A day or so ago I’ve finally managed to add a bit more content and fix some of the bugs, and now it’s available for Android devices.

Link to miniLD 73 entry.

The game is free because it’s always been that way and I don’t think the current amount of content justifies any price tag. If you wish to support it, feel free to buy the soundtrack instead.

And as always, any feedback is welcome.

P.S. During the development of Android version I’ve encountered my fair share of Unity oddities and glitches. If anyone’s interested, I could sum all that up in a blog post to help people avoid those issues (some of which were quite confusing in the beginning).

So I’ve finally finished this game I’ve been working on for ~2 days now. It’s not 100% done but still quite close (80-90% maybe?), much closer to completion than is usual for me, which is a nice change from my usual 20-30% completion level.

Having released a music album recently, it was rather exciting to see that the theme for this miniLD is “music”, so in part this is a chance to expand on existing artwork to produce something new. And on the other hand, I found this to be an opportunity to develop a game from A to Z, which I hadn’t done for quite some time.

The concept was initially meant to be a bit more complicated (2+ different waves to use) but I though it would be harder to play as well as harder to adapt this idea for phones. Hopefully that’s where the game will end up in a few days or so.

Among concepts I skipped before starting to make this one was a racing game and physics based downhill game where the player could shape the mountain. For all their promise, it was hard to imagine them working (development time, increasing difficulty, gameplay simplicity) so I chose something much more easy to imagine and thus design – indirect control for obstacle avoidance.

I hope you’ll enjoy the game and have at least as much fun playing it as I had making it.

I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post something like this, but here goes.
I hope the moderation team will allow me to share some words of encouragement.

Hi Ludum Dare community!
I’ve only heard and read about Ludum Dare, and as a gamer, I think it’s fantastic there are communities like this.

I’m Hyun from Qminder, a startup based in Estonia…
This is a bit of a meta post, but I hope I can encourage all of you out there.

I wanted to talk to all the creators, developers, writers, artists, musicians, and even lurkers:
What do you want out of these events?
If there is some financial motivation involved…

Just know that people on the lookout do drop by here.

Looking to work on your own things? Looking to get hired? Partnered up? Network?

Right now, we’re in that situation. I’m looking for a producer to make a ringtone for our queue management system.

It’s hard to imagine, but seeing how many talents are around here, I’m sure we’ll be able to find some people who can work with us!

So those who are working hard, grinding and hustling – keep at it!
You will be seen and you will be recognized :).

(Yeah, we’re not a Game Development company or anything, but just know that your talents can be used in more than just the gaming community!)

Good luck to all the participants!

Tools I will be using include:

UNITY 5

PHOTOSHOP CC

ILLUSTRATOR CC

ANIMATE CC

AUDITION CC

GARAGEBAND

FREESOUND.ORG

DROPBOX.COM

That’s it. I will be sharing my finished game on Dropbox, Facebook, Github, and my personal blog. Wish me luck!

Here’s some things I’d like to achieve (if I get time!!) before the next LD.

music!! 

• finish off some tracks i have gathering dust that aren’t quite finished.
• integrate a mod player library like this: https://github.com/shadoq/OZMod-libGdx into my framework (https://github.com/berkano/katsu)
• create some kind of in-game player to announce name of track and give the option to skip to next/previous

game framework (katsu)

• upgrade the version of libgdx being used
• think about / add features that aid rapid development and testing
• go through the build + publishing steps to see if it all still works!
• try out java annotations to link game entities to entities in the Tiled map rather than managing a separate mapping of class names -> tile map entity names. For example the Sheep class would be annotated with @Tiled(“sheep”).

publish an actual game  

• update/port one of my old Ludum Dare entries to use latest framework and fresh music from above
• I would really like to update my entry for LD28, singleton. I’ve changed so much in the framework that it is already looking like a nightmare to port, so maybe I’ll just re-use the assets and make something simpler. I have started reverse-engineering a spec for the game, so I can reimplement part or all of it (google doc link)

I will track progress on Github at https://github.com/berkano/katsu/issues.

Good luck to everybody else taking part in this Mini LD & most importantly have fun!

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20 April update: Thanks everyone for your amazing entries! It’s really cool to see (and hear!) what you all came up with.

This miniLD will be closing soon, as LD 38 is just around the corner.

I hope you had a good time!

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It was a minor bug in custom collision system, but I laughed my ass off, this lion riding was amazing, we are wondering now if we should implement this as a feature.

Hello, everyone again! We are in for this miniLD, last time, at LD37 we were late, but this was our first LD.
Now, when we have more time and some new tricks up our sleeves, we are participating again!

Get ready for some crimsonland-like slasher!(I hope)

Also, our great graphics designer(?) with us again, so at least there will be amazing art and animations.

Have a great jam everyone!

And a few more animations and “bloopers” under cut.
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Greetings!

Ludum Dare 38 is getting closer every day. But first, let’s do another MiniLD!

Do you remember arcade games in dodgy cafes, dedicated amusement arcades or, as in my case, the local ferry? Games that were brutally hard and designed to eat your quarters, but they all had one thing in common: a high score leaderboard! Of course, getting your name on that leaderboard would be a sign of awesomeness.

What’s the theme?
For this MiniLD, I wanted to do something with high scores, so I’ve decided to call the theme “elympics” (sorry, but I can’t resist a bad pun). The aim is simply to make a game where you end up with a score that can be submitted to a leaderboard. What kind of score is up to you – the game could be a speedrun, a time-limited trial or simply a “collect the most points” type of challenge.

I have designed a simple API that your game may use to submit scores, and the idea is to show all the high scores of participating games on a single page. Of course, you can skip that part and just have a leaderboard internally in your game, but it would be fun if people would join in and submit scores to the API.

The theme is not meant to be restricting games to Olympic events, but if you want to use that as inspiration, go ahead! Remember that the Olympic games are ancient and that many events have disappeared since the ancient games started around 776 BC. Some examples are tug-of-war, firefighting and running while wearing armour.

When is the deadline?
This is February’s MiniLD, so you have until the end of the month. This post was published Friday 17th, so that’s around 11 days in total. For completeness, the deadline is Tuesday February 28th, 24:00 AoE (UTC-12).

Update: I’ll leave the submission open until there’s a new MiniLD/as long as possible

Are there prizes?
Nope – except fame and improving your gamedev skills!

What do I do?
Make a game, any game! If you want to submit high scores and have your leaderboard on the official page, go to https://dollarone.games/elympics/ to register your game and to find details about the API where you can submit scores.

All the leaderboards from games that utilize the high score API will be displayed at https://dollarone.games/elympics/leaderboards.html.

Good luck and have fun!

This is how it was supposed to run:

This is how it runs on real hardware:

Still, it was a very instructive experiment and actually not that bad for a week of work. OpenGL with C++14 on a 486DX 50Mhz!

It took me a while to notice the challenge was on, but ever since I did it, I could’t help but to hurry and make something cool.

For the last 2 months or so I nurtured the idea of writing a game for a 486 and thus challenge came handy for motivation.

Last friday I bought a ancient (vintage?) 486 laptop. I actually grew up playing in a very similar model (and eventually even had one that was precisely this model, but never got to work well).  Fortunatelly, even after more than 15 years powered off, it came on mostly flawless – just some keys not working, CMOS battery dead and internal LCD blurred beyond regular use. Still, It’s feasible for play testing it.

After watching a Retro City Rampage 486 post-mortem, I went looking for more resources and found a video by Bisqwit, a finnish hacker, in which he demonstrastes how to run OpenGL code in DOS.

The game I’m working on actually has a legacy SDL/OpenGL 1.1 renderer because I didn’t bothered with writing a OpenGL 3 renderer (for OSX and Windows)- after all, it already has a OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer for mobile devices, Emscripten and Linux. Adapting it to use Offscreen Mesa software rendering – per Bisqwit example – wasn’t hard at all. The real challenge now is to make it run at playable speeds on a real 486. But so far, I was able to run it on DOSBox and under 8MB of RAM!

And does this look like, when running on OpenGL ES 2:

One last step would be to change the game itself to fit more nicely into the challenge’s theme. That is significantly easier, considering the game engine is very configurable (even without recompiling it). In fact, it has a simpler, text-based core (that runs VERY well on DOSBox. If I fail on optimizing the 3D version, at least I will have a text-based game to submit), making it more suitable for tweaking the balance and flow.

And why a 486? Why DOS? Well, despite having previously owned a IBM PC clone (8088!), NES and Atari 2600, it is this machine that caught my attention in terms of quality of games. It was the first machine I knew that could properly challenge the almighty SEGA Mega Drive.

I hope that, by the deadline for the challenge, I will have a more fine tuned game to show here! =D