Coder Vil

The voting has finally finished and the Ludum Dare 24 results are finally out. My game , frankly, did a lot better than I expected: Humour #36 Fun #239 Mood #296 Overall #417 Graphics #600 Innovation #603 Audio #615 Theme #672 There were 1006 entries in the 48 hour competition. I'd been hoping to finish in the top half of the rankings this time after a poor showing last time and that's what I managed: 417th overall. The big surprise was the humour score: wow! I was worried that the humour might be a bit too straight-faced for people, or that I'd be the only one who found it funny. Being wrong has rarely been a happier experience! I was also really pleased with the Fun score. To me that's the most important category after Overall. It means I made something that people enjoyed playing and that's a really rewarding feeling. It was nice to get a decent score for the mood category too, but I've never really understood what it means exactly. The ot...

Invaders: Evolution is the game I wrote for the 24th Ludum Dare competition. It's the 3rd time I've made a game for LD (as well as one for a MiniLD event) & although I think my games get a bit better each time, I still have so much to learn. This is a post-mortem not just for the game, but for my competition experience as well. The game is basically Space Invaders, but with a twist: it tells the back-story of the aliens through cut-scenes as you play. It also has two possible endings, one of which is rather unconventional by video game standards. You can try it out, or find out more, here: Post-competition version  (fixes some of the bugs in the competition version) Competition version  (this is what I submitted for the competition) Ludum Dare page (vote for it if you can!) Source code What went right I made a game! There was a low point where I thought I'd have to quit the competition (see the "what went wrong" section), but in the end I cam...

The 24th Ludum Dare competition has just finished.  I got a game in for it, but only barely. In what seems to be becoming a pattern for me, I spent the first day working on an idea I ended up having to abandon. The game I ended up submitting was done in a mad 12 hour rush at the end. Here it is: Invaders: Evolution It's a fresh take (I hope) on the Space Invaders story. What, you didn't realise there was a story to that? Well if there wasn't, there is now... There were a few things about it I was really happy with and a few things that could have gone better. Expect a post-mortem soon.

Solar Sailor, for those of you who aren't yet aware, is a fairly simple racing game that I made for the Ludum Dare 48 hour challenge. Here's the competition entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10456 Or you can get straight into it here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25468009/SolarSailor/index.html Making a playable game in just 48 hours is a pretty intense experience. This is my attempt to make sense of it all, with the benefit of a few days worth of hindsight. What went right I used Javascript and WebGL to write the game. Although I was fairly new to Javascript*, it turned out to be a great language for writing a game: Built-in support for object literals (a.k.a JSON) made it very easy to get content into the game. Being able to just hit reload in the browser to test out changes made for a very tight edit-run loop. You effectively get image and font loading for free, thanks to the web browser. Sound too, theoreti...

I've submitted a "completed" version of Solar Sailor to the Ludum Dare website. Play the finished game It's been an intense 48 hours but really satisfying now that I'm at the end of it. There's loads more I would have done if I had time, but there some things I was pretty happy with too. I'll post a more complete post-mortem here in a couple of days... once I've had some sleep.

Solar Sailor is now a real game ! It's actually possible to win or lose. This is quite a breakthrough. :-) Once again, you can try it out here. Also, I've made the play area bigger - it felt a bit too small at 1024x512, so I've enlarged it to 1024x1024. Now to work on the map...

More progress! Solar Sailor is now kinda- sorta- playable. You can't win or lose yet, but it does have all this goodness: There are gates that you have to pass through. There's a direction line showing you which gate you have to pass through next. The NPC racers now have some basic AI and will actually try to fly through the gates instead of just drifting serenely and hoping for the best. You can try it out yourself here! If you can't be bothered to try it out, this is what it's looking like now: If you do try it, I'd really appreciate any feedback - especially bug reports!