Rocking Out the Ludum Dare (Updated!)

What do we do on the weekend? Make more games!

It takes a lot of guts to make a videogame!  This weekend, a group of AE staff members and guests (like One-Eyed Doll!) are rocking out in the Ludum Dare Game Jam* to create an all-new, functional game in 48 hours! Last night, all of the game teams got the theme, "tiny world," and our brainstorming began!

Now showing: The Sick or the Dead

We're going to explore one of the most important, but smallest, worlds - the universe of a virus! In this infectiously-entertaining top-down shooter, called "Kitty.coli"** for this weekend's prototype, the player IS the virus on a journey into intestinal exploration... and total cellular annihilation is its goal!

Presenting the Jammers!

Weeks ago, Rolith started recruiting for this weekend's jam. With some tricksy schedule-shuffling, promises of home-cooked curry, and a LOT of caffeine, we've got an all-star team gathered! Here's who's doing what:

Programmers: Rolith, Rabblefroth, Warlic and Garrett (a friend of the team)

Art, Animation, Design: Cysero, Thyton, and Samba

Sound: One-Eyed Doll and Artix

Doctored art: monsters on unfinished background

Did you say One-Eyed Doll?!

I sure did! Kimberly and Jason of OED were in town this weekend; Artix and some friends went to their show last night and Artix, in a fit of feverish inspiration, managed to drag them back to do sound effects for our game! All the squelches, squishes, and screams you hear are the work of Kimberly and Jason!

OED's sound effects are SICK!

We want to send a HUGE thank you to OED for fitting in an FX recording session ONE HOUR before they had to leave for the airport! (And to Artix, for masterminding their assistance!)

How much progress have you made so far?

We're 22 hours in and so far we are working on:

• All the player/monster art DONE
• Player/monster art animation IN-PROGRESS
• Shooting mechanics IN-PROGRESS
• Backgrounds IN-PROGRESS
• User Interface DESIGNED
• Currently curing engine bugs
• Doctoring sound FX begins soon

We’ve ranked up our coding, art, animation, and sound skills; we are fully prepared to do battle with malicious code, tech gremlins, and instances of friendly DOT*** insistences (standard fare for any true Dare)! Armed with Flash, we’ve also got chests full energy drinks and an inventory full of nerf weaponry ready to /equip (note: to be used only while waiting for code to compile).

Wish us luck as we battle through the night in our game-making quest! We'll be tweeting throughout the rest of the Jam, so keep an eye out for progress reports!

* Ludum Dare is an international game-making competition. We're in it for fun and to see if we can beat last year's AE Game Challenge time limit. Then, we had one week to make a game. NOW we have 48 hours!
**First draft of the name "Journey to the Center of the Cat"

**Deadline Over Testing

Progress Update, 10:30PM!

• Background maps are done, thanks to Cysero. Inside the game, the maps will scroll, so you will not see the entire background at once.
• Monsters drawn by Thyton, colored/animated by Samba.
• Warlic has all of One-Eyed Doll's sound effects working. Each virus makes a different SQUISH! noise when it dies. (That must have been a really interesting recording session!)

There is the Healthy background:

And the Sick!!! background:

As of 10:00pm, the only remaining Jammers left in the Lab are Rolith, Warlic, and me. Everyone else has gone home to rest before putting in a bit more time tomorrow. Keep an eye on Twitter for random updates!