My idea on the theme was that you play as the cavern.  You have to use your natural defenses like stalactites and steam vents to eliminate the creatures that have come to call you home.  In this version you are mainly facing off against bats and cavemen though in an expansion I hope to add in many time periods of history of various cavern dwellers and users.

Here is a scene from level 5.  There are currently only 5 levels in the game.  You have limited amount of time on each level to try and destroy as many creatures as you can.  There is a nice combo system and random bonus creatures that will help you go for some big points.  There is also a completion bonus with extra rewards for perfect completion.  To encourage some friendly competition I tied in MochiMedia’s excellent global leaderboard system and even wrote up a simple leaderboard tutorial ahead of the competition in case any other LD15 participants who used Flash wanted to give it a go.

Once again Ludum Dare was an absolute blast!  There was record turn out like last time and 144 games were submitted in total!  You can view the current game list here.  My LD15 dev blog can be viewed here too.

I used the Flash CS4 IDE to develop this game in Actionscript 3.0. I also used SFXR to generate the sound effects and composed the menu and level music in Reason.  You can even view a timelapse of my games 36 hours of creation compressed into 3 minutes!  Congrats to all the participants of Ludum Dare 15!

Click here to give Angry Caverns a try in your browser!

You can play YoTowlr here in your browser

In the two hours leading up to the beginning of Ludum Dare 14 I decided to do a towlr compo warm-up to get the coding juices flowing ahead of the big theme announcement.  I posted my intention in the LD IRC channel and a few other developers signed on as well for the friendly towlr warm-up.

One of the themes on the list for voting for LD14 was Recursion (specifically, Yo Dawg!) which by a weird glitch had actually made it into the 5th and final round of LD14 theme voting.  No one thought this theme would make it that far yet alone have a chance at winning.  It was with that in mind that I decided to do a towlr game on the recursive yo dawg meme which had been already making the rounds on the LD blog.

I had actually not encountered the yo dawg phenomenon yet by some miraculous aligning of the internet planets.  Members of the LD community were happy to fill me in through with some very informative links.

For those of you not familiar with what the heck a towlr is well that is hard to explain as well as they are better experienced.  It was something that came from a previous Ludum Dare entry by PoV and since has gotten legs of its own.  Here is a snippet from the Towlr Media Group’s website:

Towlr are puzzles. Contrary to conventional design wisdom, the towlr games come without instruction and without explanation. Your job is to discover their secret, and score deliciousness. Yes, every Towlr game can be completed.

Towlr are complete audio/visual experiences. They should be played with sound at a reasonable level, and computer monitors turned on.

Towlr may frustrate you. This is normal.

I instantly fell in love with the bizarre and frustrating experience that was towlr.  So, when looking for something to warm up on ahead of LD14 I felt it was only natural that I combine Yo Dawg with Towlr and thus YoTowlr was born!

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.

• Windows build
• Mac build
• Source (linux build instructions in readme, requires Gosu available from RubyGems)

CONCEPT:

You’ve received 4 scrambled images of possible cryptids:

Use your Crypto-Computer ™ to unscramble them!

You have 1 minute to complete your task before the
evidence is lost forever. You will receive a
30 second bonus for each cryptid you discover.

Each cryptid image is made up of 4 individual pieces.
Unscramble each cryptid by clicking on the numbered boxes
to rotate a distinct piece of the puzzle image.

* Left mouse button for clockwise rotation.
* Right mouse button for counter-clockwise rotation.

Enjoy!

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)