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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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t		 jsstylos (174-31-139-192.tukw.qwest.net) – 04.26.10 01:31:21
Nice. The music is great, and fits the game. The physics don't remind me of an airplane, but I'm not sure what would they do remind me of (a rocket maybe?).
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t		 jcreed (pool-98-114-153-198.phlapa.east.verizon.net) – 04.26.10 06:54:12
I like you keep flying. I thought the hangar level was a level and tried pretty hard to accomplish anything before giving up.

Tell Renshaw (I'm assuming it's that David?) that the permissions bits on the windows port need to be fixed; I'm getting a permission denied.
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t		 Rob (pool-71-162-24-82.pitbpa.east.verizon.net) – 04.26.10 07:04:38
SOLAR JETMAN SOLAR JETMAN
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t		 Nels (gs5048.sp.cs.cmu.edu) – 04.26.10 09:38:56
I won!
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t		 Nels (gs5048.sp.cs.cmu.edu) – 04.26.10 09:41:50
Good work Tom.

Also:
Man, I dig the aesthetic of Pirate-go-Round.
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t		 Chris C (grw565-3.cis.upenn.edu) – 04.26.10 10:43:51
Improbably fun.

Also I love the writing across the bottom of the first level.
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t		 Tom 7 (63.161.156.66.customer.sprintlink.com) – 04.26.10 11:11:46
Fixed permissions. Thanks for the bug report!

You can see how unfinished the game is, like with the end screen being itself a "level" on which you keep dying, and the first level just being a sketch of something so I could test the physics. :) I'm glad you guys found it fun anyway.
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t		 Ryan (probandit.cnbc.cmu.edu) – 04.26.10 11:17:58
What about a online high scores board?
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t		 William (cmu-296652.wv.cc.cmu.edu) – 04.26.10 13:53:55
bouncecrab OS X available from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wlovas/ludumdare ! (For some reason the OS X version is like an order of magnitude bigger?)
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t		 Lea (pool-72-95-236-185.pitbpa.east.verizon.net) – 04.27.10 18:38:37
Thanks, Nels! That aesthetic is a little something I call "I will totally replace these placeholder graphics with something better just as soon as I finish writing this code; oh look it is deadline time." Plus some Helvetica.
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t		 Tom 7 (63.161.156.66.customer.sprintlink.com) – 04.28.10 11:22:11
Wow, that's exactly the same as my aesthetic!
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t		 Hock (c-24-4-177-165.hsd1.ca.comcast.net) – 05.10.10 03:08:23
I guess when I get to the third screen, I win? I can't find anywhere to land.

I played your other game but I kept dying very early on, so I stopped playing it.
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t		 Tom 7 (mobile-166-137-141-137.mycingular.net) – 05.10.10 15:03:55
Yes, you win :) the other game is much, much better. I recommend playing through it, but wait for version 1.4 (coming this weekend probably). It's not actually that hard to execute, mostly puzzle.
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t		 Hock (c-24-4-177-165.hsd1.ca.comcast.net) – 05.14.10 00:03:25
Ok, I figured out the first part and then I made it to the "thanks for playing" screen without too much trouble. Hopefully I didn't spoil the new version too much. Cool game, will have to explore it more after the new version.
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t		 oceaptemegase (ip-91-212-226-131.server.lu) – 02.03.11 11:34:51
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