So,  I decided to change my entry, after being unsatisfied with my first one. I like thise many times more.

Excavatorrr is about a mono-colour adventurer who seeks for riches in underground caves. The game may be a bit hard to understand at first, but after a while you’ll (hopefully) get used to it.

–Controls–
Arrows – move
Up arrow – aim
Down arrow + D – drop item
D – throw/use item (UP arrow to aim throwing)
S – jump/confirm

Important! Those 4 brown boxes in the beginning are ladder kits, which you use to get away from the depths of the caves. Try to carry one with you at all times. throwing the ladder will cause it to appear downwards in front of you, and throwing it upwards will make it appear upwards right where you are. I hope you read this, because, well, it’s easy to get stuck without.

Note that the ladder kit creates itself downwards if you don’t aim it with the UP key. warning!! the falling blocks are slippery and buggy! To get a bit better idea of what’s going on, I suggest you check the “help” -text, found by waiting in the title screen.

I’m really happy with this one, especially when it took 11 hours.

Download the game from this link!

I’ve finally moved on to the elephant in the room. (Well, in my room)

The world generator.

It will work as thus:

The world is a square grid that is 600 tiles on each side. The outer 50-cell border is always filled with wall tiles.

The grid is stored as a two-dimensional array of ints. These represent the various objects (Or lack thereof) that may be located on that space.

The generator started by carving out 10 rooms, which are rectangles that are 20-80 tiles on each side.

Each room is limited to its own area in the map, and those areas only have a little bit of overlap. This keeps rooms from clumping together into an uninteresting level.

Then, twenty large tunnels are carved between the rooms. The generator will take care to make sure every room is connected in this way. These tunnels are either vertical or horizontal, for simplicity.

After that, twenty-five small tunnels are carved. Fifteen of these go between rooms, and ten go between large tunnels. These are also either vertical or horizontal. These tunnels are too small for enemies to get into, but the player can easily fit into them.

Then, the rooms and tunnels are carved into the grid.

The generator then puts 1 or 2 enemies in each room, except for one. That one will not overlap other rooms, and will always be 20-40 tiles on each side.

Then, it decides where the player starts. The player will always start in the room without enemies, but the generator decides where in that room the player starts.

Finally, the generator will pick between 50 and 200 tiles to place a passable floor tile on, to add a bit of detail to the cave.

Once the grid is laid out, the generator parses it into a world. It runs through the grid left-to-right and top-to-bottom.

When it encounters a wall tile, it creates a terrain tile object, then checks the area around the point it found the tile at.

If the tile is bordered on every side and corner, it is placed into a vector of passable terrain tiles. These will not be checked for collisions in-game.

Otherwise, the tile is placed into a vector of massive terrain tiles. These are the ones that will be checked for collisions.

The outer edge are always placed into the passable vector. After this, everything is handled by the parsing code.

When it encounters an enemy spawn point, it makes a baddie at that point, and then sticks it into a vector of baddies. These are, of course, your enemies.

When the parser encounters a floor tile, it makes one, and places it into the vector of passable terrain. This simply makes sense.

When it encounters the player start point, it records the point. This is passed to the main loop with the objects, as the main loop builds the player itself. The main loop also records the spawn point for each enemy.

Then, the game begins.

If you die, the terrain is saved, and enemies are placed in their original points. The terrain is preserved.

If you defeat all of the baddies in the cave, there is a short delay and a victory sound plays, then the game generates a new world, and the cycle starts anew.

In addition, if I have time, I will put in a health bar for the player. This should be useful.

Here’s to pulling through in the face of the deadline! 😀

I hope…

—Akake

Oh, my dear God.

What have I done?!?

WHAT HAVE THESE HANDS WROUGHT?!?

Behold the manner of your destruction.

Super Bean Kid.

Finished my entry for the LD#15. It’s a pity I didn’t have enough time to include all the features (enemies, power-up’s, lots of blood, stalactites…) I thought at the design stage, but at least it is playable. I think I might continue the development, though.

I’ve had lots of fun! This was my first LD and I’m really satisfied. See you in the next one! 😀

Title screen

The Evil Dark Cavern Which Leads Straight To Hell

Tags: 2D, final, gosu, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, ruby, screenshot

I really think this time I have a good game to show.

You were put in a cell inside a cavern patroled by spiders (?! I’m awfull at drawing 😛 just focused on mechanics so spiders it is, I think) and your objective is to just escape from there, but you’ll you be able to do it? If you don’t feel excited with this intro it’s because you’re a normal person 😛

I’m about to finish all maps (ie. rooms), they will be 8 or 9 in total with some variety on the path you can take so you’re not expected to go through them all (the easier exits of a certain room lead to easier rooms), but all converge towards one final room.

After the maps are made I’ll try to make the main menu and some way to save hi-scores.

I’ve spent the last couple of hours trying to tweak the games difficulty. I’m having problems getting it to ramp up like I want. I just need to keep playing and tweaking things. I didn’t have a whole lot of time today to work on it, family stuff, laundry that kind of thing.

Other than tweaking the game play I am done, unless I find any critical bugs or issues, but so far everything seems to be fine. Had a couple of people try it out on different computers and no one had any problems so awesome.

My goal is to have the game submitted by 8pm EST.

Anyways, I’ve been diligently working on my game since for a total of around 8 hours now, which sadly, isn’t as much time as I had planned to have at this point! 😀 Anyways, I’ve got player movement, key collection, a large procedurally generated cavern dungeon, and…. that’s about it! Anyways, read on to see some screenshots of the progress I’ve been making.

Okay, game is done. Is not bad game, but you know, 48 hours, is not much time. Is fine. I am okay.

So, for those who did not look at updates (is okay, I am not mad, you are busy people), here is game; is game about boy who find fallen piece of sun in the snow. It get inside him and make him burn, and he melt right through the snow and fall into cave. In cave, he must find sunstones to keep himself lit. He is more powerful, the ice around him melts faster, which is useful but also dangerous.

Game is simple right now. Level is randomly generated, jump around until find sunstone or die, repeat. Arrows or A/D for movement, up or W or space to jump. If you don’t like level or level is impossible, press r or Enter to make new level. If you don’t like sound or music (I SPIT ON YOU) then press m for mute.

I hope you will enjoy this game I have made. I spend many hours on it. Oh, yes, if you play the web version, I am telling you that it is 2 megs and takes time to load. Some people like preloaders. Some people like to have sex with animals, and that is all I will say about that, yes?

Web Version (Is big, I told you this)
Download w/ assets and source

That was it!  Wow.  If you haven’t already, get your entry in RIGHT NOW.

We’ll hit the switch in about an hour and you can start voting.  If you want to see the current entry list, hit this link.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview

Thanks everyone coming out and making Ludum Dare 15 such a big deal!

– Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

I don’t think I could go on for another 4.5 hours, nor would it matter much. Consider my feeble attempt at a Roguelike buried under tons of rock. That isn’t to say it won’t be completed eventually, just not today.

Next time, though…

Tags: compo, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, towel

Oh hell, only 6 hours left

Tags: screenshot

Well, I started out really late. I was busy Friday night and all Saturday, so I only started last night. Progress has been slow, since I’m such a terrible programmer. No doubt I won’t finish this, but here’s a screenshot to prove that I am at least trying. Animated, it seems as if you were zooming through the colorful tunnel you see below. Making this for Flash using FlashDevelop and Flex SDK.

Tags: tigs

Firstly, annoyingly this is the third time i@ve typed this because Chrome went crazy. Oh, well.

Got about 5:20 left, and finally I have something that can be played, lost, and you get a score!
Also, I fixed it so that the level is now infinite and randomly generated.

I’ve finally fixed the dodgy collision-checking too: Moving things can now collide, rather than only moving and unmoving.

Thanks to DrPetter’s excellent SFXR, I also have some sounds! Yays! Not entirely sure they go with the graphics, but oh well – better than nothing.

So… I’m going to upload a taster! This may well be the final thing if I don’t add anything else.

Controls:
A/D or left/right to move, W or up to jump.
Click to fire.

The story / instructions (possibly more entertaining than the real thing)

You, archaeologist Ted Stuart (because archaeologists are always action heroes, for some reason) have wandered aimlessly into a cave that has laid undisturbed for millennia. Well, or so you think. It’s actually been disturbed rather frequently by all the dinosaurs living down there.

Living dinosaurs would make your job a waste of time, and so to preserve the livelihood of archaeologists everywhere, you seek to destroy them all! However, your puny gun is no match for their unusually tough skin! Your only hope is that you can shoot down loose rocks from the ceiling to bonk the dinosaurs on the head with. Only then can you remain safely employed in these harsh economic times.

Download current version (may be final, depends if I think of anything to add)  Please download and test! 😀

Tags: dinosaur, download, screenshot

Extremely close to final version is playable here.

Place Fist Here

I love you guys.

Well things improved quite steadily once I got the collision detection working, but before I do too much more work here is the current rundown of features.

The player can’t walk and must rely on the Graviblocks for thrust. If enabled the Graviblocks will pull or push the player in the direction they are pointing if the player is in line with the arrow. Space resets the player back to the starting point for the level. Stones can be thrown with WASD and can go through light colored tiles while the player cant. The player can however go through the light colored graviblocks as well as the stones. The other graviblocks do not let the player or stones pass but when they are hit with a stone they toggle their enabled state. Later some will rotate when hit, and maybe if time permits there will be button blocks which activate doors and whatnot. The map has gravity on by default but any level can override that, as well as the size of the grid. The borders are forced to be solid walls (for simplicity of collision detection) and the exit (when added) will be somewhere inside the grid to take you to the next map on touch.

Now, before I continue, as is the tradition here, I shal describe the food I will eat for the remainder of the competition (because I dont feel like owning a camera). I will prepare separately, both halves of a toasted everything bagel by layering on a paste of tomato based pasta sauce, followed by a ring of sliced orange cheddar cheese on top. Then it is nuked on high for 55 seconds while I crack open a celebratory Corona beer. Its probably best described as pizza bagels and of course it was invented long ago by perhaps the wise monks of bagledash.

And now eat my screenshot with your brain. (wipe your eyes when you are done)

Well, I finally have decent player movement and collision. Not sure how much I’m going to get done in the next four hours and change but hopefully will have something..

I’ve changed this from a platformer into a much simpler cave-flyer. There’s not much to do in the game yet.

Get it from the entry page.

For some reason I have had trouble sleeping for 2-3 past nights. So I was pretty tired even when the compo started, which kept being a problem for the whole compo.

After first day I stopped working quite early and tried to get some sleep, but still just couldn’t until some hours passed by. Well, I did get up for a little while and tweaked some stuff before trying again. For the second day I were still tired and although I liked the theme and had lots of further ideas for my entry, I was too tired to work on it. Both days I just stopped working for quite a few times and tried to take a quick nap.

Still I’m glad I made and finished at least some kind of an entry, although I feel the gameplay is lacking.

Well it is almost 2 o’clock of night here and I need to go to work tomorrow… And still not game

Here is my last result:

So idea was pretty simple after I finished with tuning up my experimental water physics… Game would be called something like A.W.C.A.F.I.T or Asteroids.With.Caverns.And.Fuel.In.Them. Idea is that spaceship traveling trough space sometimes stops at asteroids and tries to got fuel from them. Game mechanics are kind of simple. You need to use rotation of asteroid and gravity to bring fluid to place you dig a hole in it.

So as things are now I will not be able to finish it (at least at a level of quality I want) in time so probably I will stay it at that and finish it properly later this week.

For those who are interested in progress here I assembled all 4 versions of my development here. Good luck to everyone who are trying to finish now.

thigns are still progressing well. I’m feeling the time pressure, but I think I’ll be fine for time.

Just need to add a really rough menu/howToPlay and then I’ll spend any remaining time prettying graphics.

As you can see, I’ve added missiles for difficulty and coins as something to collect.

Uh so I’ve been pretty tired this weekend, it’s been hard to code. I was slackin’ for most of the first day, and I’m about 12 hours behind because of some ridiculously stupid bugs.

But, alas, things have begun to come together. Hopefully I can finish a simple game in the next four hours. Here’s a screenshot of spooky cavern, a clone of the (not very fun) 2600 game Haunted House:

spooky caverns

I finally fixed the memory leaks, implemented a decent aim-and shoot system but the “game” is still far from playable. I have no lust to continue left at this point, as it is already 2.00a.m. here. Good luck to you all.

Not that many hours left of the competition now…

Here is a recent screenshot of my little entry, Mr Monocle And His Marvelous Madcap Underground Race:

I got everything I planned implemented. Main menu, highscore, game over screen, items, enemies, a gentleman with a monocle on a penny-farthing, death, explosions, procedural generated music, sound effects.

What I need to do now is to playtest it a lot, fix all bugs I can find, finetune it, balance it, and, with some luck, at least try to redraw the sprites. I have had it on the TODO list since yesterday and I keep pushing it aside… 😛

Tags: LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, Mr Monocle

A surprsigingly-to-implement new feature, which makes the game actually hard to play:

Moving dinosaurs!

They walk along, and jump in a ridiculous fashion, without animation. But it’s late, and I’m tired, and this will probably have to do. Please, please test this and say how well it works so I can make any last-minute adjustments, that’d be swell. 😀

Link: (Windows binary and source) http://atkinssj.nfshost.com/stuff/CaveOfDinos.zip

Tags: screenshot

Only a few hours left now, thought I’d take a quick break to post a screenshot.

I present…

Bat shooting a laser from its eyes.

Besides the eye-laser that bounces off walls, in this shot you can also see the newly-introduced flamethrowers.

I’ve reaaaally gotta make some actual levels, now – I’ve been using the same test one through-out this weekend. I’ve also got to create some critters (which will be shot with eye-lasers).

Alright, back to work!

Wow!  At current count, we have a whopping 144 entries!  To start voting on entries, go here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/

For the rest of the world, hit this link to see the list of all the entries.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview

If you made an entry, but for whatever reason weren’t able to submit at the deadline (upload problems, used the old submission method), let us know (via IRC, or respond to this post).

Voting will last for 2 weeks.

Remember, this time you’re being rated on how many entries you voted for.  Users that play and rate 25%+ of the entries will see a bronze icon beside their name, 50%+ a silver, and 75%+ a gold.  There will be a final list showing the best voters, along with the rest of the results.

Windows Ports

Hurry up and get your Windows ports in! The longer you wait, the less time people have to play and vote for your entries. For more details on porting, see this post.

Also, some people need help porting their Python+PyGame games to Windows+Py2EXE. If you can help out, see the comments here. If you need a place to upload the ports, ask a moderator in IRC for the FTP info.

Timelapse Videos

Be sure to tag your posts with the tag timelapse. It’ll make it easier for others to find your videos, and for me to collect them all.

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions regarding the compo (things to change, little things to make things nicer, etc), post them in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/08/30/suggestion-post/

Thanks everyone for coming out and making Ludum Dare 15 our biggest and best compo yet! Now go vote!

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 30th, 2009 at 9:14 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.

Then I tried it with 2000 unit’s 1000 a side and it kind of went a bit slow, turn based strategy anyone! ;o)

But did uncover the fact the the unit’s are extremely dense, but then I made them!

Anyway need to add a carrier or three and some LC’s to ferry them to the beach!

3:26.10 – hmm might need lots more coffee!

Tags: progress, update

Tags: timelapse

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 30th, 2009 at 9:38 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.

I had a major breakthrough when I figured out why my monsters were walking through walls, other monsters and the player.  I had an errant semicolon at the end of an if statement and though the logic was correctly false, the functions were still executing.  After removing that, things are looking much brighter.

But not that much brighter.  I still have a few more things to do before this passes as a game, and I still need to create other levels.  I suppose the other levels aren’t mandatory, as I can show a decent amount in just one level if I do it right.

Current item on the agenda is whips.  I’m trying to get them to affect their environment, and once that is done, I can move on to something else, most likely keys and doors.

No screenshot as it looks much like it did before.

Tags: ld48_15, running out of time

Claustrophobia is actually a complete game.

You are trapped in a cave with no exits, there are immortal creatures surrounding you who wish to eat your flesh. You may choose to survive a little longer, by fending them off with your flaming torch, but you’re only prolonging the inevitable.

I find it quite scary.

I have it all finished to a degree I’m comfortable with, the only problem is creating an executable – it would probably take a good while to package, as I’d have to remove a lot of stuff from the graphics and sound code (which load in assets from Soundless Mountain – breaking the rules of the compo. even though they’re not used – it’s always fiddly and takes a few false starts – and it’s already past my bedtime!)

So, sorry to disappoint those who were interested. I’ll try and post the finished thing on my blog in a few days. Need to sleep now!

sorry, i’ve nothing worth showing this time..

some unexpected events yesterday took me a lot of time,
and today i also hadn’t enough concentration to code and rethink all the needed stuff.

next time maybe…

…

I’ve uploaded screenshots, videos to youtube and the final executable. If someone wants to host it I’ll be happy to remove rapidshare. I don’t know how stable rapidshare is, but I’m guessing it will stop after 50 or so downloads, even if I signed up with them… anyways here is the last of my foodphotos:

I’l be going through the timelapse videos tomorrow, cleaning it up and removing the parts where I cheat If anyone knows a good premiere-like video-editing freeware for windows xp, I would be a happy if you told me

Now it’s time to sleep. it’s 2.03 (am) local time, and I gotta be at work at 8. This monday (today that is) is going to be fun!

Tags: foodphoto

Oh man, took way too long!

So much went wrong… LOL, the caverns part had to be cut out to finish the game because it was taking too long to do the collision dectection and path ai.

Wrote some scrolling text routines that completely disappeared for some reason.

Overall though loved the experience. I think this is my most interesting entry ever.

Processing worked great. I really love how sturdy and well built the language and environment is. Reminded me of the quality of C# and visual studio.

Couldn’t get any decent sounds so left it out. Also, borrowed some code from a demo for flocking. It would have too me the whole 48 hours just to do that one part. Don’t feel too bad. Basically I started with nothing but the language otherwise.

Will add a domain with the game applet online later. I uploaded three version, one for each windows, mac and linux, all together in one compressed file. Java is required of course. Let me know how they work for you. Oh well, going in the pool now! Too much stress!!

Here is the final download file (in RAR format):

http://www.divshare.com/download/8333124-2e7

Here’s a final screenshot:

Spent most of the day modeling and animating, and still only using my mock level.  Less than 3 hours left!

Edit: I forgot to upload the source code. –> Get the source code here <–

I’ve done as much of Cavern Copter as I’m going to do. It’s now after 1am and I’m contemplating opening that bottle of Battle of Britain Ale that I promised myself before turning in for the night. Thankfully it’s a public holiday tomorrow, as I’m knackered.

There are still things that I would like to have accomplished:

• the scientists should drown when the water reaches their heads
• sound effects

Here are the download links:

• Download Cavern Copter for Windows
• Download Cavern Copter for Mac (Intel)
• Download Cavern Copter for Mac (PPC)
• Play online (Unity web player)

The helicopter speeds towards the first of many stranded scientists.

Congratulations to those who submitted something and better luck next time to those who didn’t.

Tags: screenshot

Well, it’s done! I’ve submitted. I started feeling time pressure a few hours ago, and I think I caught all the fatal errors anyways. There are certainly still some issues with the display, and the AI. (It’s quite presumptious to call it AI– there’s three scripted behaviors. One of them is ‘ask the random number generator where I should move’. You can play with the game to figure out the others or wait for a postmortem.

Of the things in my last post, the only thing I don’t think I really handled was a help system.. there are instructions, and slightly better instructions in the submission entry. A lot of the last minute stuff was a kludge though. This is my code in my Main class for handling a reset or restart:

case 8:
if (this.contains(GameOverScreen)) this.removeChild(GameOverScreen);
if (this.contains(CGame)) this.removeChild(CGame);
CGame = new CavernGame();
GameState = 5;
break;

Obviously that’s not an acceptable way to restart– CGame is a HUGE object by the time the game ends and restarting hangs my flash player for about 20 seconds. (I don’t have a profiler, but Windows Task Manager shows a 30Mb jump in flash players memory usage when that section of code is called) However– it does work. And it would take me more than the two hours and change left to find all the variables that need to be reset in CGame. I’m also tired, and I’m at the point where I’m afraid I might break something trying to add polish.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone elses work, but I’m going to get some rest first. I’ll leave you with a couple screen shots:

-TF

This was a fun experience. Tiring, but fun. I originally entered to warm up for Pyweek, but I found it very fun, and will certainly enter in the next one. (And probably some Mini-LDs :-D)

That said, I dreamed too big, and wasted alot of time.

I stuck with something I knew I could do for my core mechanics, however. In the end, I didn’t have time to put in terrain optimizations (Well, okay, I didn’t have the willpower), and my random world generator became to troublesome for the time-frame.

I’ve discovered a love for both C++ and top-down shooters this weekend, however. I certainly enjoy working with both, and will continue to do so.

Overall, it’s a game. It’s kinda fun, and has something of a challenge to it.

It’s not what I planned, but I’m happy with it.

What Went Right:

• I stuck to a set of mechanics I knew I could implement
• I used collision logic that I was familiar with
• I paid close attention to my pointers
• I decided to farm out request a Windows port from the community, in the topic PoV put up
• I never gave up. This was a first for me in a game development compo. Not having enough time to helped, though.

What Went Wrong:

• I was too ambitious for my lack of familiarity with my IDE, the language I used, and the library I used.
• I assumed I knew where the several segfault bugs I ran into were coming from, only to discover that the cause was something very simple that I’d overlooked.
• I had to hit the code with a hammer in a few places, and it shows.
• I underestimated the complexity of a random world generator, and didn’t leave anywhere near enough time for it.

I’m happy, though. I made a game in 48 hours. In C++. And straight SDL.

This has been the most fun I’ve had in some time! I look forward to the next one! 😀

Here’s to having a good time, even when we don’t succeed.

—Mr. Dude

I was unfortunately unable to balance the game play as much as I would have liked. A few design choices earlier made doing it now a bit cumbersome. If only I had a few more hours..

I will be making the source available in the next couple of days along with a potential linux setup.

For now you can get it from the the entries page here.

first run

V

corruption

V

bloom & ssao

the wonders of graphics programming ;D

Tags: progress

I need to learn how to draw one of these days.

Play Online: http://realnoyb.googlepages.com/cave.html

Finally done with my first Flash game (for certain definitions of done). I’m absolutely enamored of Flixel, especially coming from the oft-quirky Multimedia Fusion.

This game is a fairly straightforward sidescrolling shoot-em-up, with a greater focus on dodging than shooting. Collect gems. Ants fire blindly. Bats charge down the center if you wake them up by shooting. Shoot down stalactites to crush enemies beneath for bonus points. Falling stalactites shake the cavern when they land, and might cause unwanted collapses. The enemies get faster, stronger, and more numerous as the game progresses.

Controls: Arrow keys move. X shoots.

Tools: FlashDevelop, Flixel API, GraphicsGale, Modplug Tracker, sfxr, Audacity

Tags: flash, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009

It’s been done for a few hours now, but I needed to sleep.

Page is HERE for your enjoyment.

Have fun ^^

-Devlin

Tags: caverns, final, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, screenshot, Windows

My game, now titled “Broken Cave Robot”, is nearing completion. 2 hours left! Still need to do one more track of music, one or two more levels, and some testing. Getting tired, but must go on.

So, only two hours left? Hmm. Have a bit of a dilemma. I actually haven’t gotten far enough to implement the core mechanic that makes my game work! I think that’ll take a good hour, which doesn’t leave much time for anything else.

All I have to show at the end of my 24 hours is a basic platform engine and a few basic game elements. I don’t have time now to develop the idea I wanted to do properly, so instead I’m just going to try and muck up something with what I have – which isn’t much. It’s better than nothing, though. Here goes!

Ok, so this is my first LD and it was fun, the game isn’t complete yet, but it is playable (if you don’t mind getting no score hehehe) #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

I am still continuing the work in good spirit but I am pretty sure, that i won’t make the deadline. Below is a screen shot.

still no enemy ai and less than 2 hrs left.

Well, more or less…

I only got the first seven levels done – the entire Moon of Chronos, and the first two sectors of Kala. Rest are repeats of Chronos with slightly different gravity pulls, and textures.

But wow, I felt it was complete enough to actually submit!
Here’s some screenshots of the past few hours:

But it’s all submitted now so, hope you have fun playing it as I have had making it this weekend
Even if I did only spend about a day all in on it due to feeling a bit bleh…
Good Luck to everyone that entered!

Well the blue army is ready to deploy...

Only due to cutbacks and time management issues the landing craft will not be available in time, just as well as the red army are on holiday…

So no war today, still there is always tomorrow!

I’m done for today! Get ready to race your way down the caverns as fast as possible. The game also includes a level editor if you want to create your own tracks! You move the wagon with the arrow keys (more introductions can be found in the readme-file)

The game was developed using Python+pygame.

Screenshots (game view on the left, level editor on the right):

and the game can be downloaded from here

It was a super hard day to find the motivation for some reason. I got very far yesterday and it’s kind of a shame I didn’t use it as well as I could have, but my biggest goal for this weekend was to make a game that would be interesting enough to keep developing and I think i somewhat managed to do that. I will try to update the game with more tiletypes etc. in the near future. I think a postmortem of this weekend is needed for my part as well

Uploaded my entry just a bit ago.

http://www.esnips.com/r/hmfl/doc/2cc943fe-3236-4740-b288-0aac64fb7550/scavern

http://rapidshare.com/files/273654558/scavern.exe

http://rapidshare.com/files/273654962/scavern.gmd

Find the key and open the treasure chest to win!  Avoid the Red Dragon and Bat.  Arrow keys to move.

Used Jave and Irfanview for graphics.  SFXR and MS Sound Recorder for sound.  Yes, this sad excuse for a game was made in Game Maker 5.  Blame it on me not Mark Overmars.

11:58am Sat.  Power reset before I saved the last log.  Didn’t save what I’d developed as of yet either.  Decided to sleep over coding last night.  Still a little shakey on theme.

Currently drinking:  Instant coffee + rice protien + stevia + strawberry extract.  Really bad instant coffee too.

12:43pm Sat.  Gettings caffeined up.  Frustrated with thinking about game ideas.  Has to be simple.  Has to be doo-able.  has to be fun and unique..  Arrrgh!!!!  Shooter RPG Cavern style?  Hmmmn..

4:38pm Sat.  Decided on an art style.  Took awhile to figure out the image processing.  Thinking of standardizing on a Venture/Adventure motif.

5:11pm Sat.  Still working on the game font.  What a pain!!!!  Only doing symbols, numbers and caps though..

5:40pm sat.  Did I mention custom fonts are a pain?  Almost to the letters though..

6:26pm Sat.  Font is done!  Moving on to player sprites and objects.

7:17pm Sat.  player is moving with basic collision.  Added dummy treasure object.

8:24pm Sat.  Ate Steak & Cheese Hose ole and tried to take a nap to no avail.

12:41pm Sun. Started work again after abandoning the project for the rest of Sat.  Got title screen mostly done.

3:01pm Sun.  Got room exiting and enterning done.

4:01pm Sun.  Red Dragon Sprite “good enough” done.  Adjusted game for Full Med and low hero health.

6:15pm Sun.  Got some sound in.  More animation for dragon.  Player health dealt with.

9:12pm Sun.  Went to work to finish the rest.  It’s feature complete.  You can die and you can win.

I’m “done”

“Done” as in, some stuff left to do, but I give up. The game is playable and submitted. People can play it. I will release a Windows version tomorrow-ish. (The XP laptop is asleep and I don’t want to wake it up and start downloading files)

So… I went to sleep on a friday after a long evening of Call of Cthulhu RPG playing with my wife and brother in law. Got to bed about 3am. Up again a few hours later and started to code on my entry around 7am, 2 hours after start. (local time, but you all knew that)

After some quick thinking with a tired brain, I decided my entry shold contain a monocle wearing gentleman on a penny-farthing. The penny-farthing should fly and the player should press and hold space to make it fly higher, and release the button to fly lower. Kind of like all those flash games nobody plays.

But when the first version of the map code was up and running I decided that he should ride the penny-farthing on the ground instead, so the game was transformed to some sort of top-down racing game. And the rest is pretty much history. I didn’t really have a big todo list from the start. I had a few ideas and everything else was thought up, and included, on the fly.

It was an interesting experience for me. I have never done a game in Ruby before. And I have never used Gosu, the game programming library that powers my entry. It turned out pretty well, I think. I really like Ruby because it makes most things pretty easy to do. Gosu was also very easy to use, and I will continue to use it in the future.

What Went Right:

The game runs smooth, even on this macbook with a intel graphics card. I knew before that Ruby isn’t the fastest language around, and I have heard bad stuff about its garbage collection, and how it can make games stutter and lag. I’m not sure I noticed it. At times things was behaving a bit bad, but I had a timelapse movie in the making at the same time and I believe it caused most of the poor performance. I also had a bucket full of apps open at the same time, so I’m not ready to blame Ruby and its GC just yet.

Not sure what else to write. It got done. That is something that went right.

What Went Wrong:

Well, where do I start? Entities and their controllers? I used a new approach for me when it comes to game programming. I followed a short tutorial on how to use Gosu and Ruby. And it used a Model View Controller layout for the game. “Fine”, I though. I already use that when I code in Ruby on Rails, so I’m not a stranger to that. But I made a poor implemention of it. An entity in my game has a model. The model describes what it is and what stats it has. (position on screen, image to show, velocity, etc). Every model needs a controller. The controller tells the model what to do. But I keep these in separate lists. Luckily, no bugs turned up making this fall appart. But instead of having two lists I should have only had one with models in it. And each model should be responsible to know where its controller is. Instead of updating the controllers I should update the models, which in turn updates their controllers. Or vice versa. Not both. That made a mess out of things.

I’m not happy with the map! For some strange reason I though it would be a good idea to store the map as a long list of strings. Each string could look something like this: “3;9;3” which means, 3 solid tiles, 9 empty ones, then three solid again. This would save a lot of space and be a nice thing. Making a pillar in the moddle of the column would look like this: “3;4;1;4;3” (3 solids, 4 empty, 1 solid, 4 empty, 3 solids)
But… WHY? What was I affraid of? Why do I need to save space? It only made things much more complex during rendering and collision detection. And when I realised that, half the compo was over! Too late to change now, just keep going! This of course makes things a bit more complex when it comes to detect what’s to the left and right of a tile. Notice in the game that the stalagmites, or whatever they are called, only shows below and above a column of tiles, and never on the sides? I didn’t even try to write code to allow me to check the sides, thinking it would slow down the game a lot. Next time, don’t diss the good old tilemaps!

Music! I’m not good at making it, and it turns out neither is the computer. The result you hear is at least a lot better than my first attempt! cfxr is a nice tool to make sound effects with (I love 8-bit sounds).  However, my attempts of making musical instruments in it failed in an epic way! So maybe it doesn’t sounds good, but be glad I rewrote it and switched to some samples I found online.

Difficulty; have you played the game yet? Enough said!

Collision detection — I’m doing it wrong! It got better during the second day of the compo. It was a rewrite I had to do! It’s far from perfect and I don’t like the code, but it works. Kind off. Please ignore that you sometimes goes through a piece of the wall before you die. Use it to your advantage instead. Sometimes your should be dead, but isn’t.

And finally, how things usually turns out in my code. I have heard that globals are Bad(tm). Avoid them like the plague, they say. And I do. Stuff is passed from and to the classes and stuff. But sometimes class A doesn’t know about B, and it would be silly if it did, but it must, otherwise I can’t do C. So I hack it in. Now A know B and C is done. But then C needs to know about A, so I have to make a short cut here. And then one there. And before I know it, it’s a mess! And today I found out that I had 3 methods that pretty much did the same thing. Did a quick code refactoring, but I felt silly. The rest of the code is ugly too. But it was written in under 48 hours so I shouldn’t complain.

Closing Words:

I had a lot of fun! I will do it again! I have done similar things in the past (game-in-a-day, and my own Im-bored-will-code-game-in-12-hours private compos), and really enjoys it. I hope you like my entry. Thank you for reading my rant.

Link to entry: here

Tags: LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, Mr Monocle, post-mortem

Wow, what a weekend.

That there was a ld15 this weekend caught me by surprise. I was not sure I would enter until it all began. I figured it was time to complete a complete entry. First up, I started with the music.

I wanted to have some voice, so I wrote stuff into a text-file and got mac speech to speak it out loud. At first I had no idea how to record it to a sound file, but somone on the ld-irc helped me out by showing me that “say -o sound.aiff” would record to file.

The lyrics in the text were inspired by that song “I’m on a boat.. ” , and I wanted to do something similar only in cave setting.

”

I’m in a cave.
in a cave mother fucker.
never thought I’d be in a cave.
dark void and sunshine miles away.
baby let’s cave-in tonight, fuck the light today.

”

Then I figured, since the mac speech sounds like a robot, that there would be a robot speaking. And I wrote some stuff about the robot needing a rope. I still had no gameplay ideas. I dribbled down some stuff on a paper about a rope and a cave, but didn’t find anything. In the lyrics there is also some hints to the robot being evil and wanting to kill you for the rope.

Then the idea came to me, to make a cave setting with stone monsters spawning to attack you, to get the rope that the robot claims you have.

Oh, and a fun part of my experience was after creating the song, I went outside with my camera to take stone/cave textures. They turned out quite decent I think, allthough I’ve probably tiled them to death on my very flat box-like geometry. Wish I had a 3d program available in the pipeline to make some cool geometry, but maybe for next time.

Also thanks to the people at the irc channel for company throughout the weekend.

Here is the link to the game entry

And for people who really wants it, here’s the complete lyrics.

”

I’m in a cave.
in a cave mother fucker.
never thought I’d be in a cave.
dark void and sunshine miles away.
baby let’s cave-in tonight, fuck the light today.

The cave is so dark and loomy,
caveat I forgot we can’t see shit,
the monsters, the horrors.
shoot them, with your colt, revolt,
light baby, light. hold me tight.

Feelings are for pussies,
now I want you to fight.
Shoot your terror,
bring me a rope.
I’m the cave monster,
mostly your mother,
t-bone was busy, so mac-speech got busy,
in the mix slicks, rock steady, the cave is full of them.
the rocks everywhere, cool bystanders drip from the ceiling.
cave is ready, let’s go rave in the cave.

For what it’s worth, which amounts to nothing,
there is less here than four-fourtyeight hours
could bring to this thing.
I am instructing you. A rope, a rope.
I want your rope. My monsters want your rope.
Survive them, survive me.
In a cave. what the fuck are you doing in a cave?

Disco shit, bring light shows in the mix.
Cave, cave, rope rope, ain’t it all dope dope?
stones are cold and wet, will you slide away?
please, I’m the robot in the cave, save.
save me in the cave, save me in the cave,
your rope is the only way to save me in the cave

Never thought I’d see the day,
when a cave came tumbling my way,
believe me when I say,
I fucked a golem

“

Download Cavern Pellet Eater Creatures!

Whew, what a marathon! I am totally brain dead.  It’s amazing how much work goes in a small game project.

The amount of entries is mind boggling, I’m looking forward to playing as many as possible in the next week.

Good night all!

Deskphoto before and after:

This is going to be short and sweet. because my Model M makes a racket and it’s nearly 3AM.

About the game :

Well it’s the second ‘game’ i’ve made this year, it’s simple and has that one-more-go factor to it(at least in my opinion).

Things that went right :

Oh, So much went right and I was overjoyed when they did and it was finished and it actually ended up being pretty righteous. sound was nice and easy to do, graphics took the longest(the playersprite mostly – I was pretty lazy when it came to the floor tiles. Coding was fairly easy, the generation of the floor was a bit tricky but I got it in the end and was amazed when it all worked without a hitch! Scoring and highscores were easy to do, you get 1 point per step(~60pts/sec) and at 100,000pts(add : it’s actually about half an hour) something the world changes.

Things that went wrong :

Oh god the collision was a nightmare. The way i’d written it was everything except the score was moving at 2px a frame left, and Game Maker doesn’t like to do collision very well with moving objects because they are notorious for making the object stop without warning. This of course, led to problems with making gaps in the platforms. I think I completely squashed it though, but I think it might come back in a very very rare case.

ADD: People have commented about the logs that materialise out of nowhere, and they were a hacky bugfix that allowed me to get away with just randomising the floor/fire generation and letting it run wild(there’s a 25% chance of getting a fire tile) as anything more than a 2-tile jump is impossible(note : all two tile jumps are possible, anyone saying otherwise just got unlucky.).

Final Words :

I had a lot of fun coding this. Small games are easy to make, can sometimes be horribly addictive, and a big rush when people like them

My personal highscore is 20,171 – try to beat it!

I’ll definately be doing this again.

Tags: LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, postmortem

And… I’m done! Four LDs in a row, imagine that

Cavernous Shooter! is a top-down shooter set in a cave environment. Try to fight your way through the entire cave system, using the links below:

Windows / OSX / Linux / Source

Java Webstart

Controls:
[WASD] or [Arrows] to move
[Left mouse] to shoot
[Right mouse] to fire shotgun (if you have ammo for it)
[R] to reload
[Q] to toggle particle quality settings

The linked zip file contains .bat and .exe files for Windows, or .sh for Linux and OSX. It also contains the game source code.

There is also a web (Java Webstart) link – just run the .jnlp through your java/bin/javaws.exe (most browsers will default to this behaviour).

Tags: cavern, cavernous, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, shooter

I went out for a walk and hit the grocery store not to long ago.  It was around 8:30 PM when I got got there, and I was pleased to discover they had reduced the price of the stuff in the hot food section.  Sooooo… Blam!

Delicious 50% off pack of fried chicken.

Yummay!

This should get me through the super busy end of compo submission phase, and provide some delicious leftovers for tomorrow.

Tags: foodphoto

I finished! I’m so happies! (And tired. It’s 3am here!)

My game has the dreadful pun title of ‘Miner Distraction’, being a minor distraction from the games I should be making. Hmm. Download is here: http://bentosmile.com/games/minerdistraction/ There’s no sound or anything I’m afraid, as I ran out of time. (My bad for trying to learn while doing this!)

YAH LADIES! This is my first LD48 and I’ve got to say, even though time was quite limited, I’m happy with the result.  Needless to say, I learned a lot and had a lot of fun, especially with the nice IRC folks who so happily helped me procrastinate on stuff that I didn’t want to do (collision “system” comes to mind!)

Anyhow, without further crap I present to you: The Narwhal Bacons At Midnight

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

A game of love, romance, bacon, lots of funky characters and one little narwhal who wants to find his destiny. All in all, a heartbreaking 3-minute piece of art that everybody should have played.

Download here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview&uid=1097

NEEDS URGENT PORTING TO WINDOWS USING PY2EXE!

I got my entry far enough “done” to submit, and have kicked it off – not to be touched again

So this competition has been rather entertaining this time around – I didn’t have any real solid ideas for what sort of game to make so wound up with something not really very game-like; I’m pretty happy with it though – the tech is good; the game could have been better, but ran out of time and motivation.

I’ll probably post a proper postmortem within another day or 2, but need to do something other than the computer for a while now :>
See you all later

Duplicating combo submission stuff:
Download: Win32 Binary | Source

With only a day to make it, and given the fact that I’m no speed programmer, this is all I could manage. Play the thing over here (Flash). I’ll upload a timelapse in a while.

Tags: final, tigs

Finally, a submission-worthy version, complete with menus, music, and online high scores:

Shelter From the Rain

And, of course, a gameplay screenshot:

Nuclear War. Truly, the end has come. Wait, is that a cereal box?

You dig a fallout shelter, then hoard supplies in it. The ultimate goal is to extend your shelter all the way to the cavern below, and re-unite with the rest of humanity. If you make it there you even get to submit your score (a composite of how much stuff you’ve gathered) to the leaderboards!

Download Shelter From the Rain for Windows, or get the Python+PyGame sources (for Linux).

Tags: final, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, pygame, python, screenshot

My first LD and I actually completed a game… well… it could use a lot more polish, but it is playable with a score system, sound effects, etc.  I was a little worried after last night as I had some things come up yesterday that took about 4 hours or so out of my design time, but it all worked out okay.

StoryLine:

You are a cave shaft jumper seeking thrills and treasure.  Score points by picking up treasure and deploying your parachute at the last possible moment to achieve maximum points. The faster your velocity, the more points you score, but watch out because if you’re going too fast when you hit the ground, it is all over!  Avoid the bats when your chute is deployed as they might get tangled in it!  Complete the game by reaching the bottom of the shaft and picking up the entry key to the main cave system.

Get the Windows version of the game here.

Mac version of the game here.

Get the source here.

This game was made using Novashell

After tons of  last minute tweaks and fixes I’m done. As they say, the last 0.1% takes 99.9% of the time ;).

I’m happy how it turned out, and I got to put my new ruby/gosu framework Chingu ( http://github.com/ippa/chingu/tree/master ) to the test.

Oh.. and don’t awake him…

I always feel like its bad luck to use the world “final” but, in any case, this is what I’m submitting!

Windows Executable + Source Code

It’s of course lacking in a few ways, but I feel I managed to finish the essence of what I set out to and even put in some polish!

Feels good to get to rapidly hack SDL on windows again, iPhone development can get boring.

I didn’t have time to incorporate the help screens into the game, so here they are.

Tags: final, screenshot

Well, I spent way too much time on the level editor. I didn’t really have much of an idea anyways, it was going to be a platformer, but by Sunday morning I released I was running out of time and hadn’t started the gameplay, so I switched to yet another ubiquitious cave flyer. Anyways, it didn’t turn out.

Spaceship. In a cave.

On the plus side, I did end up with a nice (if rather barebones) level editor and a bunch of code that could be the basis for a shape-based 2D engine, if I ever feel like cleaning it up.

And I had a lot of fun! Thanks to everyone on IRC for keeping me distracted and amused.

Caverns – v0.6 (Flash)

Being like 10 minutes left I think this will be my last update to the game.

Good luck and congrats to everyone that has participated!

Here’s the entry link: Click click click

And the play link (it’s for Flash): Click click click

Well…I bit off more than I could chew, but I might have managed if I hadn’t had some family distractions today.

So. The game was Star Kittens; the goal was Dungeon Keeper in space…with kittens. How close did I come?

Well, you have sculler droids that act like imps, digging out whatever areas you select. You can also tag dug-out areas as room types (the only rooms I got in were the dormitory (red) and cafeteria (yellow)).

Once you have a large enough dormitory and cafeteria, kittens will start spawning, but because they have no AI, they just stand there. So the game is not completable, indeed there’s very little real gameplay at all.

But here’s a screenshot!

I hope to do much better next time, and Star Kittens has so much good code in it that it would be stupid not to finish it…eventually.

I still had seven enemies, SFX, the title screen and a bunch of fixes to do when I crashed last night (at 2am, and the deadline is 11am for me). Good thing someone came stomping home from her “girls’ night out” at seven thirty.

But it’s done. It’s up. I have no idea if it’s any good but I’d really love to watch two people play it.

It’s a game that needs two humans. One of you designs the next level while the other plays. It’s something I’ve wanted to try for a while and I have a hunch that interesting shit might emerge but for now I’m probably going back to bed.

Spooky Cavern is finished. Playing it is an exercise in overcoming confusion, so download it if you’re into that sort of thing:
Download it (OS X/Windows, 7.5mb)

I don’t think I’m gonna submit it, on account of it being terrible. It looks nice, though:

Cave Jimmy

Absolutely no fun to play at all. Ah well.

Tags: final

Finally finished. Again I pulled off an almost all nighter (i go to work in three hours), but I’, quite happy with the game.

It’s a very short game about being stuck in an underwater cave.

During the competition itself I decided to learn Löve2d and it was quite fun.

In the middle of day one, I actually became so angry with Löve, that I decided to throw away everything and start over in C++ and SDL – but I pursued the idea just for about two hours and then came back to Löve :).

http://optiq.hy.cz/cavedive.zip (3MB) can be played on Windows/Mac/Linux

ouch, that was close 30 minutes to the end and the jar file was giving me problems hehehehe, allways forgeting the deploy details !! but at the end everything is fine, and the final version is on the air.

thanks all !! that was a real fun !

Tags: cave, glaucon, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, ouch, zombie

Well, the competition is over, and I have submitted the rar with source. Be sure to rate well and give trophies. 😉 With my sister and nephew moving down this weekend from duluth to st louis, I probably had half the time I wanted to work on it. With a few more hours, I may have gotten the AI entities working. Oh well, better luck next time, eh?

Well after many, many set backs I managed to cough up a finished “game”

[[ Right now its just a love package (renamed zip file) and you will need love installed to play

Windows “dbl click n go” soon to come for more convenience ]]

The original concept was a “shooter” but then turned twards “asteroids meets defender”,  but then collision with the walls proved  a major problem, which took a day and a quarter !

after seeing a simple solution to all of that, I had less than 6 hours to fix the collisions and make some form of game, so there is nothing attacking you,  its mostly another maze game, and the code is horrible

But after tossing in the towel 2 times I am just happy to have a product that qualifies as a game

gfx = inkscape

music = Osgeld + crappy old keyboard and SFXR

system = love 0.50

font = cheated

1024×768 window, Keyboard control (arrow keys, wsad, and keypad)

If you have love already installed on your system or use unzip for sources

DOWNLOAD LD15-OSGELD.love

Self exe windows package tomorrow when I get home from work

Tags: final

After much work, my entry is finally finished.  Little Jimmy roams around in his cavern collecting points and mining away.

Arrow keys to move, z to mine. Explore the cave to gain points. A mining a wall gets 1 point, a stalagmite 10 points, and finding a mushroom gives 100. If you mine out of the room, you should find another cavern, continue to find more and more caverns, racking up the points. I had allot of fun making this entry, procedurally generated caverns and all, so I hope you have some fun playing it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview&uid=530

Edit: View the timelapse here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNTvw0nG8o4

Tags: timelapse

I’ve used the snazzy new uploader tool to submit my final version of Angry Caverns with 10 minutes to spare even!

You can play Angry Caverns here in your browser.

Main menu

Level 5 of the final version

You can play Angry Caverns here in your browser.

ANGRY CAVERNS – by HybridMind – August 28th-30th, 2009
Created from scratch for Ludum Dare 15’s 48hr game competition

Concept:

You are the angry caverns. You awaken one day to find many creatures living inside of you. This pisses you off. Destroy as many as you can.

How To Play:

• Click on the stalactites and bubbling vents to trigger your attacks.
• You will have limited time on each level
• Chain attacks for big combo points
• Glowing creatures are worth more bonus points
• Bigger completion bonuses for more creatures killed
• Supports online leaderboards!

Tools used:

Coded in Flash / ActionScript 3.0 using the Flash CS4 IDE and using Dr. Petter’s sfxr for sound effects. I composed both music loops in Reason.

Got Feedback?

Feel free to email me at dave [at] hybridmind.com or visit my blog and leave me a comment.

I’ll be working on this game some more so any thoughts or suggestions while be taken into consideration for the post-compo version! Thanks for playing and I hope you have a good time with it!

Tags: angry, bats, cavemen, caverns, geysers, highscores, leaderboards, stalactites, steam, vents

I’m not entirely happy with the result since there are still a lot of bugs and it’s not that much fun to play as I hoped.
If you just tuned in, Cavern Defense is a turn-based strategy game for two players.

Here is the final screenshot:

Download it here (Win32 binary and source)
I’ll be adding a linux and Mac OS X binary in a few hours. It’s 5:00 AM right now and I desperetaly need sleep.

Tags: cavern defense

Heyo, here tis:

http://www.originowl.com/Home/greencow-ld15

Finality.

Well, I managed to submit something that works and is playable! That’s kind of stupendous news to me. It’s not really all that hard (or long) but I am still interested in seeing what people think of it. I’m sure the submissiony system will go up soon and we can look at everything, but till then…

Sufi: http://www.cs.stevens.edu/~pmainwar/ld15.zip

I can’t believe I actually got this in in time

I created “Ascent” in one day, after scrapping my project from saturday that wasn’t going anywhere. This one almost didn’t go anywhere either, but I changed direction in the last few hours and managed to produce something at least playable.

Play here!

Talk about cutting it fine.

No, I didn’t quite finish my game, although it can now almost be described as a game, in that it has an ending and some sort of gameplay. It’s distinctly lacking in introduction, however, so I guess I’ll mention here how to play the damn thing:

Its a kind of text adventure, but you can walk about with the cursor keys and dig with the right control key. Type “help” for a summary of text commands. Your goal is to find the treasure.

I’m going to do a big ol’ post mortem for this one, so that’ll probably come tomorrow. But suffice it to say that I made some bad decisions that cost me a lot of time, and I vow to do better next time. I’ve also been taking time-lapse shots (because they’re awesome) so I’ll have to mash those together into some kind of video in the next few days.

So… yeah. There’s probably lots more I want to say but I’m mentally exhausted right now so I’m finding it difficult to… words….. Hopefully I haven’t missed out any crucial libraries from my executable. If the binary doesn’t work, you’ll need Python 2.6 and PyGame 1.8 – that’s all it should need as far as I can remember.

Once again I cannot wait to play the other entries tomorrow – they all look superb!

I didn’t get a chance to post about it before, because I was in a hurry to get it finished, sent off, and then take care of a few other things, but I did get it submitted in time! Behold, the Cave of Peril!

As you can see, the cave is very dark, so it’s very lucky that you have that handy dandy flashlight. You are being chased by evil invisible zombie gnomes, so it’s generally in your best interest to get away from them, all the while avoiding traps and goo and finding your way through the maze of death. Each level is procedurally generated, so you can keep playing for as long as you can survive. Have fun!

Tags: final

So, here it is, my entry for Caverns:

Refuge puts you in a turret defending one of the last cities of humanity from the alien invasion.

There is soo much more I wanted to do with this, and didn’t have time… but isn’t that always the story? It was a mad rush for the finish line, but I think I got it to a playable state.

Now I must go eat, because my stomach has begun consuming itself. Timelapse and postmortem to come later!

Tags: journal, screenshot

Tags: motivation

Finish the competition

Like a Boss

YEA~!!! watch that – feel good with ur self for the hard work and Good Night mates~!

“Like a boss~!” ^_^

So I’m pretty happy to finally post my first ever completed entry for Ludum Dare. Check out Into the Pit: The Endless Caverns here!

It’s a game heavily-inspired/influenced/ripped off from level 2 of Battletoads for the NES (which was one of the more sane levels in that game). You basically go around avoiding spikes/traps and killing bats with a simple dash attack. Like Battletoads you can juggle the bats for extra points and to regain health. The game goes on forever until you die. Right now there’s plenty of chance of that due to the lack of end stage balancing since I ran out of time near the end and wanted to get things like menus done.

This time around my goal was over the first 24 hours to come up with a fully-playable prototype and to spend the last 24 hours adding graphics, audio, and polish. Surprisingly enough that actually held true for the most part. I managed to come up with the basic game late last night and I spend most of today on things like finer gameplay details and working on sprites and sounds. You may notice my explorer sprite is a little too close to comfort to a certain famous indie game character. Forgive me for that, I really suck at pixel art and being derivative was the best I could do.

One thing I’m actually really pleased with is how at the very end (literally the last 2 hours) a more ominous feel entered into the game. On a whim I added in some rumbling sounds that I looped continuously on the menu screen. Combined with screen shaking I really dug the “collapsing cavern” atmosphere that was being generated so I ran with that. If I had a little more time I would have liked to have added touches like falling debris and other signs of collapse.

Regardless I hope people enjoy it. Have fun and feel free to criticize and comment.

Note: It was made using Flixel which I understand is perfectly fine for this competition. And I can safely say that without Flixel there’s no chance in hell I would have had anything completed.

And that’s that. It ended up… not as polished as it could have been. As is always the way. I would have liked to have got a variety of weapons and some different aliens in there. As it is, I threw in the smaller enemies literally at the last minute so I don’t really know how difficult it is.

Play in browser here.

LoneStranger's Caverns

I finally got my entry done.  It’s not nearly what I wanted it to be, but that’s ok.  It’s ok because it’s still a game.  Most of the time my entries end up being tech demos or proofs of some concept at the deadline.   This one is different though.  The engine itself is complete enough that you can create levels for it and actually play them.

If you’ve ever played the Kroz games, you’ll see the similarities.  I used it as massive inspiration.  I tend to forget about it when I think about my favorite games growing up, but there’s no denying that I spend hours upon hours playing it.

I can see myself working with this afterward, making the engine more robust and fixing some of the things that can be done in a more efficient manner.  There are plenty of new objects and mechanisms to create.  I only created a few of them.  I could create other monsters too.

Right now there is only one level, and it doesn’t have any kind of ‘campaign’ code to link more of them together, but that would certainly be in the cards.   A level editor would also be a must, as I did this first level using just a text editor and about twenty minutes.

For now though, I’m going to go spend time with my family who I have ignored this weekend.  And hey, maybe go to bed early.  There is work tomorrow.

Have fun with LoneStranger’s Caverns!

Tags: caverns, final, kroz, ld48_15, screenshot

Oooh, magic mushroomies!

Link to the entry (downloads for Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X)

Another LD. It was fun, but maybe less (for me) than the previous times. Indeed, the conditions were not really good. I just moved back to school, so I spent quite a lot of time with my friends during the week end (saturday evening, and sunday afternoon). Plus, I’m crashing at a friend place so it’s not like I can throw pizza boxes around the room from my bed. And I didn’t have all my stuff, including a mouse for the laptop.

Despite all this, I managed to make a complete game, and I’m kinda happy about it.

What when wrong

• Strictly no idea for the theme. Plus the fact that I knew I couldn’t give my full attention to the compo. So after a (short) while, I decided to remake Boulder Dash, which I actually didn’t know (I had in mind a clone I used to play on my old Mac). Originality zero.
• Loss of motivation halfway through it. I actually spent quite a few hours on late saturday night toying with LuaGL and doing the examples of the Red Book, to distract me a little.
• Erm, graphics. I suck at them, and I didn’t have a mouse. So I re-drew stuff from the web, which I’ve been told is valid. Note however that the title and win screen use images I didn’t create, and therefore shouldn’t be taken in account when voting. All the rest is “hand drawn with a model”.

What went well

• As the game itself was fairly simple, and since I didn’t need to think of new  ideas, the coding was fast and headache free. Gamplay was complete in maybe 6 hours.
• With all the time I had left, I could take special care about the sound. SFXR gave me all the in game sounds, but I took a while to select them carefully. And I managed to write a 1:19 min music with Milkytracker, which I think is not too bad (could have been a lot better, of course).
• For once, I have a game with an end, and the difficulty progression is quite OK. I managed to play to the last level, so the game should be hard but beatable.
• Once again I praise Lua and LÖVE. They rock. Plus the multi-platform awesomeness.

I don’t know how to compare this entry with my previous ones. On the one hand, it’s not original, super simple and doesn’t look too good, but on the other hand, it’s finished, a bit polished, and the gameplay is supposed to be good (I didn’t invent it. I just hope I didn’t screw it in the implementation).

Now I don’t except high positions in the results, but I don’t consider it a “real” LD for me either. Next time I’ll be more ready and available.

Good voting, and congrats to all entrants!

So I was just beginning to have fun. Here’s a vector type of miner race. But before anything I’ll represent you my accomplishments in game development.

-In highschool (about 7 years from now) I programmed a snake game, it included a rabbit with basic run-away algorithm aside from apples.
-One or two months ago I made a shoot’em up type of thing with pygame which you are controlling a plane and there are two monsters in screen and background is scrolling.
-And now I made this.

So I hope you won’t blame me now Strength lies in knowing your weaknesses, they say. I knew I couldn’t try anything more complicated. At least I learned some basic things.

So what I present you is a miner racing game (where one racer rides the mine tracks and the other, well, the ceiling) with real fake 2d physics and polynomial interpolation as a track editor. Cars act like roller coaster, they can’t leave the rails. Did I mentioned no sprites?

So first, what I was able to pull;

– If I had 2d physics, I needed 2d collision detection too (even though pygame can collide some stuff). So I made a fake 2d physics engine. It just calculates the impact of gravitational force and then everything is 1d. Still looks 2d.

And what doesn’t work as expected but still better than nothing

– I wanted to let the user enter an array of 2d checkpoints and then create a track from it by polynomial interpolation. Bad thing is I used Lagrange polynomials. I wanted to use them since they didn’t need any slope information. But midway I wanted to have horizontal start and finish lines. I should have gone with something smoother but I don’t really remember much of interpolation and I didn’t had time to read again.

– Appearently zooming in and out of a surface is expensive especially if the surface is big enough to hold your whole track. Something can be done if drawn polynomial tracks are optimised in some way, like rendering on-the-fly with level of detail. Still camera can track the arithmetic mean of 2 cars.

Things I would have added if I had some more time

– Fake collision detection in 1d. I was planning to have obstacles on road, throwing molotov cocktails at each other, rocks falling down(can’t think of a cavern game without this). And even changing tracks (like jumping up to the track above and hit the other car on the back)

– Calculating stuff so that I could tell if the tracks are colliding or seperated too much. Setting minimum margin so that the guys’ head don’t collide. Compare lengths of tracks. Putting vector rail woods every 10 unit and vector lights hanging down from upper track every 100 units. Simple calculus stuff like that.

– The racers (flowers on the pots) would have physics too. Like ragdolls, their heads would go back as you accelerate and hit their head to the front of the car if you lose speed suddenly.

– Everything’s ready to implement car graphics but I’m not sure if rotating surfaces work well in pygame. The tracks can have sprites too. (but someone has to draw them first, of course)

So here are some screens and a link to code if you want to try it. You’ll need numpy (scipy is not needed I guess) and pygame and a python interpreter of course.

Now that I used my extensive knowledge on high-school physics, basic calculus (taking derivative of polynomials really) and the numerical analysis course I took 2 years ago which I forgot everything except Lagrange polynomials, I can finally move onto real 2d stuff with linear algebra.

Of course I’ll fall asleep/faint on my bed first.

I  submitted the game an hour ago, but I forgot to post on the blog!

Play it via the browser <a href=”http://www.deadpanda.com/lj/ld15submit.html”>HERE</a>, or grab the download (Windows or Mac): <a href=”http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview&uid=472″>HERE</a>

I’m very excited because this is my first successful ludumdare entry. My last two attempts crashed and burned, and this was pretty close to doing the same. I was able to scrape it with a few rough edges and submit it on time.

I was really busy so I didn’t upload my latest food photos.  Here goes!

An orange and Dr. Pepper pre-lunch snack.

And then I totally forgot to take a picture of my In’n’Out burger, but I guess pretty much everyone can guess what it looked like.  Here’s dinner though:

Nom'd pasta with peas and chicken.

Tags: foodphoto, ld48_15

Wow… I’m still shaking from the excitement of that final crunch.  I worked on the game pretty much all day today only breaking for necessary bodily functions.  Got it submitted less than one minute before the deadline.  And I’m really pleased with how it came out!  Yesterday I hated it, but today everything seemed to click together like a jigsaw puzzle.

And I had a BLAST making the music.  I recorded and edited it all in Audacity.  I performed it on a little quarter-size Denver acoustic guitar I bought a couple weeks ago for a camping trip ($100 CAD).  I also used a Bluesband harmonica (just a cheap little thing).  As for the microphone… it’s just a crappy $40 Logitech thing from Future Shop I bought for voicechat in online games.  I uploaded the soundtrack as a separate ZIP file as well, for anyone who’s interested: http://mattmakesgames.com/soundtracks/BrokenCaveRobotSoundtrack.zip

Overall I’m happy with all the weird little ideas I got to try out in this game.  The first two days consisted of me dumping every idea I had into the game – today was me sewing it all together.

Finaly I’m done… everything works for the best I hope =]

I worked mostly on graphics, luckily I’m quite fast with drawings and my tablet helped me a lot to make things faster and easier =]

about the game, I didn’t have time to add sounds or music or make a decent menus and intro which I planed… instead I decided that I will go for polishing the game abit… I made 7 levels with bonus levels anda final boss =]

features

• 7 levels with bonus levels
• 3 enemy types + 1 boss + special creatures
• 3 attack typs + 1 super attack
• bonuses + diamonds

Download

Download Akin Revenge

Screenshots

Tags: ld48_15, motivation, sleep

Well, couldn’t get a demo working in time.  This is my second LD and my first fail.  I’ll try to take away some of the sting by detailing what went wrong!

I wanted a procedurally generated cavern that you could climb using a grappling hook.  I wanted the grappling hook to be modeled as realistically as possible, so it would react like real rope and not stretch much, wrap around corners, etc.  Turns out this is a pretty tough thing to do 😉

I used the Bullet physics library because I’ve messed with it before, and also because I saw a demo for Softbody Rope which seemed exactly what I needed.  Unfortunately, like EVERYTHING in that library, the rope was very sparsely documented.  It took me almost 10 hours to get it working.  This was something I hoped to get done in an hour or so.

Finally, at the end of my first day I got the rope behaving somewhat how I wanted.  Good enough to proceed at least, so the second day I focused on cavern generation.  I wanted to be able to create interesting geometry out of a huge block, so I decided to implement the “marching tetrahedrons” algorithm for turning a volumetric dataset into polygons.  This took longer than anticipated due to a silly small mistake that was hard to track down.  It didn’t help that I was already bummed about losing so much time due to the rope issue 😛

So after finally getting the rope working and a basic cavern generated, I tried to add the cavern mesh to Bullet and get some collisions going.  Unfortunately this is when the deadline snuck up on me, and despite coding furiously I couldn’t finish in time.  I do think I’ll continue with this concept until I get something playable.

Despite the fail, I had a great time as usual.  I’m happy about finally implementing the marching tetrahedron algorithm, as I have a few project ideas that will definitely benefit from it.  And as much as I want to hate on Bullet right now, it is a fun library to play with.  Just not the most fun when there is no documentation and precious little time to comb through source files trying to figure out how something works.

I’ll end with some random shots of things going wrong

Tags: post-mortem

You can watch 36 hours of my game development on Angry Caverns compressed into 3 minutes here in my timelapse video on YouTube.

It was my first year doing a timelapse and I think I’m hooked.  So much fun to see the creative process!

Time to sleep soon too…

Tags: angry, caverns, timelapse, youtube

Here is my timelapse video for Cave Miner:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmhxYSmflg

You can play the game here: http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/ld/CaveMiner/

Tags: timelapse

31 hours in 5 minutes ^__^.

Tags: timelapse

Had I known that I was going to end up with such an uninteresting game, I wouldn’t have bothered, but since I already did, here’s the timelapse video. At least it’s a short one.

Tags: tigs, timelapse

It’s amazing, after a relaxing swim and glass of wine, I came back to the computer and quickly fixed a few bugs that were really annoying me about the last version.

Here’s the change list:

– Net now kills any Grags on it, when set to capture mode.

– Pouper now grows out from its center, not oddly to its right.

– Now you have to get pretty much all of Brinie in the net to capture her. Winning when just getting her partway in the net makes it a little too easy I think.

Here is the new version for windows, mac and linux:

http://www.divshare.com/download/8334544-ac5

By the way, this is one program that will chew up as much cpu as you got. an overclocked i7 would be great if you want to see 1000s of Grags moving around at 30 frames per second. Will only use one core though. My dual core machine can get maxed to 50% with one core in full use while playing.

Have fun, or at least, enjoy the sand box of dead.

I should have just submitted Spelunky

So close and yet so far. Two hours short of really putting in an entry. Second Ludum Dare first failure.

In SGDSGU you are a telekinetic kid escaped from a covert government facility. Once they became aware of your escape, they sent out zombies to do away with you. As far as controls go, just click the fully formed stalactites at the top. Puncture zombie heads and try to stay alive!

(You can download what would have been the final here (play it in the stand alone flash player instead of the browser).

Currently missing:

– Win condition.

– Sounds.

– Stalagmites to block the zombies.

– More user feed back (hover mouse over stalagmites causes a glow).

– Gore effects.

– Optimization 😛

I’m still running on the high of getting the game done on time, figure I may as well decompress with a mini post-mortem.

What Went Right

Concept

Settled on a pretty simple concept.

Art

The animation and character creation went extremely smoothly in flash.  I like how everything turned out visually. Flint also eased the burden art wise with some neat dynamic deaths for the zombies.

Programming

Flint was pretty easy to get up and running, the examples that came along with it could not make it any easier to use.

The game programmatically was not all too complicated, so most of that went pretty smoothly as well.

What Went Wrong

Concept

I wasn’t too big on the caverns theme as it left so many options open (?). Yes too many options, through together a bunch of concepts. They were pretty easy to narrow down, most of them included tilesets, yet, since I’ve never drawn tilesets from scratch I was pretty apprehensive about going that route.  I did a lot of humming and hawing as Flixel looked like the perfect little engine for this competition. Easy to generate some random caverns toss a ninja rope in there, and bam you’re done. In the end my fear of pixel art was enough to keep me away.

Art

I hate flash registration points.

I need to have a timer going while I’m working on the art, I put way too much time into making the art bits, when a good chunk of it didn’t get used. I know placeholder art, generally becomes the final art. So I try to get it done all in one go. Having the same problem last compo, I think I’ll have to go about it differently next time around.

Programming

Wasted a little bit of time getting up to speed on Flint. I have to stop using Ludum Dares as a way to try new things. I need to start dealing with the learning curves before the competition.

Placed my registration points way too willy nilly,  wasted way too much time programmatically shifting bitmapdata and registration points around.

Sleep

Squandered a bunch of time sleeping, got a decent 20 hours of sleep in.

—

I got most of what I wanted accomplished. I wish I would have had more time to play around with Flint to create some neat gore effects but oh well. Despite all the extra time I sunk into the artwork, it was a good experience, it was good to spend some quality time with my tablet.

Congrats to all you guys the majority of the games this time around look really phenomenal.