This is a prelude of what is to come from Team Recusants.

Egyptian Mafia “The Stoners” kidnaps the family of famous racecar driver “John Jon Johnson” and forces him to take second place to their man and only their man in ten World Series races.

On deck for this LD:

Game Design/Programming: @TehSkull
Music: @OmarTAbdalla
Artwork: IvoryTigress/@ALittleDurr

So I’ve gone through a large variety ideas and settled on this one. In it’s current state, it looks like the most ridiculous game I’ve ever made.

Right now, I don’t have any final assets in place, and am just trying to get a feel for the programming and gameplay aspects of the game before the art.

All assets in the game are either horrible looking or taken from a source that I can’t publish from. The link below is just a demo that cannot and will not be officially submitted:

Demo Link

Controls:
Left-Front Tire: Q – Forward, A – Reverse
Right-Front Tire: W – Forward, S – Reverse
Left-Rear Tire: E – Forward, D – Reverse
Right-Rear Tire: R – Forward, F – Reverse

This is just a minor gameplay demo. The finished version will have multiplayer and simpler controls, a car that’s harder to flip over, and oh you know actual RTS elements. No big deal.

This is going to be fun!

I’m keeping tight-lipped on what the game is going to be about until I finalize some details, but you’ll be hearing from me. Expect my stream to be up throughout the week.

Team comp:

Music: Omar @OmarTAbdalla
Programming/Design: Kyle (ME!) @TehSkull
Design: Mitch @mitch_orcino

Tools:
Articy:Draft SE (just purchased from Steam Sale)
Unity Free

Assets:
http://tf3dm.com/ Because I don’t have a lick of 3d art capability in me.
http://www.freesound.org/

Stream Link

Made some nice progress on “The Gallery” (working title). Added another level, a replay method, a level select, and a scoring system.

One more level and a highscore board, and this game will be done!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/29856467/Betas/Web/TheGallery.html

Screenshots below: (more…)

I’ve got a web demo ready to go. Play it, won’t you? The idea of the game is to demolish fancy pieces of “Minimalist” art in the fewest shots possible.

Currently just has one piece called Voice of Fire, with proper credits included. I’m not yet sure if using recreations of art disqualifies me from the Compo. Likely not.

The game is best played in fullscreen (Right-Click, Go fullscreen). To reset the level, shoot the green score block.

I’ve managed to beat this level in 1 shot. I hope the future levels will be more difficult.

This isn’t my first LD, but it’s definitely my first solo entry. Thanks for playing it.

Our build is up! We are now working on a post-Jam build, and bugfixing on the beta. Level 1 took WAY too long, but we finished it.

And yes.

So…LD #24 didn’t go so well for any of us, between the hurricane preparations, weekend plans, and general inexperience. The best parts were the art and music, by far. Whatever, set that aside, here’s the team composition:

Name (Twitter)
Skillset

Dae in Cho (@Haloflooder)
Game Maker Studio, graphics, music (I’ll be lucky to keep this guy for LD26, he might do a compo)

Kyle Bradshaw (@TehSkull)
Corona SDK, some GIMP, ideas, social media

Mitchell Orcino (@Mitch_Orcino)
Ideas, sprites

Seth White (@herbivorezombie)
Musician

How our team will fit together in the end will depend on the final theme, though believe me we are already planning, based on Round 1 and 2’s results.

Our lead game designer for this project, Mitch, has come up with the idea of a storm evolving slowly into a major hurricane. ( or something else, perhaps? )

The game has 4 basic controls, steer the storm left, steer the storm right, go higher (using hot air), go lower (using cold air).

• Fun fact: these are the only 4 assets in the game that we have rights to. Our artist is still not home.

Because of this, we have to take some….liberties which inhibit our ability to distribute the game, or even qualify for the competition at this point. And also make the game really creepy.
First screenshot:

Here’s to our artist coming home soon.

Our team consists of a musician, a game designer, a game designer/programmer (me), an artist who may or may not help depending on the theme/genre (I’ve never heard of a picky artist), and a comic relief expert.

If need be, we could find ways to make our own art, but it’ll look so nasty. Does anyone want to join our team? We’ll be making a game for Android via Corona SDK, and possibly porting to LOVE later on. You will receive full credit for your work and retain your rights to the art. Any monetary compensation the team receives for the game will be split evenly. If interested, comment below, or hit me up.

Email/MSN: TehSkull@hotmail.com
Skype: Skullman555626

My team, Pocket Change (team name subject to change), is going to participate in the Jam. We’re still looking for an artist to join us. If you live in Louisiana or are willing to drive here to meet with us, you’ve got an instant in, but everyone else can feel free to comment below with an example work and we’ll just communicate over Skype/MSN.

My personal tools:

Corona SDK (maybe LOVE too)

GIMP

Notepad++

Foobar2000 + Tron Legacy Soundtrack (gotta have my music)

Starting tonight, I’m making a warmup game based on the theme “Homeless” found randomly on the slaughter page. Chosen because I had a really good idea for it. The game will be based on the framework of a game I never finished. If I use that same framework for LD24, I’ll make the code public.

Goal: Finished by this time Saturday.

This is my team’s first full-size Ludum Dare competition. This is also the busiest weekend we’ve had in months. Funny how that coincides; life hates us.

Artist – Stuck on a fishing trip Friday/Saturday, home late Monday.
Musician – Unable to make team meeting due to family issues and lack of ride.
Lead Designer – Friend’s birthday party to attend, college assignments, and campus job to attend to.
Programmer – Stuck at home waiting on assets. ;__;

First tip: Make plans in advance, don’t be surprised when those plans collapse a week before the LD.

The theme was announced, “Evolution.” I squirmed in my chair a bit out of dislike for the theme. Rush home, get on Skype, no one’s on. *facepalm* When I got everybody in one chat, we got to planning. Odd as it is, the first idea that was shared ended up being our final choice. Plenty of ideas were vented in our chat, but the problem was that I can almost guarantee that all of them were thought of by someone else, as evolution doesn’t make for as much originality as you would think.

Examples: (I’ll link to games that were made using ideas that had been thrown out in our chat)
“I’ve an idea where we take some kind of basic game, and have the art and music evolve as the player progresses. The only caveat is that a similar game has been done before, by the name of Upgrade Complete”
“We could make a funny game showing how some evolved animals would fail miserably laughably bad”
“An AI could evolve”
“Maybe, a man of some sort creates a cyborg. Half human half robot or half animal half robot, which ever one. And as the game goes on it evolves and turns on the player.”
“Maybe the player could evolve in some way, not the character they’re playing, but the player themselves”
“like lets say the music evolves ranging from who knows when to today different guitars or sounds from your guitar, up to modern music. Make like a music game based on that or something, idk.”

All of that has been done. I just know it.
Second tip: Go for the most original idea.

We went back to the idea of a breeze becoming a depression and later a category 5 hurricane. This was unique and also had a grassroots feel to it. Our team being based in Louisiana, no one was more qualified to make a hurricane game. Also it was the only game that made its own pun.

“going from a wind to a hurricane, and we could call it The Winding of Isaac (for those not in the know, Isaac is the hurricane that’s supposed to hit us in the next few days)”

The original plan was to make the game follow from an original breeze caused by something or other in the Atlantic all the way to a Category 5 Hurricane hitting the Gulf of Mexico area and use the “music evolving” idea to let the music help show how powerful you’re becoming. Yeah, that didn’t happen.
Third tip: If you can’t do everything, take what you can and make it nice.

From the start, we knew the idea of going from a light breeze just wasn’t going to happen with our artist out of town, not to mention the difficulty of planning. So we skipped forward to the final stage of the game where you’re a hurricane going from Category 1 to Category 5. Once it was planned, work began. The hurricane ended up in game pretty quick, and it rotated (backwards, *facepalm*), and I added a random background, just so I could see the movement of the hurricane relative to the map.

The hurricane was intended to (and does, if you’re super good at our super bad game) grow with the amount of water you gained, and that would be represented by the background scaling up or down rather than the hurricane growing on the screen, considering how much real estate it needed to look proper. We used the scaling of the hurricane itself as an attempt to reference how high/low you are in the sky.

Fourth tip: Developer graphics.

If for whatever reason, like in our case, your artist is unavailable and is the holdup in the development process, don’t sit there and do nothing. Make some garbage art that no one will see but you. You’re not doing it for the final game, you’re doing it so that you can move forward. Instead of jumping over the hurdle, you just gotta plow through it and stand it back up later. This is the fatal flaw of our game. I relied too heavily on the hope that our artist would be able to do a decent amount of work in a decent amount of time.

This led to two crucial features to the play of the game being broken/missing. The first, fronts, would have added challenge and variety to the game, through the use of strong winds blowing your hurricane left/right, making it go faster/slower, making it spin faster/slower, and changing hurricane height all based on what front hit where and what direction it was facing.
The second, and most important to the “gameness” of our game, was the endgame. With no end game showing the destruction your hurricane wrought, you just fly right on through the top of the map, never to be seen again. With no end game, there was no scoring system beyond the water count and speed that you’ve managed to achieve. The whole thing just ended up being a lot of concept and not a lot of play.

A word from our artist: “I would like to say working on the artwork for a couple hours before the deadline was very pressuring but I enjoyed being part of the team and will be making a port for this game.” Expect his GameMaker/HTML5 port to be a post-competition build.

PS: This post contains just under 500 characters less than all the code used for the game. Props to Corona SDK for making game development that easy.

It’s 11:30. I just uploaded the first and only MiniLD build of this game. I hope those with an Android don’t mind installing and playing a bit. Due to the hectic schedule of my unpaid (for now) voice actors and time constraints, I couldn’t even finish chapter 1 for your approval. Please enjoy what little I have given you and forgive me for not giving more. I promise for an amazing game in the future.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/29856467/Betas/Like%20Night%20and%20Day.apk

Let me again mention that I’m looking for voice actors, especially female ones, so either comment below or email me at TehSkull@hotmail.com

Much appreciated,

Kyle B.

 EDIT: Ooh lawdy I should have done device testing before uploading that build. I’ll fix it up asap.

164 lines of code later, and the engine is complete. Took a few rewrites as I’m not quite used to the Corona SDK. Speaking of which, Android will be the target platform of Like Night & Day (working title) via the Corona SDK. Trial version as I don’t have $250 to be spending at the moment.

Windows and Linux versions will be made, both based on Python, Windows version through py2exe, though these versions will not be as well polished for the time being.

A minimal build will be available tomorrow at the earliest. In the mean time, if you’d like to help, I’m in desperate need of a female voice actor to play a lead character. I don’t want to give too much away here, but comment below and we’ll arrange something to see if you’re a good fit.