A remake nobody asked for

I'm planning to submit my MiniLD 74 entry, Cooperoids for the first AKJ tournament. Not happy with the way the game currently looks, though, I'm releasing a brand new edition. Introducing Cooperoids: Tournament Edition (oooOOooh).

In brief, expect (hopefully) fixed audio, better graphics and more intense gameplay (full description here). Enjoy! :)

I just realised the music was not there on the version of BDSM that was uploaded. There is now! It's music generated by a web that uses AI to create background music, so it's as fitting with the theme as it can possibly be.

Maybe you find it useful for your games -> https://www.jukedeck.com/make/tracks/browse

Just wanted to share! :D

And so I have jettisoned my fragile game, Prison Breakpoint, into the internet wilderness, ready to be devoured by a howling mob of people with probably totally valid criticisms.

I'll write a longer reflective post after the voting stage, but these are my initial thoughts on the game.

• I had to crunch pretty hard last night to turn what was a congealed blob of JavaScript spaghetti into something resembling a game, but am happy with the end result. It's definitely basic in some ways (the art styles are mixed and incoherent; there's no SFX or music), but it does have a reasonable level of polish.

• Because I lost a big chunk of time, there's not a whole lot of AI. The whole game is about writing some AI, which is enough to get into the jam, but it still feels like a cop-out. I would have preferred more AI in this game.

• The elephant in the room: I suspect this game is a bit too inaccessible. It's not particularly hard, but… you have to read a manual. Seriously. What the heck was I thinking?

I finished my Kajam entry… and I managed to do it before the sun rose.

I'll figure out how to upload it—probably to Itch—tomorrow (still a few hours left before the deadline), but for now here's a screenshot. I hope this piques your curiosity :)

A couple busy weeks put me a bit late with my 1v1 PvE platformer, but I'm back on track!

Throughout the month I have managed to complete all the basics & structure required to make the game playable, leaving this week-end to actually develop an interesting AI. All the iterations of that AI are actually going to be in-game as various levels. I hope to get at least 5 levels done:

• Level 1 (DONE): Almost idle AI
• Level 2 (DONE): Jumping around the map
• Level 3 (DONE): State machine-powered objectives
• Level 4 (IN PROGRESS DONE): Pathfinding
• Level 5 (TODO DONE): Tactics (health management, human movement anticipation)

I'm currently hacking together a waypoint system… and hoping it won't be too hard to build movement on top of it, so that the robot can actually jump on platforms correctly.

EDIT: And the game is finished at last! One day early for once :)

The GPU skinning I've been working on is going well—but not that well. I decided a couple of days ago that I need to prioritise finishing something for the Kajam, and then continue working on the OpenGL stuff. So I've started working on a new game in Phaser, but trying to reuse as much as possible from the other game (mostly the artwork).

I re-rendered the model from before, and did some tidying up in GIMP to produce this instead:

So I'm making a traffic light programming game for Kajam 4. I thought it would be fun to look at the cars zoom by and respond to the lights you've so cunningly set up.

The first thing I wanted to set up are the roads. Because I plan to make a bunch of different levels, it would be neat to have a little road drawing algorithm, so I easily have various layouts.

First I started with a basic horizontal and vertical road, like this:

Now of course, the next thing was to try to have an intersection, because that's where the traffic lights come in. So there we go:

Hmm… that doesn't look entirely right, does it. So I added some special intersect drawing code:

Pretty sweet, if I may say so myself :D It doesn't just support 2 roads either:

And it also supports more than 2 lanes :D

And that's it for now. Next up: adding cars!

My project will be called BDSM (Bomb Defusal Squad Machines)
A level (which is mostly the one I used while testing to make sure everything is bugless) is operative!

Is the UI understandable, even without tutorialisation? Please, if you want and can, try the level and tell me if you managed to beat it (deactivated the bomb) and if you understood everything or misunderstood anything. Thanks! :)

https://raindrinker.itch.io/bdsm

I'm about to embark on coding the animation stuff; but first I needed a nice animation to test it out with, so here it is. Originally I was animating the arms too, but it seems to look more (or less, perhaps?) natural this way; it's a robot, after all :D

I expect that adding animations to the game will take a couple of days, but once it's done my crappy texturing the sky is the limit for the graphics in this game!

All hail Wingardium LevioJam!, the new incarnation of Alakajam!

After launching this website back in July 2017, we quickly realized its name wasn't completely effective, as a lot of people didn't get the pun between "game jam" and the "Alakazam!" magic word (which it definitely is). Because of that, we have finally grown tired of the Alakajam! name and decided to retire it.

After long debates and dozens of rejected names, including "Code Prog-jammers", "World Jam-pionship", and "OSWALD" ("OSWALD Surely Wasn't Another Ludum Dare"), we unanimously praised the discovery of the awesome pun: Wingardium LevioJam!

Sure, we feared for a moment that the name was a bit long and forced, but then we remembered this great quote:

"Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself" - Albus Dumbledore

Inspired by these great words, we have eventually decided to stick with the name and launched this new version of the site. We hope you'll like it!

UPDATE: Our lawyers suggested we retire the "Wingardium LevioJam!" theme & name, due to similarities with an existing license. It only lasted for April 1st, too bad!