Ludum Dare : Play the game and read the postmortem

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Hey folks. Sorry for not posting more during the competition. I guess I was too busy making a game! But the good news is, that game is finished and you can play it right now!

Stampede at Crooked Thorax Ranch

I also wrote a mini-postmortem about the production process.

I ended up combining two of my ideas. One for the tower defense game with enemies that grow as they approach and the other for cowboys that ride on bugs.

Enjoy!

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Ludum Dare Tiny World: 1 hour down, 14 ideas

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The theme for LD23 is Tiny World. After handling an unrelated work call I got cracking on ideas. I think a lot of these are pretty good!

  • Platformer with impasses that require the player to shrink down to sneak past.
  • Medical War game
  • Tower Defense game with pixel sized monsters that creep up (unnoticed) but grow suddenly when they reach growth pads near the player.
  • Manage resources on a tiny planet with too many people (2)
  • a creature lives in your nose mining boogers + fighting allergens
  • Position Planets in space so they don’t crash into the sun
  • Grow planets in a lab setting + release them into the wild
  • Insect cowboys on a bug ranch
  • Your in a cell and you can only interact with things that pass by your window
  • ON a small planet, every bit of acid rain or toxic waste erodes your planet a little. Stop it before the core is exposed!
  • A platformer where whenever you get hit you shrink a little (everything else grows). The monsters get more detailed and it takes you longer to reach the end (but you never die, just get impossibly small)
  • Some kind of puzzle or obstacle course using close up photography for graphics. Macaroni Tetris?
  • City building game where you can only use pieces of molecules that fit together
  • A game where you destroy particles (ants?) one or a few at a time. Try to get a large score in the hundreds or thousands (1 pt per particle). Violent screams for sfx of course.
I’ll be voting on these using the criteria:
  • Easy / Simple to make
  • Innovative
  • Fun
  • Kelly’s (wife’s) Pick
  • Mims’ Pick (worth 1000 points)
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Ludum Dare 23 – Pre-Game

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So this year I’m doing my first Ludum Dare game competition. I’m very excited and have been trying to get my system ready to go before the theme is announced at 18:00 Pacific time. I’m running down my pre-flight checklist now.

My loadout:

Note the inspirational collages and ferret poster

(note: I’d love to put a link to every single one of these but that’ll take a long time and you can google them yourself.)

Software:

  • FlashBuilder
  • Text Mate
  • Adobe Creative Suite
  • bfxr
  • Garage Band
  • Amadeus Pro
  • Art Rage

Libraries (probably won’t use all of these but they’re in there just in case):

  • FlashPunk
  • KitchenSync
  • Abstract AS3
  • AS3 Signals
  • AS3 Utils
  • AS3 Core Lib
  • AS3 Data Structures
  • Google Analytics
  • Sterling
  • zOMGamezLib (This is an old game engine that probably doesn’t even compile but I might pull some useful stuff from it. source)
Hardware:
  • MacBook Pro
  • Wacom Intuos5 tablet
  • M-Audio Oxygen
  • Blue Snowball Mic
  • iPhone / iPad (not sure what for)
  • Headphones
  • Scanner
  • Camera
  • Sketchbooks & Pens
  • Jones Coffee

You can follow me here or on Twitter @mimshwright

I’m on Dribbble

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I recently joined the “Twitter for designers,” Dribbble.com. If you haven’t seen Dribbble yet, go check it out. It’s a great resource for finding design ideas by keyword search. I am very excited because up until recently, getting onto the site required an invite which seemed impossible to get. I love the site because it inspires me to create new designs and illustrations and reminds me that I’m capable of doing that stuff. That’s right, I can draw AND code!

Check out my profile and follow me!

A message you would never see in a Flash site

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Here’s a message you would never see on a Flash site.


To be fair though, I would be just as frustrated to see a message that says “sorry, iOS users, we can’t show you this page.” I guess my point is that JS isn’t without it’s drawbacks and sites should always degrade gracefully.

Found on the otherwise impressive site: http://flashtml5.com/