Viridian Games

Here’s a time lapse of my desktop as I competed in Ludum Dare 11.

I know, the screenshots got cropped. The program I was using to grab them wasn’t grabbing the whole screen. Sorry about that.

And yes, there’s a whole lot of downtime in there. I’m married and I have three kids. My wife made a pithy comment about my participation, which you can see in the video.

You can download a higher-quality version here.

I am so weary now. But it’s the weariness of VICTOLY!

I lost about four hours this afternoon because of family obligations; I kind of assumed that it was over for me after that. But when I managed to get back to my computer I hunkered down and finished what I started, adding very few new features – and it seems to have turned out okay.

Download it here. Game and source are included.

Did Viridian bite off more than he can chew again? OF COURSE HE DID!

Frankly, I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish. Using treasures in rooms requires a tag system and I don’t know if I can finish one and get all the tags on the map and debug them in eight hours. At the very least, I should have a complete game where you run around killing monsters and getting treasures…but I wanted so much more.

Despite many distractions, I now have a castle map that you can walk around in. Monsters spawn and will chase you (but don’t hurt you yet). You can outrun monsters and they’ll lose aggro.

Now I need treasures and puzzles. Puzzles will require a tag system and frankly that scares me. I now have 22:30 left…can I finish in time?! Tune in for the exciting conclusion! (Excitement not guaranteed.)

…For I cannot build a castle…

Oh, wait – YES I CAN!

(Yes, I know those aren’t the right lyrics. But that’s how most people hear it.)

Okay, finally got something I like. When the Minimalist theme was announced my first idea was a minimalist RPG, like a Roguelike. And I’d been thinking about writing a Roguelike for a while…but I don’t think I could write a good Roguelike in two days.

After getting some sleep I thought of a very simple action game – top-down, 2D. You start in the center of a room and must avoid enemies until a weapon spawns, at which point you can pick it up and kill them. Unfortunately this is almost exactly what MrFun is doing…and he’s actually a good way into making his game.

So I came back to thinking about the minimalist RPG idea, and of course of the first games I thought of was the original Legend of Zelda. (Except that some people claim that Zelda isn’t an RPG at all. Why? Because there are no stats to improve. You don’t level up and gain abilities; all your abilities come from things you find in the world. Want more health? Find a heart container. Want do to more damage? Find a better sword, etc. I can see their point, but I don’t think I agree with it.)

And then I remembered a game I played a long time ago called Castle Adventure. It was a very good real-time RPG similar to Zelda, where you picked up items that gave you new abilities and allowed you to explore (and ultimately escape) the castle. Combat was a bit lame, however – it had Roguelike combat, where you just ran into an enemy and whoever was tougher won. I liked that there were a lot of puzzles in the game, though. You used treasures you’d already found to access new areas of the castle and get more treasures.

Both of these games seem to strip the concept of the RPG down to its roots. So I’m going to write a game similar to them, but adding improvements of my own. It’ll have Zelda-style action combat but it’ll also have Castle Adventure-style treasure collecting and puzzle solving.

And it’ll be in text mode 🙂

I finally come up with an idea and discover that MrFun is already doing it.

Minimalist.

And it won by a huge margin.

What the heck? A Ludum Dare game is pretty much “minimalist” by default!

At 9 PM local time, actually. Which means that I’ll have to resist the temptation to stay up real late.

Here’s the list of final theme candidates:

Anti-Gravity
Backwards
Bleeding / Leaking
Bumper Cars
Cooperation
Defense
Endless
Escape
Flood
Icicles
Minimalist
Morph
Slowed Time
Turn Based

The final theme will be one of these, although we won’t find out which one until time begins. The current favorite appears to be “Endless” which I’m not a huge fan of. I’m also not a huge fan of “Bleeding/Leaking”, “Morph” or “Slowed Time” because I think it would be hard to write a game using those mechanics in 48 hours.

I’m going to be doing a lot of blogging over the next 48 hours. I will try to mirror all posts here, but most of it will be at the official Ludum Dare site. And of course I’ll be hanging out in the official IRC channel – #ludumdare on irc.afternet.org.