too much code for simple tasks like having to recognize in wich tile im on, etcetera. I ditched iso right away with the promise of coming back to it later on the future, but never again on a LD.

Started with, what I thought it was a shmup, while watching some retro/vintage science fiction posters around the web, and fell in love with some of the styles I found there. I was always a big fan of retro-like stuff, and vintage posters are simply beautiful (when properly done), not to mention most of them are drawn very minimalistically. so the game was started and intended to look like one of those right away. Having the style defined allowed me to start pushing other aspects of the game quickly, like asteroids and props, also creating the gameplay super quickly

While developing the initial aspects of hte game, wich was supossed to be a vertical shmup, I kinda thought of the story behing this little ship I drew.. It looked like a rescue or transport ship more than a fighter/warship.. So maybe we just have to go somewhere or escape from somewhere instead of shooting random hordes of aliens..? And so it happened that I ditched the shmup idea to make a vertical dodge-and-survive kind of game. It lacked most of the elements I would have liked for it to have, but overall, I really liked it, not to mention that the visual outcome was, besides minimalist, very beautiful, even to my likes!

I finished the game within the initial 30 hours of the competition, being the quickest LD for me until now, for wich I am very satisfied, but I lacked the imagination to use the rest of my spare time.. I would have liked to add more stuff to dodge and maybe even stuff like powerups, but I just couldnt think of anything that suits both the theme and the game idea. even until now I found that to be hard work.

Overall, most important things went just fine:

1. I finished the vast majority of the game within 24 hours and all of it within 30hs.
2. I defined a style right into the beggining of the compo, that allowed me to focus on more important things quickly.
3. Having made everything so quickly also left me with plenty of time to develop and poolish different platform ports, especially HTML5 wich is usually a pain to fix, works just as fine as the desktop version with a couple minimal graphical discrepances.
4. Slept more than enough
5. Timelapse didnt failed (phew!)

What went wrong:

1. The game is not as extense as I would like, solely because of my lack of imagination for it, since I had plenty of time to add new stuff.
2. Besides the art style, the game doesnt fit the theme much more.. its a 50/50 thing.
3. No music/sounds.. completely forgot until the last day, and I was like, ‘oh well, who needs that stuff’
4. havent really gone out home in the entire weekend, and I just focused on the game the whole time, in the end I got really stressed. I just wanted to go out and run ~100 miles.
5. havent drew anything on paper before starting, in the end it didnt affected me because I developed the idea right away, but it is the second time in a row I do this, and im scared I wont be so lucky next time.
6. Didnt had a reliable internet connection during the entire compo, that kinda slowed me down a couple times, especially when looking for inspiration or particular images. Not to mention IRC kept on closing unexpectedly and twitter didnt even loaded

Game page:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=2290
(the game works on Windows, HTML5 and Android)

Timelapse video:

As usual this was a super-awesome experience, I havent really worked on any game since last month, and the ammount of inspiration this competition pumps on me is priceless, you are all awesome, and I am looking forward to play ALL of your games asap!!

Thanks Ludum Dare people!! =D

Soo, I read around Twitter someone suggested we should have this, and here it is, The Potato Seal of Aprooval!

Medium size seal

There is also a 512×512 png seal for all of you hi-res lovers:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/64862817/ld26/potato%20seal%20big.png

Feel free to use wherever you want and do whatever you like with it, spread the (potato) love!

Cheers!

So, everything is going smoothly.. nothing got me stuck since I am keeping it as simple as possible, wich is pretty great!

Title Screen

The style is very minimalistic, I actually like it a lot (its been a while since I made anything like this, I was all pixels lately), made in CorelDraw to keep it as clean as possible. The game has all the basics done already, now I should start focusing on adding more diversity to it, I dont like it being only asteroids, it gets boring quickly.. I was thinking on comets, huge planets, shooting stars for bonuses? dunno.. I have lots of time left so I guess I can play with it for a while 😀

5hs in.. Here is what i’ve been working on, first I started doing something isometric, wich is kinda wht was on my mind before the theme was announced, After about an hour I sent iso to f*** itself and started… well, this:

It doesnt really have much into, but its going smoothly, I should drop style now and focus on gameplay before its too late. Oh and I think I have a name already!, Return Home

looking at the picture I realize my asteroids look like giant potatoes. hehe…

(Im serious, it was an accident!!!!! =S )

Nice Ludum Dare this was! allow me to start by saying that I had a the most awesome time with all of you guys, as usual, so thanks for that 😀

This weekend started pretty badly, and for the sake of irony, right after the theme (you are the villan) was announcedI almost got robbed coming back home. After that, and as you might see on the timelapse later, it influnced a lot on the final design of the game. After that I tried to keep up with my original plans for the game, but my mind was so messed up, that I couldnt have any work properly done. So I went to sleep triying to accomodate my head and thoghts.

On the next hours everything went better and better, I woke up completely renewed, still with some hangover, but in a pleasant working mood and much more relaxed. drank some coffee, eat some cake, and started coding and drawing a preliminary platforming engine. From then things went their natural course, influenced by my previous night I had my villan, a thief, and pretty much had an idea on my head about what to do with him. I also was decided to make a simple 4-colour palette style and a gameboy-like screen size, to compensate all the lost time and get into the game as quickly as possible without worring much about the looks.

Starting day 2 I had all the basic stuff done and I was missing the actual gameplay. This is where my mistakes start; having the basics done and no gameplay at such point of the compo is pretty bad, and I knew that, but I kept working on secondary stuff I saw then as very important. This wasnt wrong, it was work that had to be done sometime on the weekend, but having left the gameplay for the last 12 hours didnt allowed me to make any sudden changes to it, just keep going with all I had in mind, and get in time for the deadline!

Now, I never got to add a couple things I wanted wich are pretty important. The most important missing feature I guess its cops. Being a villan with no good guys to stop you is boring! this is a key flaw in the game, and I know it! this was because I needed to add this after I finish the gameplay, as my idea of cops where guys with weapons chasing you, and shooting to you, I needed to have pretty much everything else done before starting to work on them. I finished all of that, but when I started writing the cops AI it was too late, just 15 minutes before the compo ends.

Title screen

What went right:

• I kept on going even after what happened the night before starting, almost quit then but now I am glad I havent!
• Even trough it was a time-related descition, the gameboy style turned out pretty well, despite some visual flaws due to my inexperience in low color-depth design.
• Slept a lot and didnt missed a single food, kept me energyzed all the time 😀
• I managed to somehow include something that happened to me into the game, not precisely how I would have liked, but feels great for a game to have your emotions bulked-in.
• Fortnately hte game works on HTML5 just as fine as in desktop, I know many will appreaciate that!

What went wrong;

• No cops = no good guys to beat
• Chronolapse crashed/closed? ~5 hs before the end and I didnt noticed.
• First time working with low color depth sprites, found it difficult to contrast dark areas and some other areas wich ended up being hadly noticeable.
• Controls are a bit hard to get used to, and I never made any tutorials or intro because they felt very natural for me while making them and so, I completely forgot.
• Never drew anything on paper for the final design, and so every stage, weapon, animation, and even style was improvised on-the-fly. that was bad, bad, bad.

I also ported the game to Android today, I only tested on my phone so dont kill me if its completely crazy, but it worked fine onmine so you should be Ok, you can check out all ports (html5, windows and android) in here!

Oh, and you can also see the timelapse, of crouse!

Cheers to everyone, especially everyone who chats around the IRC constantly, and dont forget to voteee! 😀

Finished after so much work! yay!! The game is named ‘Burglar’ (because I saw a few other games named ‘thief’ around there hehe), In the game you go around stealing, shooting and killing people, entering houses and buying weapons.

Title screen

You can play see the game right here!, I had to cut off a few features I initially thought to add, like cops to chase you, and an Android port, The later I will look into making it tomorrow or sometime around this week, along with the timelapse, before the whole voting starts. Right now I am very tired and pleased I finished just in time 😀

Thanks everyone for this super awesome weekend, probably the craziest weekend of my life!

Lovee ♥

I really dont like to say im in anymore because lately I wasnt able to join Ludum Dare for a few personal reasons, overall, I was too busy. But this weekend seems like its going to be rather dull, so im 90% sure I’m in this time!

Declaration of tools I will use:

• GameMaker Studio (engine)
• CorelDraw X6 (for vectorial art)
• PyxelEdit (pixel art)
• BFXR (sounds)

No music for sure, not only I suck at it, there is no way I could write anything in two days without sucking at it completely, so I wont bother on wasting any time on that. Time is golden coins around here!

Best of luck to you all, love ya! ♥

Ps: OOHH, its 12/12/12 😀

(http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=2290)

First pot mortem ever haha, many things to say about this ludum dare! First of all, thanks to everyone for making out of this the best gaming competition ever, without any other people posting stuff all the time and chatting on the irc it wouldnt be the same, it keeps the motivation up in the sky even if you arent doing anything interesting, so thumbs up everyone for that!

Now with the game. At first, i had this idea of a racoon who is alone and must gather trash and food to survive on the city.. but the bloddy racoon kept looking like a cat! i hated him so i left him as a cat.
Then, i started writing the platforming engine based on the animations i just drew, i rewrited it afterwards but having that done quickly helped me a lot to start designing the entire game in very short time, so it was three hours after i started and i already had an idea, a style and an engine! yay! it was time to get into the theme.

After making the engine and the first levels i stopped for a while, i needed a story.. so, its a cat. and he is alone.. it naturally suggests the cat has been abandoned or something liked, and since i was rejective to the idea of abandonment (too sad for me hehe) i developed this “i forgot my cat on a road trip!” idea.. silly but it works!
So after having a bit of a placeholder intro i wrote a few more levels, added stuff, lives, texts and other stuff and took a long break before entering the last day.

Now on the last five hours i was determined to finish as much as i could, so i took the damn thing and started rewriting the platform collissions, added a menu (wich took me less than expected), sounds, finished the intro and mini tutorial, added one more level, GFX (rocks, water splash, orbs), fixed bugs and added a stats tracker. I actually ended up with enough time to make more stuff, but my ambitions where beyond the time i had left; I wanted to make a pretty Day/Night cycle to make things easier for me when making more levels, but after starting it i realized it was too much, so i submitted the game without it.

Rounding up;
What went right?

1. I completed a style i wanted to have on a game for a long time, kind of like a neo-retro thingy. i also managed to make a 2x scaling engine with surface in very short time, because i already had everything on m yhead from a start.
2. The platform engine turned up really well, despite the few bugs.
3. I managed to complete the intro in a way it actually explains what happened, at first it seemed as if you where abandoned and seemed crude.
4. I kept the game simple all along wich kept me on a very constant workflow during the whole time, also managed to  balace the ammount of sleep and work, unlike other times.
5. Had tons of fun!

What went wrong?

1. I couldnt finish the advanced day/night thingy (too much to do in so little time)
2. During the whole compo i couldnt think of a reliable ending so i left that aside for too long.
3. No timelapse! forgot to turn on chronolapse.. a pity because it would have been awesome!
4. I suck at platforms level design hehe, specially with puzzles and such.

Now its time to see the results of everyone’s work, Cheers and good luck!