Winter is coming,
the goose is getting fat.
Put another penny in the snow-man’s hat.

Then run, run for your life!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=20788

It’s a glorified Lunar Lander.  Had to abandon original control scheme halfway through day 2, which was fun (!not), the final engine control is much more how I think the Apollo mission retro controls worked, setting power and time then firing a burn.

Of course you have to do it repeatedly for this, but it is a game…

I used Construct2 this.  Also spent far more time than usual on look and feel, which I think was a good decision, though as a typical programming-first developer I do find it tough to admit that visual polish is important and the ‘brilliant’ idea will just vanish into the murk without it (not that this is an original idea ofc.)  I found time spent was about 20% each for design, coding and testing/bug-fixing and 40% on graphics and polish.

All the planets are based on an iPhone photo I took of a weather windowsill tile out the back.  Gimp filters ftw!

Built with Construct2, Gimp, BXFR, Audacity and a (small this time…) amount of piano playing.

Testing with 4 hours to go late last night (UK timezone) found a few minor things – and I realised that the harder levels were fine on Touch devices, but bad on with Mouse control… so added keyboard shortcuts, updated the help & other pipeline stuff… sigh.  Three releases in final minutes, just one more thing Columbo.

As always thank you for the fun LD and see you next time!

All that remains is: Load/Save, powerups, Difficulty changing, random terrain, parallax glide, sideways movement, starmap discovery, many more sound and visual effects, balance, testing, ohhhh… OK who has hidden the coffee machine… Coffee now!!  Sleep once half of the above completed and half in skeleton form

http://web2.mrexcessive.net/ConnectTheWorlds/

Just need to do that world connecting bit… erm… a Lander game with dubious crash physics

http://web2.mrexcessive.net/ConnectTheWorlds/

Shopping for good coffee… CHECK; snacks… CHECK; chocolate… CHECK.

Tooling this time:  Construct2, GIMP, PickleEditor, Audacity, BXFR, iPhone for music recording and lots and lots of sheets of paper, a pencil and pen.  Open Broadcast Software for Twiching my efforts #LudumDare

Hot tip – gleaned from another LD’er, apologies can’t find it again to give you credit – it is worth spending a few minutes now coming up with an idea for all 20 possible themes… then you have a flying start when it all kicks off.

Favourite theme: Chaos

Everybody have fun now!

Hey and good morning LD people!

Had a bunch of fun this time, long weekend of coding with a break to play Middle-Earth-Quest, that game takes an age, but we beat Sauron … just… anyway…

Please check out my game http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=20788

If you rate or comment I’ll rate you back where I can run the game, gonna take a while to get through all 69 pages – wow!

Finally bit bullet and setup WordPress, linked to about 8 old pieces of my work – even found a Flash/Actionscript version of my PyGame original GiggleBubble!

http://web2.mrexcessive.net/

Hey… (EDIT apologies… not sure why this is appearing above MiniLD50)
After seeing the excellent PillowCastle video, I made a demo Forced Perspective object resizing workspace… not a game as such, but if anyone is interested in making some models or creating levels, give me a shout – perhaps we can work together on something.

 http://web2.mrexcessive.net/ForcedPerspective/

If anyone wants the code including whole project environment which borrows from snippets found in various Unity forum threads, then you can download that here.
http://web2.mrexcessive.net/ForcedPerspective/ForcedPerspective.zip

The complexity (it’s not that bad…) is in FixedJointDragger.

Vogon weapon sound made using BFXR

Starfield based on excellent gimp instructions here http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/starfield-tutorial

(I need to redo it to get better colours & positioning)

Still to do… Earth shields, Poetry generator and end of world!!

I need to create four  main visuals…

• Starfield backdrop (am using tutorial for Gimp at http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/starfield-tutorial)
• Particles/effects for Vogons firing on the earth
• Shield and other on the Earth effects for fighting and defending
• Earth destruction

After that… need to create the poetry generator and then do some balancing for the levels, end of game.

Making placeholder everything… will probably end up as final version everything..  My art is not good.  Map of earth freehand for projection onto globe.

Have uploaded a placeholder build which doesn’t qualify as a game. Earth and projectiles, spaceships and events next.  Then the basic mechanics of gameplay.

Yes I realise this is backward, I’m doing the things I think will be a problem first, then tomorrow is reserved for all the gameplay with whatever effects are made before 10pm tonight.

Have some RL things to do over weekend, and rules more relaxed, so started slowly tonight  – setting up Unity environment, publishing a blank game to website, that sort of thing, checking the pipeline is in place.

NGUI for Unity has changed a bit since I last used it so running through basics again to get the new approach… good so far.  Like the .ttf importing