First progress post, had hoped to do more but as we all know things can get backed up a bit.
Got the rigid constraints for the tentacle ‘rope’ sorted out as well as the main gameplay sprites. Still deciding whether or not to have gravity affecting it.
Collision, it rocks
I’ve been up to allot since the last post. I barely had the code started, and I got windows and moving around working well. After wasting a ton of time working on walls only to realize that the way I wanted to do them would infact take forever to do with all the different possibilities to consider. After giving up on that for simpler walls, and failing at one attempt to do collision I was somewhat discouraged, but after a quick walk around the block, I was back at it. I got collision working well now, and with all the basics set up, I can finally start focusing on actual game play.
I’d also like to note that this is the first time I’ve gotten this far with a game basically ever. I’ve known how to do it, but haven’t taken the time much, and have had to do a bunch of documentation reading (ug) to get the basics working.
I am working at this place, dangerously exposed to direct sunlight and have no support for my backbone as I’m sitting on a bed.
My inconvenient workspace
Tags: desk shot
So I put my nose to the grindstone, and finally have a feature-less, but quite playable release! I’m heading to take a shower, and when the gf gets here, we’re heading to the dog park. I can’t wait to get back and really finish this up!
Hey everybody, looks like it was time I made my first post on here. Anyhow, I thought I’d make something not quite what everybody else was making and therefore decided to focus on maximum meme-ness. I finally have the a good bunch of the base stuff finished and can finally move on to create more interesting stuff. For now, this screenshot is all there is:
Scientists are searching for water deep beneath the Earth’s crust. They set up their equipment and start to drill. Suddenly you realise that the water level is rising and the scientists are all in peril. You take to the skies in your trusty helicopter and try to save them.
A helicopter flies deep underground.
Or something like that. The one thing that’s certain is that rising water levels will play a part in this game. The actual game mechanic is still in a state of flux.
Tags: screenshot
I took an expensive option and used atan2() funcion to determine some direction. For some reason, it computes to weird results. Don’t want to debug it now, it’s only for the looks at the moment anyway.
After much struggling I finally got collision detection working. You can now swim around levels and that’s it :).
However I have all the logic in place and tomorrow I will just work on content, content and content.
Thanks to some help from Gilvado I figured out this whole CamStudio business and uploaded my first ever gameplay vid to YouTube! 😉
It’s 20 seconds of the current state of Angry Caverns
I’m tuning some of the bat physics now.. which reminds me– ya know one thing I love about doing game development? It’s getting to say things like “I’m tuning bat physics…”
Hopefully I’ll be back soon with more exciting developments.
Rex has found out that it’s kind of dark in these caverns. Luckily he’s prepared with a torch!
Who turned out the lights?
I just came back from a friend’s BBQ. It was very good and the company was excellent. On the other hand that plus a late start plus grocery shopping means I’ve made pathetically little progress on my entry. I’ll try to get a little more done tonight and work all day tomorrow.
Tags: foodphoto
The more I code that game, the more it feels like freaking Boulder Dash…
If I can’t break from that mold, I will abandon it (and this Ludum at the same time). I really don’t like where that game is going… I shouldn’t have used the BD graphics as place holder, apparently they have influenced the concept more that I would like.
Here is a proverbial screen :
I never realized how much the XNA framework screwed with tansparency when rotating before I took this screenshot…
I am at another coffee shop… and I am drinking cucumber soda. It is strange and delicious. Also, battery is almost gone. Heading back home to recharge and get some quiet.
I’ve made some progress, but not as much as I would like. Having a hard time getting gameplay down. I like where the current version is going, though it’s nothing to look at.
Now I finally feel like I’m getting somewhere! Which is good, as I need to sleep soon.
Also featured: My nifty little archaeologist guy, Ted Stuart.
Rocks now stop falling when there is a rock (or ground) in the way. This is a good thing. Took me a while of wondering why it didn’t work to realise that I was checking if there was solidness to the right rather than underneath. Oops. Just now added pseudo-physics: things accelerate as they fall, then snap nicely back to the grid when they land. And there’s a (n uncontrollable) player! Quite pleased with him. I had the sense (for once) to use layers, which should make animating him easier. The GIMP is wonderful! 😀
Tags: GIMP
So, I’m finished! Not totally happy with the game, but whatever, it’s finished anyway.
Windows only. Download from here
Tags: final
Fire and forget! Don’t go back and touch things up!
Which I really ought not to be doing… But anyway finally got a look I’m kinda happy with, need to go in and add all the animation now. Hoping to get walk and attack cycles done by bed, then tomorrow morning add in the enemy I have planned, and get it running. It’s gonna use one of the many variants of the Soundless Mountain II engine… I need to figure out which as they all have slightly different sets of features…
So I went for groceries around 17.30
made two 190g hamburgers for me to eat (and ate them) they were delicious
played 2 rounds of the kill-switch demo…
..and with the help of too many cookies and a few glasses of apple-juice..
…my monster can now puke green things that bounce around for a time and then disappear (explosions pending).
Next time, I’m going to focus on a game where it’s easy to take screenshots
Tags: foodphoto, screenshot
There be blobs!… proper polygonal blobs. With blob shadows, and physics (I’m using Tokamak again)
Actually, I’m only intending to have one blob, for the player. There’s still no controls/gameplay, I’m not expecting this entry to reach a particularly complete state – I’ve been rather too overambitious (and wasted loads of time tweaking graphical stuff) . But I should have at least some gameplay by the end of tomorrow…
The trouble with the caverns that rex explores, is that they tend to be full of strange creatures, like this Zombird :/
He'll peck your brains out!
I’ve built a cavern generator, and then put together a simple space partitioning thing to fill a world with caverns Next come the interconnects between caverns!
Here’s a shot of what it looks like – this is a lot smaller than it will be, the world is only 800×800 pixels in this image. The procedural generation will produce approximately the same set of caverns regardless of scale though – I’m pretty proud of it.
(I’m using my desktop rendering windows for debug windows in this entry 😛 ah well, maybe next LD will give me an opportunity to use them to their full potential)
I’m taking a quick break after wrestling with my own framework for far too long. I thought I would get done with heightmaps at 3…ended up being more like 6. Oh well.
Basically what I’m doing is generating a heightmap from the bitmap image of the level. Thus I can make silly levels and just plain not have to worry about collision detection for going up a hill or down one, which to me is pretty sweet.
Here’s a screen from a bit ago:
I had the height map flipped and visible so I could see the problem I was having with it more closely. Turns out I was scrolling the background for the level faster than the heightmap…stupid!
Also, lunch – a toasted sandwich with grilled chicken, spinach, tons of garlic, american cheese, and hot mustard. Delicious, I say!
This uses my level generator code: Lightning (Video)
I think ill have to call it quits about here, I have critters and sheep (zombie sheep BTW) wandering around the cavern.
Good luck to everyone and remember to have fun! Cant wait to see what everyone comes up with.
My cavern generation if anyone is interested.. numpy is teh fun.
data = numpy.random.randint(0, 2, size) alive = numpy.zeros(size, int) for c in range(iterations): alive[:] = 0 for x in range(-1, 2): for y in range(-1, 2): alive[max(0,-x):min(-x+width,width), max(0,-y):min(-y+height,height)] += \ data[max(0,x):min(x+width,width), max(0,y):min(y+height,height)] >= 1 data[alive =5 ] = 1
cheers!
A.
Woot \o/ my game is improving!
There is no scrolling, animation or collision detection but still it is an improvement
Heading to the dog park soon, but wanted to release this before I left. Comments would be greatly appreciated! I’m especially wondering who all (if anyone) even has Python installed. Am I programming for an audience of zero?? I hope not 
www4.ncsu.edu/~tamorgan/LD15.zip
P.S.: I’ll get screenshots up when I get back.
It’s midnight, and I’m reasonably happy with what I’ve got done so far, so time for bed. Just animated Ted – only 4 frames for walking, so it looks a bit pants, but I can always sort that out later if I get time. Some animation > no animation.
Otherwise, not much different from last update, so this is probably a bit pointless. Oh, well. 😛
Tomorrow I might get around to actually making something playable. And with dinosaurs in.
Wow, I’m simply amazed how good-looking my game is turning out to be! It’s basically going to be a pong game played inside a cavern with rocks and stuff in the way, the walls will also be slightly deformed for some interesting bounces. I’ve selected quite a simple game to implement because I really wanted to make it with OGRE and I haven’t done anything with it before. Let’s see if I’ll get something done by the deadline.
Thank goodness for that trusty flashlight!
I’m making a lot of progress, though certain little bugs still pop of from time to time. I’m slowly squishing them. Overall, I think things are looking pretty good for this stage of the competition. Still, I plan to add a few more really fun features and changes to the Cave of Peril!
I’ve got my level in game now… but it’s not screencappable until I have a character (unless you like the black area at the top of the frame ^^; ) Yes, character is next, and then, all the rest of the background art. 😀 Hoorah!
"I am in Darkness | Disoriented."
"I can hear things | Coming for me..."
"... A Light! | Hallucination | Reality?"
It’s looking like I’ll actually finish this or at least get it playable.
After doing pretty much nothing, and just messing around, I finally got something that actually seems a little decent.
Now maybe I can work on the actual game part.
first person view
here is the mouth of the beast, the fateful cavern… IN 3D! (Procedural caves produced with the 12345/3 Game of Life rules, with some alterations) I was able to get rid of most of the deadends by randomly killing blocks in one round of a large sum. It is actually pretty nice now, as far as generation goes. Now to make this texture better, and implement enemies…
Well, here’s my work space 15 minute before the competition started:
I got gedit and a terminal, so I’m good to go. But looking at the other posts, I got a bit self-conscious about how modest my setup is, so I decided to take this show on the road.
LDing on the subway!
Harvard!
MIT!
Boston Public Library!
Hey, they had a book. Now I can totally make a 3D game!
Tags: deskphoto
Last post of the day before turning in. I finally settled on a name, Cavern Copter. It has been great to get so much time today, although I’m not sure if my wife appreciated my absence. And I nearly forgot to feed the ancient and venerable hamster.
Ideally this would run in the Unity web player, but I can’t get it to work with the WordPress plug-in, even though the same file works fine from a “normal” web page.
Windows build here.
Fly the helicopter with WASD or the cursor keys.
Now I’m going to sleep and think about that bottle of Battle of Britain Ale that I’ve promised myself as a reward. Should really take a picture of it. Or drink it.
I had a couple of false starts last night, but today’s been more productive, and I have this little fly-around-and-bump-into-walls thing going:
If you like, you can play around with it here: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/ld15-xue/
I think I’ll be calling it “Xue”, but I’m not entirely settled on that yet.
Oh, and here’s what was today’s breakfast — it was responsible mostly for fueling the bump-into-walls part, I think…
Tags: foodphoto, screenshot
As the remnants of Hurricane Danny thrash against the windows on it’s way out to sea I’ve finished with my dinner and half-finished with my beer. Been working on the game now since 5am EST and it is now almost 8pm. I had way too much coffee a few hours ago and in some attempt to bring my nervous system’s ballast back in line I’m having a Corona.
The game is going well so far. Angry Caverns is starting to be fun and I’m starting to refine some of the ideas and mechanics with all the time I’ve spent playing it. I hope I can get a bunch more finished tonight before I have to crash though. As soon as I start nearing this point in the competition (usually about 15 hours of dev in) I start getting a little loopy and distracted. If I can just stay focused for as long as possible I can lay the ground work for a productive day tomorrow. Well.. back to the game dev!
Been coding for almost 18 hours. (with breaks of various sizes, but none too long)
Game is progressing well. I now have a player, and he can shoot. And there is enemies, and some of them shoot. And player can pick up stuff, and the player can die in different ways. And the player can win the game. And there is a highscore list. And stuff.
The plan tomorrow is to create an intro, a you-won-the-game-outro, credits, make pretty graphics (can’t get much worse anyway), fix the music so it doesn’t sound like crap (it’s generated on the fly by the computer, and it doesn’t do a good job). I have a TODO list here somewhere between the windows, but I’m too tired to check if I forgot to mention something. 😛
Here is a picture of Mr Monocle riding his penny-farthing on some railway tracks, and an Evil Gnome shooting at him. And there is also a ruby. Collect it to get $500.
So , my first blog post on the ld site.
I actually participated in ld#1 aaages ago, but then I rediscoverd the whole joyful concept now.
Now I’m working on a guy that’s in a cave with a laser.
There’s also a robot in the cave that wants something that you have. So defeat his army.
made in unity, so I’ll link to the unity web version
This version has enemies spawning and moving somewhat silly around and jumping.
The enemies don’t hurt you yet, and they move like idiots. Shoot them anyways. it’s fun to shoot.
Spaceman Jimmy has been stranded inside an asteroid! He is quickly discovering how inconvenient zero gravity is.
Shoot the aliens before they hug you to death! (Disclaimer: death may not actually occur.)
My cave is very square at the moment. I want to implement some cool per-pixel collision detection on the cave walls, but Box2D won’t let me do that and I’m not going to let myself reimplement a physics engine.
I spent the entire evening trying to get Physaxe to work like I want it to, but I give up! I´m sure it´s possible to make a good platform engine with Physaxe, but it´s not going to happen this weekend and not with the tiny bit of documentation I could find.
Time for plan B, I’ll stick with rectangular tiles and make a simple platform game without those beautiful slopes.
BTW, here is some food I ate:
Day 1 of my first LD is over and after almost 18 hours of work, I have some sort of a game.
I enjoyed doodling on a tablet after a really long time
Unfortunatelly, I underestimated planning and created a system that is too complex to balance in order to produce fun. It’s just too random – sometimes too easy, sometimes too hard. I’ll try to tweak it tomorrow and see if I can get it a little bit more enjoyable.
Music would be nice and also adding multiple levels could make it more interesting (they’re procedurally generated, so no sweat).
The frogdog character that keeps popping up is probably a product of my fatigue 😉
Goodnight, fellow LDers (2:24am in Prague)
Well, it’s a tentative name. I couldn’t come up with anything better than that.
Anyway, I’ve made some progress, as shown below. There’s also a little webstart demo if anybody wants to try. It’s not quite what I’d like my game to be, but it’s better than nothing.
Tags: cavern, cavernous, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, shooter
There’s a movable player character, level loading, and the rudiments of player projectiles. There’s no collision detection though, and the terrain isn’t modifiable yet. Things are progressing, but I don’t have much time to participate this time around. I think I’ll at least get something done by the deadline.
http://z-machines.com/zacs_files/youmustfinishtherace.mp3
I think that people will be pleasantly surprised by the sound effects in Cavern Tycoon.
Tags: motivation, progress
Explore the depths of ancient caverns which hold secrets about gravity. Walking is not possible. The stones you have collected can be used to activate Graviblocks which can pull and push you around. Its a puzzle game where getting stuck means restarting the level. Find the exit into the next cavern to advance to.. possibly more doom.
Is this screenshot busy enough? I'm not sure yet.
Well, stuff is happening. I’m pleased with my first day’s progress — I’ve hit most of the points I designed, and in that regard this has been a smashing success. Trouble is, the game as-is is neither as polished nor as fun (even to me) as what I like to turn in as a final compo entry. Good thing we’ve got another day, I suppose. I’m out, folks — going to hit the bed and work on some music until I pass out. If you’re feeling bored and/or charitable, check out my first day’s (TEMPORARY, SLIGHTLY BUGGY, UNREFINED, etc.) playable: Fallout Cavern.
’tis appreciated!
Tags: screenshot
My game is coming along! It’s a game where you throw bikini babes into a pit that you have filled with traps. Also there are police. And umm guts everywhere? Core mechanics are in place, going to try and write some music now so I can spend all day tomorrow adding features and polish.
Tags: Bikini Babes
Here’s a video of my game so far.
I only need to implement enemy A.I. for the enemy squads to move around en mass and try and fight you. Once that’s done, it’s time for progression (skill tree, experience, levels), missions, graphics, sounds, and gameplay.
Er, ok! So I think I finally have an idea I like! Will start working from scratch tomorrow morning.
Some great looking entries here – can’t wait to play them all
I completally forgot to write anything today, and my cameras broken, so ill do a quick summary:
9AM: Got up. Ate sandwich. Thought about game ideas.
10AM: Got idea.
10:15AM: Started Coding
10:20AM: Remembered I hate Perlin Noise
NOON: Went to a party
3PM: Played halo
5PM: Got home
6PM: Got Cave Generator working
7PM: Ate dinner(steak+mac and cheese)
7:30PM: Got the mine cart working
8:15PM: Its my BIRTHDAY! YAY! I got a 1TB HD!(it was the only thing on my list(i was so surprised!))
8:45PM: Gameplay is done, now to add graphics and interface
9:15PM: I wish opengl had font support
Heres a screenshot:
Prototype mine cart rolling through a cave
Well, it’s the end of day one now… haven’t worked on this a whole lot ( about five, maybe six hours in total?), to be honest, but I’m reasonably pleased with what I have so far!
There’s a funky maze like cavernous system to the east of the player in that screen shot… the building is a research centre, of which there’s another one in the caverns that you’ve to find to rescue the peoples in there before the moon destabalises. Rescue them by landing on the pad ( the thing in the middle sticking up like a sore thumb. )
Those red things are nasties ( there’s a few different types of nasties, and there’s a number of different attack paths they take as well ) which can be shot cause if they smash into you, you take some damage and eventually explode ( same with careening into the walls, which seeing as the ship’s currently a nippy little bugger, you’ll be doing a lot ).. luckily, the research centres will repair you a bit.
There’s 28 ( count ’em! ) main cavernous screen types ( not all are in the demo just now! ), and plenty more derived from them – adding beastie spawn points, research stations, and all sorts.
Of the core gameplay, I’ve only really got the picking up of researchers to do, then it’s just implementing some fonts to track score, health, time and create some fiendish level designs and appropriate bleepy-bloops!
Current tech-demo is here: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/ld15/MoonsOfSubterrane.7z with cursor keys and “z” to fire. There’s GP2X-Wiz and Dingoo binaries, though they run a tad slow just now and I haven’t set the controls up properly yet. The linux binary is AMD64 compiled and the Win32 exe was compiled and tested on Windows 7.
Now for some sleep…
I am at the point where all the basic game play mechanics are implemented and the game is fully functional. I need to add sound and a start menu and probably create a few more graphics to make it a bit more polish. I haven’t quite got the increasing difficulty worked out yet, but that is just going to take a bit more playing. I was going to put what I have so far up, but I am going to hold off and wait until after I test it on my other computer and do a few release builds.
However, here is a current screenshot.
Here’s a screenshot of my game so far, our little explorer is getting ready to enter the evil cave for the first time … (click to enlarge)
Still LOTS left to do … sigh.
Also, I’m trying to think of an awesome name. I’ll come up with something.
This is my progress at the end of the first day – http://mattdev.com/cavernbat.zip.
Controls:
In the menu, up/down and enter.
In the game, press and hold ‘s’ to drop the bat down, and release it to make him hang from the ceiling again. ‘a’ and ‘d’ will alter his current angle. Escape to quit.
I’ve been working on this almost the entire day, and I’m reasonably pleased with where I’m up to. So far I’ve spent the majority of my time on the “art” – doing animations is tricky! The music took some time, too.
Screenshot:
Here’s my current to-do list, which is probably missing a load of things:
I haven’t quite figured out what the bat is going to be doing while moving from start to end points of caverns – picking up items (keys to unlock doors), maybe, or getting points for doing spins in the air, or something.
Anyway, I’ll deal with that tomorrow!
Ok, this is not a major update, I was asleep and then I had to fly to Illiamna and back, so I’m just picking things up again now.
Flash games on the web take the form of .swf files, which are streamed by their host. The flash player won’t normally play a frame of a flash movie until all the assets used by that frame have been loaded. Working in FlashDevelop/FlexSDK, you really don’t use frames much at all, everything is done from AS3 code, and the .swf which is created is a flash movie with 1 frame. Because you don’t want to show the player a white box until everything has been loaded, normally you add a pre-loader, which is small, and which allows the flash player to show something to the user while the rest of the assets are loaded.
Up till now, all of my projects have been wrapped either by the Mochi version control wrapper, or by Whirled’s wrapper. These include preloaders, so I’ve been able to totally ignore all aspects of preloading up unitl now. Unfortunately, as in my normal development flow I had set up my FD project as an ActionScript3 project. In order to get the FlexSDK to create a movie with more than 1 frame, so that that first frame can be implemented as a preloader, there are a few compiler options that need to be set. FD has a AS3+preloader template option, so I re-setup my project and away we went. (This really isn’t a big thing, but I lost 30 minutes because I didn’t know my tools).
Also in the line of I didn’t know my tools, if you hold shift while using the pencil, GiMP will draw a straight line!! Learning this alone made entering LD worth it to me.
Implemented a main menu and intro animation. Next up is building/support placement and a stress heat-map. That might take a little longer, so I figured I push what I have public.
Embedded flash versions here
-TF
Morning LDers, added board sounds, the begginings of a combo system, and I’m playing around with lighting so my lava pieces will look cool hopefully.
I've run out of onomatopoeia to type here, thats the real reason I added sound in this build =p
playable after the link:
[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.sophiehoulden.com/randomstuff/ludum/LD15_web06.unity3d" width="560" height="420"/]
I’m going to have some breakfast ow I think 
Tags: caverns, hoverboards, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, unity
My folks came over and I haven’t had much time in front of the computer since then. We went swimming for awhile and then grilled some burgers. The doofus I am, I forgot to take a picture of our picnic out in the back yard. Burgers with bean salad and pork and beans. Wow, did we have enough beans there? Anyway, my mom had a few cake mixes that were getting close to expiring so she brought down a cake.
Cake!
So where am I in development… I’ve got a hero that moves around the map and collision detection works great against the walls. I’m putting the finishing touches on the gem tile type and have begun the monsters. I still need to do more tiles, but I think I can wait until I get enemies done.
Screenshot showing gems and the updated tiles. Player is left of the gems stash.
Most of the work is all behind the scenes, which I hope means that the rest of it will start to fall into place at a faster pace later. Hopefully the next screen shot will show some monsters, even if their AI isn’t ready.
ok Ok.. so they are still rather stick figure like.. BUT they switch comically between running and walking and change directions too. You can watch a gameplay video of version 0.2 here.
At this point I’ve implemented 2 different enemies (bats & cavemen), 2 different weapons (stalactites & geysers), a combo system, tracking of stats like base level score, bonus score, and reporting back on a level over screen.
Many things still to do of course but my plan is still holding so far of trying to get the bulk of all implementation finished before generating levels and upgrading the graphics.
You can play version 2.0 here in your browser too.
Tags: angry, as3, bats, cavemen, combos, demo, flash, gameplay, screenshot, vid, video, youtube
I’m still working out the kinks in Box2D for Flash. But the concept is down I guess… I think tonight might be a long night.
I did some cover art as a break.
Inkscape is awesome.
After collision got working (last post) I implimented digging, and it works great animations and all. After I got digging as done as it’ll get, I tried tackling cavern generation…and ended up with laggy strait tunnel generation. This was another bummer because I spent so much time working on it trying to figure out a good algorythm, but it failed in the end. I got a tiny bit a spriting done, and now I’ve turned off the screen recorder for the night and am not going to work on it anymore at the moment. I’m going to sleep on the algorythm, and hope tomorrow will bring better luck with my not waisting my time with failedattempts.
Wrote a couple of song loops for the levels, and made some eyecandy for the surface area.
Also added a magnet item that can help maneuver the pellets. I’m in a good place for one day of work, but am going to need work out some sort of win/lose mechanics and more engaging gameplay tomorrow morning.
space bar to switch which swarm you’re controlling, click to tell them where to move, wasd to pan camera
swarms automatically try and take cover behind cover that is touching the rectangle
75 percent chance that cover stops a bullet, unless swarm member is touching said cover
I was thinking in doing something rogue-like but now the game is shaping into a puzzle-game and it looks interesting (at least for me :P). I got almost all mechanics written down and all it’s left is level design.
Here’s a screen of 3 enemies and their field of vision (in red). Since I’m no artist I think these tiles will be final ones.
Progress going good, just optimized the speed of my game around tenfold, and decreased the levels filesize by a similar number.
lovely screenshot.
As you can see, 2 layers of cave (foreground and background) that can be switched ingame for awesome platforming.
Also, a neat motion blur, a stylish edge tracing, and a halfdecent overall look
Other not so obvious features include my very quick and very convenient mapeditor that I created to generate the maps, the fact that there are many screens such that as soon as the player goes off one edge, he starts on the other edge of the next screen.
Similarly, you don’t see how cool it is to go around stuff in a 2D platformer. I assure you, it is quite cool.
Just an ugly progress shot before I get dragged off to lunch with some old lady that I think we’re only friends with because she got so excited over design of our business card.
This one is coming along a lot better than the last attempt besides one frustrating problem where Construct tried to help me by auto-hiding a canvas that had an X ordinate below a certain negative value–despite the fact that I was zooming in on that layer so it should still have been on-screen and therefore fucking VISIBLE.
It probably won’t be playable until fairly late, so I hope the gimmick turns out interesting enough to make up for the horrible graphics.
Woke up again. This keeps happening.
Anyway, I don’t have much to show for yesterday. My code can draw animated tiles and tilemaps (scrolled) into a rectangle, but that’s about it. Oh, and maintain correct aspect ratio no matter what size it’s rendering at. Originally I wanted to support fullscreen, but apparently flash disables keyboard in fullscreen mode for some reason, so it’s not very useful unless I do a mouse-controlled game, which I probably won’t. You can still just plop the swf directly in the browser to fill the browser window though.
Also, I think I got an idea now. Don’t know if it’ll be good yet, but at least it’s something. Time to draw some gfx.
And so I’m heading for the bed.
New in this build is improved ai for the little cretins known as monsters.
There is a lifebar as well. it recharges if you stay out of trouble.
You get points for killing monsters.
When you die you are returned to a screen which shows some score info.
If you press the middle mouse button, you push enemies backwards. nice for crowd control, but really overpowerd. I should add a cool-down to that “weapon”.
I want to add grenades and improve level design + spawn points, and also do some difficulty curve work, so that it gets harder and harder. Hope I get time for some of that tomorrow.
Darn, I have fallen way behind in my schedule. Haven’t done half of the things I set out to do the first day. Oh well, at least I got to my first screen shot. Allthough it is techically just one picture blited to the screen, all the logic to blit all the objects I want is allready there. At least I got something.
Next up are ligh emiting objects and some kind of resource object.
Tags: behind, first screen
Just got up after 5 hours of sleep. I’m feeling like a zombie…
I hope I’ll finish this…
Hi!
So, this has been going pretty well, I think. I’ve pieced together something reasonably interesting and playable – while not really constituting much of a game yet, I think I have time to remedy this.
I’m uploading an exe here if you would like to check it out, please let me know what you think
Given that I have almost a full day left, I’m intending to add gameplay of some sort, integrate my audio lib, and revisit the cavern graphics, hopefully make them more cavern-like.
Download: ld15_CavernGhost_1.zip (Win32 Binary)
Screenshot:
Early in a project, things like this are funny. Later on, I find the time lost incredibly frustrating. I don’t think windows is going to find the error before I do…
-TF
Dinner tonight was a roast, with a baked potato, a roll, and a bottle of Martinelli’s, prepared for my by my sweetheart of a girlfriend. Afterwards, we played some Animal Crossing, and now, back to work for a few hours before bed.
She's such a sweetie ❤
Well finally! I have a demo that everyone can try out. I haven’t really spent any time on balancing the game play so don’t expect much in that respect. The idea of the game is simple. You control the little guy at the bottom of the screen with the left and right arrow keys. Your job is to collect the coffee beans that fall from the top of the cavern without being hit by one of the falling rocks.
Ongoing
I have not incorporated a state system yet. When you run the game it will immediately start playing. Once you get hit by a rock the game is over, you will have to close the window and restart it.
Known Issues
For some reason pressing the Esc key is not exiting. I am going to fix this, just haven’t had a chance to yet.
Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions.
Well, i now have a J that moves around like The Flash and an @ sign that you move around. I’m implementing PoV’s timer code, too, but I haven’t yet. There’s also a little bit of dialouge at the beginning of the game. No screenshot yet, though.
I have a ton of code to write, and i have no graphics at this point. Things are looking pretty hopeless. But I just stocked my energy drinks, water and candies, rewatched the keynote speech and am totally motivated.
It is gonna be a long night…
…They’re all still spheres along with everything but my mock level. Making good progress so far, have most of the game logic done and my goal is concentrate only on art after midnight or so and all of tomorrow. Also plan on making the game take place on one huge level.
My game involves a dragon looking for her lost babies in a cave (duh). She can roar to get the closest one to answer and indicate the direction it’s at, use fire to take down enemies, and fly around. So far I have giant moths and acid dripping stalagmites as obstacles. Once she finds a baby she has to fly it back to the roost and look for the next one. Early prototype was ok fun so I decided to stick with it given the short amount of time available. Gameplay is 2D with 3D levels (Shadow Complex is a recent example). I’d post a screenshot but just have spheres to show off.
Note: Like I said on IRC, recording a timelapse increases productivity and makes me feel guilty about slacking off on the Internet. Give it a shot haha.
Chris
Well I thought I had a simple idea but I neglected to consider how long it would take to throw together a “quick and dirty” level editor. So instead of getting anywhere with gameplay, I spent all day on the editor.
A small level in the "editor"
Anyways.. a least that’s working pretty well now. Now to try and add some actual gameplay to this thing.
Okay, so I’m wide awake (thanks, seagulls…) and ready to get back to work. The plan for today is:
Here it is so far… I hope I can turn it into something solid, but the knight looks like a pansy. I might have to redraw that.
Oh my goodness there’s no way I can keep up with the amount of posts and comments this site is getting! It’s awesome that so much awesome is awesoming here so awesomely.
Awesome.
So my update.
Looks way better in motion. Click it!
Turns out that Flash doesn’t really likethe way I am doing 2.5D, but eventually I got the framerate to be a consistent 30.
Postmortem of Saturday:
I’m doing it wrong:
I’m doing it right:
Basically I am ripping off the Wario Ware Inc. microgame Ninja Pipe Cleaner. Which you can see a video of here.
You can see my last upload here. I’ll be uploading updates there occasionally.
Yay for food!
The game is nearing completion, by the way. All I have to do right now is to add all perks (there will be 10), story, concept art, music, sound effects, and help. It’ll be easy.
Same instructions as last time:
swarms automatically try and take cover behind cover that is touching the rectangle
75 per…cent chance that cover stops a bullet, unless swarm member is touching said cover
Combos are working, though there is still only the 1 ‘trick’, you can add to your combo by doing air jumps, and getting *really* close to lava (best to try when in slowmo).
Lava in games is always cool right?
playable after the link:
[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.sophiehoulden.com/randomstuff/ludum/LD15_web07.unity3d" width="560" height="420"/]
Tags: caverns, hoverboarding, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, unity
Right, I haven’t gotten the building placement yet (nor drawn the buildings, so that’s the major stumbling block) but my little game is correctly placing the supports and displaying the stresses on a heat map. Playable version history here. The halo effect in the screenshot below is caused by setting every border cell, actually, every cell 1 step outside the border of the playing field to be a support. I’m not sure if that’s going to work or not in the long run (however long of that run is left). Ideally, 1 support will nullify 1 building. I’m not sure if it’s a better idea to drop the supports around the edges entirely, or to thin them out a little so their effect isn’t as large…
-TF
Hop.
Nicely coming along. Made the selection system, and the game is detecting that the proper number of items where selected.
It still need to be able to check when the items are stuck together, or not.
Here’s a binary, working but you can’t do anything except selecting the items
I’ve added lightboxes and a UI (left to right: num lives, num lightboxes lit up, num reflectors available). I’ve decided the aim of the game is to light up all the light boxes in the level, which will entail connecting lamps to boxes via reflectors, finding extra crates of reflectors, and avoiding any hazards along the way. Eventually the sky will get lighter as you light up more lightboxes.
Not nearly as far along as I should be, but getting there. I’m definitely not going to have time for art tomorrow. I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping I’ll be able to get the gameplay done. In its current form:
Biggest wastes of time today: trying to figure out how to do inversed masking in Flash (to draw a black rectangle everywhere except where there is light), and tracking down a slight error in my matrix math that was throwing off all the scaling. Doh.
Tags: progress, screenshot
Ok, end of the day for me. I’m going to sleep. If I wake up around 8 or 9, I’ll have 11-12 hours left to work.
I’m probably not going to finish what I originally intended, but I’m having fun anyways. I’ll definitely continue this project after the compo is over.
As for the game, I’ve got movement down and am nearly finished with digging. Plus, I’ve got a terrible menu system. I’ve never done a mouse-based interface in a game before, and I’m not very good at it. Anyway, after digging, I think I need to start adding more units, so that I can add attacking. That, plus bughunting and packaging, may be all I can get done, though if I have time I’d love a random/procedural level generator. The enemy AI, assuming I even get that far, is going to be *very* primitive.
Goodnight!
Breakfast is muesli with greek yogurt and honey, and a cup of tea.
Last night I went to bed concerned about the lack of progress I had made, however this morning I found I’m advancing quite quickly, so I guess I did make a lot of progress on the ‘scaffolding’ code after all. Or maybe I’m just less tired. 😛
Also I made a (-n awful) piece of music for my game. It really sucks though so I might not leave it in.
Tags: foodphoto
I just woke up and now it’s back to work. I’m going to rush to inject some damn gameplay into this thing today so that it can at least be described as a game and not just a pile of shoddy cavern wall graphics =/
The other entries are looking amazing this time round! Ludum Dare never fails to surprise me. Every time, people go far beyond what I thought possible in 48 hours – whether it be graphically, technologically or even in terms of the gameplay or story itself. Once again, I can’t wait to get my hands on some of these entries!
I forgot to post foodphotos of some snack and a pizza, but here’s something more interesting. My wife made a kalakukko, which is “fishcock” (edit: umm, cock as in rooster) in English as a direct translation. Kalakukko is a traditional Finnish food made by baking fish and pork inside rye dough and cooked in oven, and then left to poach with low heat for roughly 8 hours or so to make it softer.
Tags: foodphoto
OK, the game detects when a row is selected and close enough to be removed.
Yet, it’s a damn bunch of bugs. I guess my setup is to complex, and 3D physics is not really suitable for this
Anyway, here’s an updated binary :
Okay, last post before I switch computers and go and make some music. Here I’ve added spikes and lava, and collectable reflector crates. It’s possible to die now too, although there’s no fancy animation – it just decrements your life and puts you back to the start of the level. I don’t know if I’ll have to time do anything more polished in that regard.
Still to do:
There’s other things I’d like to do, but only if I have the time.
I finally finished my entry. If I get enough time, I may update it; but it’s polished and in a playable state right now. It’s also quite fun to see yourself die in horrible ways; even if you have the best weapon in the game (called “The Reaper +15”). You can find it in the submissions menu; http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/
Edit: There was a bug in the game in the Altar sequence. It’s fixed now.
Well, its coming up on 4am and I have almost nothing to show for this LD. I spent far too much competition time on other things (soccer games, movies, drinking) and the time I DID spend so far I’ve wasted messing around with blender and ogre, tools I have almost zero familiarity with. I really wanted to make a 3D cave shmup, but it is simply outside my abilities to finish within the small amount of time left. I struggled for hours trying to get all sorts of other tools to work to get my cave from blender into ogre in a useful way, but ended up with nothing feasible.
I guess this just isn’t my LD. I neglected to start a time lapse, I’ve taken no food photos, and at this point there is about 15 hours to go and I have zero, count em, zero lines of code. Here is everything I have so far – a simple render of my cave system from the top down. It’s fairly dark (on purpose), so the image isn’t worth much by itself.
Map of the cave system
Not too bad, but not great either — still, I learned some things and had fun playing with nurbs, so even if I drop out it isn’t a total loss.
