I name this post “recent” Ludum Dares, but honestly I haven’t really posted anything about any of my entries for over a year. Anyway, I wanted to give an update, but I don’t have enough cool stuff on new projects yet to show, so I thought I’d step back and post about recent Ludum Dare entries!

To start out, if you don’t know what Ludum Dare is, it’s a competition where you’re given 48 hours over a weekend (or 72 hours if you choose to do the separate jam, rather than the compo) to make a game from scratch. In the competition, everything has to be created by you, with the exception of open source engines and such. So art, music, sound, and code has to be created within that 48 hours. It happens about 3 times a year, and is a ton of fun, so if you’re into game programming, I highly suggest you check it out.

I’m just going to give quick posts for my latest 3 of the 4 of my latest entries, from oldest to newest. My latest entry will get its own post.

Faelanx

To start out, my Ludum Dare 23 entry was Faelanax. It was a top down dungeon crawler with an action battle system. The goal, like many dungeon crawlers, is to crawl as deep into the dungeon as you can.

As you defeat monsters, you collect gems you use to upgrade your 6 spells, and you use those 6 spells to help you defeat any monsters that stand in your way. It has a full item system where you’ll find items from enemies and chests with randomized stats that you can equip.

The graphics were iffy at best, but attempting to get as far down as possible while trying to upgrade your gear made for some cliche fun. It wasn’t original by any stretch, but I still thought it was pretty fun.

After the competition, I actually spent quite a bit of time adding bosses, fixing things up, polishing it, and making it more fun. I added more monsters using REFMAP graphics, and even got someone to make me some more tilesets. Unfortunately I still haven’t released it, but hopefully I’ll get around to it at some point. I might port it from Flixel to Axel in order to be able to release it on Ouya also.

The Legend of Elzad

The Legend of Elzad is another game that I never got around to releasing. The game is a game very similar to the older Zelda games like A Link To The Past. You take the role of a character who is attempting to save the land. As you progress you’ll find different items, upgrades to your armor, and other tools to help you on your quest.

The game is relatively straight forward, takes place entirely on the overworld, and doesn’t have much of an ending. The original plan was to have a couple of dungeons with puzzles that you also have to explore. Unfortunately due to time I was unable to get these other features in. The main reason that I never got around to releasing it is that because it doesn’t feel quite like a full game, it would have taken a lot of work in order to bring it up to speed to be something that I could actually release as a “game”.

From The Black

Play At Kongregate

From the black was my first chance to make a space shooter. I originally wanted to make a scrolling shoot ’em up, but ended up going with a kind of geometry wars-like twin stick shooter. The theme was “You are the villain”, which gave me the idea to create a game where you appear to be the hero until the end. Ended up being kind of a depressing ending, but it all worked out.

Summary

Anyway, that’s a summary of my Ludum Dare 23, 24, and 25 entries. Soon I’ll have a post detailing my Ludum Dare 26 entry, and then I can get back to posting about things I’m working on!