MLC's made some maps, even a double-actor one.
The rest of you are clearly not dedicated enough

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=EgiyYt07

Beat 20 points.

Sorry, making a game from scratch in 48 hours, BRB.
(I seriously am though, 'cos I missed LD48 )

You're excused, good luck.

I bit off a little more than I could chew for 48 hours but that's OK since I don't have that deadline really. My new deadlines are code: this weekend; levels and eyecandy: next weekend.

But this thread is about you, not me.

World 1-1 complete.

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=aGYtnCVr

I got a question for ya Geti: How do you design or conceptualise your games? Do you always make mockups?

Mostly, not always. I think about how I want it to look and feel for sure, but if the game has to be made quickly then I usually go for an hour long walk and imagine things first. I try not to think about code too much at that point but it always pops up, and by the time I get home I usually have at least 2/3 of how I'm going to design the code mapped out in my head, and a lot of the aesthetic.

Most of the time, that leads into pixelling. Thinking about code for too long usually leaves me frustrated so I pixel for a bit, get colours and shapes roughed out. More often than not that leads to some changes as I've neglected to take 8x8 into account when imagining enemies or whatever, or at least impacts level design (if enemies larger than a tile are going to pathfind to the player with A* that doesn't take into account the unit size and just goes by tiles, they'll have to be near 2-high tunnels or in pits that they can't jump out of or whatever).

I dunno it's kind of hard to sum up a creative process. I think about it a lot, basically, and try not to think about any other games at the same time. I know it sounds like mind poison as you're going to think of elephants at least briefly if I tell you not to think of elephants (twice now) but when you're making games, after your first few minutes of inspiration DONT LOOK AT OR THINK ABOUT OTHER GAMES OR ART. Not "oh minecraft has that neat mechanic with a grid and you arrange stuff and it gets made" or "oh hey there's a neat way of drawing robot arms that Arne did there" - just create from your mind.

In my experience it nets you a game with fewer borrowed mechanics and lets you work things out for yourself.

There's quite a bit to think about there. Thanks.

Not a worry, glad to see someone interested.

So I decided to procrastinate some more and continued working on the beam runner editor but for a completely different project. Need to draw up more tiles and things for it but ran out of time so I've been playing around with arranging the tiles that I do have and making it a bit more ergonomic - still have to add keyboard only controls though.

Sorry about the image quality or lack thereof - I'm on a new laptop and realised I saved as .gif from idiot paint too late. Long story short artifacts everywhere and I'm installing some version of photoshop or at least GIMP asap but you get the idea.

Idea for the game is basically 3 different factions in a persistent world with an easily sharable level format and a large pre-made vanilla world for all your lazy freeplay needs.

It's some sort of alien world, the Humans are a new addition and aren't being very friendly. They hang out in the more desolate areas of the map looking for scrap metal and minerals but rough up the natives as well to see if they have anything of worth (ie so they can smelt their drinking flasks) They're the blue faction and have a focus on technology because they're a squishy lot.
The Birds are biped insects with a chicken-ish gait, they're the main overworld alien faction and tend to form small settlements around rivers. They farm bees for protection and honey and hunt with sharp sticks tied to their sides. They strive for peace but are fairly agressive in doing so, and will try to hunt any wayward Humans, naturally.
The Fungi are animated mushrooms that farm themselves and horde treasure, and are the main underworld alien faction. The self replicating aspect should be fun.

Ideally:

As a human, you'll be able to go out into the world, collect scrap and whatnot and bring it home to build more structures at your team's base and to buy and upgrade mechanical things from the local mechanic. You'll hopfeully also be able to turn scrap and minerals into items at a sort of a crafting bench (which will not be grid or combo based, just X of Y minerals into Z item.
As a bird, You'll protect your home, farm stuff, hunt for your family and generally slowly amass a bustling village.
As a mushroom, you'll go treasure hunting and farm buddies and then do more treasure hunting. I might need to make some AI orders so you can lead a mushroom army around to loot human bases for their tasty tasty trinkets. Not sure if these guys can walk up and down walls or not.

I'm a bit sketchy about overarching goals here because I don't want the player to be able to build directly, except for small barricades etc on existing structures. Perhaps there's a boss to kill or something.

The main part is persistence though. If you ransack a town all the guys there should stay dead - if your town gets ransacked so should your guys, and so should you.

I'm aiming for a save to be infinitely playable as long as there's a playable entity alive - if you die you can swap control to an adventurer of any race, though you won't be able to keep whatever items you've got, naturally.

You'll hopefully be able to share saves like you can share levels due to the way the level format is planned... I'll just add an "in progress" flag to the format which would remove the whole "which adventurer do you want to play as?" part of starting to play.

NOTE: I'll likely not work on this again for quite a while due to KAG work an exams. Still, thoughts welcome. I'd upload the swf but it doesn't save yet and is completely un-playable besides pushing tiles around. Knowing me I'll get distracted but it was nice to do something tangential again, even if it was just tiles and thinking about mechanics

That sounds like the best game ever besides full version MMORPG consistent KAG that you (or was it MM?) posted on the blog.

Yeah, that was me.

I've hit a few snags with that though, namely in getting strange chars to paste into a textfield to allow me to use 128 tiles of characters referenced by character number. I'll work it out at some point, for now it's KAG and exams focus time anyway, sigh.