Okay well its not quite complete, the waves of enemies could do with some more work but I have my mum coming up from London to visit me in 30 mins so im gonna call it quits here.
So, finally it has a name, I have called it “48 Hours Later” Its not technically true as I have only had 40 hours to do it, but oh well!
Overall im pretty happy with my first Ludum Dare entry, im very tired right now and have a banging headache, but thats all part of the fun right?
So onto the game. First some shots:
Okay so if you have been following waaaay back my original intention was to make a game with the same sort of art style as World of Goo but with the game mechanics of Boom Stick. I think I have stayed pretty true to that original idea.
Basically you fight against waves of enemies that float across the screen. There are currently only 10 waves, I would have liked more and with more variety but oh well
The theme of the competition was “Enemies as Weapons”. I have incorporated that theme by having the enemies drop giblets when they die. You then have a certain amount of time to pick up those giblets and fire them back at the enemies. Enemies as weapons!
So as a disclaimer: im sure the game has many bugs and things, I have run out of time to do much in the way of testing and optimising. If you find any bugs however drop a comment I would love to hear about them as I plan to release this to a few flash portals, so would like to get those bugs fixed
Anyways enough jibber jabber. A few more shots then the game is below:
EDIT: I have now made a youtube gameplay video and timelapse of development, check em here.
Okay its 3:31am the competition started 31mins ago. I had originally intended to wake up at 5-6am then start coding but I couldnt sleep so I thought I would get cracking early then catch a nap later on when im tired.
The theme for the competition is “Enemies as Weapons” which is actually a better theme than what I was expecting “Technology in the wrong time period”. I havent got an idea yet but im sure something will come to me
Anyways, here is where all the magic will be happeneing over the next 48 hours:
I have ChronoLapse setup to capture a screenshot every 60 seconds so hopefully we will get a nice video at the end showing my progress (or lack of ).
I will be updating at regular intervals throughout, mainly to break up the dev process a little as 48hours is a long time!
Dont think I have blogged about this yet, so im doing so now.
Im planning on entering the 18th Ludum Dare compo, starting this sat. This will be my very first entry and im quite excited!
For those not in the know the Ludum Dare competition is a competition for Indie Games Developers. You have 48 to make a game (practically) from scratch. Its a solo competition so I cant call in my partner in crime olip.co.uk to do the artwork for me.
Rules are as follows:
You must work alone (solo).
All game code and content must be created within the 48 hours.
Games must be based on the theme.
All libraries, middleware, content creation, and development tools are allowed.
Source code must be included.
The themes for this edition of the compo are currently being voted on here.
I doubt I will be able to come up with much in the 48 hour limit, but im hoping to get at least something remotely playable!
I spoke about 6 months ago about joining a new startup called Playdemic as the Lead Flash Developer. I couldn’t say much at the time as we were in stealth mode. As our first product has been out for about a month however, I think its about time I wrote a blog post on the subject.
Gourmet Ranch is Flash game for face book that follows closely on the heels of the other Facebook game successes such as Farmville and Cafeworld. The premise is simple, you grow crops and animals in your fields and then when the time comes you harvest them and use them to bake recipes. Those recipes are then served to your waiting customers by your waiters.
As the lead flash dev on the project its my responsibility to code all the engine and game play elements. Despite my several years worth of experience with flash games this was a challenging project . Making a game that is a multiplayer game but not a multiplayer game (no client pushing) is definately not for the feint of heart.
Despite the challenges and the occasional heated moment during development I think the product we have produced is excellent and is superior to many of the similar games available on Facebook. The stats for the first month of the game are impressive as can be seen from the data gleamed from AppData.
The main challenge now is to continue the early growth we have seen and retain the existing users we have won. So that means players of the game should be looking forward to regular updates with new content and bug fixing
I, like many others have been eagerly anticipating the latest Blizzard release Starcraft 2. I have been looking forward to the game but more importantly I have been eagerly anticipating the custom maps from the community.
I used to spend hours and hours playing the custom maps released with Warcraft III, I still log in every now and then to check out how its going and am suprised every time to see people still making new maps. Some of the most popular game genres in existence today wouldn’t be around if it wasnt thanks to be map making community in WC3. Genres such as Tower Defence (TD) and Defence of The Ancients (DOTA) were born there.
So it made me extremely happy to see this video on YouTube showing that yes custom maps are possible in SC2 and yes you can make TDs with them, horaay!
This is my first post of what I suspect will be many on the subject of SWFt.
What is SWFt I hear you cry? Well in a nut shell SWFt is an Entity-Component based game framework powered by Dependency Injection. Still confused? Well basically its a really nice neat method for making flash games. Still interested? Read on!
FINALLY ITS LIVE!!!! Oh my, it has taken literally months and months to get all the deals sorted but finally now its done and out.
Its Oliver and my latest game. It was supposed to be a quick re-skin of BlastWave, but as usual “quick” was a word that got lost during development as we got excited about it and decided to add more and more features.
Stumbled across this game this morning and was blown away by the beauty and complexity of the game, I dont want to think about the amount of code that must of gone into making this beast!
My partner in crime Oliver P has just released a little game. Its catered for a very specific, yet popular, crowd. Yes yes its a dress up game, but it has very nice graphics so I think its definately worth a mention
Its not technically true as I have only had 40 hours to do it, but oh well!
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Michael is a Professional Flash Developer currently based in Manchester UK. His passion is all things programming, particularly Games and Particle Systems.