Yey~! I’m eating fried potatoes with some slices of tomatoes and a shnizel with ketchup and halapinyo XD ~ AWSOME

and I came up with great ideas for my game and I’m working on them right now @_@

here’s a screenshot Yummy ^__^

Not sure I’m going to get something done this weekend due to being a bit blegh, but I’m going to have a shot.

Using my engine again ( which I’ve just committed a bunch of stuff to the repository for “chunky” scrolling action and a bit of a cleanup that had been sitting on my laptop for a while ) which, should you want scarred for life in reading atrocious code, is here: http://svn2.xp-dev.com/svn/stuckie-SGZEngine/

Currently, my game concept is as follows:
Gigantic maze-like caverns ( possibly randomly generated ) full of nasties and helpless people.
Rescue the helpless people from their research stations by landing on the pads to pick them up, and take them out the caves to a safe area ( your ship can only carry so many, so you’ll need to ferry the buggers about. )
Might as well grab some precious minerals while you’re in there too, for some extra points.
Do it before the caverns cave in due to destabalisation from the nasties.

I’m leaning towards a Cybernoid-style gameplay experience – so expect viciously difficult sectors, with switch-screen scrolling rather than smooth-scrolling, allowing each screen to be a puzzle in it’s own right.
Not sure if I’ll keep the Cybernoid “constantly falling” mechanic, or implement actual gravity.. depends how much of a clone I want it to be, I guess.

Art is being done in the Gimp as usual, sound effects and music in MilkyTracer should there be time.
Right, I need food.. hopefully have something playable by the end of the day, and I’m predominantly targetting handhelds again, so expect a 320×240 res unless I whack some scaling in there.

Well after a late night of brianstorming, and 7 hours of sleep, I’ve decided to set my sights on somthing a little more realistic for 48hrs.

Cavern Color Pellet Dispensor

Deep within the cavern things are hungry, but they are only hungry for pellets of certain colors.

As feed master of the cave system it is your job to make sure the pellets get to the right beast, by clicking to open trap doors and change the angle of platforms.

Each level features a different cave system and an increasing amount of colored pellets and beasts.

Maybe not the most creative idea, but I hope it will be fun and a well polished entry..

Awake now!  And I know what game I’m going to make.  It’s not going to match the theme perfectly but it’s one I’ve been wanting to do for a while now.

So here’s my first screenshot!  Which is actually just a screenshot of the framework I got running before the compo begain…

The game is getting better and is almost playable; the main issues being the number of enemies, and the popup of getting new items making your eyes uncomfortable (I won’t correct the a/an mistakes arising from adding random strings to strings, I don’t think they are important)

There will be four “backgrounds” to choose from: Gentleman Assassin, Modern Barbarian, Retired Commander and Glorious Dreamer. Right now, there are 3 item slots: Weapon, Armor, Finger. I will try to add more; as well as boss fights and a little bit of story. I will also implement a shop system, and maybe procedurally generated speeches for random NPC’s (they won’t make sense, but will be fun to read, maybe.)

Whoosh!

the character is really a rough for now, especially what animations are there. also I improved collisions a little.

anyhoo, playable after the link:

[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.sophiehoulden.com/randomstuff/ludum/LD15_web04.unity3d" width="560" height="420"/]

arrows to steer,  space to jump.

I think for th next build I’ll try ‘hold space to crouch, release to jump’ so variable power jumps are possible, might even make the board faster if crouching

I has procedurally generated caverns!

It’s not perfect but it’ll do the job for now.

Ambient Occlusion?

Still no gameplay whatsoever, but some very basic level editing, and sort-of per-vertex ambient occlusion, which works fairly well…

Bacon & Brie Ciabatta, plus a handful of pecans, carrot cake, and apple juice.

Oh man, I love food. It’s a good thing I actually have this thing in front of me, because the sight of it makes me hungry. So, progress on the life front — but what about the game? I present a screenshot:

+7 hours.

You can move, dig, and scroll around. But it’s a start, anyway. Nothing technically challenging or interesting going on here, folks — I’m afraid I’m just not that kind of LDer. Sad day.

Well man can't live on..er well!

Well minor progress have basic level map drawn in art package just need to convert to image and then tilemap, but that will involve code!

…just don’t hit the ground! So far our hungry hero/monster flies around and can make a puke-animation, behind the game-window is the sucky level with the even more sucky level-format

I might make some touchups here and there, but otherwise that graphics probably is final. If you don’t like it I’m going to send evil kittens to haunt you…

Those very dramatic shots of my last candy means that I don’t have anything left, and it’s time to shop for food. I’m going to curse my refrigerator for being empty and then go shopping. In the last shot there is a little sketch about how stuff work in my game – enjoy

Tags: foodphoto, screenshot, sketch

Since I didn’t have any solid ideas for the game, I continued working on the rendering of the map…

Added holes, water and lava to it… These are not procedurally generated… So, the current “level design” system is to generate a base cave, and then add by hand stuff like the water, lava and holes (according to the gameplay).

Wondering how I can animate the lava and water… wanted to do some UV animation, but without shaders I have no idea how to do it (in D3D).. just added an up and down movement to the meshes, just to make it a bit more dynamic.

Anyway, I got a concept for a game…

A robot is sent into the caves, to provide rock samples or something… but the player (which is a scientist) kind of skimmed on the project, and the robot is plain dumb, and not intelligent as supposed… So, he has to help it collect the samples, by use of another robot (one that can’t get the rock samples itself). This robot is controlled by the player, and the player has to make him pickup objects, etc to help the other one gather the samples…

Might work…

Some sleep and breakfast is out of the way now

Coding starts at 8.15 am Sat.

Tags: foodphoto

Tags: deskphoto

Well I remembered that JayIsGames is running another casual game desing competition with theme Explore. It is only for browser-based platforms so it may not be of interest to everyone but to some it will.

I was thinking in participating but was not shore. So I decided to filter out my ideas that do not fall under Explore and concetrate only one those who are + those which I will be able to extend in a month to make in a better/bigger game then LD usually allows. And in same time try to finish something playable by tomorrows night.

Anyways here is my current progress:

Click to open at DeviantArt page as for some reason it does not work here for me Shows up in Media embedder but in post it self does not show…

Decided to test one my old idea for how to find normal of surface defined by a picture. And it worked 😀

How to use: Click to generate new map. When mouse is over ground it shows a normal vector of collision in that point. When not it spawns water particles. So far not collisions among water particles but already looks promising I wonder if I will be able to have enough particles and did not hit wall of Flash performance

Tags: caverns, CGDC, Explore, flash, JIG, progress

I did some more work after last night’s post.  I worked on the tile map classes and scanned in my sketches, then created a couple image files to load in the tile map.  First shot, blammo, it displayed the map perfect on the screen.   I did a little tweaking of the map size so that it would take up more real estate on the screen and was left with this:

First screenshot of my caverns themed game

Not much to see, but the designs are all mine.  They’re loaded from a text file with some level metadata and the grid layout.  The space on the right will be the status area.  The graphcis are not text, like my Kroz inspiration, so they will get better than what I have above.

My work this morning will consist of making more sprites for the tiles, and of course, the hero dude.  After that, I’ll work on moving him around.

Tags: caverns, kroz, ld48_15

Good morning.

If it isn’t obvious, you can now pick up items. The light bulb lights up the area around you. Pretty useless, but still fun. 30 seconds after picking it up, the light bulb will burn out.

Yes, I did take those screenshots at different times, if you noticed the coin count.

This game I am make
Is very difficult.
I have found a somewhat satisfactory method of doing the melting
Which is an important thing to do
but the alpha blending, she does not blend.
Very annoying.
However, one of the major technical hurdles has been crossed, albeit in a manner that some might consider crappy.

This version is shiny and melty. These traits are preferable.

Now I have a thing I can show you, I tell you a little about what I want this project to be. Red box is boy; I know he does not look like boy, but you understand. Red box is walking in snow when big rock fall out of sky. He fall asleep, as most young boys do when hit with big rock. When he is awakening, he is on rock (is different rock) in bottom of big ice cave. This is unusual, but not as unusual as that he seems to be more immolated than is common in a boy of his age. So okay, this rock it set him on fire. For all that he feels pretty good. But he is stuck in bottom of ice cave, and in order to get out he has to climb on ice. Ice and fire are not super big buddies, so he has troubles you see. This is the plot at the beginning. Some things happen later, but this is not important now. Is difficult enough to make ice melt, you see.

I had a bit of a late start but I am getting into the swing of things. I  decided to go with Visual Studio\C++\SDL.

I have my idea and sort of a plan and now it is time to get a prototype going to try out my idea. Will describe it more once I have a screenshot or something more to show.

Not sure if I’m going to finish anything playable at this rate.

Eventually there will be creatures in the caves.

Tags: LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, progress, screenshot

Just playing with ideas, but I think I know where I’m going now. Here’s the inside of a cavern. Can’t get more literal than that. Now, about that gameplay…

In a cavern, in a canyon...

Tags: screenshot

Tags: motivation

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 1:52 pm and is filed under LD #15 - Caverns - 2009. 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.

Well.. Ladder collision took way too much time, I dont have anything “playable” yet, you can walk around, dig and build the ladders.

Now – make some quick artwork for some valuable stuff, implement perlin noise level generator and some score and I have something playable!

(Click for bigger version)

Since last post… I first worked on creating a player character, including movement and collisions etc. It’s a tiny ninja, because everyone loves tiny stuff and ninjas.

Then I worked a little on weapons.

Then I helped people move four almost four hours. This helped the LD progress a lot.

Then I worked a little more on weapons. And added making holes to the dirt.

Here’s a screenshot showing the tiny ninja charging his first weapon, the digger only weapon.

Tags: burrowing, chargin, digger, ninja, tiny

It’s raining terribly outside – I was going to go down to the local awesome coffee shop and get strawberry crepes..but I settled for cereal.

and I also have my first screenshot! …of a sprite floating in mid-air. I have to admit I’ve mostly been working on ideas about how to use a heightmap in a 2d game and what will actually make the game fun. Maybe I can manage…both?!

I forgot to grab my photos of my camera for dinner last night, so here it is:

Friday Dinner - Turkey breast, corn and french bread.

And here’s this morning’s simple breakfast:

Saturday Breakfast - Honey and Oat cereal

I think I’m going to get some toast too….  I’ll post my desk photo later on

Tags: foodphoto, ld48_15

6 hours of development so far and progress continues on my game…  thought I’d post a few early screenshots.  I’m working to get the first playable level done so I can continue messing with making the mechanics fun.  Doing bare minimum art as the lumpy bats will testify to:

Stalactites, Geysers, and Bats now spawn.  The bats have a funny animation right now which I think will make them enjoyable to watch flap around as you try to eliminate them.

Rough working main menu too.

Well, I’m stalling out on productivity right now because I am starving.  I have a chicken pot pie in the oven cooking but it won’t be ready for another 30 minutes so I’m powering on best I can.

I’m really trying to focus on getting the earlier playable and fun parts of this game coded.  Building out primitive menu systems and game framework logic so that I won’t have to mess with it later.  I have implemented the timing bar, level counters, and scoring widgets.  My hope is that once I get the basic ‘level format’ working I can do 5 rough levels with very basic art today.  Then tomorrow can be spent on improving the art and adding music and sound.

Tags: anger, angry, bats, caverns, geysers, progress, screenshots, stalactites

After having lunch (I didn’t take photos, but it was fish, cheese and a salad) I re-did the cavern image, since I had to drop the first version. This time I draw the cavern in two layers, texturized them with the previous cavern background and then drawing lines to achieve a ‘hand-drawn’ effect. You can see the full picture here.

About coding stuff, I did the game states transitions with fading, and also a parallax scrolling background. I like how it’s looking!

Parallax scrolling background

Tags: screenshot

aha, the char is moving around with the light folowing =)

Tags: draft, gameplay, glaucon, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, light, screen

Ah, I had a reasonable sleep, now to work again

I tried to come up with some very cave-like gameplay, but it all seemed rather dreary. It seems to me that caverns is goign to be mroe of a setting than a gameplay mechanic.

Anyways, 2D platformer. I have 2 superimposed such that the player is interacting with only the frontmost at any given time. Pressing spacebar will instantly reverse the order of the two caves, creating hopefully interesting gameplay.

Making it pretty is tomorrow’s work. Storyline is unneeded.

Oh, and check out the awesome realtime value sliders and the restart button that reloads all scripts and restarts the game, pretty convenient if you ask me.

Still not sure what the game will be, though…

I has FLOOD in my caves!

Trying to flood, dunno if it will be in the final game. Click to run!

Tags: cave, flash, flood

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 2:23 pm and is filed under LD #15 - Caverns - 2009. 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.

Well, I got my slime effect working.  I just need to get it fast enough that it won’t skip frames like mad  It’s hard to get the idea from the screenshot, but animated it’s pretty slimy!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 2:30 pm and is filed under LD #15 - Caverns - 2009. 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.

The collision detection’s pretty ropey, but you can now zoom your little robot about the place like a proper platformer.  Next step is to get the screen to scroll as you move about the level.  Then it’s onto the beams of light themselves…

My pot pie has finally finished cooking.  Luckily I had a few CheezIts so I didn’t collapse before it was ready:

After this hot meal on a dreary rainy day here south of Boston it’ll be back to work on the Angry Caverns.

Tags: chicken, foodphoto, potpie

Making some good progress at the moment. The main problem is the room and zone detection.

Once thats done I’ll move onto connections then I can slab the exploration and combat in.

Also planning to use marching squares style pass to clean things up. Though TBH I quite like the roughness.

Progress but room detection is broken

Some graphics included.

The problem is that some sharp angles stay, and if I want to remove them, the number of combinations gets big. And i’m a bit lazy to draw + code them all. Next, FOOD.

Next next, sprites for the digger and the bad guys and the gems and the rocks. And stuff.

I have the groundwork in place to start building off of. I am hoping to have a prototype of the game play within the next couple of hours. My plan is to get the basic mechanics up and working with placeholders for graphics and than get the game play polished up and add the graphics in once this is for the most part done.

Right now I am in need of some lunch and to catch up on what others are working on.

14 hours into the contest and only about 15 lines of code. No graphics, no audio, no nothing. The stress is kinda high right now, but I’m trying to remember it’s a fun contest, not too serious. I do have my concept… actually two… so I still need to decide between the two My goal is to decide between the two, and have the game running at least enough for a screenshot by 6 tonight, when the gf’s coming over for a while.

Breakfast was store-brand golden grahams, cranberry juice, and a bit of leftover blackberry cobbler.

Changed the dirt image a bit, gave it some friends: Walls and floors:

dirt.png

wall.png

floor.png

Now to get a level rendered and up on the screen!

Tags: art, foodphoto

Presenting the driller, the stupid robot with a simple behavior: always hovers in the direction he’s facing until he faces an obstacle (for now, everything is an obstacle, later lava/water/holes will be lethal), then he tries to run right… if he can’t, he’ll turn left… if he can’t, he’ll walk backwards…

I got the driller to move around, with the camera focused on him (with some controls for zoom and rotation):

Now, to model and add the helper robot…

Cavern Tycoon Screenshot 003

Here’s how the game’s shaping up at the moment. I’m say I’m about halfway done with being “feature complete.” I just have myriad bugs to work out, is all. 😛

As an aside, I just want to say that Construct is great. I could never program this by myself–never. Even though Construct is finnicky sometimes (all the times ;)), it’s still a great program, and it’s absolutely free. Muchas gracias, Scirra.

About 10 hours have passed since I officially started coding. Well the screenshot isn’t that impressive and I still have to cut some features and hope I’ll finish in time.

Today I concentrated on gameplay features. You can move your circle around and attack the enemy (that other circle). All I need to do is to add more circles and the game is finished 😉
Well, there is a lot more to do and the circles are going to replaced with real graphics, still working on those. It’s gonna be a busy day tommorrow.

This trance music has increased my productivity ten-fold: http://www.philosomatika.com/

So I’ve got a Super Metroid-style map system and a simple platformer engine running in Game Maker.  The map system lets me have rooms of any rectangular dimensions fit together in any pattern and lets the player transition correctly from room to room.

Still no clue where I’m going with this, but it seems to be going somewhere!  Screenshots as soon as I have something worth looking at (it’s all just colorful boxes right now).

It’s still in a pretty early stage.

I’ll add a bunch of more critters/creatures, perhaps some other tiles. Creatures will interact between them, if they’re compatible.

Please feel free to try it, it’s made for Flash: Here’s the link

Was the theme swarms? No? It was caverns? Apparently I thought it was swarms…

I’m trying to make my space marines move and fight together as squads, and decided to use a few flocking algorithms. Now my space marines are swarms that don’t move like space marines. I’m thinking I might arbitrarily decide they’re flying drones, but at this point I’m not sure. If I’m lucky, I’ll at least implement cover so that you can make your swarm take cover. But right now I’m thinking my theme score is gonna be pretty low…

Still, work is progressing. Going to add some progression elements soon.

a series of screenshots to show the current progress

the assets & layout seems ok, now comes the tricky part: coding the game itself !

He is the Basic setup. The scene, the assets, and a spotlight.

More of the same

Collision shapes roughly setup.

Seems good so far, unfortunately, tomorrow I’m outside, hence I should finish the most of the work today. We’ll see :’)

Ive got how I am going to do the scrolling maps worked out, just need to figure out collision

Delicious Bunches

I’m all set with my music, laptop for chatting, and a nice clear screen for code!

Plus, there’s nothing like honey bunches of oat to start the day!

so far very basic,. just a procedural-noise based cavern and a brute-force point light algo,. it runs fine here but it terribly unoptomized,.  I may try to get some recursive shadowcasting going,.   however for the sake of a timeline I should probly just move on to a bit of gameplay and see what develops.

I am working in the ZGameEditor,. so it’s opengl for the graphics, once I get the game working I will then consider the visuals..,

IDE shot,. .

Tags: cave, light, line of sight, ray, shadowcast

Ok, a lot of fundamental stuff out of the way, I’m now going to dive into getting my procedural cavern generation working.
But in the meantime, I took a screenshot of my current progress:

so far I didn’t ancounter any bugs in my game unlike the prevouse entry which I worked for 6 hours to fix the arrows hehe…

I’v done a background I don’t think its too fancy but its okay I guess

and Akin can now walk and jump and shoot and slash and do hell lots of stuff perfectly =]

soon I’ll add the enemys 😉 and heres a picture of Doritos with cheese inside a very russian looking plate =] on the side u can see my energy drink and my exotic soda joice and a water melon XD AWHOOO~!!!!

Rex shooting some mud

So far I have a hamster with a gun that can carve holes into the cavern. Good times!

I think that I got the name for my game, which is really the concept behind it as well…

Announcing Last Minute Miner!

Here is the first screen :

I’ve been using Boulder Dash’s tiles, and while replacing them I realized that my tile making talents are only good at 16×16, so the game will have 16×16 tiles doubled (or even tripled) in size. I’ll call it a “retro look”!

And no, I am not making Boulder Dash… I did to much of that in my life…

map engine, main character, and a very simple map

Finally something to show :P.

I got the game to read a map from a file and finished the code that make the map scroll when the player moves.

Also created some quick art in Gimp. Now I’ll concentrate on collision (should be fairly easy) and then I’ll focus on enemies.

I’m a tad late in posting this picture, on account of the extreme busyness I’ve been under in order to complete the awesome game of complete wonder and joy that I’m working on for Ludum Dare 15. Seriously, it’s going to be sweet… just like this delicious plate of french toast with blueberry syrup and cherries on top I had for breakfast this morning (along with the orange juice, can’t forget that!):

I’ll make an update with my progress on the game soon. I know you’re all just dying to see it…

Tags: foodphoto

Hey everybody,

I wanted to have something visual before making a first post about my LD entry. So here it is:

My game will be a fast-paced racing game inside caverns. The goal is to drive your wagon through the caves as fast as possible without hitting any obstacles or going too fast into a curve. There can be multiple simulanous rails so that the player has to be fast in his decisions when switching between them. I will soon be finished with my map editor that allows users to create their own tracks :). I will concentrate more on the graphics tomorrow, i promise. 😀

Turns out my folks aren’t coming down until after lunch, which means probably an early dinner… so early lunch it is!

Just some left overs from the other night:

couple of tacos with beans, rice, ground beef, cheese, lettuce, salsa and sour cream.

An update on the game front… I’ve finalized my two wall tiles and am getting ready to start with the player character sprite and code, and his movement around the board.  I did some more code work to facilitate the transition and change of the player based on reactions of the tiles.   Also in this time I took a shower, did some pool maintenance, and tried to ignore the TV before it was shut off.  So here’s to a good work effort over the next hour and a half!

second screen shot, showing the two tiles and some more test map.

Tags: caverns, foodphoto, ld48_15, screenshot

Red vs Blue or BLue vs Red?

Chicken Balti…

Got a basic menu screen appearing … OMG I’m trying to create an RTS in 48hrs don’t tell me the odds, now where is more red wine and lots of coffee!

Tags: food, screenshot

Ew. That looks ugly.

The game is now practically finished, just gotta do more levels and musics. And probably something to the grahics, too.

Why has Construct decided to turn its back on me after everything I’ve done for it, supporting it spiritedly in my posts?!

See my thread on Scirra if you want to help me sort out what is probably the equivalent of an amateur programming problem. What I don’t understand is why it did work and now it doesn’t, and that’s why I blame Construct.

Title says it all, really. I can draw a map now.

First Screenshot

Tags: progress, screenshot

I spent a long time experimenting with Physaxe, and now I can set up the bounds of a level from Tile Studio. It’s going very slowly, I might still decide to go without Physaxe and just do it the old fashion way.

Yay, my game has a title screen now (and a name, as it seems). An hour of doodling with a drawing tablet and here you go

And now I shoulf create more units and tweak the settings a bit.

The first graphics are in and there would be some challenge already if I put player damage in.

Next up: First boss (might be the only one if there is not enough time)

I made myself a mozzarella pizza for dinner.  It looks the part, but I think I need to work on my sauce-making skills – there was definitely something missing…

Game-wise, I’ve got the scrolling mostly working except for a weird offset between the player character and the rest of the level that’s suddenly appeared.  I’m going to try and fix that now, then hopefully I can get the light beams up and running before bed.

My pony is Master of Jellybeans. What’s yours?

Assault on Cavern Station

The cover is working, but not tuned, in that video. Black is walls, orange is cover. If a swarm member is within 100 pixels of the point where his beam intersects the cover, then he automatically fires through it. Otherwise his bullet has a 75 percent chance of stopping. Now I need to make A.I. that will actually cause my swarm members to run behind cover.

I’ve decided to (mostly) ignore the theme to work on a game I’ve wanted to work on for a long time.

Basically, it’s Dungeon Keeper. In space. With kittens.

I’m not kidding. Here’s a picture of a security kitten! Considering that I have no artistic talent, doesn’t he look fetching in his lovely red uniform? (The actual icon is 32×32 of course.)

I was hopeless when I posted an entry message yesterday and I had work to do until a few hours ago (mostly work I should have finished Friday). However just now I have the greatest idea (something like graner’s wagon race) ! Also I’m free whole Sunday.

I wanted to learn how collision with world and physics like speed and bouncing worked in platform games. I think I’m about to make it my own way. A late start but I’ll get definitely what I want to do. I hope I can finish and give you people a little something to look at too.

I think the Numerical Analysis lessons I took will be enough for me but I didn’t write anything like this before so I appreciate any resources on f=m*a type of physics or world collision in 2D.

“Life is Guano and Then You Die” is … “playable”

Finally have all of the core features implemented. It is actually fun!

I spent way too much time on guano colour, fruit and rock physics, and pixel art.

Now to take a bit of a break and add all that good stuff like missing art, point system, a HUD, a menu, more sound fx, help, omg so much to do.

I thought it would be interesting to post the progress in individual milestone shots, as I did not record a timelapse.

4 frames of bat animation, flapping about!

Priority #2, bat poop. The bat is emitting Guano!

Priority 3, something to poop on. Miners of course.

Blackness is boring, we need to delineate outside and inside. Added world extents and floor/roof. The Baobab appears!

Miners belong in a cave mining. Now they do. Simple arse AI added (Seek, Mine, Return, Aim, Throw)

Fruits sway in the wind, and you can eat them for more guano. mmm. fruit.

Those are the 6 big milestones so far. I’ll edit this post later to add the rest.

Well, I have an idea. Cave dragons will be shaking at the sight of this knight:

Okay, he’s not too knighty yet… And I don’t have a title. There’s collision detection and lighting though!

Stay tuned for some sweet knight action to come!

Last hours were productive (albeit slow for my usual form, I’m getting old…).

I added the Helper robot, which is the one controled by the player:

and got his controls working (was easier than expected, since it’s controled by the arrow keys, but it is relative to the camera)…

Anyway, added the first real “gameplay” element: the gems… This is what the Driller robot has to get…

On the image, he’s currently picking up one of the crystals… he can only mine what’s right in front of him.

He’ll also be able to destroy stalagmites, which act as obstacles for the Helper robot, so that might add to an interesting gameplay bit…

Now, time for dinner and a movie (so my wife doesn’t feel neglected! :))..: Going to see the new Tarantino one…

Have fun everyone, and good luck!

Yeah!  Lighting system done!

I have an overambitious project I want to try… So far it’s taken most of the day to get this:

Difficulty levels. They even have descriptions. The second shot is hard mode. Doesn’t make much of a difference, just you can’t see very far. Of course none of you will play on Easy Mode, right?

You can also see I resized the window. No need for 640×480 if you can barely see anything around you.

So far, I’ve got a little robot that runs around.

She has a gun, but it doesn’t do anything yet.

Here’s a picture:

She can run, but her gun doesn't work :-(

I have decided to go with the idea of using more than one theme.

“Cavern” will be covered by the setting (Once the terrain is in place)

“Guns. Big Guns.” is apparent. Well, the gnomes will have bigger guns because they are bigger. My pigtailed android is actually quite tiny, but it doesn’t show because there’s nothing to compare her to at the moment.

Which seques into “Evil Gnomes”. These are the enemies. They are much bigger than you, and can step on you as well as shoot you. They are rather slow, though, and can’t fit into every space that you can. Their guns also aren’t terribly accurate. Well, that will be true once I actually make them.

“Kittens” is a secondary mechanic I’ll put in if there’s time. The kittens will be somewhat smaller than you, but able to attack the gnomes. Kinda like the security guards in Half Life.

That said, the environment… Might be hard-coded, but if it is I’ll place enemies (And kittens if I put them in) randomly.

If I have time, I want to generate them procedurally, where you have to kill all of the gnomes to move to the next level.

All that being said, it’s rather bare-bones now, but I’m aiming high.

———

One of the core mechanics that I’m using is an unusual relationship between the size of the player and the size of the enemies.

This creates an interesting effect, because the player must use their speed and wits to succeed. (Heck, even to survive!)

The idea of size has always fascinated me, I admit. Very large things have an air of power and… Even authority about them.

By contrast, very small things have a charm that I can’t resist. They have a quality of efficiency and grace.

The next upload will have baddies and working weapons, I promise.

If you want a completely up-to-date version, you can get a subversion snapshot at my GoogleCode site: http://code.google.com/p/pycron-ld48

Note that this will be updated fairly often as the project picks up steam.

So… Not a waste, but certainly not much.

Here’s to challenge, triumph, and learning from hardship.

—PyCron

After being excited about LD48 all week I’ve ended up starting on 8pm on Saturday night with 1day 7hours 25minutes remaining.

I’ve got an idea in my head / sketched on half an A5 page but unsure what tech/language to use yet.

I’ll be calling this a practice if I fail to get anything submittable done

My desk and some sugary foods to keep me going.

I am calling my game “Coffee Caverns”. I am not as far along as I was hoping to be, but I had some other things I had to take care of. I decided that instead of just creating temporary art, that I would take a break from coding and work on a few graphics that may be what I use in the final game. I almost have a working prototype, but I created a quick screen mockup to show off some of my idea.

The basic idea is you are in a cavern (maybe more than one time permitting), and you must collect coffee beans. Coffee beans will be falling from the ceiling along with rocks. If you get hit by a rock, game over! The game is really never ending but the longer you play the more coffee beans and rocks will appear and the higher the score you will get.

I haven’t created the player graphic yet, but will have that in within the next thirty minutes or so.

Overall, I think I am making decent progress. I am very confident I will have something for submission at the end of the contest.

Mmm, leftovers

First day food

Tags: foodphoto

Time for a first progress report. Now this is going to be short.

Behold the amazing caverns.

Behold the greatnes of it all

I know, I know, you probably want to quit and start drinking in despair because, honestly, everything is going to look awful after this.

Or something. I don’t think I have any chance of finishing this if a keep at this at the same rate, but let’s try anyway… The point of the game is to build a cavern that the computer controlled blob cannot escape from, at least now it is. Don’t know tomorrow.

I was able to finish a beta for the day. It works; and better than what I expected!

http://trialofnight.googlepages.com/EternalSeekerBeta.zip

I’ve been fiddling around with music and graphics all day, but I can’t seem to get my idea to come together. So I’m scrapping it! And starting something else right now! Er, don’t know exactly what, yet.

Lasagna and chocolate. What more could you want?

I had dinner plans. It was covered — I’d gone to the store yesterday and bought way more food than I could possibly eat in a weekend, all of it quick to prepare and full of game-inducing nutriment. And then my flatmates go and make lasagna. I mean, seriously? I have sandwiches to eat, folks. You’d think they’d keep that in mind.

Ahem.

Anyway, all is good — dinner was fantastic, and I solved a niggly little Python bug I was having. Word of caution: when switching back and forth between Ruby and Python, try to keep your head on straight as to which one you’re using. And what constitutes an error in which. My problem came down to my calling a method (in Python) that didn’t exist; in Ruby this is throws an error, but in Python it’s hunky-dory. Apparently. Gargh. I mean, I like the ‘not-an-error’ approach, but it really bit me this time.

So. About that update:

+17 hours.

You (the dude with the shovel) can dig out a fallout shelter, then dash above ground and bring back food and supplies to tide you over through nuclear winter. Graphics are terrible, which is really embarassing — but I don’t really know what I can do about that. Next up, audio, scoring, and some better pacing — the intensity doesn’t ramp up at all right now. Sadness.

I’ve made quite a bit of progress so far, but I have a ways to go yet. I just added collision detection and physics, but the real cool stuff is coming soon… Here’s a screenshot I took a while ago:

I’ve been meaning to try out Adam Saltsman’s Flixel API for quite some time, but haven’t found the motivation until now. Spent the morning hammering out a shmup engine.

It obviously needs a lot of tweaking, but below is a link to my current build. Fly with the arrow keys, shoot with x. There aren’t any enemies yet, but you can knock down the stalactites, and destroy the stalagmites. Hitting the floor, the ceiling, or a stalagmite/stalactite destroys your ship. Restarting isn’t implemented yet.

http://realnoyb.googlepages.com/LD15.swf

Tags: Flixel, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009

Progress has been going incredibly slowly, not helped by my getting distracted a lot. Anyway, as can be seen below (well, I could have faked it, but if I had you’d be seeing this post much earlier) pressing space fires bullets randomly from the centre, and when they collide with the cave wall, cause a rock to fall. Finally!

Hurrah, falling rocks.

So, no dinosaurs, no player, and the rocks fall through the floor. Gah! Why are so many other people so far ahead? It’s demoralising… Though admittedly I haven’t spent that long on it, I guess.

I might as well take this opportunity to explain what I’m using for this: C++ with SDL, in the Code::Blocks IDE. GIMP for the graphics… and that’s about it.

Ok here’s how it looks in-game, but there’s no animation yet.  Sloooow progress!

Hmm, I probably rushed this idea a bit too quickly.

looks like I’m working on a lighting engine and not so much a game,. just yet.

lighting is working!

I hope to fix that after dinner.   Well at least this lighting is working,. the cavern walls light up when struck by the light source,. and fade a tad slower than imediately,. a good effect.  I also added scrolling of the whole map,.  however perhaps its a bit too jerky,. well, it will do for now.  I really should work on some gameplay,. . .  but i think i will make some noodles 😉  yumm,.

Alright– finally have my initial proof of concept demo up and available for any curious souls to try out.  It isn’t too exciting yet but it will show you the initial inklings of what I’m going for anyway.  It’s Flash so you can run it in your browser.

Basically this is a test level here with 4 stalactites, 3 steam geysers, and 6 flying bats.  I am enjoying the bat movement at this point.  Each time you play the game the cavern levels will have the same configuration of weapons for your use.  What will change is some slight variables on the initial speeds and directions of the enemies in the cavern.  The timer will likely be going away as now each cavern level has a limited number of weapons for you to use.  You use a cavern weapon by clicking on it with your mouse.

I hope to support interesting combos and other funny events perhaps to help your score and experience of the game.

Today my main goal is still to get all the behind the scenes engine working with my levels, get all the enemies moving correctly in the various levels, and finish coding all the weapon functions and effects.  That way tomorrow I can spend as much time as possible on bringing the graphics up to speed beyond the rapid primitives I’ve made everything here in.  My plan is to have the game be fun before spending anything more then the bare minimum on graphics because the game is what matters in the end to me.  Especially if I want to keep working on anything post-compo I’ll be far more motivated to improve graphics and polish if the actual game is fun!  😉

Controls:

Click on the bubbling steam geysers or the stalactites at the top of the cavern with your mouse to trigger them.  Steam geysers work like a short range shotgun at the moment so wait for the bats to be near.  Stalactites fall so you need to time them right with the bats movement.  100 points per bat.  Max score of current demo is 600 points… 😉

Tags: angry, as3, bat, caverns, demo, flash, geysers, playable, screenshot, stalactites, techdemo

Got a unit in, can draw him along with the squares he can move to. Need to add an actual interactive UI, so that the player can actually select a square to move to. Gonna go with mouse driven, rather than keyboard like I did in Operation Lambda.

A digger. He has a movement range!

Lunch was leftover pizza, kool-aid, and Loaded Potato Skin flavored chips. Yum!

Yum!

Tags: foodphoto, journal, progress, screenshot

I’ve got the lightbeams up and running, so yay!  There’s still a lot of stuff to do, but I think I’m going to leave it for tomorrow.  I reckon (I hope) I’ve got the hardest parts out of the way now (though the collision detection’s still not right), so hopefully tomorrow will go a bit easier…

My girlfriend made me some awesome risotto!

Followed by some strawberries whilst I do some 3D.

I had a few difficulties with my game, but it’s starting to come back on track.

The core game is almost complete — now I just need to make my dudes fit into ‘slots’ in the cover, so there won’t be enough cover for everyone all the time.  Then, it’s time to add some fun! Two squads, random enemy squads that move around and attack you (they’ll be really dumb…), exp, abilities, etc. I think this is going to be the most complete game I’ve ever submitted to LD :).

Demonstrating Cover Behaviour

very well the engine working… I have background… I have almost all the tiles I need… the hero character is fully animated… I have bats flying around the map =] and my cahracter can throw stuff slash jump and jump down platform and everything is awsome =] here you go a screenshot ^__^

Well, I’m way behind schedule but I’ve finally hit an important milestone. I had hoped to get the chance to write more posts than this, but its been hard work to get to this point and I didn’t want to stop until I had something worth showing.

Some kinda cavern

I’m trying to make a text adventure with a kind of Eye-of-the-Beholder-type first-person view.

Creating all the wall images and getting them to line up and everything has been a total pain, but that’s mostly done now, meaning I can move on to the actual text part of things. I’m really going to have to pick up the pace tomorrow if I’m going to get anywhere near the game I envisioned at the start =/

Tags: eye of the beholder, first person, milestone, screenshot

Although I’ve just noticed that my screenshots haven’t really changed that much, I’ve made a huge amount of progress.  The game is entirely playable–I only have one problem. There’s no real goal. It’s been designed as a sandbox game–the goal is expansion with the resources you have until you can’t expand anymore. Unfortunately, I fear that some people may not see this and wonder, “Where the goal is at?!”.

It is, however, far too late to turn around now–and I think that my concept could really be fun if people just see the point. I hope they do, and think they will. So here’s a progress shot.

Cavern Tycoon WIP Screenshot 004

Food!

lunch

Tags: food, lunch

First ingame screenshot.
The mouse is working, more or less. It should be able to raycast the items properly.

The basic scripts of the items is working too.

Need to add the selection mode, and write the removal check code