Ludum Dare 25 - December 16,17 - Help Claus make a game!

[Claus]

Ludum dare is a Game Jam, an event where all participants are challenged to make a computer game in a weekend. It is super fun, and me and MME have been participating for a while (since LD 22).

The rules are as follows:
- Your game must be made "from scratch" (all art, code, etc. You can use sound samples, or computer generated art/sounds, and you can use libraries/game engines that are publically and freely available).
- You have 48 hours to make your game, by yourself. You also have to follow a theme that is announced when the clock begins ticking.
- You have to publish your code by the end of the dare

It is a very fun event, with participants ranging from wizard indie devs to complete noobs like myself.

Ludum Dare Page!
Claus' LD Journal
MME's LD Journal

"But Claus" - you say - "I don't know how to program!". - Then you probably want to use something like this.

Even if you won't participate, I will try to post some prototypes of my entry here, so people can help me out by pointing where I messed up royally (last LD I really fucked it up by not getting user feedback before posting my final version).

Hope to see more scummers this time around!

[Claus]

Just a friendly reminder, Ludum Dare 25 is tomorrow! If anyone has some time to spare, and an appetite for making games, participate!

[Claus]

If you are interested, why not download gamemaker (I linked it in the first post), and give it a try this weekend?

[Claus]

Theme for Ludum Dare: You are the Villain! Go go go

[Claus]

Hey Guys!

My game is about 80% complete (with about 75% of the time gone).

If anyone could play it and give me your opinions (if it is too hard, or too easy, or the sounds too annoying, etc), that would be awesome.

Get it here:
http://claus.castelodelego.org/games/LD ... ap-fat.jar

The link is a java jar file. If you have Java in your computer, double clicking it should run the game without problems.

The theme is "you are the villain". This is a pacman game where you control the ghosts. You get points if you kill pacman before he gets all the pellets.

Use AWSD or arrowkeys to move your ghost, 1-4 to change which ghost you control, escape to pause.

Thanks for any feedback!

[Claus]

Hey Shafted, Pizza, thanks for the comments!

couple technical bugs, that might be due to my computer.
-if i got Pacman to stay still, the sound stopped completely

The "waka waka" sound only plays when Pacman is walking, so I guess there is no sound triggering events when he is stopped, unless you kill him. (or are you saying the sound wouldn't continue even then?)

-I lost functionality on my mouse after I booted up the game

That is weird... :-/

from a gameplay standpoint
-If you start by going to the middle/upper left with each new board you can easily kill pacman between 2 and 4 times. I dont know if you can tweak his AI so this isnt abusable.
-As said by others, sitting on the final pellets is in issue. I found it strange that this was also the case even if Pacman had an invincibility pellet left, he wouldnt go get it

So I spent almost 6 hours yesterday trying to make an AI for pacman, just to realize that the fundamental way I was going about it was completely wrong. The current AI picks the closest coin to Pacman, and tries to move to it, avoiding ghosts in the way (unless they are vulnerable). If it fails to find a path, it does nothing until it can find some other path. There are many ways to improve the AI, but since I only have 10 hours left, (and little sleep), I'm probably trying to finish "quality of life" things first (start screen, highscore screen), before giving another go at the AI if I have the time.

-I ran into a couple times when Pacman would just string pellets together making the game nearly impossible to win. Though this only happened twice with him stringing three pellets. He would very often string two together. Don't know if this is a bug or a feature

Neither - the current AI ignore pellets completely. :-/ Also, there is a maximum invincibility time, and if you take another pellet while invincibility is up, the extra time will be wasted.

[Claus]

uhm.

my pacman just goes off on his own little thang with no user input.

Psssst, you are the ghosts!

[Claus]

Thanks!! I'll see what I can do. I probably can add some quick and dirty "sound reset" function to solve that!

[Claus]

Are the ghosts supposed to be faster than pac man? I did not remember that :-/ I think they start pretty slow and get faster over time, no?

On the other hand, with the abysmal AI that pac man has right now, he needs every help he can get.

MME: Thanks! I'm not sure about LD Mini... I might join if you do, but it is not very easy for me to dedicate a whole weekend to something like this (I always wanted to join some mini LD, but I was never able to take them seriously...)