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Ludum Dare 26: Dragon Drop!
(29 Apr 2013 at 12:07) |
As usual, I participated in Ludum Dare, the internet's favorite 48 hour video game programming competition. This time's theme was Minimalism and my game is called Dragon Drop.
Click to play Dragon Drop!
Mild hint: Every game can be won. There's more (or less) than there looks, should you think of dismissing it.
Play Dragon Drop! | |
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Ludum Dare 25: Age of Umpires
(29 Dec 2012 at 13:53) |
Hello! As you know I like to make video games, especially in a 48-hour binge called Ludum Dare. I did the 25th edition a few weeks ago. The theme was You are the Villain, and my game is called Age of Umpires:
Age of Umpires
I don't want to spoil the surprises in the game since they are fairly shallow. I think it came out fairly well, so if you have a soft spot in your heart for Nintendo's Ice Hockey, go ahead and play it online. The two-song 8-bit soundtrack is available.
Many more projects in the works. Even worse than usual about finishing them. :( | |
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Ludum Dare 24: One of the best birthdays
(31 Aug 2012 at 12:44) |
Last weekend was Ludum Dare time again, my eighth-ish time participating in this 48-hour video game making competition. The theme was "evolution", a classic which has made the final round of theme voting like 10 times without winning. This particular competition I ran into some problems, but the game is charming in its way:
One of the best birthdays by Tom 7
At first I was trying to come up with experimental gameplay, since I got a big kick out of doing that in some previous contests. But I couldn't get excited about anything (of course 2/3 of the way through I had an idea I really liked, but it was too late :)) so I decided I'd just make a game in a style I really like and spend loads of time cranking out content. The game is a large-map dangerless exploration platformer. I initially attempted to make the map 16,000x16,0000 pixels (256 megapixels!) but found out hours into working that some tools I expected to be robust (Imagemagick, for example) did really weird bugs on such-size images, and it also turned out that libpng was like the one thing I had not installed in preparation. Wha-wha, I know, cool story bro. So there are some epic hacks going on behind the scenes to make this work, and some of the game world is conspicuously barren, and I didn't finish the in-world music so the game is silent except for the characteristic title theme song. But the game can be completed and I think it's pretty fun and it was a weekend well spent! Play it! | |
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Ludum Dare 23: T in Y World
(24 Apr 2012 at 23:37) |
T in Y World - Play that thing!
Sup guys. I made this game in 48 hours for Ludum Dare #23, whose theme was "Tiny World". It is an experimental homage to an old game called ZZT, with some twists like that everyone can edit the game world, making it a Moderately Multiplayer On-Line Rule Playing Game. Other features:
Very expensive simulated color-ASCII graphics Content & technology double-whammy False dichotomy Four new music tracks, including shamelessly self-referential theme song You can turn off the annoying music Spoiler 1 Thrilling Computer Science based gameplay Integrated level editor Spoiler 2 Boss battle!!
You can play it or get the soundtrack, or both! | |
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Some Ludum Dare #22 reviews
(31 Dec 2011 at 21:16) |
Hello everybody. I had hoped to make a game for Ludum Dare this time around, as it is one of my favorite quarterly events. Unfortunately I had to head home to CT early because of my dad's health (more on that later), which has also led to a lot of idle time in which to get really good at iPhone games and play some of the Ludum Dare entries. I've got a lot more to go (a preposterous 891 entries this time), but some favorites so far to discharge my obligation for December 2012:
The Word Alone is a very clever word game. It's pretty easy once you figure out how to do it, but it's quite fun to figure out how to do it. Word games are pretty unusual for Ludum Dare! The Last Geek should have been called "Super Vegetable Boy"—it's basically an homage to Super Meat Boy with a twist. Really quite complete, probably the most content in the competition. Nyan Nyan Stack is a cute platform puzzler with charming CGA graphics and dialogue. It's pretty hard but the puzzles are good and it's not too long. Final Trip Soccer has lovely graphics and plays smooth as laxative. Has a great surprise. Can't believe all this was done in 48 hours! Urine Trouble is pretty juvenile, but I did laugh a lot at its absurdity while playing. /follow has some of the best graphics I've seen in a Ludum Dare entry, and is a pretty fun and easy little clicky adventure. I'm happy this one was a three-person 72-hour jam entry so I don't need to feel too inadequate.
I love playing these, especially sleeper hits, so please hook me up if you have found any other gold. And happy 2012! | |
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Escape Cod - Ludum Dare #21
(26 Aug 2011 at 08:49) |
Last weekend I did another installment of the 48-hour solo video game programming competition Ludum Dare. They announce the theme on Friday night and then we draw and sing and program all weekend to try to put together a game. This time the theme was Escape, which was a weird theme for me because I've been working on a game just called Escape for like 13 years. The game I made last weekend is called Escape Cod and it's kinda like recursive fish pinball:
The game's best understood by playing. The basic idea came from Ryan. Thanks Ryan. Initially there was going to be more pinball stuff to do inside the fish, but I knew that the transitions and animations were going to be tricky, so I did most of that first. By the time it got to mid-sunday, I was burned out on implementing physics and I had come to actually like playing the game in its current form, so I just kept doing polish. As usual, when the weekend ended I felt kind of down on the finished product (because of all the things I knew were wrong or wished I could do), but after seeing a few people play and the feedback on the entry, I'm pretty happy with it now. Escape Cod for yourself.
Do you recognize the Cape Cod scene illustrated? I had this canonical image in my mind that I thought was from a postcard or t-shirt that we had around the house growing up. I wanted to get it right so I searched around for image. Turns out I was imagining the bag of potato chips! The title screen is a tribute.
I recorded screenshots from my computer every 15 seconds as well as webcam shots of me touching my face a lot. It's stalkertastic.
I've now entered this a few times. Only Disco? Very! placed in the top 20 overall, but I have done well in the audio category several times. Priority Cats was #2, for example. Since all I care about is winning (winky-wink) I spent a bunch of time on the music for this game too, which you can get in a separate soundtrack.zip. Or make it like an interactive music video by listening while playing the game. | |
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My 48-hour videogame: Priority Cats in ''It's dangerous to go alone. Take sis!''
(03 May 2011 at 00:45) |
I made a new video game this weekend for the 48-hour game programming contest Ludum Dare! For the contest they announce the theme at 10pm on Friday, and you have until Sunday night to crank something out as quickly as you can. You're allowed to supplement your hacking and drawing and musicing skills with beer and whiskey and coffee, which I did. Not a lot of sleep though. My game:
Play Priority Cats in the browser
The theme this time was "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this!" which is pretty ridiculous. I suspect vote fraud. The line comes from the old Nintendo game The Legend Of Zelda, where at the very beginning of the game a man in a cave gives you a sword and says that. Like as if giving an 11 year old a sword is a recipe for safety! Here at Tom 7 Radar we are big proponents of sword safety (not really. Some people in the computer science department circa 2003ish logout party have some stories about me and swords. But seriously who keeps an actual real sword in their closet at a party?). And there is a fairly famous internet "meme" (that means "picture" in internet language) that is a picture of someone holding a cute cat with that caption. So my game is about a brother and sister cat who go on an adventure outside the house for the very first time. Go ahead and play it (after turning on your speakers) if only for the cat animations and theme song. The controls are pretty intuitive but realistically frustrating! The ending is not too hard to find. If you collect everything then there is a small additional reward.
Also: I recorded 4 brand-new songs, which are available in the soundtrack zip file. And then I made this timelapse video of me programming and drawing and drinking coffee, which has pictures of my screen and also of me touching my beard a lot, via brand-new webcam. I'm goin' all out here, guys. | |
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My 48-hour videogame 'Disco? Very!' for Ludum Dare #19
(20 Dec 2010 at 01:58) |
This weekend I made another game all by myself, for the 48 hour game programming contest Ludum Dare:
Disco? Very! The way this works is they pick a theme on Friday night at 9pm, and then everybody makes a game for the weekend based on that theme. That theme this time, chosen by lowest common denominator vote, was discovery. Since I can't resist the 'misheard it' gag (deployed last time with islands → is lands?), my game this time is called Disco? Very!. You can play it right now in almost any web browser, because it's made in Flash. This is a dance platformer (I also like to invent a new genre) with moderately charming VGA-style graphics, lots of dance animations, a boss battle, and three new T7ES songs as its soundtrack. Plus this time there's actually something to do, and you can win the game, and it almost seems like it's on purpose! So best is to just play. I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out, and I was efficient throughout the weekend, though it is also sad all the stuff that got left on the cutting-room floor. For example the original intention was that when you die it plays the sound of a vinyl record scratching and the screen says: Disc over? Y! and when you win, it shows you pictured on a dancing magazine, and it's like Dis cover? Y!, etc.
I recorded a video of my screen throughout the weekend (only stopping it when I was leaving the house or sleeping), so you can see my nausea-inducing window-switching habits. It's kind of funny to see the graphics being drawn, at least. Its soundtrack is truncated versions of the game music. | |
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Ludum Dare 18: You Keep Sliming
(28 Aug 2010 at 11:11) |
Last weekend was Ludum Dare, a weekend-long video game programming competition. Since I had such a good time last time I knew I wanted to do it again. This competition had a new simultaneous "jam" which was open format (no real rules; does not have to be teams of one) in order to tempt away rulebreakers from the mainline competition. I had done a team game jam before with Head Cat so I was interested in trying again, and so were like 9 other people (mainly computer scientists from CMU) and so Bouncecrab 2 was born:
 You can download the OS X version or Windows version. Both should just work if you download and unzip and click to confirm your selection.
I regret to inform you that the intro sequence is not representative of gameplay. Let me tell you about it. One of the ways Ludum Dare protects against head-start rulebreakers is to announce the theme of the contest just as the clock starts. The theme is determined by voting, so you can see some of the options, and we were talking through them all at dinner and excited about ideas for some of them, but not for the one it ended up being, which was "Enemies as Weapons". So we applied the deliberately misheard it strategy also deployed for the theme islands in my previous ludum dare Is Lands? and made our game with the theme Anemonies as Weapons.
OK but still: We started with some code (BTW this game is written in Standard ML) that I had developed to prototype a long-time secret project, which in its current state is just a boring jump around a nearly empty room video game. The first night we had lots of ideas, like how you'd be doing space-inversion rock pushing puzzle solving, where each time you'd find an anemone it would unlock some power, until the dramatic boss fight, etc. The story is something like you're a hyper snail, and you have to rescue all of the anemones from the Evil Dr. Bouncecrab (an inescapable in-joke from William's Ludum Dare 17 entry). One of the minor details was that we needed to adapt the physics of my test game to snail physics, which was mainly that we needed the snail to be able to slime up walls. Long story short: Getting the snail to slime up walls actually took the entire weekend, and even on Monday night it wasn't working yet, and David just decided to replace the very delicate and carefully thought out but non-working physics with new hilariously unexpected physics but that allowed you to slime up the walls and get stuck flying upside-down sometimes, but actually get around our universe, which had been half-heartedly built without the benefit of being able to move around in it, because of the sliming, and with only like 25 total graphical tiles since I had been distracted from making graphics like I promised I would. So you have here an oddly unbalanced game, with like 15 minutes of lovely newly composed music by the music team, a pretty nice intro sequence where it seems like this game is gonna be pretty polished huh?, a pretty fancy level editor, some bits of the universe that are lovingly detailed and others that are literally I just drew a big beer glass and wrote "beer" on it, which you get stuck in and there's no way out except resetting and you don't know why, which probably had to do with the drinking we were doing at some parts of this, plus custom written ray-traced lighting:
And the game itself, which was charmingly put together in the last few hours by those still with us, can best be described as "exploit physics bugs to find the anemones" or "you keep resetting". I added a last minute timer for speedrun mode. At its best gameplay looks something like:
Despite the wide gap between dreams and reality, consensus is that the game came out magnificent and we can't wait to make Bouncecrab 3: World of Bouncecraft! [Bouncecrab 2 OSX • Bouncecrab 2 Windows]
In other news, I have a long-outstanding game post I really should get to, since I keep making in-jokes about it on my blog but not actually sharing with you. For shame. But next up is another music post... | |
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Ludum Dare 17: You Keep Flying
(25 Apr 2010 at 23:06) |
Ludum Dare is a 48-hour solo game programming competition on the internet. This is my first time doing it; I participated with a bunch of friends all hanging out at my house and stayin' up late. The theme for this competition, announced at the start of the contest, was islands:
Here is my game that I made, called "Is Lands?" (submission) which is about landing a plane. You can play by just visiting that page, because it's Flash. (The game is very short.) I didn't plan well for this one, in that I spent too much time struggling with physics, its interaction with scrolling, and refusing to use existing libraries for it. (Despite all the work you can still see a bunch of silly stuff happening when you put your plane in a solid object.) I should not have spent so much time investing in a quick way of generating content without actually then investing significant time in content creation. There are only two levels and neither one even uses physics significantly. But, highlights: I think the atmosphere is pretty good, from the title screen to the parallax to the soundtrack to death chords which are tuned to the soundtrack. The off-screen arrow was a deft (though not new) solution to an annoyance where Flash wouldn't let me create movieclips large enough to actually surround the enormous playing field. Most of the things that I like about the game came about without any real work, which is usually the way it goes. Of course I've got no chance in the contest, but it was worth the weekend and I'd do it again for sure. (Unfortunately put myself a little out of shape for next week's Pittsburgh Marathon!)
Other people in my party: William made bouncecrab (submission), Lea made Pirate-Go-Round (submission), and David made Geology (submission). Those are all downloads and I can't guarantee anything. William and David were using my SDLML library and were having release problems as they tried to submit (though I tried to warn them hours in advance to start doing hourly submits). But I think they had fun and I think they'd be in for next time, too.
I'm kind of on a Flash game kick recently, since I made another game for SIGBOVIK. I haven't posted it here yet—it's much better than this one and I have been polishing up some corners before I post the final version on Tom 7 Radar. (But if you do some light digging it's not hard to find.) | |
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