I spent the weekend competing in the tri-annual Ludum Dare 48 hour game competition.  This was the 14th competition the site has hosted and there was a record turn-out!  121 games where created and submitted in a 48  hour period.  The theme was Advancing Wall of Doom. This theme was picked by the community through a system of voting during the week leading up to the competition.  Once the theme was announced on Friday night participants had 48 hours to create an entire game from scratch.  All content had to be produced by the participant during the competition.  The event ran from Friday night on April 17th through Sunday night on April 19th, 2009.

Fleedom is the game I managed to finish as my entry.  It is a Flash game so you can play it in your browser here. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out think it is a great base prototype for further improving into a really great game.  I will continue to work on it and turn this prototype into a finished Flash game.  I won’t know the final results for two weeks on how it did but the competition is so much fun that the results aren’t really the point.  I have participated now in about 5 or 6 of these 48 hr Ludum Dare competitions and I am the most happy with this game than any of my past ones.  I actually enjoy playing this one a lot so that is a good sign indeed. Creating a game in under 48 hours can teach you a lot about game design.

One of the last Ludum Dare contests I entered was a smaller version called a “Mini” Ludum Dare.  These happen in the 9 off-months that aren’t hosting a normal Ludum Dare.  They are hosted by veterans of the LD community and can have customized house-rules depending on the host.  A prototype I created for the theme Cryptozoology eventually became my first published Flash game TurnStyle.  So, I hope to take Fleedom Flies into a similar published future.

STORY:

You are the Hero trying to reach the head of a runaway train to get to the locomotive. You start at the caboose and work your way along fighting off the bad guys who have taken the train over. You have to be careful not to fall off the train cars or get swept off the left side of the screen with a disconnecting train car. Also, don’t get shot! You can get hit 3 times before you die.

CONTROLS:

• Use left and right arrow keys to move, Z to jump and X to shoot
• Use Game pad stick and button 1 to jump, button 2 to shoot.

BACKGROUND:

This game was originally made for Mini Ludum Dare #6, a 48 hour competition on January 9th-11th, 2009.  The primary theme was “monochrome”.  The secondary theme which I got to pick from a list was “train”. Monorail is very much a work in progress and can use a lot of game play love still.  It was coded in Ruby and uses the Gosu game development library.  I used sfxr for creating the sound effects and Reason for creating the soundtrack loop.

LICENSE:

I have released the source code to the game under the GNU General Public License v3 .  The graphics, music, and sounds are released under a separate Creative Commons License.  The source code and all media assets are included in this archive along with any operating system instructions in the README.txt file.

BUGS / FEEDBACK:

I’d love to hear any bug reports or feedback in general, good or bad.  Thanks for playing!

DOWNLOAD:

• Monorail v1.2 for Windows (4.8MB)
• Monorail v1.2 for Mac OS X (3.9MB)
• Monorail v1.2 for Linux (3.2MB)