Ludum Dare 27 | Ludum Dare 26 | Ludum Dare 23 |
I haven’t taken part of LD for a long time. Time to have some fun!
Tools:
– NightMod for IDE
– Aseprite for art editor (and maybe Sprite Something)
– Auto tracker, Schism and Renoise for music making
– ocenaudio for audio editing
Maybe Tiled for maps, assets placing if I need it.
Cheers!
This time I’ve managed to finish something.
It’s called “Fantastic Journey of a Teleporting Circle”.
Click image to visit my entry’s page.
P.S.
Things left to do:
– improve gameplay (it’s too random)
– add meaningful animations (level start transition, level end transition etc.)
– add music to the levels
– add fx (would be neat to animate teleportation) and sfx
I’ve changed my techstack at the last moment.
So now I use haxe/openfl/haxepunk.
I spent most of the day doing things not related to compo.
But I have a little teaser.
Click the image to see the flash movie with animation and sound:
I’m a bit anxious because I have other things to do beyond LD but OK.
I’m going to use this engine (it’s JS):
https://github.com/superjoe30/chem
My tools are:
Sublime Text,
sfxr,
Renoise,
autotracker,
Pixelmator,
Aseprite,
maybe Tiled
My workplace:
The food will be provided by KFC and local street food dealers (I live in Thailand at the moment so expect it to be rather exotic).
I’ll also try to live stream the process.
I live in the middle of nowhere on subtropical coast surrounded by palms and old people from several north european countries who come here to spend the rest of their lives living on their pension.
My support team includes giant cockroaches, tookays and snakes.
I’m going to make my game using JavaScript and this engine http://craftyjs.com.
I hope not to use graphics at all but if I have to… well it would be simple pixel art.
As usual for audio/sound I use autotracker, renoise/schism trackers, garage band.
I also hope the theme will fir a rogue like game.
Good luck!
My first idea was to make a game about the dark lord who is trying to save himself from a prophesy of death brought by a hero by kidnapping and impregnating the princess so he can be reborn again.
I tried to prototype it as a board game but felt like it didn’t work. The idea was good but I couldn’t make a core gameplay from it. When I tried to mix it with additional mechanics of territorial conquest and resource management things got too complicated for a board game.
It pissed me off a lot and I’ve jumped to another idea in a different genre of platformer. It should be a dark knight running by a castle wall breaking through gates and slashing through guards to grab the princess. I was under a false impression that I have all the tools ready for it but alas my javascript code base lacked several important features:
– frame-based sprite animations switchable by name
– tween-based objects animations switchable by name
– collision detection with collision groups and easy to setup results processing
– simple audio API
So it’s ended in a whole lot of procrastination, waste of energy and lack of self confidence.
In the end of the first day I’ve jumped back to the original idea and started to prototype it as a simple adventure/strategy game where you as the dark lord talk to your servant imp who asks different questions about your actions for the day. Then next day comes, you listen to reports, give new commands and so on.
The goal is to live a long and evil life conquering the realm in the process.
In the beginning you own nothing but your lair and a gang of goblins. You can send your troops to siege, raze and pillow. Your evil actions makes you more popular among the monsters and from time to time they ask to join your cause. If you don’t act much your villainy fades, the monsters run off, and in the end you can even fall into slumber which is a game over.
Your acts of agression against villages and towns break the patience of the people and the king. So at some moment heroes begin their assasination attempts and your territorial conquest meets resistance from the king’s army.
The problem with heroes is everyone of those pesky bastards has a small chance to kill you. The more power you have the more the chance. There is a prophesy after all. To get around this problem you need to kidnap a princess and impregnate her using some special game mechanics. 
Of course when you kidnap the lady all kinds of heroes try to save her and you should be sure you can manage the situation. But if you have done your darkest deed you can die ’cause you will be reborn after several turns.
So much ideas. I’ve got to the level of ugly prototype where you can talk with your imp, the days pass, the monsters come and you can send them to the villages. The next step was to implement siege, raze and pillow mechanics. But I was already out of time.
Lessons learned:
– stick to one idea
– be good at low level and fast game prototyping
– ready your tools in advance ( again )
– get the core gameplay ready in the first day
This time I’m going with the tools I’m most comfortable with – browser and javascript.
I can guarantee my game works in Chrome and Firefox but sorry no Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer.
Or maybe I’ll stay Chrome-only and pack the game as standalone app using https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit
The libraries I’d like to use are:
https://github.com/Animatron/player – for 2d rendering
https://github.com/jakesgordon/javascript-audio-fx/ – for playing the sounds
I’m not using any specific game framework but quite possibly I’ll take SAT collision detection from crafty.js and A*, RNG from https://github.com/ondras/rot.js
I want to make a game about this creature some day. Read about snapping effects. It’s just crazy!
Some numbers (remember it’s all about a very small shrimp):
60 miles per hour
218 decibels
5,000 K
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_shrimp
Maybe I’ll post a game as a jam entry but I doubt it ’cause have some work to do.
The idea was to make a shooter/roguelike with evolving enemies with evolution path defined by your agressive (or not) actions.
I’ve spent too much time learning lua and programming engine. But I like what I did and will improve this engine. I’ve completely ignored OOP this time. It’s all functions and event maps (actually lookup tables) and that’s great! Gives me a bird-eye view on the inner mechanics of the game.
Take a look at screenshot!
…and video.
First of all it was a bad idea to learn lua in Ludum Dare.
Next time I’m going to do warm up game before compo.
Good thing I was able to make some art very fast this time. Just had to limit myself.
Tools roundup.
Development: Löve + ZeroBraneStudio
Sound & Music: cfxr, audiotracker-bu, Schism Tracker Maybe also Renoise
Map/level editor: Tiled
Some more tools I can’t live without.
Note taking & project management: DEVONthink
Source control: git + SourceTree
Assets management: Dropbox
Ok. No Frogatto engine this time ’cause it has issues. It’s nearly impossible to package a game without relying on the main game which adds >150Mb of dependencies.
My solution? You’ll like it:
After two Ludum Dares my opinion about proper approach to game development changed a lot. The only thing I value now is the ability to change the game and get feedback as fast as possible. The best thing are the engines with live coding ability when you can change game logic on the fly. I had plans to use Frogatto engine which is the most advanced thing in this area. Check the video to get your mind blown:
I’ve chosen my weapon it’s Löve! There is also another secret ingredient which I plan to show you as soon as that vimeo video is ready.
And I have not decided yet what engine to use. I’m familiar with haxepunk but I really want to use something which lets me live code whole project. There are some interesting technologies out there but the results are hard to package and distribute which means no one will play them.
Talking about the tools I absolutely gonna use autotracker script to generate me some music, SFXR to make sound effects and aseprite to pixel art. And if I stick with haxepunk I’ll use Tiled.
I was aiming for something rythmic
