I’d have moved much faster with Love 2D as I normally do, but variety is the spice of life.
It’s starting to look like a game
Just another nationality-confused Linux game-programmer! I use C, C++, C#, Lua, Haxe, Java and Javascript, depending on how lazy I'm feeling. Head over to my site to check out all my games.
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October Challenge 2013 | Ludum Dare 27 | 7dRTS | Ludum Dare 26 |
Ludum Dare 24 |
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I’d have moved much faster with Love 2D as I normally do, but variety is the spice of life.
It’s starting to look like a game
Hi there ladies and gentlemen
Probably a bit of a no-brainer but yeah – I’m doing a game about weapons that are not allowed by the Geneva Convention, specifically chemical weapons, specifically Chlorine Gas.
For the first time ever my LD has gone extremely well – I have a few hours of leisurely polishing before the end and I plan to make them count ๐
Probably the reason things went so well is that there are literally no sprites in the game, so that chunk of time could be used for music and programming instead.
Despite the lack of graphics assets I think the game looks pretty nifty though!
Another GIF after the “more” ๐
Insufficient… sleeping… arrangements…
The game’s going pretty well though So well in fact that I’ve taken the liberty of creating its page early.
It looks like this:
I spent a long time getting the lighting down to pat, including ridiculous numbers of render targets, blending f*ckery and colour temperature theoryย in order to get the day-night cycle looking right. Yeah because I have a day-night cycle in my game ๐ Yay!
Anyway yeah, g’night
W.
Yeah yeah, sorry for the late ๐
Ludum Dare, unlike many jams, can be done anywhere you like. So I left Paris to do it in Bordeaux with the Motion Twin guys!
My chair is the orange one
I was rather riding on “Snowman” so this whole “Single screen” thing is a bit of a pain in the butt. Ah well ๐
I was also hoping on using Haxe and Heaps, but work was pretty full-on so I didn’t have time to get it working. So it’ll just be Love 2D as usual. Old faithful ๐
Github repository here.
Good luck y’all, see you on the other side!
W.
This last fortnight has been hectic for me, leaving no time at all for playing Ludum Dare games. I made an effort yesterday evening though to play, comment on and vote for 20 games. However my coolness rating is still 0% :'(
Edit: looks like thisย was a bug: I talked to the organiser who reset the server, and I jumped up to 45% coolness. Here are my results
Did this happen to anyone else?
Does anyone know how coolness is actually calculated?
I was up late voting for games on a work night so I feel a bit cheated
On a more positive note, here are my top three of those are played this jam. This may well not be your top three: I only played 20 remember ๐
It’s party time ๐
“Kraken Pool Party”ย is a game about a schizophrenic Kraken. Each player controls a different tentacle: may the most tentacle-y tentacle win ๐
As predicted the game looks nothing like my mockup ๐
A lot of the initial features didn’t meet the cut, but since we applied McFunkpants‘ rolling MVP philosophy we were able to fall back on our most recent working version aboutย 30 minutes before the end of the jam (at 2:30AM French time) and submit with no stress
To be precise the game ends after a fixed time rather than when the Kraken is killed by the enemies. The enemies don’t even attack, and no sailors fall into the water (so there’s nothing to eat). We did manage to implements all the important features though (moving, grabbing, smashing, throwing, title, score screen, etc): it’s a complete game albeit a limited one
So this kind of agile, iterative development strategy can work extremely well, it just means spending a lot of time and energy guiding the project, and a considerable amount of discipline (because we all want to implement all the features)!
Looking forward to playing your games ๐
Beneath the surface, the Kraken awakens!
We’re making a party game where each player controls a different tentacle of the Kraken. So basically we’re ripping off Crawl hardcore ๐ Also Death Worm. Only it’s multiplayer so it’s cool.
The game will probably look absolutely nothing like this (click to zoom):
The Kraken can block projectiles and smash ships, and move itself around my grabbing the sea floor. It can also pick up animals and sailors and put them in its gaping maw of death!
We’re using Unity 3D because we’re lazy.
… than “you only get one” in my humble opinion. Then again the theme always leaves me cold to begin with ๐ I’m going to be focusing on making an interesting non-violent game first and a “you only get one” game second though I think.
Time for our post-mortem
I won’t re-introduce the team, you can go to our “we’re in” post for that. Basically there were 3 of us and we’re pretty awesome!
So what happened?
Well, we made a time-bending tower-defence game called “10 Second Onslaught”. It’s about an onslaught you see, and the onslaught in question lasts 10 seconds:
The game wasn’t really “finished” after 72 hours even though it’s completely playable. I’m actually glad we were over-ambitious though: it’s a good beginning and something I’m still working on (in a separate branch of course ๐ )
What went well?
The art pipline was probably the one thing that went particularly well. Thomas is really a 3D artist, so soon reverted back from pixel art to making models and rendering them to bitmaps. To speed things up I wrote a couple of little ImageMagick scripts to mirror and then stick these images together into sheets. Then it was just a matter of using the haxelib spritesheet to have animated characters in the game
What went badly?
For various reasons, mostly the technology (OpenFL) being something only I had ever used before, I ended up writing a majority of the code, which is just stupid. Next time we’re going to have to organise ourselves better.
Read on for a rather long discussion of OpenFL, including comparisons to Unity 3D and Lรถve 2D…
The TAW (Thomas, Antoine, William) team is in
Yesterday I started laying down some OpenFL base code I don’t know what kind of game we’re going to make, but I’d like to have some scene- and object-management logic down before we start ๐
I’m one of the two main organisers, with Gaeel , of the Montpellier (France) Ludum Dare gathering – we’ve just closed the sign-up form at 26 participants: this weekend is going to be epic
You can find Gaeel “we’re in!” here. As for the TAW team, read on to find out a little more who we three are specifically ๐
Good news everyone!
Montpellier will once again be hosting a Ludum Dare real-world gathering!
EGGZ is a real-time strategy game with eggz in it – click on the EGGZ for a sweet 48-hour timelapse EGGlapse ๐
As mentioned in my last postย Eggz was essentially finished in 48 hours, though they’ve been a couple of bug-fixes and enhancements since then. I’ve also been very lazy about building a version for distribution, but I’ve finally gotten around to it:
Unfortunately the game has no AI, so if you don’t have a friend to play with you’re not going to get much out of the game
I’ve drawn up a quick state-machine that should play the game adequately but it’s not going to be in the 7dRTS version I’m afraid. Check the game page for any post compo improvements
Looking forward to playing your games guys, I really love RTSs – let’s revive this genre ๐
Good new everyone ๐
EGGZ is a real-time strategy game with eggz in it…
I was really happy to hear that there’s a 7 Day RTS, because I really love RTS game – it’s a pity more indies don’t make them!
Anyhow, we held this friendly multiplayer oriented game jam called the “Funky Future” last weekend, so I decided to make a single-screen competitive RTS controlled with the keyboard (or a gamepad) and with no elimination. The game was basically finished last weekend, but I’ve been tweaking it and doing bugfixes since then.
The Paris “Computer Human Interaction 2013” game jam was very… different. Researchers are odd people, not at all like most jammers.
Anyway, we played around a bit with a heart-beat monitor. Or rather I made a prototype which worked with the keyboard using processing (first time, but pretty easy to pick up) while the others got the Arduino to work. This evening I’ve polished up the keyboard version a little to submit as my compo entry.
Yeah sue me: the game logic is all mine, with no external code or assets, and done in 48 hours. It’s also plenty minimalistic, and not unintentionally ๐
Not like this entry is going to win any medals, but I thought I’d put it up anyway: failures are just as important as successes, they teach us what not to do next time. As for what exactly it is that I shouldn’t do next time… well I think I may have to sleep on that ๐
There are still a few places left at our Montpellier event in Southern France, so if you’re in the neighbourhood go here and sign up!
Although I’m one of the Montpellier organisers, I’ll actually be in Paris for the LD participating in the CHI 2013 conference’s Game Jam – funny how there things pan out. But apparently the organiser of this event may be tagging along with the LD theme, so I won’t have to miss out after all. It’ll be my first time straddling multiple LD events in different cities so hurrah, and stuff ๐