Shadow Covenant

The weekend after the next (from the 23th to the 25th), there will be another 48-hour competition on Ludum Dare.

In these competitions, you get a theme at an appointed time (3am in the morning of Saturday, in my case), and you have to build a game from scratch in 48 hours based on that theme… By from scratch it means you have to make all code, all graphics, all sound, all design, etc, in 48 hours, and release it with source code.

With time, the rules got a bit relaxed (you can do a code framework beforehand, or use a game maker), but it’s all good fun, and I’ve been participating since the first one (although I stopped for a while in the middle).

Thinking on this, I got this idea of doing a retrospective of the games I made in 48 hours… Note that most of these games were created before Spellcaster Studios even existed formally (only on my mind…), and that I did _everything_ you see in the game, in raw C++ with DirectX.

Competition 1 (July 2002)- Theme was “Guardian” and I actually did 1.5 games for this one… it was my first competition, and I was overly ambitious, so I had to scratch my first idea halfway through, and try to finish up something… I ended up with “Supahero – Protector of the Panicking Idiots“, in which you control Supahero and have to defeat some geometric forms before they kill 3 panicking idiots… If I remember correctly, I won 3rd place in the sound category, using only my electric guitar and my wife to do the sounds… this game is almost 8 years old! 🙂

Competition 2 (November 2002) – The theme this time was split between a cosmetic theme (“Sheep”) and a gameplay theme (“Construction/Destruction”). I had this idea of building a FPS in which you could destroy and build platforms in which you stand… Again, it was overly ambitious and I ended up with a game that wasn’t finished… I just got the construction/destruction part, and it has no AI and gameplay… But still, “Sheepdome” is still an idea I’d like to work out one of these days…

Competition 3 (April 2003) – The theme was “Preparation”, and I remembered a very old ZX Spectrum game called “Star Trail” (a ripoff of Star Trek in game form, featuring a procedural universe), and I did a game that featured shooting with angles and power to destroy some targets, considering gravity. It was called “Battlefield: Stars” and after that one, I always wanted to revisit that kind of strategic space combat game (with ships moving and stuff).

Competition 3.5 (Christmas 2003) – This was not an official competition, more of something to do because there was a big hyatus. Theme was Christmas, and the objective was to make a game in a the whole month preceding Christmas (since people were very busy, nobody could allocate a whole weekend to it)… I finished up doing “The Nightmare Before Christmas“, which wasn’t completed… the idea was to use influence markers to steer the elves away from traps and into Santa’s Workshop, so they could make the toys… Only had about 16 hours to work on this total (in a month… 🙁 ), but the result was some of the best graphics I’ve ever done!

Competition 4 (April 2004) – The theme this time was “Infection”, and I created a game called “Virgil“, in which you controlled a virus that had to infect cells, while avoiding and destroying antibodies… It was the first time I gave up on 3d for a 48-hour competition, and the result was that I actually finished this one… And it was fun playing it at the time… I mostly stayed within 2d games for the next competitions… 3d games might be cool to make, and easy aswell, if you have an engine, but if not, it’s just painful and you loose too much time with details, and not enough with gameplay and completion of the game. I went into a two-year hyatus from competitions after this game, for some reasons I can’t remember anyway… I came back in:

Competition 8 (April 2006) – Theme was “Swarms”, and I wanted to create something that would incorporate the concept of natural swarms into the gameplay, and hence “Ant Swarm” was born. The idea was to control one of the ants, which would leave a pheromone trail behind her and the other ants will follow to gather food for the winter. The game worked so well, in terms of concept (not implementation, but it served as a proof-of-concept) that afterwards, Spellcaster Studios (as a company now) would take the concept and pitch to a publisher, which actually agreed to finance it and build a “good version” of it. Unfortunately, the publisher ultimately pulled out, and we couldn’t figure out how to get the game past some design issues it had… But the game is more or less complete in my hard-drive, with decent graphics (two sets of them actually, since we weren’t happy with the first real iteration of them and redone them).

Because of all the Spellcaster Studios issues, I didn’t have time to participate in anymore competitions until 2008…

Competition 12 (August 2008) – The theme was “Tower”, and I was thinking of creating a procedural RPG game for the competition, taking places in the different levels of some mage tower, but I decided against it, for two reasons: one, I was out of practice with this kind of speed-coding, and two, I had a work trip to Dublin schedulled in the middle of the competition, which meant I started the game in Portugal and finished it in Dublin… Anyway, “Brick Tower” was a simple puzzle game, and it was complete, and had some nice ideas in it, although it wasn’t very sophisticated design-wise. Unfortunately, I don’t have the original version of the game (the competition one), only a version with redone graphics by an artist, so it looks a bit better than the version I submitted…

Competition 14 (April 2009) – The theme this time was “Advancing Wall of Doom”, and it was a small nightmare comming up with something to do with it… I finished up doing an “Indiana Jones” kind of game, in which an explorer goes into some caves and has to fight off ghosts and traps to get the treasure. It was called “The Haunting“, and I was quite happy with it… Remindeded me of the spirit of “Rick Dangerous” on the Commodore Amiga, and it is certainly one game I’ll revisit when I have the time for it…

Competition 15 (August 2009) – The theme was “Caverns”, and it marked my return to 3d games for the competitions… and it was a mistake… The game was going very well, it was a game in which the player had to control a robot inside a procedurally generated cavern, to help another robot (AI controlled) get all the minerals in it. Problem was that I wasn’t having fun doing the game, for some reason, and I kind of gave up on it in the middle (48-hour competitions are about fun, so just doing something for the sake of doing, and losing a whole weekend at it didn’t appeal to me). Out of curiosity, the game was similar to what was the initial pitch concept for “Blitz and Massive”, before it turned into a graphical adventure.

Competition 16 (December 2009) – The theme was “Exploration”, and I created “Cursed” for it. The game was about a cursed pirate crew that had to find 8 relics in a procedurally generated pirate world, by getting map pieces, digging around, fighting other pirates, etc. It was one of my best 48-hour games ever, since it was very complete and it really was pleasurable doing… I even did an initial cutscene for this one, and the procedural generated game world and map system was pretty awesome for 48-hours… I even got the hang for some pixel art (hence the cutscene). Hope I can repeate this experience for the next competition…

And that’s it, all the 8 games I did for competitions in the last years… Check them out and have fun (if you can, some are terrible and don’t work too well in modern PCs)…

Can’t wait for the weekend after the next, I’ll be doing updates on my blog on the progress of the game I’ll build…