Many thanks for a good game all, and thankyou to the hosts. You did a great job.
I like the current anonymous scoring system, though can we have a description field with each disqualification nomination? I'm a bit alarmed that I received one and would like to know why.

#######-I would like to say this before i will fade away...-########## ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Huge thanks for Richard for this compo :P and thanks for helping me put my game on in the last min :P i was getting realy nervous back then... :) Dont count me into the next compo...because im going to serve in the army in about less then 2 months :S May be they wont put me on Attacking units so i could probably come home much more and may have a chance in joining the next compo but i doubt it :( I am sorry that i couldnt finish my game didnt have much time during some personal problames while programing but hey everything was good in the end and im pleased :) btw i was making even an intro movie for the game shame i didnt finish it. well never mind maybe ill do it later :P after my exams. Good Compo and Best of Luck for ya lads for the next compo :D :D and may the best wins ^_^ _______________________________________________________ yours Ariel Yust 2.5.2005

I wrote up a postmortem for my game... you can check it out at http://www.robo-murito.net/code/ld48_2005/postmortem.html

Thanks to richard for the website, the work adminning the contest and actually running it!

Thanks for all the fish... err.. work.. :)

For people who did t understand how to play my game PureEl please read the instructions :P and if you cant understand how to launch it press the LVD.exe :) thats all oh and i have improved my game and i have the next level ready :D ill impliment him and draw some more art for it :D and it coding time :D yey

well... went to fix that little *cough* *cough* bug that I had in my game only to discover that I deleted everything but a lttle backup I made that saturday afternoon during the compo... o well... always next year to make a game that doens't crash your pc... not intentionally of course :P...

Am I really allowed to post news about bugfixes and improvements I've made to my entry? It sort of defeats the purpose of a 48 hour contest if people keep adding things after the deadline.

Even after my last rant people still wanted one. Well who am I to deny the masses.

Here it is: http://www.larrymite.com.au/andy/al-101/al-101.zip

The only change I made is the green square is a little less picky about detecting a win. See the pygame version if you really want the origional. Virt no difference.

Enjoy

Andii

It was made on a PC not a playstation2, an O2 or a palm pilot. It would probably run on all those platform though.

I guess since my game was written in python its target platform is python. But python runs on the PC so what is the problem? At least bitch how there is no exe and knock a few marks of for that. Just do not 'no mark' because you are too lazy to bother.

Anyway my readme explains you need pygame and python. Please RTFM! Because that kind of comment I would expect from a dumb ass user not a programmer.

I'm not that pissed off (:

andii

I decided that the gore factor of my last release was a bit high. So I changed the blood to bullet holes. The new effect looks pretty cool.
pygame | windows.

Enhanced Edition

During the week after the contest I fixed a multitude of small bugs, and added a multitude of small enhancements.
Please try it out: pygame | windows.

• added 3 new levels -- varying from easy to hard, 8 levels total now
• added 3 different dying effects -- see screenshot
• added level status in corner
• improved sound effects
• optimized painting
• fixed a multitude of small bugs

Post Mortem

The Good

• Prep: I made sure all my tools were installed and working before the contest
• Planning: gave me considrable direction and a better starting idea
• Tools: pygame, pgu (level and tile editors), ModPlug, n-track, Audacity
• Windows: knowing how to use py2exe
• Testing: Having lots of it. Game play came out good, and no critical bugs were in the contest edition.
• Time: Managing time from most important features to least

• Tools: wish I had 3-D tool knowledge to do my lighting effects and hi-res graphics.
• Testing and Time: wish I had more time to do more to weed out the last few non-critical bugs, but you can only do so much in 48 hours.

I enjoyed this year's contest even more than last years. I am really enjoying trying out everyone's games, and I'm learning a lot on what I can do to improve my game making skills.

For a longer version of this entry go here.

I've recompiled my game to work on OS X. I bought a Mac mini just for that so I hope someone will give it a try and tell me if everything is working OK.
Download DMG file (1.3MB)

Heh - i guess that my screwup with the testing code seems to have made it so
some people couldnt see how it was linked to the topic For those who left the
comments saying so.. the link is:

The object of the game is to bring light to the dark universe.

Every time you increase the size of your sun (try pressing '=' a few times) the
stars shine brighter. Oh well.. next time ill be extra carefull with the
binary i upload.. sorry for that. :) Besides that i still havent judged
everyone.. very slow process! (i keep getting stuck playing them for too long!)

I've noticed I have a lot of comments saying that there is no AI. If this is the case then I have a rather large bug to fix before I continue programming this game. Is everybody sure they have PixelsFinal.zip and not one of the test versions? Note to Cairnswm: If you feel like finishing Piksels then make sure I get a copy. :)

I've had a couple of comments about Uplighter running very slow, all from people with 3 ghz cpus. Which is weird since it runs smoothly on my computer with 1.8 ghz. I'm pondering whether I've screwed up any of the timing code, but I don't know yet, and thus I have no recommended fix yet either. Update: Codexus has gotten it to work by simply compiling it in MSVC. Here's a link. Thanks Codexus!

Also, Uplighter will, per default, use as much cpu time as it can. Some people do not seem to like this, but it should be easy to fix: Either enable vsync for OpenGL, or try running Uplighter with the -cpufriendly switch.

Well I have finished judging the 36 entries that will run on my machine with what I have.

People should try and include all DLLs required for their game in the entry. A number of games were missing allegro libraries and msvcp71.dll or msvcr71.dll. Thanks to other entries I found the msvc dlls.

I was impressed with the level of entries. I am sure last April when I last entered the level of completeness was lower. Well done everyone.

For those looking for my entry and not finding an EXE it is available from http://www.cairnsgames.co.za/ld48/treasurehunter.zip as my entry continually timed out when uploading. (Richard is aware of the problems I had).

Once again thanks to every one and especially Richard.

My game sucks ;) - I didn't have enough time to finish it, so don't expect anything more than two monsters in a room. However, I'll try to finish it off this weekend, so any that are interested can see what I was planning to do. I think I'll release my finished version just after the ratings have ended, so as not to colour anyone's opinion.

But as it stands, my released game is only useful for people who want to look at the source, or who want to adapt the engine. It has no playability at all.

You can read my Post-mortem Here. I have moved the direct X 9.0c work around to here Hope you are all having as much fun as I am judging the games!

Be weary of that! :\

Oh yeah; I'll work on a real entry next time.

Hm. I edit an entry and suddenly it magically doubles itself. :P

OS X version of my entry is here.

And again: If you reviewed my game and you don't think it fits the theme then please read my diary entry (or the readme.txt) about how it fits the theme. I don't want to be punished for being thinking too far outside the box.

As i see some comments about the guard always seeing the light:

An essential part of the game is the toggling of the flashlight. Press L to toggle it off and on. Careful, don't do it too near to a guard, he might hear you.
There will be several parts of the game where you will have to memorize the layout before (when using the flashlight or the editor :) ) and run past a guard in the dark. Here be careful again, as when you run against a obstacle the crash sound may be heard as well.

The first two levels are piece of cake. In the third there's a bigger room with two guards walking vertically. You'll have to run up to the bathroom behind the guard in darkness. This may take several attempts.
In the fourth turn off the flashlight at once. In the last room there are two guards. Although it looks easier to walk down the left side, it is impossible. The guard will notice you when you want to walk by him. Try walking down the right side.
5th and 6th are not that hard, plenty of room to maneuver.

7th is annoying since there are a lot of cubicles to search, but can be done as well.

8th has a real bitchy room on the bottom. Be sure to have your flashlight turned off here.

When doing the 9th i ran out of time. Pretty straight forward: down, right, down, right. Flashlight off and you have to wait sometimes in a little corner to let a guard go by.

Final level, not too hard either. If you get to the room with a choice to open left and right, go left first. You'll need the keycards.

If you're still reading this, you'll get the fine part: If you want to see the other levels, type "georg" during playing to advance a level. You can also type "willi" to see the end screen (not that impressing).

Ok, now go and have fun with it!

Georg "Endurion" Rottensteiner

Here's a script, kindly written by alar_k, to make Uplighter able to compile on linux. You'll need GLFW, GLFT, FMod & FreeType2.

sed -e 's/#include <FTGL/#include <FTGL\/FTGL/' src/main.cpp > src/main.cpp.new \
    && mv src/main.cpp.new src/main.cpp
sed -e 's/#include <FTGL/#include <FTGL\/FTGL/' src/main.hpp > src/main.hpp.new \
   && mv src/main.hpp.new src/main.hpp
sed -e 's/\\/\//' -e 's/run\.exe/uplighter/' -e 's/ -mwindows//' \
  -e 's/-lmingw32 //' -e 's/-luser32 -lgdi32 -lopengl32 -lglu32/-lGL -lGLU/' \
 -e 's/objflags = /objflags = -I\/usr\/include\/freetype2\/ /' makefile > makenew \
   && mv makenew makefile
mv gfx/ARIALBD.TTF gfx/Arialbd.ttf
dos2unix lvls/levels.txt

apperantly alot of people have had alot of trouble running my game and I've figured out what the probem is... I thought about it for a while and figured out what was soooo wrong with it... I pushed a texture that is 600x800 onto a sprite... long story short.. only some cards support doing stupid things like this (automatically making it 800x800)... I can't fix it untill sunday though... when I do it should work. garunteed.

So, since I missed the cut off to upload by 10 minutes y'all are getting my early release, which really isn't that much different than my later release. Ah well.

One issue that has been pointed out to me is that the cursor is inverted along the vertical axis. I've no clue why this is. Works fine on my iBook, but is inverted on a friends iMac. No clue.

And to respond to some of the comments, yes, I'm sorry, my entry is Mac only. And it requires the SDL runtime libs. But most sadly, it won't run on windows. If anybody feels really ambitious and wants to try it on windows I'll send you the source. It's just OpenGL and SDL written in straight C using Apples dev tools. The binding to things are a bit wonky, but that's all done by the linker.

Well that was my first LD48 and boy, was it a learning experiance (sadly not enough XP to put me up a level though :)

• +: python: Way easy to code up the classes and stuff.
• +: pygame: Very nice wrappers for sdl (but.....)

• -: pygame: It has some very odd behaviours that are not obvious from the docs. (Eg, color_key and alpha channel stuff dont mix.)
• -: know thy toolkit: Id only started playing with pygame the week before and boy did it show once I really started.
• -: graphics: I should have listened to my own advice and ignored the graphics and get the gameplay done first.

Yes, pygame is a plus and a minus. My time to get something appearing on the screen was very short. My time to get what I _wanted_ on the screen was very long. Infact too long.

Being able to write a short program to draw a transparent object to the screen a day before the comp, doesnt mean you knock up a library to blat it ontop of a colorkey'ed tile surface during the comp. :)

I spent most of the sunday day (pretty well the whole thing) trying to get the graphics working. I should have abandononed it as soon as I had problems and got my game play going. Im sure people would have been more forgiving of a program with crap graphics and _SOME_ gameplay than they would be with my current entry, which has graphics but no gameplay. *sigh*. Annoyingly my idea would have worked fine just with 2D draw commands and I should have just bitten the bullet and gone with that ;).

The only current bit of game play is to fire up an editor and edit the level files at data/maps/level0 although you might also need to nuke the data/maps/level0.calc file after you do. Currently only 'M'arine spawns do much of anything (give out light and thats it). Thrilling, isnt it? :)

Oh well, next time.... ;)

Does my entry really crash some systems? o_O

It doesn't under Windows XP... *cough*

I'm totally confused here :/ I already have three comments saying my entry doesn't follow the theme. The red team is fighting to turn on the lights and the blue team is fighting to turn them off. Red is healed by the light and blue is hurt by the light. What is so difficult to unsderstand about that?

Yeah, everyone keeps having trouble with the controls and losing a lot lol. It's because I didnt leave myself enough time to adequately test on more than just my development computer. By the time I realized that on any of my other machines the speed was all messed up and the gameplay unbalanced, it was too late to make any changes. This is something I will fix in the next competition ;)

Also don't forget to vote for the best game overall (again, on the front page.)

If you think an entry should be disqualified, vote on the front page.

Entrants may vote that an entry be disqualified for one of three reasons:

1. Did not follow the theme of the competition,
2. Did not work on the target platform, or
3. Entrant cheated.

An entry that gets more than 50% disqualification votes is not eligible for any prizes, though they'll still appear in the rankings ("do'h, if only I'd followed the rules!")

For those of you who are having my game crash at launch, have you extracted the zip before running, or are you attempting to run my game from within a compressed folder? It sounds like it cannot find the font file. Can you e-mail me with more information? CrazyNorman@GMail.com

Well, all things considered, I don't think I did a bad job, especially since I started 12 hours late and slept through another 12! :) I'm quite happy with how I actually got mouse gestures to work too.

It's just a crying shame that the rest of the game is bad. ;)

I didn't have the time to make it what I wanted it to be, though I probably had my vision set just a little beyond the horizon, if you get my drift. The mouse gestures are apparently too hard to do, I knew how to draw them so I didn't have much trouble with them, but I forgot I wasn't the only one who was going to play it. I probably should have worked more on the pattern recognition code..

The ghost barrage is also a bit of a mis-implementation. I wanted them to come the further you got into the game, but again due to lack of time, I was unable to implement a proper spawning code. Maybe I should have left out the defenders, and instead spend more time write good Raider code..

Regardless, I had a lot of fun again this LD48, and I'm pretty impressed with some of the games. I'm probably going to enter again next LD48, and again, try to make a FUN game instead of a hard, impossible to control game with some innovative features. :)

See you in 6 months!

- Deepflame

Sorry about doing an EXE installer... I too like all entries to just be zips. The reason I did an installer was because I had tons of time left (this one was so easy for some reason!), and I was trying to polish it in every way I could, including that. I also am aiming at my website audience as well, where the installer is needed. I should've put up a zip one too, though, because even I would've preferred it.

Also, nobody's mentioned this, but it's something that I fear: I hope you realize when playing my game that's not a strict, simple, puzzle. The first few levels can be "solved" in a simple way, but once you get into it, you see that it's actually a hybrid of puzzle and arcade, and there aren't fixed solutions that can be reached, you just have to battle the CHUDs effectively until the sun comes up! There are some later levels that can be solved, but it involves clever manipulation of your peopleses, not just clicking on the right fuses, so I'm pretty proud of that! I felt good when I discovered a solution to Double Trouble, myself.

Oh, and anybody having trouble figuring out the win conditions for a level, it's at the bottom of the screen - it either says to keep X people alive, or torch X CHUDs. It's always down there, so just have a look!

As soon as I get ahold of the head honcho I will be uploading an OSX dmg version of my entry as well as a linux makefile & run script.

Also I would like to say that anyone who doesn't understand how this game connects to the theme should read my diary entries on the subject.

Again the chosen theme wasn't the one I would have liked the most. Instead the winning theme was "Light & Darkness", which I felt as dull and not really restrictive enough to give extra thought for creativity.

It didn't take me too long to pick up a game idea to work with. I set out to make game in style of shooting gallery or the classic Operation Wolf, where player is supposed to shoot out all the lights. There wasn't much technical challenge in this, so I figured out that this time I will try to think about gameplay before doing finishing graphical touches. I decided to use tile-based layout for the graphics, and I used tool called Mappy for laying out the levels.

When building levels it turned out that for making the game even remotely interesting enough, there has to be sufficient amount of different content. So eventually I end up using quite much of the time to work with the graphics. This led to the fact that I didn't have time to implement more rich gameplay features such as moving or animated targets. However, I still tried to stuck with the decision of focusing on gameplay first. So, for example, I created the level state logic before doing sound and graphical touches like particle systems.

Still most of the levels and graphics in final version were done as the last thing, without enough energy or time to do proper playtesting to tune difficulty curve. While it generally gets harder in pretty reasonable way for the first level, turns out that at least a few players complain that e.g. level 8 seems to be a bit hard compared to levels before and after it.

In retrospect the chosen idea was bad in the sense that it required a moderate amount of work with graphics. Some theme with less such work with assets would have been better choice for such quick game project.

Working with the sound and music was a nice diversion from the other work. I had fun time making sound effects for the breaking lights -- I borrowed a kettle and handful of spoons from kitchen, and kept on dropping the spoons to the kettle to create a few sounds resembling shattering glass. :) I created a few small pieces of music in one module with Impulse Tracker, only to find out that with SDL_mixer (and its embedded MikMod) I couldn't properly get the module loop inside it with the standard looping commands. This time I also tried to pick better quality samples but the sound quality was still not that good in the game, which I figured out being a fault of either SDL sound, SDL_mixer or MikMod. I decided to drop those and switched over to FMOD, which solved both the looping and sound quality problems.

Sticking to libraries and tools you already know is good in projects like this. Again I used SDL libraries and the Turska UI framework. When switching the audio engine from SDL_mixer I first thought about using Audiere, but I haven't used it before so I decided to use FMOD instead which I was already familiar with. I'll try Audiere later with some other project.

I estimate that I used about 22 hours for actual development of the game, not counting sleeping, eating and other pauses.

What went right:

• + Familiar set of libraries (SDL etc), again.
• + Do more gameplay logic at earlier phase than in previous 48hr games.

• - Game idea ended up eating a bit too much of time in making graphics etc.
• - Problems with music playing so I had to switch audio engine mid-project.
• - Doing all different levels left up too late again, so there wasn't enough tuning for the difficulty curve.

• 1 PC (3 GHz P4).
• About 22 hours of time.
• About 70 KB of source code (2653 lines).
• Kettle and a handful of spoons.
• 170 KB of sound and music (9 oggs and one oxm module).
• 181 KB of graphics (20 png files).

I made some small updates to Light Warrior, download version 1.0.1. Notably the difficulty of level 8 has been lowered, as quite many complained that it is a bit too hard.

I have removed my testing code - so now the universe runs for longer... also i
have slightly decoupled the framerate :) a new binary can be found here.
Ill continue to update over the next week or so as i get time (and catch up on sleep).
Its crunch time at work so it might be a slow process.

Your absolutely correct my use of the theme was terrible. At night monsters popup much more frequently but that is essentially all. I added the monster does more damage the better your weapon was last minute and didn't think of the consequences. It would have been much better to base monster damage on your current HitPoints instead.

I doubt it is even possible to win against the two dragons as they have a rediculusly strong atk and def score. Anyway sorry for inflicting this on the testers, heheh. I'll be sure to do better next year and not make a stupid RPG. Damn content driven games :o)

edit: Oh and I forgot to mention my all encompassing excuse. I'm new.

If anyone is interested by those kind of things you can read my Post-Mortem for my game Lightstream48.

I have correctly identified the required Microsoft fix for the runtime error many people have been seeing when running this program. It is now available to DOWNLOAD HERE . This is a Microsoft .msi file zipped. If you have had problems running this game, this file should work. It should not require a restart of Windows.

I found this goes for more games, always try reading the Readme file(normally I'm
too lazy for it too), for me at least 48 hours didn't allow to put in much ingame
explanation, and I've seen that goes for others too.


For those lazy readers who still want to understand my entry:
RED are BAD and BLUE are GOOD. So use the blue ones to kill the red ones.
It's not that hard :)

I've just been playing with my entry, wondering why so many people are finding it slow. Much to surprise, I've found that if I _increase_ the canvas resolution from 16 to 32 bits, it runs much smoother.
Now DON'T LOOK AT THIS UNTIL YOU'VE JUDGED THE UPLOADED ENTRY. But if you want to see a much smoother entry, where the only difference in the code is the increased screen depth, a new version can be found here. It is a better game for just that little switch. Ho hum. I'll know next time.

A comment from my ratings page:

• Won't run have python 2.3 installed and pygame 1.6 - maybe try py2exing it

Thanks to all those who have left feedback. A few comments:

• I allocated 1 hour for using py2exe just could not get it working. So please install python and pygame to play my game. After install open the al-101.py file to play.
• The green square does detect a 'win', the tank's bounding box must be completely contained in it. I ment loosen this issue but never got around to it. All it does is say level complete anyway (:
• The lights do do somthing. Just drag them into the path of the tank. The title text at the top of the screen...
• Yep had planned a field for the lights, just ran out of time.
• Yarr correct Braitenberg vehicle behaviour would have tied into the theme more obviously. But no time... And yes red squares as 'lights' does require a little fancy thinking.

So it seems I uploaded a bugged version (once again). Oh well to late. If anyones interested in playing the fixed version of my game - where its possible to complete the 1st stage, I've made a zip of the fixed exe here: http://xout.blackened-interactive.com/dump/new/LD_fixedEXE.zip

Hey, I just started to get reviews/comments for Dayside, thanks judges! There are a few bugs, including one which seems to cause it to freeze. For best performance, run in Internet Explorer (I've been informed that firefox fails at dhtml, sorry for the inconvenience). Death is also an issue (isn't it always?), but just keep this in mind: if the game freezes, take a look for a red/green health bar at the top of the page. if it's not there, you've died; reload the page to try again. Nice games all, I'll get back to judging!

People keep complaining about the missing DLLs. It's too late for me to re-upload with the DLLs, and I already edited my last post with links to the proper DLLs less than an hour after the compo ended. However, I'm still getting a lot of complaints that my (NyanNyanKoneko) entry Hero of Light VS. the Warriors of Darkness doesn't have the proper DLLs, and that I should tell people where to get them. So here they are again.

zlib1.dll: http://www.playingwithyarn.net/share/zlib1.dll

libpng13.dll: http://www.playingwithyarn.net/share/libpng13.dll

alleg41.dll: http://www.playingwithyarn.net/share/alleg41.dll

Windows Binary With DLLs: http://www.playingwithyarn.net/data/hero-win32.zip

I know keeping track of all the games submitted is difficult, but if the game below looks unfamiliar, then you might need the new package or just the DLLs.

After spending all of both days in front of the computer, I'm feeling it today. My neck is hurting and my legs can feel the lack of exercise.

Anyone think that Othello doesn't fit the theme?

Here's my case.

Any thoughts?

1. I need to clear my weekend next competition so I can have enough time. :)

2. No new features in the last hour. I added game over and title screens at the last minute, but they didn't work in the executable form so I had to scrap the changes anyway.

3. I should spend more time making the game fun. I thought I had this figured out, but there were minimal gameplay elements here, and I should have concentrated on that rather than making sure the walls and floor looked decent.

Thanks for everybody's ratings, and much more importantly, COMMENTS! I listen to the praise and criticism equally and they're really helpful!

Can't wait for the next competition! It's really a rare opportunity to help collaborate on a project like this, and all the different entries were really interesting.

As for this project, I have a bunch of ideas about where to take it from here, because I HAVE to make it fun now that I've started it. :) I'll post an entry once I've got the new stuff incorporated.

I see that there have been problems playing this game - this is due to a missing directX library that needs to be installed. It was included with the SDK for 9.0c. I will try to indentify a specific microsoft download if i can to fix this as this is the identified issue. I am hoping someone will be able to judge this game (at least one person please!)

Watching my score drop... and drop... and drop... :( Next year my name's gonna start with eight z, just to be on the safe side. :)