Seeing as the theme has caught my imagination, I have decided to enter.

However, there is a catch: realistically, I only have one day to work in and I can’t stay up that long either, seeing as I have a long car journey tomorrow. So! My ultra-speedy entry is going to be called something along the line of “Honest Joe’s Discount Terraforming”.

It’s simple: you play Honest Joe. Honest Joe sells custom planets – at low, low prices! Of course at low prices, your planet isn’t very big – and the terraforming isn’t very accurate! Fire bundles of water, sand, soil and more at the target planet, in order to paint its surface with a specific proportion of each terrain type.

Hopefully this will be simple enough for me to finish in time, with a decent amount of polish too.

I’m working in C++, using SFML. Pictures willcome soon, and as usual I’m creating a time-lapse video of my progress.

Well that was fun.

After spending a day and a half working on my original idea – a sidescrolling platformer where you play as a spaceship captain who must escape onto the last escape pod before the core overloads – I realised two things:

1. I suck at making platformers that aren’t buggy piles of rubbish
2. I had just enough time left to start over

So I did. I had 15 hours or so, and apart from a couple of hours here and there I spent them all working on what ended up being called “Escape the Space Nazis!”

The name came from a last-minute thought: “Hey, wouldn’t it look cool if the game was in the style of a WWII propaganda poster?”
Well I’m sure it would, but the stuff I ended up with wasn’t too bad either. Throw in some stuff about ‘Space Nazis’, and BAM – that’s the story done in about five minutes.

There are a few bugs that I had to work around, it’s not the most pleasant thing to look at (or listen to) and there’s only one level – but I hope you enjoy it!
(And in my defense – it was made in 15 hours at the very most!)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1886

Finally got the timelapse of me creating my entry uploaded to Youtube. You can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLYye9zr32s

I created it using Chronolapse, set to take a screenshot every 6 seconds. The video was encoded at 30FPS. Given the length of the video, this means that I spent almost exactly 16 hours working on my entry; more than I had hoped for, but a lot less time than I actually ‘needed’. Oh well.

Just a quick reply to the comments on the submission so far: I’m glad you’re enjoying it! I could go and add to it for a Jam version, but I’d rather not. Don’t know why.

Also to commenter Devenger: not sure you mean about getting stuck near the right-most altar. Just go back through the tunnels?

Now for the post-mortmem:
I made one huge mistake right at the start of making the entry, with regards to how the terrain was stored. I stored each screen as a quadtree of blocks. Moving off-screen triggered swapping out the ‘current’ quadtree for the appropriate replacement, and sending the player to the other side of the screen.  What I should have done was store the entire world as one big quadtree, and just had the camera snap to fixed positions – or not. Really, if I could go back and chance one thing it would be this.
See, if I hadn’t done this I could have had my original winning conditions – collecting four ‘orbs’ instead of just seeing the four altars – in and working instantly. As it was, I had to scrap that because of my lack of time. Also, making one continuous world would have allowed me to grant the player special abilities after getting each orb – digging through walls, a jetpack, etc. – something that would have just raised too many problems with the current setup.

Art-wise, I can’t really complain – I was at the limits of my artistic ability as it was. I might have tweaked around with background colours and water tiles if I had the time, but I can’t see myself doing much better.

Sound… the sound effects are fine, I think. SFXr is a fantastic tool. The problem was background music – I have no idea how to create it, and it’s something I need to check up on for next time. I was going to use WolframTones, but that only produces MIDI files ( I can only play WAV ). Oh well.

At the start of the competition I considered how to use the theme best ( you can see this on the timelapse video). I didn’t have a decent game mechanic in mind, and trying to do it through story would have meant spending far too much time creating a GUI that could display the story (text). As it was, I decided to go with atmosphere – and I think I just about pulled it off.

If you haven’t yet done so, please try my submission “Quest for the 4 Altars”, and tell me what you think.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=1886

Due to work getting in the way I’ve had to finish and submit my entry early; read more on the submission page!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=1886

That’s Saturday gone, or as much of it as I’m willing to be awake for. I’ve got the core of my game down; mechanics, loading terrain, transitioning between screens (although that still needs work). Tomorrow it’ll be a case of finishing the map, making actual graphics, putting in a menu, intro and pause screens, etc. That will give me a very basic, silent world to explore and discover.

If I have time (and I won’t have much free time tomorrow) I’ll add in a goal – collecting four items – music and sound effects – courtesy of SFXr and WolframTones – enemies – avoid them! – and maybe even a few other extras.

For now, here’s a view of the terrain of Mt. DragonHead – would you believe I drew this completly at random, and was surprised when it looked like a dragon?

Here are the time-lapses I did of my screen, divided into the two days.

Day 1 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jenOIEQt9Fk

Day 2 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMqPKhMHDvw

Please check out my submission here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=1886
I’d love to know what you think of the code – the entire source is included!

Yeah, I’m a few minutes late – but in my defense, those last few minutes were linker errors. In my mind, I made a game in under 48 hours so I win.

Of course there’s no winning condition in the game, but still.

Hosted here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/50837/LD17.zip

That’s the source code and .exe. Have fun!

A randomly-generated map.

A very basic title screen.

Man, what a day. This is my first go at LD, and nothing could have prepared me for it.

It didn’t help that I had to be out of the house for four hours – and the same tomorrow. I can’t even work into the night because I need to be up early.

So here’s the plan: Work like mad tomorrow, and right up until the deadline if need be. It doesn’t matter that that’s 3 in the morning, as Monday is my day off.

It’s been a lot of fun today. I’ve learnt all sorts of fun stuff – what bezier curves are, why the static keyword can be very evil, and just how bad my art skills are. I can’t wait for tomorrow.

A thing of beauty.

Welp, Islands. I seem to be alone in being pleased, as Islands was actually my firm favorite all the way through the voting.

My game isn’t going to be massively original – one of those “You have a load of islands, joined by paths (shipping) lanes. Move your forces from island to island, crushing the enemy tribe as you go” type games. Still, it’s not setting the bar too high, and it has challenges of its own –  a basic AI, and procedurally generated maps, for one thing.

It’s hour 8 (almost 9) but I’ve only been working for two and a bit hours because of timezones. Add in the fact that I’ve got 8 hours of work at the shop over the next two days, and it’s all the more of a squeeze. Still, nothing ventured nothing gained.

Well, guess I should finally give this a go. I’ll be rolling with C++, as well as:

SFML
Paint (For graphics)

Yes, I realize that’s a terrible list. I haven’t actually figured what else to use – I’ll download stuff for sound effects, etc., as and when I need it.