Ludum Dare 32 | Ludum Dare 29 | MiniLD #34 | Ludum Dare 21 |
Ludum Dare 19 | Ludum Dare 18 | Ludum Dare 17 |
 The "Ever one deserves two awards" Awards Awarded by lxd1 on November 7, 2014 |  The "No man is an island" meaning "Everyone should have at least one award" Award Awarded by Robert Swan on April 27, 2010 |
It’s done. It’s live. I’m dead inside.
Gradience has been submitted and I didn’t actually get around to building out the level progression like I had planned. As it stands… it’s a vaguely pretty demonstration of a game idea that might be good… in another life.
After a full day of actual real make-me-money-so-I-can-eat work, I’ve only been back on Gradience for a couple of hours. I’ve got to keep trucking and make this thing awesome! Here’s the latest treat…. Neil’s excellent title theme.
Today seen a total overall of the level system to allow for concise YAML descriptions of the levels and progressions, along with player and enemy death stuff. Which means we should be able to get some serious work done for tutorials and early levels tomorrow evening. On top of this we’ve been working hard on getting some excellent music into it.
Tonight’s teaser: The title screen! (click for better version)
Time marches on, Dan has taken to generating some authentic music using a NES TRACKER and we have overbearing glow shaders…
I fell asleep last night before posting this little update, but Team Rehab performed admirably until late in the evening, here’s a little gif of something actually happening. Still a lot of work to do today to make it what we envisioned on those whiteboards. Let’s get cracking… after some coffee and toast.
(is this gif running slow for me or everyone?)
The first day draws late, the clock has struck midnight and there are still a boat load of creatures stirring. Pizzas have been ordered. Beers have been drunk. Sine waves have been coerced into staying within their immutable boundaries, like good little functions.
On top of that, our Doodler of Fortune has returned from building real things out of wood and watching horsies to present us with a style guide!
Now to get this into the game and see if we can’t have something playable before the Sandman claims what remains of our sanity.
(except Sos is probably making something much better, obviously)
Our in progress game looks something like this:
Placeholder art FTW.
So, after some long deliberation, a hefty but delicious lunch, and a few sneaky beers, we have our core idea!
Codenamed “Gradience” our game will be a traditional scrolling shooter, but using colour as your weapon, we have a few other tweaks and twists that make it more unconventional, and we hope to reveal them as we solidify, but for now here’s some shots of our brainstorming whiteboarding and you can follow our progress on github here, all nice and open.
We are (mostly) present and accounted for and will be making something that has the properties of a gaming experience over the next 2 days. We are, in no particular order: Me (@thegrieve), Neil (@njmcode), Dan (@stealthii), Claire (@clairedotw); with potentially some design and art direction from the venerable Sheldrick (@jsheldrick) and Pete (@petemcconnell_).
Our current thoughts seem to be leaning heavily towards a bullet-hell shooter, but we’re currently prototyping out mechanics so that may change.
See you all soon, and in the meantime, here’s a picture of the boss, Charles Babbage.
tl;dr – I created a slack group, you can get an invite here.
I know we all dearly love our IRC channels; it’s our history, our culture, our misteps and foibles immortalized forever on codedojo … wait… where did the quotes on Seth’s site go?
Anyway – IRC is oh so old, and I’m sure a lot of people will be annoyed at me for saying, not good enough any longer. This is why I created a Ludum Dare Slack!
I know! I know! I’m a luddite too, I use vim, I occasionally use mutt, I like old. But, I also like new shiny features: inline images, GIFS(!), code syntax highlighting, mobile clients, offline messages, pinned notifications, embedded YT videos and tweets, a friendly API, and other such wonders.
We’re a visual community, we need visual communication
Because we do still love IRC, I’ve even created a special #irc channel on Slack that echoes everything said in IRC to slack, so you’ll never miss a beat. It doesn’t message back to IRC yet (I didn’t want to piss anyone off in IRC) but it’s pretty easy to get that set up if we ever wanted it.
Feel free to sign up!
Chat here: http://ludumdare.slack.com
Get an invite here: http://ld-slack.herokuapp.com
P.S. @Mike, I’m happy to hand over ownership/control to yourself or any other LD trustee at your request of course. Just trying to help the community out!
P.P.S For the paranoid, the invite system does not do anything with your email address other than send you an invite to slack, this seems to be the only good (non-manual) way to do it. Code for the inviter is available here for the still-paranoid
– Grieve
Why did I do this? I don’t know, I just wanted to.
Inspired by Will’s mosaic images, I knocked together a super quick prototype of a thumbnail browser, allowing you to filter thumbnails by platform (even went so far as to try and parse out unity entries separately) and click through to the entry page. It’s a bit hacky atm, but I might expand upon it and make it more stable and maybe work with future jams.
It’s been about 3 hours since our kickoff brainstorm and we’re definitely making something. Neil is hard at work on the map generation, Pete is pumping out some phenomenal art and I’m drinking cider. This is our main man, Samuel.
He’s not the happiest chap in the world, but neither would you be had you lost your essence and are now being chased around by the Groundskeeper.
I think we’re definitely approaching pizza time now.
– G
Jam participants here, we’ll be working in Javascript, with PhaserJS, undoubtedly photoshop will be used at some point and FLStudio may get opened for some dark, soul-crushing music.
