Well, I have incredibly basic combat going on, fog of war, win and failure conditions… a lot of the important stuff.
I don’t have enough time to really make this great – I have to work on the level graphics a lot, there’s a lot of balancing of resources etc that could be done, I need to make at least a few level maps to play on, the level editor needs to have the ability to rename levels… lots to do and not enough time to do it all I fear. But I’ll try to get as much done as I can.

Now that Space Lord has made its little splash on the internet (featured on the Newgrounds front page, yay!) I figured it was time to put Space Hero out into the world.

Space Hero is what happens when you take a game about being the villain, and then make it about being the hero again. 😉 In other words, people design levels by playing Space Lord, submit them to the Hall of Fame, and then you can test out the levels they’ve designed by playing Space Hero. I won’t pretend this is the best shmup game ever made – it’s mostly just a fun little experiment.

And now it’s on deviantART.

And on Kongregate.

And on Newgrounds.

I wonder how it will do!

While we wait for the game to emerge from its judgment period on the portals, you might enjoy reading this detailed blog post I wrote to announce the release of Space Lord.

Good luck to everyone participating in 7dRTS, by the way! I wish I could have joined you. 😀 Looking forward to playing all the games you come up with!

The penultimate day of the 44th MiniLD compo comes to a close, I’m happy to report that the game is more or less feature-complete.  I didn’t get the chance to include all the features I would like to include, but I’ve managed to implement all the core functionality I wanted to include, including:

• Spacecraft and immobile space stations
• Unit selection (single and box-based) and command
• Combat
• Income according to public approval rating
• Income from raiding trade routes
• Capturing planets
• Enemy AI
• A win and a lose state
• Basic sound and particle effects

This is great.  Tomorrow, then, I will focus on solving the game’s remaining problems, including a fixing a few bugs and adding missing features regarding unit selection; softening the extremely difficult enemy AI (the AI doesn’t even cheat! If anything, it is handicapped.); adding more sound and particle effects; balancing unit costs; fixing population limits; and generally fixing bugs and trying to track down and prevent the mysterious random crashes I experienced earlier today.

Good luck to everyone else on the last day!

Cross-posted on my personal website.

Tags: MiniLD #44, RTS

Finally got attacking and damaging working over the network. Some bugs I’m still fixing though.

I also noticed goffmog said, “There had better be guitars in this.”, so I made this:

Tags: progress, screenshot, Strat Souls, unity

Woof – day 6 is behind us.  We got a ton of stuff down today.  Todd and Ryan are starting to wind down on the ingame assets which means Todd will be spending a fair amount of time tomorrow working on UI stuff.  Today I focused on getting the game into a playable state.  This involved getting all of the player actions working over the network.  I spent the last bit of the evening working on our neutral AI.

Attrition doesn’t have traditional RTS tech trees in that you don’t build structures and do research to upgrade your army.  You need to steal everything.  To that end – you start with only 1 available combat unit and must fight AI controlled opponents on the map in order to gain upgrades.  These neutral structures automatically spawn units to defend and drop “Tech Cards” when destroyed.  The better the card is, the stronger the defense will be.  A player can run over a tech card with one of their units and if they manage to return it to their base then they are granted new units or structures.  The catch is  – if your base is destroyed then you drop the cards you’ve collected and any player can come and capture them.

Darn, it’s getting close to the deadline and there is still so much left to do.

Check out the web demo for a preview of the death and destruction. Still need to get the player units attacking and responding.

Units dying, buildings blowing up… mech rampage!

Tags: #7DRTS

Here’s us doing a playtest to make sure the bugs are fixed.

And one thing we immediately noticed is the poor movement handling.

I don’t have any pathfinding or obstacle avoidance yet. Also, no formations. Boid movement can be worth a try here.

Also summoning cost isn’t implemented yet so we had too many units (we were goofing off), I was envisioning something like 10-20 units only per player.

To the two guys who joined us, sorry I think you got disconnected. Blame it on my country’s ISP.

Web Build WIP

Tags: progress, Strat Souls, unity, unity3d, video

I love RTS games. And it seems that I love making them, too. I could have made one this week. I tried. And I failed.

Here’s why I didn’t manage to make a proper game for 7dRTS:

• I didn’t have time on monday.
• I just came back from an “exhausting” vacation.
• It’s been hot as hell from 9 am to 10 pm straight.
• I’m still learning to use Haxe/NME.
• Haxe is hard to debug (I’m used to Java)
• I suck at finishing projects.

Here’s why I should have made this game a proper one:

• It’s a simple concept.
• It’s possible to code with my low level of experience.
• It’s easy to continue without a lot of refactoring.
• It doesn’t include a lot of art.
• I love Sublime Text.
• I love Haxe.

I might use it as a base for a future project, but at the moment I just need a break.

If you want to play around with it (which I don’t think you do), here it is.

I’m sorry.

Hi! I go by auto_suggestion, and I’m a fairly newb-ish game developer. This is my first Ludum Dare anything, and I’ve been really excited to participate since several years ago when I first heard about Ludum Dare.

Yes, it’s already the final day of the 7dRTS challenge and this is my first post, but I’m just going to talk about my entire process from the day I conceived the idea until now. In any case I’m really glad how things turned out, and I’m still motivated to continue working; even after the Monday deadline comes and goes. The 7dRTS challenge has given me a push, if not a push to the finish line.

=====

I did a lot of thinking about the RTS genre. I love playing and watching RTS games, being a League of Legends player and crappy Starcraft player. Much deliberation led to listing the elements of an RTS in writing in order to clear my thoughts; this is what I came up with:

• Resource management / building units
• Unit placement / control / micromanagement
• Base management / placement
• Map / terrain considerations

My game idea (partly affected by the fact that I knew I had to aim low to get anything done at all) was to abstract one element and make it the focus of my game, and at the same time de-emphasize every other element. I decided to focus on resource management. Here’s an early mockup.

A two-player game. You are responsible for two things: collecting resources and spending them. You have a set number of workers that you can allocate to each type of resource, red, green and blue (hence the name of the game, ‘rgb’). The number of workers allocated determines the speed at which you collect that resource. The resources you collect can then be used to build certain units. For example, a unit of the grunt class costs 1 blue, 1 red, and 1 green. This is where the creativity comes in. Unfortunately, I haven’t thought about this part at all, and I have no experience with game balancing. Fortunately, designing and balancing the units is a completely self-contained job and has no effect on development of the engine, which I’m working on now, so there’s no pressure to think about that now. I have some good ideas floating around, though.

Anyway,  your units are completely AI controlled (no micro for you!; a de-emphasis of unit control). They’ll leave your base immediately upon being built and make a beeline for the enemy base, stopping only to attack the enemy units in the way. There are several lanes which the units can spread out on, so that there won’t be a problem of bottlenecking like in the flash game, Age of War (does anyone know about this?)

=====

That’s essentially it for the idea. As for actual progress, here’s a screenshot of “gameplay” (though my game is not playable yet):

One major concern I have is multiplayer implementation. What about private information, like total resources collected? Isn’t it possible to immediately counter the enemy the moment they start building something? Stuff like that. The end-goal is putting the bases on separate screens, essentially splitting the battlefield in half and putting them on their own screens, probably on mobile devices. I can think only of Spaceteam, which uses Bluetooth for multiplayer. I have no experience there either, so that’s a milestone for another day.

Finally is the last day!, after a week of hard work with my partner Rageshow, Monkeys vs Crocodiles is about to be finished, we only have to fix some bugs and give it the final touch.

Below you will find some pics about the game, and be aware, before the night we will create other post with the link to the game.

See you soon!

So six days live streamed the whole development twitch.tv ging3rtoby. It is a tower defence game with a twist. You build building to generate resources to create the towers. I have got some stuff left to do but it is nearly finished. I am really proud and happy with the game.

This article is copied from my personal blog.

Today I worked on making the level format and core engine more robust. I added a bunch more dogfighting levels. There are 11 now, and they get pretty crazy at the end.

The cool thing about them is that the core game engine does not even know that you are in “Dogfighting Mode”. There’s no dogfightingMode variable that tells the engine that’s what you’re doing. Instead, thelevel format supports trigger conditions, events, and groups, and the logic of dogfighting is done in the level JSON file.

Michael gave me the battle music today as well. It sounds amazing. I made it so that the game automatically detects when you are entering or exiting a battle and transitions the music appropriately. I’m pleased with the effect.

Here’s a list of what I got done today:

• 12am – Added battle music. The game automatically detects when a battle is happening and fades in the battle music, then fades back to normal music once the battle is over.
• 1am – Added more dogfighting levels.
• 3am – Worked on making dogfighting levels more fun. You have to try again if you die rather than respawning.
• 4am – Made the Militia ship show the area of attack when you are manually piloting it.
• 6am – Sandbox Mode: Ability to load and save. I was able to use this to build some dogfighting levels.
• 7am – Added more dogfighting levels.

I did not accomplish most of what I set out to today. Regardless, I am really happy with Dogfighting Mode right now. It’s almost certainly more fun than Campaign Mode currently.

Here’s a video of me playing through it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vye8Sfs3rFM

This version of the game is going to be pretty close to the final one that I submit for 7dRTS. I will probably only spend about 6-8 more hours on this debugging on Firefox and bugfixing. I will not be supporting Internet Explorer.

You can try out dogfighting yourself. Too hard? Too easy?

Hello everyone,

I just put up a playable beta of Lode Storm, my entry for the 7RTS.  I hope you all enjoy it, and please let me know what you would like to see changed and improved.  I wont make working right up to the deadline unfortunately since my hands are cramping up and it to painful to type any more.

See my entry details for a complete description of how to play.  I am worried that it wont be too intuitive.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=20953

I’ve been on holiday the past week so I missed out on 7RTS, But I still have like 8 Hours! I’m gonna try and make it!

Coffee’s not working yet. Kids are annoying the wife and she’s gone on strike. Have a headache. Didn’t get enough sleep.

Going to try to get in something of a macro-game in today, something I’ve never done on a week-long prototype before, but game design genius Mark Nau sent me a doc with his ideas for it so I’m going to give it a stab.

Title screen:

Omaha beach:

Gratuitous blood splatter:

And, for posterity, here’s Mark’s notes on the macro game. We’ll see how much I can get done today –

The moving parts

1)      The game is divided into “levels” which are pass/fail challenges. Passing a level makes the next level available for play. Completed levels can be freely replayed.

2)      While playing a level, the player earns a level score which increments as he marches toward completion. For example, every time an enemy unit is killed.

3)      When a player completes a level challenge for the first time, he is awarded XP equal to his level score. No XP is awarded for failing a level.

4)      While replaying a level, the player has a way of voluntarily dynamically ramping up the difficulty of the level. For example, a “BRING IT” button that releases extra enemies every time it is clicked.

5)      When a re-played level is successfully passed, the player gets XP equal to the DIFFERENCE between the score he just got and his PRIOR high score on that level. In other words, you can’t just grind away at a level over and over to earn XP. You have to elevate your success, and you get rewarded by the amount you improved on your prior best attempt.

6)      The player can cash in XP for upgrades and perks that make his position stronger and therefore easier to complete levels.

Suggestions

1)      Each level should have its own cosmetic and/or gameplay “theme” that the player will use as a hook to remember that level and give it weight and identity. This can be as simple as unique colors for each level. This helps the player get a solid sense of revisiting places where he was once weak but is now strong.

2)      The level difficulty should be paced so that by the third level or so, the player is feeling some pressure to re-visit earlier levels in order to mine XP and make it easier/possible to clear the 3^rd/4^thlevel. Later levels should be difficulty tuned with the assumption that the player has almost fully optimized the amount of XP mining he can do on earlier levels.

3)      The UI should be very clear about displaying the player’s high-water mark on a level in as many places as possible. On the level select map, while the player is playing the level, and on the post-match screen. The post-match screen should make it very clear that the XP reward is based on exceeding the player’s prior high-score for that level.

4) The XP expenditure screen should give the player the option of clearing all his upgrades and refunding his XP to re-spend as he wishes. This keeps him from getting permanently stuck due to bad decisions.

I started 148 hours ago — it went by in a blur but also it feels like I’ve been doing it for a month.

I finally tried my hand at level design, and instead of dreading it it’s actually a lot of fun seeing it pop up in game. I credit all the work I did getting the world structure setup so I can listen to tunes and make a ton of levels.

I’ve got 1000 ideas floating around in my head but I don’t want to miss the basics. I decided to tackle lighting this morning, and it took five minutes:

It’s not the best but it looks better! Plus I can try having each of the bulbs emit light (I’ll just disable pathfinding is that cool?).

Sanojian mentioned: “Could it be that after 30-odd failed games it starts to get easier?” Yes! A ghostyard of abandoned projects on my hard drive has finally shown some value.

Little touches like, oh, the frontend are things I pass off while I’m fighting with flocking and hierarchical pathfinding. I just refuse to make another tech-heavy fun-light game. We’ll see how it goes.

So from devving like straight Friday to Sunday morning with no sleep, had some nice morning sleep up from like 3am to 10AM today. Oh and I totally have a new feature to show off as well.

So whenever units overlapped each other, their “health bars” would be practically illegible. Say hello to the new stacked hp system.

I originally started to design this system to be a universal tool for me as well as for this game but because of so many unexpected errors it required a lot of slopping tweaking, this will need to be improved and designed for universal use after 7drts. Heres a nother screenshot of it’s use.

Main menu in the game, lookin great. Yes its a full menu I promise ;p 

I’m going to start working on that cannon that was shown in the last update. I’m trying to squash nasty bugs at the moment so the game will atleast be enjoyable, I woke up to a roachfest!

Bad news first: I got so lazy about this that I couldn’t make it in time to submit the project.

Mostly I underestimated how much work I had to put into making this game, thinking it would be a simple job. It wasn’t.
What went wrong:

*Lazy Coding and Issues with Gameplay

*Multiplayer

*Controller Support which I ended up figuring out

*Limited Singleplayer

This was mostly a learning experience for me in terms of game development, but now I know how bad the others have it. For the other developers – godspeed to all of you : )

I haven’t completely given up on this project, however!

http://seagullrts.tumblr.com/

I will continue to sporadically develop this concept, and, just maybe, we’ll see how the game unfolds! If you want to keep a checkup on progress that’s actually made, this tumblr blog is your best bet at this time.

Apologies on failing to deliver for MiniLD-44.

Looks like I got busy on the last couple of days of the MiniLD. I had a lot of fun streaming. I am quite disappointed that I don’t have time today to finish it up. However, I do have a demo for you guys to check out. I thought I’d at least share what I got done. Not the best week to work on this, but I tried to get my time in.

Enough rambling, here is the demo. Instructions are on the bottom of the webplayer.

Even though I only had a couple of days to spare, I decided to participate in the 7DRTS. Had I an entire week, I would have tried for a space-conquest game with fleets battling each other. Instead I opted for a colonization game. Whoever colonizes the most stars wins. The metal available in each type of star determines how quickly you can build colony ships, so the game speeds up as you continue to expand your empire. The compo page is: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=15656

I will be taking a few hours off then writing a postmortem. It looks like this challenge has a lot of submissions (for a miniLD) so even though I am not a big fan of RTS, it looks like I will be playing a lot of them over the next couple of weeks.

I was uh-uh, am gonna pass on this one, but then I got an idea for something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while, and before I had a chance to reflect on whether I really had time for this, I was already busy coding.

Started a bit late though, and things are going sluggish, so I’m not confident it’ll be ready on time.

The idea I’m working with is Chess. Specifically, real time chess. I wanted a chess experience that is close to speed chess, but without any turns whatsoever. To limit myself, it’ll be a one player game, with you playing white and the computer playing black.

Wednesday: Grabbed chess pieces and background from opengameart. Initialized the matrix, set up the board and pieces and started working on pawn movement. After just a few hours, everything seemed to be working quite alright.

Progress video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSdbK8RWtwU&feature=youtu.be

Thursday:
Rook movement. Rats! Who knew rooks could be so tricky? Sometimes I get them hiding behind pawns. Sometimes capturing white pieces without actually taking them off the board. Sometimes just jumping over pawns. Spent hours on this now, and they’re still not ready!

Friday:
Ok. So the rooks are finally behaving. Plugged in Rook behavior to the queen, so she’s halfway there as well. It’s starting to look more like a game now. Of course, at max speed, a complete chess round seems to be over in a minute. That’s speedy… With  a little fine tuning at the end (and logic for player movement – currently, it’s on the honor system – ie. you’re permitted to do all kinds of illegal moves), I’m hoping a reasonable match can be played in 3-5 minutes. That’s the sweet spot I think.

Another progress video:

http://youtu.be/LZTIYEoqIHk

Rooks, bishops and the queen is now in the can. King and Knights remain, and then just the singleplayer logic. This should actually be doable, but family stuff will get in the way on saturday, so the rest of the work will have to be done on sunday.

Saturday:

Snuck in an hour of dev time in the morning. Fixed a few bugs regarding player select and movement. It’s really shaping up nicely. Very hectic gameplay. Still need movement patterns for Kings and Knights, and the whole player logic.

Screenshot saturday

Sunday:

Movement for Kings and Knights are done. While writing the logic for those, I came up with a much more efficient algorithm for deciding when and how to move those pieces. Doh! So now I really must rewrite the other pieces with that code. However, if I’m going to be able to put up something playable today, that has got to be moved to the backburner.

Another progress video, now with all pieces moving: http://youtu.be/V2h6xitUB6Q

First public beta:

First public beta is done… It’s playable, but there’s very little intelligence to the computers play, so winning is relatively easy. Bugs are likely. Refinement is necessary, but hey, I made it. Cheers. Hope you like it, and hope you have fun. If you find bugs or have suggestions for improvements, please tweet me at @svenardocom on Twitter.

Hi guys Faisal (Team Leader/Designer) from Team Tartan Paint hear again to show you our progress before the final changes that will be made for tomorrow

Character Art

Currently Jurgita is working on a polished Title screen for the game.

Sound

Currently the sound is providing a lot of challenges as need to change the volume seems to interfere and lag certain functions such as despawning units so it is likely that there will not be fighting sounds in the final version but the music still works and sound very good.

User Interface

Stewart has currently added some finishing touches to the User Interface with the addition of the mute and fast forward buttons as well as some readjustment of the current layout. And is currently working on auras to show when a character is boosted by the environment.

Code

Zacs has been progressing very well adding multilane combat as well as the death animations for characters. He has also managed to work out a basic enemy AI for spawning units though this is still being tweaked. He has also managed to program win and end conditions for the game.

Currently the game is almost finished just a few finishing touches before final submission.

Day 7 Prototype

Yes! has been a long week but finally we finished the game!. You can play it here.

The game is about defeat the base of the crocodiles, this looks easy but they will do everything possible for defend it. You must control the monkeys for get the victory and kick out the cocodriles of your place.

The time was our main enemy, but we will discuss this later in another post, where we will comment all the work we had in the game and our impressions about it.

We are waiting for your feedback!

Ah, and sorry for the bad english :/

My entry :

www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=14843

It is not like i want, but for my first game I am happy.

I will try to make a post-mortem version with lot of features.

EGGZ is a real-time strategy game with eggz in it – click on the EGGZ for a sweet 48-hour timelapse EGGlapse 😀

Click here for 48 hours of EGGy goodness :D

As mentioned in my last post Eggz was essentially finished in 48 hours, though they’ve been a couple of bug-fixes and enhancements since then. I’ve also been very lazy about building a version for distribution, but I’ve finally gotten around to it:

Cross-platform .love file

Windows .exe and .dll files

Unfortunately the game has no AI, so if you don’t have a friend to play with you’re not going to get much out of the game

I’ve drawn up a quick state-machine that should play the game adequately but it’s not going to be in the 7dRTS version I’m afraid. Check the game page for any post compo improvements

Looking forward to playing your games guys, I really love RTSs – let’s revive this genre 😀

Tags: #7DRTS, competitive, crossplatform, eggz, linux, Love, love2d, lua, mac, mini ludum dare, multiplayer, RTS, strategy, tower defense, Windows

Well, that was a disaster! But it taught me some things.

First of all, I should have used a framework or environment I was familiar with. It took some time to get used to Enchant.js, even though it was easy to understand and well documented. And it didn’t gave me the lower level tools which I needed to achieve the mechanic I was going for. I had to go into the code of the framework to change things. And that’s not what you want when you’re building a game. I still think Echant.js is a great framework to work with. But I think for the specific mechanic I had in mind, I was better of without a framework.

It’s not even a game yet, so I don’t think submitting it is good idea. Next time I’ll try to be better prepared and have a good plan of how I’m going to tackle specific problems.

Going to write a longer thing later, but for now, I am going to call the jam version of this game complete… There are some issues with it (MAJORLY), but I think it is playable? I hope it is at least.

Play IKON_COLONIZE on kongregate.

Tags: #7DRTS

Its been quite a week. Unfortunately, my game isn’t in a submittable state quite yet. But hopefully, by the end of tomorrow, I’ll have something which is completable. The project has come with its own lessons and plenty of surprises. I thought I might list a few:

• Networking is a nightmare to debug… with a debugger, but really easy with a bunch of well placed printf statements
• By writing algorithms down on paper, everything seems to work second attempt (I’ll give examples in a later post)
• A* is really easy to implement, but getting the characters to follow the path is the difficult part
• Two monitors makes things much nicer
• SFML is a really nice library to use
• Once networking is out of the way, programming the rest is much easier
• I get “in the groove’ when listening to music
• Keeping the games synchronized was almost too easy

What I’ve got left to do is:

1. Implement fighting and collisions between people’s minions. (yes, I haven’t done that yet)
2. Add a win condition
3. Make the settings dialog
4. Make the sound effects play

Hopefully I can get that all done by tomorrow… hopefully….

After waking up early in the Oregon wilderness (because I didn’t get any sleep! LOL) and having a fantastic breakfast, I return to the city, dropped my family off at the county fair, and returned home to lay on my couch.

How long do you think it was before I warmed up a tankard of coffee and got back to work?

NOT LONG AT ALL, MY FRIENDS

I’m putting the finishing touches on upgrades, economy, and in-game menus today. So you’ll be be able to invest resources into getting resources faster, building heroes, building defenses, and repairing damage. After that, I’d love into adding more guns to shooty-shoot with, but there is no opponent at the moment.

Well, there is: it’s a carbon mirror copy of your team, minus the player. Decisions, decisions. Clumsy AI, or giant, evolving boss monster? Or MONSTERS? HMM

So I finished it!!! I never really post anything during any Ludum Dare at least not until I finish the game. I think I like this kind of LD more than the normal one just ‘cuz I have lots more time to polish the game and add actual sounds to it. Game’s pretty much as I want it to be you can check it out here.

So, after a day and a bit, I’ve finished my second ever Ludum Dare game, game jam game, and game full stop, in one fell swoop.  BotWars is a real time, tactical local multiplayer tank battler where you hopelessly try and control four tanks at once, while fighting over the space key with your friend.  It was also my first time working in 3D, using Unity, and I must say, is it one sexy piece of kit.  My game works on Win/Linux/Apple, with absolutely not extra effort required from me.  Rather stellar, really.

So, what have I learnt?

Smaller is better.  Really.  I know I said so last time, but it really came in use this time around, working with software I wasn’t used to and with not as much time as I’d have liked.  Power-ups were cut, AI got cut, and I didn’t even try to make network multiplayer.  Am I disappointed?  A little.  Some semblance of AI, even if all it did was randomly wander through the map, would have been good, but hey, baby steps.

Polish is good.  And I don’t do any.  I really don’t.  After a day and a bit of coding, I was so damn knackered, I just wanted to publish and go home.  So take breaks, and figure out some time to do stuff like improve your sound and graphics.  Oh, and put in an actual end condition.  I don’ think I did

Take liberties with the theme.  I was never, ever going to finish an actual RTS in 2 or so days.  So I made an RTS-lite, and  you know what?  I think I probably learnt more.  This is the whole point of game jams!  Proper RTSes are silly anyways.

Play to your strengths.  I’m a terrible coder, a terrible artist, and a rather good writer.  So why aren’t I including any damn writing?  I really need to start thinking ahead, and use what I’m good at, even if it doesn’t feel like a conventional way to approach games.

So that’s it!  7DRTS, done.  I’ll see you for the next LD, or possibly for 7DFPS.

Tags: finished, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, RTS

Hopefully I can finish it after some sleep.
..and find a name for it.

“The left side is sending troops! Quick, build a defensive line! Oh wait, right side isn’t implemented yet.”

World’s Aftermath

A Sickening Dystopian Warzone Realtime Simulator

“If you like utopias and hate awesome, this game isn’t for you.” -Benjamin Franklin

We didn’t have time to post any updates outside of our regular 9-5, plus the time we spent working on this. It has been a very, very hectic week. We’re just happy we could finish a completed game by the end of it all, but we did have to cut some features.

See our full entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=24948

We’re going to work the rest into a proper release in the coming weeks and release the game for free on our website (online multiplayer anyone?).

-James and Nick

My fingertips are numb I’ve typed so much.

You folks like dynamic lights on your bullets? Visibility matrix debug output? Magenta collision boxes? Me too!

I’ve been desperately trying to solve inter-tile collision, rewriting it saved the day finally.

So I got my train of guys going, you can go into train mode or group (huddle) mode, formations don’t matter in tight spaces so I’m going to focus more on the AI side of things.

Was having a great time doing loops until they’d stop all of a sudden. Couldn’t tell why.

They now descend on the poor guy with zeal, but then forget to keep following me. I’m thinking of just leaving them there for the next victim.

Welp – the compo has come to an end.  We worked our butts off this week.  Unfortunately – we weren’t able to get everything in that we wanted to.  There are probably a fair amount of bugs to be worked out and there aren’t any victory conditions in place.  But the basic mechanics are there and Todd and Ryan’s art is awesome regardless.  We came up with a pretty ambitious plan and still managed to execute a large portion of it (curse you day job!).  Here is Attrition in its super raw state.  Please shoot us some feedback!  We had a lot of fun working on this and sharing our progress with everyone.  The support we got from this site was awesome so thanks a bunch!

Check out the Attrition entry here – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=24891

Please tweet at us and comment here to leave feedback.  We appreciate it and thanks for playing!

Finished writing my postmortem for Metal Galaxy. The link is http://blazinggames.blogspot.ca/2013/07/metal-galaxy-postmortem.html
For those who don’t want to read my blog post, here is a quick summary:

What Went Right – 1GAM theme of Metal

What Went Right and Wrong – Changing to a colonization theme

What Went Wrong – Fleet code not used

0 days 19 hours 57 minutes 36 seconds left!

Ok, so I got soul consumption working. Meaning, summoning units now require souls. Each unit type has a soul cost and you are (for now) given 1,000 souls at the start.

As we discussed before in Internal Brainstorming 1, people don’t seem to like the traditional RTS type where you have base-building and resource-gathering, so I didn’t do that.

You have a fixed amount of souls at the start (like every other player in the map) and summon units to compose whatever army you want, as long as you can afford it. You also probably shouldn’t be allowed to attack enemies while everyone hasn’t finished summoning their initial army yet. But I haven’t added that in for now.

Be wary of rushing.

I probably can’t add anything that significant now; there’s not enough time (still fixing a few bugs here and there).

But I wanted to add mainly better movement (pathfinding, obstacle avoidance, lockstep marching, whatnot), and a few more units (bonewheel, pyromancer, guitarmancer, etc.).

Here’s the thing about the initial design:

“When you defeat an enemy, you gain souls equivalent to 50% of the unit type you killed (i.e. dwindling economy). You can use this to summon reinforcements in the middle of battle or upgrade your existing units.”

We got this idea from the multiplayer in Total War, as described to me by my friend (actually haven’t tried it myself so I don’t know how it works) my friend’s suggestion, he just happened to mention Total War as an aside, so I got confused.

Now, what strikes me as odd is, why would you reward the player who’s winning? If he’s winning already, he doesn’t need more help.

Understandably, I believe this comes from the basic idea that people should be rewarded for their hard efforts.

In the context of the game, it makes sense to reward the winning side if players are in a stalemate and we need tip the scales of battle quickly.

But once someone has the upper hand, you don’t need to bother watching what’ll happen next; the winning guy will just steamroll through everything for sure. Every character he kills means his army will grow bigger and the opponent will have his back to the wall.

So that was where I thought of the size growth idea. Whenever you lose a unit, all your remaining units gain size (someone suggested that only your units that are close enough to the killed one should be affected), until you are left with one unit who’s a giant boss kind of guy.

My proposition was, is it possible to give the losing side a second chance while still keeping it fair for the winning side?

Here’s also something I was thinking about: Factions. Something like this:

1. Undead (Lordran)
2. Phantoms (Boletaria)
3. Demons (Capra demon, Taurus demon, etc.)
4. Dragons (?)
5. Chaos Witches

Maybe each faction has a particular passive bonus to its units somehow. I’m also thinking of sub-factions, like the Covenants for Undead, or the White/Black Tendency for Phantoms.

Web Build WIP

Tags: progress, screenshot, Strat Souls, unity, unity3d

So here it is, then – Day 7 of the 44th Mini Ludum Dare.  As this is a 7 Day RTS compo, that makes this the final day – and about time, too, since I really need a break.  I am, therefore, done – here is my first LD submission.

My game, Jumpstarter, is nominally about taking the reigns of a rebellion against an Empire, using crowdfunding (tied to public approval rating) and trade route raiding as a main source of income.  In point of fact, the theme is rather thin; most of my work was concentrating on coding a working RTS, and in that respect, I think it’s a moderate success.

There are several issues remaining – not as many selection modes as I’d like; a bug that crashes the game if you exit to the main menu and try to start it again from there; homing missiles are a little wonky; and the balance of the enemy AI is iffy at best, swinging between hilariously incompetent and ruthlessly efficient.  I played against the AI’s current design and won a few times, but I am generally terrible at RTS games (despite them being a favorite genre), so I upped the difficulty a little bit above my level before uploading it, and I can’t consistently beat it as it currently stands.  Also, ship costs are mostly arbitrary, and are probably not properly balanced.

The game uses fairly standard RTS controls.  You drag-left-click to select all units within a box, or single-left-click to select one unit.  Mouse wheel zooms in and out, WASD pans the camera around..  Right-clicking issues orders, either to move, attack or invade.

There are three ship types and three station types in the game; the main difference is that ships are mobile and stations are locked to their parent planet.  The ships are (in the same order as the build menu)

• The Cruiser, a powerful but expensive ship;
• The Interceptor, a fast and cheaper ship;
• The Dropship, a weak ship that is capable of conquering planets;
• The Shipyard, which is required to build ships;
• The Repair station, which repairs nearby ships and stations fairly quickly; and
• The Turret, which fires homing missiles at nearby targets

To win the game, you must capture all the red Empire’s planets; to lose, you must lose all your planets and ships – that is, you can live on if all you have are ships (but you effectively cannot win if you have neither planets nor Dropships, since you can’t capture any planets).

Tomorrow, I will consider doing a more exhaustive post-mortem on how the development of Jumpstarter went, but for now I need some rest.  Good night everyone!

Cross-posted on my personal blog.

Tags: MiniLD #44, RTS

Finally release! Although it may be riddled with bugs, not even close to what I set out to make, probably not even fun I am extremely happy to have it done. I enjoyed making it so much I may even start over and make a full game out of it!

!Check it out here!

Thanks so much for all the nice comments I received as well.

Make sure you read how to play! and there will be bugs!

Wish you where here. I don’t feel the screenshots do the game justice!

I decided to take part in this Mini LD as a reply to a challenge issued by an ex-coworker of mine on twitter. The goal was to develop a game for the jam in just one weekend as opposed to 7Days. I’m already past the 48h mark, but my challenger forfeited so I guess it’s either a nil-nil or I win by default. Anyway, my game for this Mini-LD is called MINI WARS, as a token to a great turn-based strategy game that I love, Advance Wars (GBA and NDS).

This is how the game looks at this point. I wanted to go with a Gameboy Advance / Gameboy classic feel combined with UI elements of the Nintendo DS. All the graphics, except for the portrait and level indicator (arrow in screen 2) have been drawn by me on Friday, with some updates during the weekend.

Gameplay:

• Turn based
• 3 types of units: Infantry, Tanks and Mechs (rock-paper-scissors)
• Terrain matters: Buildings and Trees raise defense, water lowers it and bases (square buildings with a flag) restore HP each turn.
• Each unit has 16 action points. Movement costs 4 AP / TILE while shooting requires 8 AP.

Here’s a video I uploaded a few minutes ago to youtube:

Note that the AI is as dumb as a sack of puppies. Reason is that I broke the pathfinding code near the 48h mark when I updated my Grid class and had little to no time to rewrite it with many other stuff left unfinished. Probably, after the jam, I’ll re-write the entire thing from ground up and port it to Android in order to check the market (free-to-play, no IAP).

What left? Options menu, about and In-Game-Menu, + two more levels. The game is designed for 480×320 resolution, but can be upscaled from the Options Menu.

Developed using MoaiSDK and LUA (+ some C++ for some edits to the HOST – lua player).

Tags: Advance Wars, Mini Wars, turn-based, Zapaman

I have had commitments the last few days but now I have time to add a few more features before the deadline.  The game now has chat and a slightly better UI.

Play MountainKing!

Still to do:

• sound
• unit experience
• show fighting somehow
• better map

This marks the first real release of lode storm!

I spent most of this morning adding sound and some music to the game.  Me and my girlfriend recorded all of the voice overs and I composed the music too.

I want to add in a win condition check and extra levels too.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vlloxiks83hc890/lodestorm_v0.2.zip

0 days 15 hours 40 minutes 13 seconds left!

So I got obstacle avoidance working, with thanks to some pseudocode explanations on boids here.

Units will still get stuck occasionally however, as there’s no escaping the need for pathfinding.

Now I’m wondering if my old code for influence maps will help with this. Although influence maps are used for tactical reasoning, they are very similar to potential fields (which is the one used as an alternative or supplement to traditional pathfinding, i.e. A*), so I think I can use the same code.

I shared my simple test implementation of Influence Maps in Unity. You guys can check out the source code here. Here’s my forum thread on the Unity forums.

I think you need a combination of both obstacle avoidance and pathfinding to get good AI movement.

Anyway, I would consider this tolerable for now, so I’ll move on to making a few more units.

Tags: progress, screenshot, Strat Souls, unity, unity3d

Just posted a new version of the game on kongregate with a few fixes.

My desire to make a dotalike for this competition rose out of the fact that I really enjoy dota but am unable to get my coworkers to play it with me. I wanted to make something that is similar to dota that matches the sort of games that we play and enjoy at the office, in the hope that would get them interested in the real thing. I was also interested in exploring what makes dota fun for me, and if I can find that fun thing in a week.

I have written previously about what I liked about dota, and strangely enough, I don’t think I included much of those things in the game that I made this week. What I did manage to include was a somewhat grindy game that tips over into an endstate with a surprising speed, and has some of the micro work that goes into a dota match. There isn’t as much teamwork in this game, because it turns out that organizing alliances is something that doesn’t just happen in a quick match. I suspect that alliances are a thing that can happen when you actually have time to think out the whole issue.

This is also the second multiplayer game that I have made in a row, and I think I am starting to close in on what would make a successful one. The first game we just finished is local only, but only requires two players to play. I solved the local only with this one, but added a new wrinkle, which is that you need exactly 3 players. It is a bit frustrating that social pressures force you towards certain types of games, but I suppose I could work on making this something that would support 2-x number of players. Potentially by adding teams, or by having more players at once.

The other direction that I could build this game in is to add more abilities for each player. Making the dash a triggerable state with a cooldown made it feel a ton more like dota, and I think that adding a set of ultimates for each player would add a really nice last ditch phase to the game where everyone is triggering ultimates, or saving them to exactly the right time. I am not sure if adding the tech tree / store system to this game would be a good idea or not, but having different builds for the players is something that would be interesting. Basically adding complexity to create depth.

I hope you manage to find two other players and get a game of it in.

Tags: complete, postmortem

OH HO, LOOK WHAT I HAVE OVER HERE

This land is peaceful, its inhabitants kind.

Tags: blender, progress, screenshot, Strat Souls

https://www.dropbox.com/s/megmeycl7jsbq43/raid.swf

I wanted to explore strategy without micro-managing, the idea was that you’d set the AI’s behaviours as in Dragon Age and it should run itself. I had the full gamut of selectable units and the like, but as I developed it I found it too cumbersome the more party members got involved. So I dared myself to strip it to the core.

WASD keys to move, Right mouse to shoot, that’s all that’s needed. When that’s all you have, what strategy will you employ?

I’m not happy with the game but I’m satisfied…I had to cull a lot back due to time, cpu, and brain energy (including my precious pathfinding nooooo). It’s nowhere near where I wanted it, but this is my first full game in Haxe with a home-rolled framework and I get to wake up to this game that’s begging for all the features I promised it!

I’ve learned a ton for the next LD48 — that tech is nice but a game idea is the balloon that floats you over the chasm. Too often I jump off the cliff trying to build the plane before I hit bottom. Content isn’t something that can wait until the end, I’ll learn that eventually.

Thanks sorceress for putting this together, much appreciated.

My second attempt on a Ludum Dare ^^
Enjoy Troll Defense 😀

Tags: MiniLD #44

Time to wrap things up!

I’m going to think out loud here and write my final task list:

• Finish all menu text
• Finish all upgrade purchases scripts
• Create a health bar for the Hero
• Replace the Red Sky background with a Deep Ocean one
• Implement new gun type: spread
• Implement hero speed and bullet rate increases
• Add Fortress Armor
• Make coffee
• Add Hitbox to Fortress and Hurtflash effect
• Add “bang” graphic for when Flyers and Heroes die
• Make sure Flyers collide with heroes, bullets, turrets
• Add shoot function to Flyers
• Drink coffee
• Set up CPU player to have all towers built at start
• Set up CPU to launch waves at a regular basis
• Set up CPU to make decisions at certain intervals, and either repair or make upgrades
• Title screen
• Game Over screen
• Post builds
• Crash asleep

n_n

So here it is.

So basically it’s a rip off of Z, from The Bitmap Brothers (1996), but on rails.

You “control” an army of robots that are too stupid to be controlled directly. So you have a set of waypoints when you give them direction orders. You win when you reach the enemy fort waypoint.

That’s pretty much it. It’s ugly but functional.

Source code is there, on github.

Cya late august for the next LD !

Tags: #7DRTS, rails, strategy, switch

Made a couple last little fixes this morning and here it is!

http://orchammer.com

Nazi Elves are exterminating us Orcs. We must fight back! No sleep till Berlin!

It’s a pretty fast-paced survival RTS – more and more creeps beset you as you find loot caches and build units – how long can you last, and how many of them can you take with you? As you improve your score, more units become available to you.

The current world champion is Mark Nau with 1251 total score.

That was hard work, but I think it came out ok. There’s probably tons of bugs.

Check it out here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=10029

7dRTS! How can i forgot about it. It`s 23:47 in Saint-Petersburg so i still can submit my game i`ve been doing this week. Give me 10 minutes and ok, i will submit it.

Aloha Todos,

Here is my entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=12154

It’s not finished, but I’m still working on it 😉

Enjoy!

Hell yeah, done! (as it is, pity)
All Your Base (AYB) is submitted and this is a post about it (All my base belongs to captain obviously).

I`ve forgot about 7dRTS till 26 of july but this week i`ve been working on this game and it is the RTS so i`m pretty sure i can submit it and have some feedback or advices.

In fact, this is the game, but the idea is to share an app that says “Hey, you can learn how to control space fleet, just try and you`ll love it!”. With an opportunity to download sertificate in PDF.

So, some things i`ll add to this game later will add more “atmosphere” to my idea and make it more convincing (to stay in touch follow me on twitter).

• .exe for windows
• .i-dont-know-OSx-format for OSx

P.S. don`t pay attention to all that “touch the screen”, just click

Hi!

Here is my entry for this LD. Unfortunately I had too little time this week, so the result is not, what I really wanted at the end.

But try and enjoy and please leave some feedback.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to spend the last two days on my game, so I haven’t added a single player campaign like I wanted. You can still play single player, but there’s no win condition.

You can play the game here. Enjoy!

This post is an announcement of failure. I’d already scheduled to go away at the weekend so I lost two days and all the momentum I’d built up by Friday. This, combined with unwillingness to reduce the scope, has meant that there’s no way it’s getting done by the end of the competition; I’m simply too attached to the idea to do a cut-and-run job.

Still, this isn’t a negative announcement of failure, I feel! I’m intending to work on this up until 7DFPS and hopefully do a stellar job worthy of my vision.

Somehow, despite losing a big chunk of code hours before the end of 7DRTS, I’ve managed to release my first mini LD game. I’m fairly happy with it, although I would have loved an extra day or two to balance the difficulty a bit and fix some of the “quirks” in the game engine.

Icarus

The game takes place in a star system with 11 planets, all colonised by the player. The star in the centre has exhausted all of it’s hydrogen causing runaway fusion to occur. This means that the player must work their way to the outer planets less affected by the solar expansion. The ultimate aim being to build an interstellar colony ship to escape from the dying sun.

I had initially planned to have some of the planets populated with an AI which would mean you must fight for control of some of the outer planets. As the game progressed their would be fewer and fewer planets and therefore resources forcing the player and the AI to fight over what little is left. By day 3 I realised this probably wouldn’t be possible within the 7 days so I had to cut it.

I’m hoping to work a little more on this, so please post any suggestions in the comments. I’ll post a full post-mortem in a few days when I’m a little less tired.

You can view the ludum dare page here.

Hey Everyone,

Me and a friend are gonna be live streaming some Minecraft for a little while, you can tune in here: twitch.tv/0creds

Hope to see you all there,

– OCreds

Welp, I’m conceding defeat.
A huge draw bug has occurred.

Simply, units you can control live in an array. You have a dragbox to select them.
Once the dragbox falls over them, their respective select() method is called. This turns flips a boolean to true and changes their colour.
Simple.

For all units (except the final one) doing the select procedure calls the method select() but the colour does not change. You can actually issue individual commands to them still.
If you select the final unit in the array, all units are coloured but only the final one has the select() method called.
Bizarre…

I tested by creating a different way to select them (using the exact same methods) and it works. Reducing the population to 1 also works (the only unit is the end of the array.)
It seems like the dragbox doesn’t it EXCEPT that the select() methods on the units that should be selected is called at the correct times.

Painfully aggravating.

I’ve run about 10 different tests and I end up with the same issue so I’m thinking it’s a draw issue. Still, it could be something glaringly obvious.

So, that’s that.
Final screenshots
RPG Mode:(Ignore that minimap issue…)

RTS Mode:

As this will be my last game for quite sometime, this is most disheartening. But hey, in my 3rd attempt to make an RTS, this is by far the furthest I’ve gotten. A shame to be cut down by such a silly bug.

After the cut is me rambling on about the concept. (Which I actually rather enjoy.)

Okay. This all began with the idea of isolation.
You are an inhabitant in a town that has no connection to the outside. This had a couple of variations:

• The town was forced to be closed by a military-like force. Would have had patrolling guards. Also would have had recruitable units.
• The town had been cut-off for thousands of years but no-one ever dared to venture outside. Also would have had recruitable units.

The key difference between those two is the motive of the protagonist. The former is purely the protagonist’s yearning for freedom outside once again. The latter’s is the protagonist is tired of tradition and people’s contentedness to remain where they are without knowing anything of the world around them. (That last one sounds a little familiar but I came up with it before watching SNK.)

The former I thought was a goer for a little while. Little being the operative word here.
I started off using this concept and by day 2 (I think) I was very sick of it. Why? It wasn’t very good from a narrative stand-point.

So, I spent a little bit thinking again. I went back to the 2nd idea.
I then remembered I have a concept for something kinda similar but instead of physical walls, the walls lie in the protagonists mind and it’s a metaphor for learning how shitty the world is blah blah blah.
So I combined them.
And named it [eyknir].

So, I’ll describe how it goes in an procedural fashion:

• You start in RPG mode. You can talk to inhabitants of the town and learn their views. Eventually, you’ll speak to everyone and you’ll go to sleep.
• Next, in a subconcious state (dream or not…) you’ll have to do battle with various aspects of ones self in RTS mode. In your arsenal you have Confidence, Knowledge, Curiosity and Willpower. The enemy has Mediocrity, Tradition, Laziness and Subservience.
• There are resources, sort of. Energy and Motivation. Energy decreases over time and is halted by destroying an enemy. Motivation increases everytime an enemy is destroyed. Once Motivation reaches its max, you can build a new unit.
• After the RTS mode, you go back into RPG mode where the inhabitants speak in a slightly different tone. The colours of the town also change slightly.
• You talk to the people, do battle and so on, all the time the town is getting worse and the people are getting weird.
• If you lose, you return to a perpetual state of mediocrity.

So, that’s how [eyknir] goes.
It deals with ignorance, truth and perception.

The world is not always as we perceive it to be, but we strive to perceive it in a way where ignorance and truth can be balanced out. A total truth can be just as harmful as total ignorance.

Because I have to make all my games deep or something…
Fuck, I might find time to make a Twine game from this idea.

Hi guys,

Well, that was one hell of a ride.

To facilitate my testing better, I divided my web builds into two: Release, and Experimental version.

This is pretty much the same idea with stable, and development versions: the Release version is the latest that has no (showstopper) bugs, while Experimental is the bleeding edge version with new features for testing.

Right now, the Experimental version is the one that has the Bone Wheel unit.

Here’s me and my friend doing a playtest:

I’d appreciate if you gather some friends and test the Experimental version if it runs ok! Send me messages on my Twitter, or comment in this page.

You can check out my entry here.

Tags: progress, screenshot, Strat Souls

So after 7 days I have a game of sorts. Win Condition and 8 levels! of madness.

Things that went well:

Happy about the music I wrote for the main theme last night.
happy with my title screen
glad I made some more levels then one.
Play testing! I had two friends play it and that was a great learning experience.
Recording my own sword fighting folly(ok my gf helped luckily she didn’t hurt me)
Learning to analyze creative thoughts quicker, still have lots of room to grow.

Things that didn’t work out:
Enemy pathing AI etc (much harder then I thought)
Ballance? (I can beat the game but it’s pretty ridiculous for other people)

Graphics, really really wish I had more time or was just more efficient. I’m use to taking a day per frame of art… there was so much more I wanted to do.
Basic time management, I learned a lot but working solo on a project like this it was really eye opening.
waiting till the last day to make levels.
spending too much time on music/graphics all the things I really like.
animations that I can make quickly and not look like seizures.
Not sure if Game Maker is best for RTS

My biggest take away for me was the point after day one, when I had to drop all my cool Ideas and just try to make something that barley resembles a game.

Thank you to all the people that streamed and posted really was nice not to be alone doing this and I learned lots from you guys.

Windows: sorry about the exe file

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=24829

I’m not going to bombard you with paragraphs so here are quick points for a postmortem:

SO SO: I used old base code from my turn-based strategy game experiments. It was not the best fit. There were some few unused pieces of code that I had to clean up (“I don’t think I’m using this function, I should delete it, it’s distracting me… but is this part really not used? I have to check…”).

GOOD: Clearly define the scope of what you’ll do. That goes without saying, and yet some people don’t get this. When I see others saying “I’m gonna add this and this and this, I think it’s ambitious for the time-alloted, but I think I can pull it off LOL” that’s already a red flag right there. Do you even have a concrete plan to do all that?

I put it out there that I can create either a singleplayer game or a multiplayer game, but not both. At least, not within the 7 days. So I asked in the Ludum Dare website which they want first. Of course I want to add both eventually, but I have to choose what to finish within the 7 days.

GOOD: Create a “testbed” level to quickly prototype ideas. A sort of playground level without victory/defeat conditions so you can test things quickly. I do this all the time. Shigeru Miyamoto does this, so why wouldn’t you? Don’t you love Miyamoto-san?

GOOD: Sound software engineering practices. Abstract low-level details with high-level convenience functions! Reduces clutter, makes it easier for you to think! I’m going to write a separate article about this.

GOOD: Used NGUI! Worth the $45 (got it on sale)! NGUI’s WYSIWYG workflow allows you to design GUI layouts fast!

GOOD: Used free art assets from the Internet! Some editing was required but still lessened amount of work!

GOOD: Made my own 3d animations! Better control on how I want attacks to move.

GOOD: Used primitive shapes for my 3d models on purpose. Didn’t add legs to lessen work! No need to animate legs! Looks cute according to some people! (?)

GOOD: Made use of free 3d models from blendswap.com (i.e. the skulls of the units) to lessen amount of work.

SO SO: I probably should have made use of a state machine to facilitate low-level behaviour of units. But with the behaviour tree plugin I integrated, I think I can make use of that instead. I did not choose to do this though, as I concentrated on multiplayer instead as requested.

GOOD: The good thing is all the ugly code is hidden behind a clean interface & facade class. So eventually I can clean up my ugly code without adversely affecting the rest of my code.

KIND-OF BAD: Should I name my function FaceUnit() or TurnToUnit()? Can’t decide! Drives me crazy!

GOOD: The network code I made includes a lobby and match-making service, which I could use later on for other games.

GOOD: Although I use the built-in Unity network library, I modularized my code so I can swap it for a different network library instead (Photon or uLink, maybe?). This is probably likely as I’ve heard many complaints that Unity’s built-in network library is buggy in real-world use (when there are dozens of connecting clients).

SO SO: This game jam forced me to learn git subtrees. I lost sleep wrestling with the damn thing, but now I can use it.

BAD: Live streaming? With the quality of Internet connection in this country, forget it. Tried it. 90% of my streaming video’s frames were getting dropped.

GOOD: Keep two versions of your builds: one for the clean, playable, version, and another for your experimental version where you are adding new stuff. In case what you’re adding won’t make it to the deadline, simply use your last clean, playable version.

I usually release my Unity web builds on Dropbox. But I realized I should have put two versions on Dropbox, i.e. the two versions I mention. There would be a StratSoulsRelease folder and a StratSoulsExperimental folder. Once I’m sure of my experimental version’s stability, I simply copy the necessary files over to the release folder.

Tags: postmortem, Strat Souls

Schaak!, my 7dRTS for MiniLD 44, is complete and submitted. Coding started at 9pm on Monday the 22nd, and ended at 9pm on Monday the 29th. Very little of the process went to plan. The repository is online at https://github.com/essarrdee/Schaak.

DAY 1

Day 1 was mostly taken up with scribbling and typing design ideas, and emailing my collaborator about CMake, ideas, and names. Various bad puns and portmanteaus were rejected without comment, Persian and Spanish words were considered, and a Dutch word was settled on. Coding started at 9pm, and mostly consisted of copying SFML boilerplate from a previous project.

DAY 2

Coding continued into the night. Board drawing was set up pretty quickly, followed by board drawing with cover indications (showing whether a square is guarded by black or white pieces). I took an unusual approach to board rendering – a texture the size of the map is stored on the graphics card, and updated regularly with the cover information. The board size had to be halved to fit this texture in my CPU-GPU bandwidth.

After a sleep, scrolling to zoom was implemented in the evening and piece definition files were planned – just a name, sprite information, move speed, and list of move/capture locations.

DAY 3

Implementing the piece data loading was pretty quick. Next I made a dummy piece, the Doomed Wanderer, that jumps around the map in Knight moves and tests the protected-square display’s correctness. With one piece working, it was time to plan how thousands of pieces would work – not a trivial consideration when all of them will be AI controlled. The plan was to exploit the grid nature of the board – if you need to know whether a piece is in a square, you just look up the ID of the piece in that square. This simplifies capturing and collision avoidance. I also wanted to keep the vector of units compact, minimise the number of gaps formed when pieces die, and minimise the time it takes to spawn a new piece.

With the help of some people from the IRC channel, I settled on a three-part structure to hold pieces:

• The vector of piece objects, indexed by piece ID which never changes during a piece’s lifetime
• The double-ended queue of free slots in the piece vector, which just lists all the piece IDs that don’t correspond to a live piece
• The 2D array of board occupants, mapping each square to the ID of the occupying piece (or -1 for no piece). Pieces also store their own board coordinates.

With the first two of those implemented, the Doomed Wanderer met his fate – deletion. I now had random walkers spawning a few times per second. There was no collision detection without the occupancy grid, though.

DAY 4

I had been making attempts to recruit artists to draw chess piece graphics since day 2, but everyone either joked about how their pixel graphics skills were so good that they could draw 1×1 sprites, or made an attempt and gave up. Or told me to use a font that doesn’t scale small enough, or attempted to shrink vector sprites down to 8×8 and smaller (with antialiasing).

Halfway through the challenge and I only had a board full of invisible random walkers. There was no way around it, I had to make the sprites myself, today.

It took about 3 hours to get them right. I looked at low-resolution chess sprites from around the internet for inspiration, and for the larger ones visualised my grandfather’s chess set. The knights look pretty stupid. Drawing pixel horses is difficult.

The high-resolution sprites have outlines, and to smooth out the zooming I made the 16×16 ones have half-outlines. They looked *terrible* like that. I added a bit more outline to them, but I’m not really sure what to do with them.

Code written today: zero lines. Halfway through the challenge, I only had a board full of random walkers and a spritesheet.

DAY 5

Progress towards drawing sprites. Still no chess pieces on screen. Time to get concerned about whether I’ll finish the game.

DAY 6

Continued coding into the night. First thing accomplished was pieces being drawn. Squashed bugs. Got a linux makefile from a new collaborator, who exists. Implemented scrolling. Decided it would be a bad idea to develop epilepsy while coding an RTS, set scrolling speed to prevent horrible flashing. Made pieces mortal. Made a video demonstrating the zoom functions and piece sprites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIKouIOXPtY

Pieces are mortal – time to make them capturable! Planned and implemented the generic piece AI, capable of 4 out of 5 of the behaviours I want (the “protect” behaviour requires an extra, more difficult feature). Loaded behaviour definitions from files (but I only wrote two of the 4 behaviours). Took me a while to notice that the value-based AI was actually picking its *least* favourite move. Discovered this because a lot of pieces set to “Kamikaze” were ignoring all opportunities to capture enemy pieces…

Next problem with the generic AI was that the move-choosing method sorted by target coordinates when values were equal. This meant that *everyone* beelined for the bottom-right corner of the map. And captured their friends. Fixed. I added a behaviour that causes pieces to seek friendly pieces’ cover, which made them form clusters. Made a video of that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ght5eUgH3QM. I changed the friendly/enemy cover colour scheme from green/red to green/magenta to improve colourblind usability.

6 days into the 7 days challenge, I had exactly zero ways of letting the user interact with the pieces. This needed to change, and the first thing to do was implement selection and commands. Dragging boxes with the mouse is pretty awkward on a scrollable zoomable map, but I managed it. Set selected pieces to flash regularly. I didn’t have time to implement complex things like orders to attack specific units or groups of units, so the only command you can give (and really the only command you need) is to set a destination box by right-clicking. The distance from the destination box feeds into the unit’s value system and lets them follow orders – within reason (trying to stay out of enemy-covered squares, taking capture opportunities, etc.). I made a video of the epic battles possible with this command system: http://youtu.be/LA75nbdoZU4

At some point there was some sleep. I also started ignoring the TODO list and scribbled down a list of priorities for giving the game some semblance of strategic depth on the last day.

At some point this day or yesterday I decided that playing this game against an AI was a terrible idea, and that playing this game over a network was not something I could code in 2 days. It had to be local multiplayer. Switching control between black and white and playing against oneself or a real-life friend.

DAY 7

Epic battles are only meaningful if you can tell who came out on top. Added piece counters for both players.

Added an interface, the screen looks so much nicer at minimum zoom now. Buttons to select all units (which gave me trouble when I recorded the previous video), or to select all units of a given type, or to restrict the current selection to units of a given type. 20 minutes left.

Added buttons to switch pieces between behaviour types, with no feedback of any kind as to what behaviour they now follow. Added a key to delete pawns and earn money, and buttons to upgrade piece speed and pieces’ chance to cheat death. Again, no feedback. 5 minutes left. No chance of adding feedback for these features now. Users will just have to keep track themselves…

Updated the readme, took screenshots, submitted.

I really want to add those few sf::Text objects to make the game more intuitive. Maybe a button to display the controls in-game. This will all have to wait for a non-7dRTS update.

Hey Guys,

I’ll be continuing development on my MiniLD game, and thought it’d be nice to stream the entire process, therefore, go to this link to catch the action: twitch.tv/0creds

Hope To See You All There,

– 0Creds

After some seriously mind-blowing time spent on basic math failures (I’m looking at you, logistics functions), I’m back to showcase the project heading into its final hours.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone that worked on the project here at the University of Minnesota’s Video Game Development Club, all of whom are listed in the credits on the main menu. Good work team!

Meanwhile, in Space… is a javascript RTS game set in a 1950’s B-movie universe, where you select the different head and body of your “race”, and then take over planets and do battle vs the basic CPU enemy. Due to time concerns, the extensive battle scenes have been cut, and fleet battles are now determined by whoever has the greater health. Galaxy generation has also been reduced to one pre-made galaxy due to time concerns. Damn you 7 day format!
The decision was made to continue development past the 7 days (through the rest of the summer semester), but we will be submitting the 7 day project around midnight tonight.

Next, I’d like to show some screenshots of the galaxy menu:

You can see the rotating planets here as well as a sample fleet of three ships. As you can also see, the race modifiers are not implemented yet, but the assets are done, and merely need to be programmed in. We should have this done by late tonight. You can also see the buy window on the right, but since we have no planets captured in the screenshots, we have no resources to build with.

Everyone here is making one last push, and I need to rejoin my team, so I’ll cut this one short. I’ll be back with a link later tonight. Thanks!

 Entry Page for MOBIUS // Oreganik Home Page // Dev Blog

If you’ve ever been fishing, you probably know the feeling of hooking something big, pulling it to the surface, getting it almost to the shore and… splash! The hook is out and the fish is gone, deep into the weeds, cartoon curse words bubbling up in its wake, and real ones blotting out the sun from the hands holding the rod.

Normally, that’s how I feel after 48 hours of Ludum Dare: like something got away, and I lost whatever I was after. But by stretching this out over seven days, even though the fish got away (like it always seems to do!), I really enjoyed the fight to bring it home.

This was my first compo entry since I officially founded Oreganik LLC as a business. When I started, I tried to balance working all day on one game (Chess Heroes), then coming home, being a good husband and father for a few hours, then working on this game. THAT WAS EXHAUSTING. Then I realized: hey, I make games for a living! I can just do this as my day job! So Thursday and Friday were full dev days, as were Sunday (after waking up deep in the forest) and Monday. All told, this represents about 40 hours of work, and hey! It’s a great foundation! Now I get to see if enough people are excited about what Mobius could have been to see if it’s a candidate for full-time development at a later date.

I also learned some good rules to follow for next time. And, because this is officially “what I do” now, I can take the time to properly write it all down. Stuff like “how to write an extensible transaction model that simplifies functionality and centralizes data.” And then MAKE that model, and then have it in the pocket for the next compo.

^_^

Well…didn’t meet the deadline ;__; but I did enjoy doing it!! But I have a base for something so I will keep with it :). With school and work I had to squeeze what I could.

Stage 1

First I focus on the player moving and controlling their little box man.  I wanted to the building to hold a certain amount of units in side a building and when they sensed the player was too close for comfort they would come out and start to defend the building they took over.

Stage 2

I got tired of testing on a blank background and took the time to make a scrolling cloud back ground and to draw out the level land. Was looking at upgrading the building models but didn’t being that I wanted to have the building code more functional.

Stage 3

So started working on the code to get the man to come from the building and attack the player once they got to close and if the player got to far away the unit would return back to the building that they are defending.

Stage 4

Wanted to code the player unit to be smart enough that if they are being attacked or see the enemy that they would go into defense mode and start to attack.

Stage 5

Add a 2 more units so I could code the multi-selection tool that was very tricky and I ran into trouble to get to work.

Stage 6

Started to code the commands the player could give to their unit. Sadly only coded the movement.

What I think that slow me down was I kept trying to refine the code I already had instead of going forward with the project. So I always found myself going back to something that might have not been perfect but functional and trying to make it  as best as I could. Maybe next time I can try to refrain from this habit during a competition.

~~Yasmeen G~~

12:40 A.M. and I have finally finished a simple build of the game. I didn’t have enough time to give the game all of the bells and whistles due to work and schedule conflicts, but the build is functional and entertaining. In the end, that is good enough for completion, and “Quebec” is ready to roll.

Above all, this project has shown me that I have the ability to finish a project. This is my first real game jam that I have done, and it was awesome. It really taught me that one of the most important things to consider is the scope. There is only so much that developers can do within a week, especially a beginner like me. In the end, it comes down to timing, the code and a prayer.

Here is to taming the game dev wilderness. Good luck to everyone in the judging!

It’s been a crazy week, but we finally have a (arguably) playable prototype. Still plenty of work to be done, but here is our first version: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=24975

Sail the high seas and defend your booty from other pirates!

Booty Defense (working title) is a prototype programmed by Rob Williams, with art by Dustin Brown and music by Jordan Beischer.

Heavily inspired by Plants Vs Zombies but with a lot of different features planned for the future.

Updates coming soon! Stay tuned to http://bootydefense.tumblr.com/

Tags: #7DRTS

[View my entry : Age of Rice]

I’ve not develop it during the seven days and lot of features are not implemented.

Well, that was a busy week 😛

We already had some RTS codes in our codebank, so making one didn’t seem like a problem. 7 days? Bring it on!

Oh, we were wrong. Very, very wrong.

First of all, most of the codes were rewritten anyway. Previous RTS was too different and much simplier than this one.

Crime 1930 features four players trying to capture the control points. AI needed to capture points and fight 3 opponents, thus alot of time went into writing the worthy opponent.

Secondly, we wanted to make a game with shared economics, where one player’s purchases would influence prices of all other players.

This system ruined our testing immediately, sending and receiving NaNs. We fixed in a very last minute.

Thirdly, in the middle of the process our artist suddenly departed.

We needed character skins and fast, so I had to take her place, remembered GTA Vice City modding times and used VC skins as references.

Well, that’s pretty much it!

Here’s the game: Crime 1930

I hope you enjoy it!

We’re planning on expanding the game further, so if you have any suggestions, let us know!

Hey guys, just wanted to take the opportunity to write a bit more about World’s Aftermath, and the process behind it.

Assets

One thing we strived for when we were planning this project was that we really didn’t want to use any content that wasn’t our own. So, from day one, Nicolas set out drawing pixel art, laying down guitar tracks, and doing voice overs for the character deaths. He kept a steady stream of content coming in, and I plugged away endlessly programming it all together. Every day when I returned home from work Nick told me he’d been up till 6am drawing dozens of animations. One night he stayed up all night animating 30 strips of animations and laying down the entire soundtrack. By the end of it all, we had 300+ frames of graphics, 6 original songs, 50+ original sounds, and half a dozen levels.

Code

All of the source code is original too. I’ve been working on a 2D game engine since 2007 that I’ve been using for all my other projects. The night before the competition I gutted out one of my projects of all it’s content so I could start with a blank canvas. I used my custom World Builder (level editor) to design the levels. The engine is written in Java, and uses the Java2D graphics library for rendering (which I’ve optimized immensely). The most important thing, I realized, was that I would need to be able to create units for the game as quickly as possible, and that I wanted hundreds of units and hundreds of bullets on the screen at once. The game was going to be visceral and gratuitous and I think we hit the mark.

Every single variable, animation, sound, and unit/bullet type is defined in the INI files in the /gamedat/ folder (which leaves rooms for mods). By the time we were finished, units, bullets, sounds, levels, etc. could all be added without a single line of programming. To make sure the units could pile up without slowdown I wrote a spatial partitioning algorithm that sweeps over all the units at the beginning of every frame. Each unit is put in a different “bin” for every 100 pixels.  This way, unit vs unit or bullet vs unit comparisons are made only on those units in the surrounding area by getting only those “bins” in range.

Gameplay/Mechanics

We really looked to Command and Conquer as a source of inspiration for this bad-boy. We wanted to capture the vibe of the original Command and Conquer, but we also wanted to make a game that could be played by anyone, without ever having played an RTS. So, we simplified the control scheme and mechanics quite a bit from a traditional RTS. This is where we feel we’ve innovated. Without direct control of unit placement, we were able to reduce the gameplay down to three actions (purchase, attack, defend), but made sure we left room for emergent gameplay and strategy. This created a very casual gameplay experience but also leaves room for a great amount of depth.

From the start, we realized the importance of making sure it was completely clear how to play without any sort of tutorial. So, we designed an intuitive and simplified control scheme that is ultimately compatible with touch screens. In this fashion, the entire game is playable with only a mouse, only a keyboard, or only a touch screen. Unfortunately, we had to ditch the tower defense and defend actions for this version, but adding them in our final release will give that additional layer of control that will really bring the gameplay together as a complete package. Forcing the player to commit to an attack makes each decision of what units to send, how many, and how often, that much more important; and the immediate urgency to capture towers right from the start sets the pace from the start of a match. Finally, the need to unlock tiers of units, as well as the importance of purchasing and defending your harvesters ends up making each purchase critical.

Finally, I’d like to mention that a design decision was made very early on to use object oriented code design to cleanly separate each aspect of the game. In this fashion units are separated from teams, and teams from players. We will be able to add in network support fairly easily for the full release, as the code is designed in a way to make networked control of a player trivial. Something we wanted to do from the very beginning was to play versus each other, so the full release will certainly have online multiplayer.

Music/Sound Design/Ambiance/Inspiration

We’ve both always been huge fans of the earlier games in the Command and Conquer franchise. And even though Nick won’t play me anymore because I dominate him every time, we wanted to draw from these games for inspiration. We intentionally left out a unit cap, and made sure the game could facilitate as many units as a player could afford. The music and sound design were crucial, also, in creating an homage to these games. We laid down some guitar tracks ala Frank Klepacki (see below), and did our best imitations of the Wilhelm scream that Command and Conquer used so charmingly for it’s infantry death sounds. Getting the artistic direction of the two factions and the mood of the game just right was critical–since graphic design makes or breaks a first impression–so we worked hard to capture a dystopian “Red Alert Vs Tiberian Sun” feel. We decided the more conventional “Rebel Scum” vs the domineering and futuristic “Allied Collective” would be a good representation of this. There isn’t a story explicitly stated in-game, but we feel we hit the mark with our “show don’t tell” approach that we meticulously crafted through the subtle use of our art direction and the limited wording/naming we sprinkled throughout the game.

In closing

Looking back, we feel very satisfied by what we’ve accomplished here. In 7 days we’ve completed a game from start to finish with all the technical aspects of game development accounted for (sound, music, graphics, level design, victory conditions, menus, AI), and a strong core set of game mechanics. We’re geared up to now create a proper release of the game, having proven our prototype, and in the coming weeks we’ll polish the game with all the love in the world and release a free version of the game with all the bells and whistles.

Download

Download/view our entry here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=24948

Tags: #7DRTS, #indiegame, #MiniLD44, 2D, compo, final, game, gamedesign, gamedev, jam, java, Ludum Dare, MiniLD, post-mortem, postmortem

Unfortunately, we were not able to meet the mini LD 44 deadline. This was due to several factors, the main two being part-time work and windows drivers related casualties.

Though we did not finish Pile O’ Pirates in time to have a working game, we fully intend to complete it. So look out for progress updates and videos in the coming months.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElementalZealGS

Website: http://www.elementalzeal.com

Game Features so far

–        Zoomable 2D game

–        Selection/Movement of pirates constrained to boats.

–        Movement of Ship without screwing up pirates.

–        Saveable settings (Such as resolution and Fullscreen)

–        Over 300 styles of male only (as of now) pirates

–        Random name picking from list of popular male names.

Here are some screenshots of what we have managed to accomplish.

The beginnings of Pile O’ Pirates title screen.

A zoomed in view of a selected unit and his comrades.

Selecting some units in Pile O’ Pirates.

Moving a ship in Pile O’ Pirates.

See you all for the next Ludum Dare.

Tags: 2D, game, progress, screenshot, Windows, xna

Hi!

This is my first postmortem on my first LD game. I am not going to write much text, here it is some facts and thoughts.

“Rock, Paper, Geometry!” – is a real-time tactic game based on “rock, paper, scissors” rules with random generated levels and impulse movement.

What went right

1. I’ve finished it!
2. Feature cutting. I’ve cut more than 80% of  all planned features, leaving the most important and delicious. Time restriction is a powerful productivity tool
3. Surprisingly the game balance was achieved very quickly.
4. Very poor random AI generates different fun situations.
5. I think the gameplay has a good combination of skill and luck, providing a replayability.
6. Sound effects made the “feel” better.

What went wrong

1. I was distracting by my real job and 7 days unfortunately became 3 days.
2. No ambient music.
3. Hard to remember the rules of the game at the beginning.
4. The art. I hadn’t enough time to improve it.
5. Poorly written code. There is a little chaos

Conclusion

I’m very proud that my first LD experience was fun and I finished the game against the all road blocks! Thanks for reading!

Tags: #7DRTS, postmortem, rock paper geometry

Hello Everybody!

We’re really happy about the next Ludum Dare, it will be our 3rd Ludum Dare, I am absolutely sure that it will be our best entry yet

We are finishing up our last entry’s game.

North Korean World Saviour (Our last Ludum Dare)

Korean maneuvers over Canada

Mission Selection Room

Cheers

Team Something Beautiful

Unless by some miracle, I get struck with a surge of energy, I’ve been completely worn out. I have everything except the actual AI ready, so its just basically you walking around taking other bases with no real point or flow :'( To be completely honest, the games scope was a feasible one given that this was a normal week, but as some of you may know, it is Ramadan, and I’ve been fasting while working on it, so ultimately I just didn’t have the energy to properly finish it. I will be working on it past the due date though, and just release it as a normal RTS. Here are some pics and stuff.

While its all still without graphics, I have all graphics and sound already done and will be putting it in when I’m finished. It will literally take 5 minutes.

Well, Congratulations to those that did finish, I look forward to sharing the finished version of this game on a later date :D.

Hey Everyone,

Continuing work on my 7dRTS game, and streaming the entire process, you can check it out here: twitch.tv/0creds

Hope To See You All There,

– 0Creds

Ludum Dare 27… Here I come!

I participated in Ludum Dare 26 and I had loads of fun although my game wasn’t too good.  I am looking forward to Ludum Dare 27 quite a lot and cant wait for it to begin.

Since LD26 I have been working on a couple more games and hopefully one now that will be a bit bigger than a weekend project, THi².

I feel now that after a year of canvas game development I have progressed quite a lot and I feel now that I can create a full game, not just a small canvas animation.

Ludum Dare, here I come!

P.S. There is no “LD #27” category yet.

EDIT

Moved to “LD #27” category

Well, i decided that i will again partake in Ludum Dare 27 after all the great feedback i got for my last game.

I hope i was able to improve my coding skills quite a bit and i will definitly try to make a better game then the last one (like using an actual physic enginge or proper collision detection).

But i won’t change my Tools, i will still be coding in Java with the Slick2D Engine, using Paint.net or Photoshop for Graphics and probably some creator again for the music..

Well, i am looking forward to the next challenge, check out my last game (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=21938) if you want or leave a comment, i would love to get in touch with some people.

Greetings
Xatulu

“The Great Story of DOTS” is online, we had a rest and it’s time for the report !

I am currently in vacation in France with Aki,  and after read a tweet about 7dRTS, I convaincs her to participate :  “It looks cool, fresh and it’s an rts !! 😀 ”

Day 1 : Brainstorming

Well we decide to participate but we were busy with spectacles, visits, friends and parents this week, so our main point was : “no time”…

We eliminate “complex” idea and spoke about dot soldier ( easy to design ), also the idea of draw free line interest us since few weeks ( we test it on another concept ) and we want try it on this project. Finally we get the idea of start on a small screen to reveal new mechanics and create a story . After mixing these elements we arrive to the current concept :

Draw line to move your units and create building, an interface without button and with the background story of Dots vs Square.

Technical point of view we decide to made it for the web in html5with pixijs (2d framework using WebGL ). We are  very satisfate by it and thanks to them for their support on github

Day 2 : Nothing !

Day 3 : Research

Aki start to made a design of the map and I create an small experiments to recognize shape ( makiopolis.com/labs/15/ )
We also work hard to find a great name ( more hard than we though :p )

Day 4 : Create the base

Aki continue on the map and I create the basic architecture of html and js.. but we were kidnapped by friends to party

Day 5 : Back on the field

Start developping and drawing hard

Day 6 :

The dots finally attack castle and die in the water ( big progress ) and the design start to looking well ( some animations, more details ). The story system with the different condition checker was also done.

Day 7 : The great day

Big rush,  we product a lot of assets and code to made it the current version with the maximum of features and all the story ( IA, Story, Timing , Animation, Monster, Mine, Big castle, Astar, etc… ). Also we change the map few times after testing to improve the gameplay. Add win / loose, eat pizza and thanks to “picard”.

Finally we post it there  ! (OH YEAH)

You can find the src here : https://github.com/ipfix/The_Great_Story_of_DOTS , for any questions don’t hesitate to ask @akican or me ( @makio64 ) directly on twitter or in the comments !

Thanks geeks to read us, we hope you enjoy it and we wait your feedback ! ^.^

Hey Everyone,

I’ll be doing some more streaming of my 7dRTS game. Should be streaming for at least a couple of hours, you can check it out here: twitch.tv/0creds

Hope To See You All There,

– 0Creds

Hi everyone, I have a little problem.

I have quite a bit of knowledge with coding but no program to use it in to make a game.

I don’t know how to apply the coding knowledge I know to make a game in a program.

What do i use? how do i use it?

Please help me?

To make up for not having a linux playable version of my game (yet) I made a short gameplay video with some instructions annotated on top. Hopefully this’ll be at least partially useful.

A more lengthy postmortem may also be in the works

PLAY IT HERE

Soooooooo we’re a little late delivering our entry for 7dRTS… unfortunately a number of distractions raised their ugly heads during the second half of development but we soldiered on and are proud to present Troops!

Troops is a side-on 2D/3D game that mixes strategic unit placement and skill shots with real time multi-player mayhem. It was made in Unity from scratch in just over 8 days by 2 programmers and 2 artists from the lovely city Dundee, Scotland. Music and soundFX were obtained under Creative Commons licences which can be found on GitHub along with the source, linked below. All other assets were produced during the 8 day period.

Gameplay Overview

• Game consists to two teams with 6 Troops each, placed at either side of the map. Shoot your enemy until there is nothing left to shoot.
• Adjust your Troops’ fire power and aim to perform skillshots at a distance or in close quarters.
• Weapons have a set reload time and Troops need to stand still to reload, moving them will reset the reload time. You can adjust aim & power without interrupting the Reload.
• Game ends when one army is wiped out. No base building, its all about the Troops.
• Multiplayer: Connect to a hosted game via the master server or by IP and become victorious!
• Practice controlling, aiming and shooting with your troops before joining the fray in offline mode. No AI yet

Controls

• Select your troops with left click / drag and move them by right clicking
• Manually aim troops’ shot trajectory & power with right click and dragging from a selected unit, or ctrl + right click to fire at a position.
• Scroll the camera with the middle mouse button

The jam was certainly a challenge for us but we had an absolute blast! Hopefully there’ll be more larger scale Ludum ‘mini’ jams in the future, the games produced have all be phenomenal.

Game: http://tooeasygames.com/7dRTS/Troops.html

Source: https://github.com/graehu/7dRTS

Also, check out an entry made by one of our programmers for #LD26 😀

Make Friends Don’t Bake Them

Tags: #7DRTS, 2D, 3D, C++, Ludum Dare, multiplayer, Too Easy Games, Troops, unity, unity3d

Players have problems with controls in AYB, that`s priceless feedback and here is small manual:

First clicked planet is the source (blue marker).

Second clicked planet is the target (red marker).

To send ships click the source-planet and then click and hold the target-planet.

Note: you can send ships from one source to multiple targets, but you can`t send ships from multiple sources to the one target. Source marker will disappear when the last sent ship will reach the target, then you will be able to choose another source.

Note 2: you can`t send ships from your base to enemy base directly. Use neutral planets.

Advice: keep 5-10 ships on your base.

Hey Everyone,

I’m gonna be streaming again for a short while, so why not come on by and check it out? twitch.tv/0creds

Hope To See You All There,

– 0Creds

After playing my game with the three of us who made it for well over an hour and a half, I think I can call this a success. It was probably the project I’ve put the most effort in in my life so far. And I had so much fun making this game. Its also really nice seeing other people enjoy playing it aswell. I hope to invite a few friends over with laptops so I can actually try out the 8 player mode. Playing with three players is mad enough. I’ll see how more then that goes.

I’m not going to do a day by day breakdown of how the game progressed, but rather talk about all the major parts of it and give a brief discussion of how I overcame all the problems I faced. Mainly for my own purpose because although I can look through the git logs to see what was done when, its nice to put it in a better form of english.

The code took a very long time to get to a state which was properly playable. I’d never written a game with SFML before but I found it to be a very well thought out and consistent game library. Before I’d always used SDL but because I needed pieces to be able to rotate, SDL wasn’t going to do the job, unless I started using OpenGL directly. And I wasn’t going to do that yet. I did try but that didn’t work out very well. Also, the SFML networking module was truly my saving grace and without the sf::Packet class I don’t think this game would’ve been possible.

At the beginning I wrote my own GUI library on top of SFML. It was a complete flop and very short lived. I lost a few hours to making that and replaced it with SFGUI. I future versions, I’m probably going to re-replace that with my own code so that I can have more control over it, and save the extra dependency (I have a feeling it increased the binary size by about 4MB). But thats for the future, for now it helped a lot quickly forming the game joining screen.

My friend Jake drew all the tiles in one sitting! I think he was expecting the game to pop out of thin air at about the same speed as he could produce the graphics for it. I wish! So anyway, he had other commitments later on in the week so when I rang him to say that I’d finished the game on Monday, he was very surprised. The other friend who was helping me with graphics, Tom, he did all the drawings of the minions. Initially, he was very disappointed by how small they were and that his work wouldn’t be visible, but that thought was quickly banished when he attacked me with his army of 3500 of them.

When I started out, I really wanted there to be epic battles with hundreds of units all fighting. And now, well, as you can see from the screenshot, you can see that thousands is much more common. Unfortunately, due to me not play testing enough, the path finder wasn’t really up for it. But that was due to the fact that I was massively underestimating H in my A* algorithm. So in the post compo version, I now overestimate (I’ll upload that tomorrow, its getting late here). The paths your minions take is still of a high quality, and the path finding no longer takes for ever. Yay :).

The network code was a nightmare to get working. But once I’d written a base code for it, the commands I sent over the network were easy to manage. I had a few bugs, but they were easy to sort out because they caused really obvious desynchs.

The way the game manages the network code is by running a full simulation on everyones computer, and sending messages for command the player issues. That way, the game is really easy to hack because there is no validation on the commands sent, so you can move your opponents minions should you want to. But I thought that the game is designed to play on LAN with friends so that doesn’t really matter.

The code is probably the worst in the world. The update method when you’re playing is 350 lines long. I don’t think that that is how its supposed to be done. But after 2 days, I really didn’t care any more, and just went for it. It managed to stay pretty stable with 4000 guys walking around, so I’m quite happy about that.

All in all, 20% of the game is the tile, 20% is the hats, 20% is the gameplay, 20% is the number of minions you get and 20% is the ridiculousness of the collision resolution algorithm I wrote.

I could write this much again, but I think I’ll leave it here.

(See the entry here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=2430)

My entry for the 7-day RTS was a little two-player bomberman-like game called Spawner Pawners. Here’s the development process and some other stuff in a nutshell.

My initial mockup!

Initially, I wanted to make a more traditional RTS, but I realised I would be busy for three days just learning and implementing pathfinding, and I didn’t really have a great idea to build on. So, I challenged myself to make an RTS with these limitations:

– No pathfinding
– No AI

As I read the description of a game: “…2 player bomberman style weird territory annihilation game!“, a thought popped into my head.  Spawner Pawners is the result of that thought!

Maybe you’ll say “HEY RUBNA! This ain’t no goddamn RTS there ain’t even units u control what u be pullin’ some sorta trick on me? Huh? What? Huh?”

To which I would reply that it actually could be seen as an RTS; the bombs and pushable walls are your units, the spawners your resources and barracks in one tiny, handy package, and you need to destroy eachother’s base to win. It’s actually the most innovative RTS of all time!

(But secretly, I just made bomberman with a couple of twists and an artsy-fartsy graphical style, and slapped the label “RTS” on there for good measure.)

Some things I wanted to make but couldn’t/didn’t:

–up to 4-player multiplayer! But I realised I could be happy if enough pairs tuned in for the 7-day RTS to rate my game, far less quartets. But maybe I’ll make this for the OUYA-port 😉 (I’m not making an OUYA port)

–ONLINE multiplayer! But I had no idea on how to pull this off and the chance that two people would play at the same time would be very small.

Things that could’ve gone better:

–Incredible loss of focus all the way through

Like, seriously. It took me like four times longer to make this than had been necessary. I need to work on my workflow…

–Two player Ludum Dare Game

…it just isn’t a good idea…

All in all, I’m pretty happy with how the game turned out. Eventhough I haven’t been able to playtest this against anyone, people who did play it seemed to have had a good time, and I certainly had a good time making it!

Until the next Ludum Dare!

Hey Everyone,

I’m not much of a programmer, but I’ve decided to dive headfirst into programming this game on my own, if you’d like to be a part of the “learning” process, and watch me fail time and time again, stop by here: twitch.tv/0creds

Hope To See You All There,

-0Creds

About 6 months after coming 6th in Innovation in Ludum Dare 21 (web version of the game is here), I made a new version of Flatland as a team project, as a part of starting up our new studio. We made, marketed and released the game in 96 hours (over a 3 week period), fixed it up a bit, released it again, and then won an award for best writing in an Australian game. We also got a lovely write-up from Rock, Paper, Shotgun about the game.

In all that time, I didn’t post anything here, because, well, yeah. No real excuse. Suffice to say, none of this would have happened had it not been for Ludum Dare.

6 months after all of that, we’ve decided to release Fallen Angle for free! There’s a plethora of options for playing the game on our website (torrents, kongregate, and direct download), as well as a bunch of special extras we’ve put together for the occasion (including a 60-page e-book chronicling the entire development experience, a soundtrack and making of videos). Check it out, and please let us know what you think of the game!

Tags: flatland, free, SuccessStory

So I’m extremely happy with the finish to MiniLD44.  My entry Power Grab is about 90% to where I wanted it when I started the whole process.  Unfortunately, the 10% that is missing is pretty key to the whole experience so I’m treating the current state as a technical test of the mechanics.  There is also a nasty, really obscure bug in the code that will crash the game when some unlikely combination of events happen.  It is something like a bullet tries to hit a unit when the parent of the unit that fired the bullet was destroyed.  I’ve only had it occur once and thought I’d fixed the code, but others are reporting the same problem so I need to do a little more digging…

You can play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=22584

Good:

I finished with a playable game.

I had an extremely limited feature list because I knew everything was going to be complex and I was able to implement everything in the time allowed, with the exception of the status display for the selected units…

LibGDX worked great

I used an MCV architecture to split the model, control, and view pieces of the code.  I can now make changes to the visuals and UI without rewriting any back end code.

I stepped the graphics back to a pixel look and I think the final product is better for it.

Bad:

I had no framework for structuring my code.  I would forget what a method did what and accidentally call helper methods in the place of main ones, which would cause all sorts of problems.

The aforementioned bug.  I can’t duplicate the set of circumstances that cause it so I can’t troubleshoot it

There are no win or loss conditions since destroying the power stations is impossible.

I didn’t have time to make my own music, so I grabbed some from opengameart.org

So-so:

The AI.  I’d never written an AI for an RTS before.  This one is actually almost completely random but actually puts up a fight, which surprised me.  It is easily exploitable, but for about 20 minutes work I’m happy with it.

The instructions are ok for explaining what to do, but not how the units interact with one another.

The UI is getting there.  It needs some work to really give the player a clear picture of what is going on.

I’ve only played a small fraction of all the 7DRTS Games but here’s a few of my favourites

Pillagers! by superjoe

Pillagers

A very fun game where you must steer your flagship to then end of each level defeating various enemies along the way. I really loved the unique way the ships controlled and the art is rather nice.

Spawner Pawners by rubna

Spawner Pawners

A bomberman-esque strategy game where you must collect bombs from your home base in order to defeat the other play. Offers a unique twist on bomberman and has a simple yet appealing art style.

Power Grab by MiniBobbo

Power Grab

An interesting take on the strategy genre which offers a more hands off approach. The player places power plants which are used to power units which then attack the enemy. The game probably needs a little work to give it more of a strategic element but the presentation is very nice and I wish more strategy games would follow the lead of this game in replacing micromanagement with macromanagement.

Interstellar by avh4

Interstellar

Another one which takes a much more hands off approach. All the interaction the player has is adjusting the levels of research into a particular field each research leading to another. As you progress your civilisation begins to travel to other stars which in turn must research new technologies. The game excels in creating a relaxing mood and despite having little, if any, difficulty I found myself playing for quite some time. The author intends to continue working on it and I can’t wait to see what it becomes.

World’s Aftermath by James Daniello & Nicolas Ickovic

World’s Aftermath

Last and certainly not least is World’s Aftermath. The game is probably one of the most conventional games on this list but the high level of polish, very nice graphics and solid gameplay makes it a very enjoyable experience. Well worth a play.

I can’t play Unity games (especially web player ones, some standalones run), and I’m getting tired of seeing almost only those =/

Any Mini LD 44 / 7dRTS game which was not made with Unity?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 2nd, 2013 at 4:00 am and is filed under MiniLD #44 / 7dRTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Hi there guys, for a long time I’ve been trying to learn how to develope games, and I choose HTML5 because I think it is the future, and there are a lot of improvements in the past 2 years. HTML5 gives us the hability of making games that work in different devides such as SmartPhones, Tablets and Desktops.

I know the basics in programming, OOP, and make easy games, but I want to do something nice for this LD. In this 21 days that I have left, I will try to learn the basics about game mechanics, how the stuff works, how to make tiles games and those kind of things.

Give me luck in my first LD!!

Gikdew, from Spain.

Skype: gikdew, Add me if you want to talk…

After a long time without updating or posting nothing related to LD26.

If there is anyone still interested in helping me finish LOWBAT (my entry for LD26) i’d be really thankful.

This is the link for testing:  https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18325427/Folio/LOWBAT.swf

Controls are WASD or KEYS.
Lights on: V
Lights off: B

(had to change control to fix input problems)

If anyone is willing to help please comment this post with contact information!

Thanks everyone!

I’m starting a livestream of my current development on TAG, The theme is “Wrecking“, with sub-themes of “Invalescence” and “Depilation“. I am using both Invalescence and Wrecking in my game, and have already made quite alot of progress and got most of the main functionality complete. Feel free to leave me suggestions and feedback in the stream chat

Edit: Just Finished Up, Made quite a bit of progress and fixed a few things

Tags: Arbitrary, GameJam, Invalescence, livestream, TAG, Wrecking

A Game of Numbers

RELEASE DATE: August 13th!!!

>> PREORDER HERE <<

>>PLAY LUDUM DARE WEB VERSION<<

The game is a math based puzzle game and did pretty well in the last compo. It came in 14th overall, 5th in fun, 7th in innovation. I didn’t really plan on working much further on it, but the response was so good that I changed my mind. I had a goal of trying to finishing something before the next Ludum Dare and it looks like I will be achieving that, as the release date is set for August 13th. This is my first commercial release and I’m grateful to the Ludum Dare community and everyone that supports the site, it is the only reason that my game exists in the first place (I would have never made a puzzle game, I hate puzzle games!

Things in the enhanced version

• Music and Sound Effects
• Slightly better visuals
• A couple new mechanics
• A lot more puzzles [Greater than 75]
• Editor
• Upload and Download Levels + Level Packs In game [Very excited about this]
• Windows/Mac/Linux Support! [Thanks to MonoGame!!]

I am selling using the Humble Store and am excited to see how well it does. I’ve been making games and following the scene long enough to know to keep my expectations low, as odds are it won’t sell a whole lot, but either way it’s exciting to me. I have already picked up a couple pre-orders, some of which paid above the $5.00 asking price, which is a little surprising. I will also be building it for iOS/Android/WindowsPhone a couple weeks after the PC release. I had planned to do both at the same time, but there is more work getting the UI working on the different screen sizes than I thought.  Thanks again, this community is awesome!!

Here’s an shot of a new level (shows some of the new mechanics, also is super difficult!)

PS: If anyone knows how to make trailers and is interested in helping, let me know. I’ve been trying for a couple days and I suck!

Hey Everyone,

I’ll be streaming some more development on my 7dRTS game. You can check it out here: twitch.tv/0creds

Hope To See You All There,

– 0Creds