Answer: Everything’s more awesome with pirates!

I need to just finalize on an idea and get to work!

Well it’s technically day 2 right now, so i’m off for some sleeps! but before that, how about an update?

so as you can see there’s one major update; that little green guy, you spawn in a little house on a fairly desolate island. to the left are two more islands with different resources (you can swim between islands). you’ll also notice I got rid of beginning resources, and those extra little slots will be for items (ex: you need this item to mine stone, chop wood, etc.) I also added stone. you also can’t destroy blocks that are too far away from the character (64px to be exact) there’s a bug with that but I’ll fix it tomorrow. That’s about it 😛 also, I’ve uploaded the current version to media-fire, so feel free to check it out my progress here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?y2nndenddht

Plans for tomorrow:

• Stamina so getting to far away islands is harder
• fix odd bug with destroying blocks
• add 5 more tiles
• add items
• add a way to make items with your resources
• more islands
• a point to the game (a way to win?)
• day+night
• enemies of some sort

Good luck and Good night!

What progress?

Seriously, who the hell voted on these themes? Islands? C’mon…

It’s the end of the first night for me now and I still don’t really have a solid idea. There’s maybe some vague concepts floating around in my head (like islands). And there’s an idea, but I have no idea where to go with it. Hopefully something will develop to the point where I can work with it when I wake up.

So far I’ve only written some very basic code that really does nothing significant and thought a lot with very few results.

I’m not given up yet though. I will continue the fight after sleep.

So I’m awake, and the theme’s islands, which wasn’t what I’d been expecting.  After some thought though, I’ve come up with an idea which I think will work.  It’s going to be a take on the Weird Worlds/Adventures in Infinite Space formula, set in the Hebrides.  There’s going to be quite a lot of art to do, but if I can get that out of the way today I should be in good shape.

Here’s a picture of my extremely cluttered desk:

A big bowl of porridge for breakfast, which seemed appropriate given my game’s setting.

I’ve got my tile engine up, mouse support is good. I’m doing a pretty simple game where you’re just surviving on an island after a some accident on your yacht or private jet or whatever (I think I’m going to let you pick which type of crash you survived, and that would control the items you start out with). You have to eat, drink, build shelter, etc. or you die. The point is to survive long enough to get rescued. The terrain will be generated at random, but I have to create a better algorithm than what I have now. I’m in the states so I’m off to score some sleep (finally).

keep it simple

Woke up after six a.m. read the theme and went to sleep again. Of course my lazy ass subconsciousness didn’t come up with any idea, so I have to do it all by myself.

Got some healthy breakfast and now I’m ready to come up with something.

I would like to do an adventure game, visiting different islands, collecting objects, talking with people. Let’s see where this will get me.

So far I have taken the Box2D example app, and, er, made one of the shapes look like a boat.

It's box2d in debug mode, with islands, maybe

Hello ! I’m now here !
First, I am french, and I was not so courageous for wake up at 4H00 AM. I’m now here since 8H30 AM.
The subject seem to be really cool !! My idea : a tycoon game.
The game start with an desert island and one people go on to live in. You have to improve his standards of living.
For that you must to build some building with the money that people give to you.

For the moment, I have just display a rectangular island on the screen.

Oh, before I continue, I want to say that I use Python and Pygame.

modeled a fish, and a raft. made some islands, and added a stamina system and a few other odds and ends. going to sleep for a few hours and get back to it.

Tags: islands, unity

Hmm.. Unexpected…

Rainbow Islands?  Carrier Command?  Pirates? 4 8 15 16 23 42?

Initial thoughts involve a landscape engine, but I don’t really want to go for the whole over-ambitous full 3D thing… not got the tools/tech ready to load models…   Can’t really go for anything high-tech these days, from near scratch, it just gets pwned by the Unity users… so maybe I’ve got to actually start concentrating on gameplay?!

Trying to sprite… Usually easy for me, but not today xD. Anyway, I really like the theme, And Ill make a game… (For the comp)

It’s going well, what I need to work render side is there, so I decided to kick back and start drawing some art up with my restrictions of 4x 2 bit palettes, and choice of one of these palettes for each 8×8 tile. It’s actually pretty fun doing artwork like this – my main problem with art is all the choices I can make. Having strict limitations has forced me to think a bit smarter when drawing up my artwork. First, sanity check, then a sneak peak at my background tile sheet.

Oh dear..

Palm trees! Sun! Clouds! Cactus!?

It’s “Islands” theme, and I already got an idea. You’re a traveling salesman and you sell stuff, while trying not to get killed by pirates. It should be a fun game! I’ll be using gamemaker as my weapon of choice as I only got one day.

My breakfast!

Vanilla yoghurt with a taste of strawberry, raspberry and rhubarbs. I added a banana(not pictured) for extra taste!

Candy leftovers

… and some candy leftovers from yesterday. My brothers though Minnie Mouse candy suited me

Heya folks! Time for LD again I guess. Grabbed my stuff, emptied my fridge and went to university to work overnight cause there’s no way I could work at home. The theme is islands? So I’m gonna (try to) go with:

– Gosu and Ruby for programming

– Photoshop and my tablet for graphics

– Trying to make a timelapse with photobooth and a screencast with chronolapse

– For sounds, sfxr and gonna try LMMS

Here’s a pic of the current workspace

And I’m a really smart guy. Packed food, but forgot my toothbrush and stuff. Yay, gonna be happy tomorrow when my breath will hinder me at programming.

Have fun everyone!

Graphics style update:

Gfx Mockup #1

No real code written yet, but I almost have my framework together to the point where graphics are being displayed on the screen and I’ve got a good idea how the architecture will work.

I am a huge fan of Sid Meier’s Pirates, so I took inspiration from his game. I however am not very good with 2d math, so I decided to wait to do the movement and battles for last, in case I won’t have time.

I’ve pencilled in the map.  If there’s anyone from the Hebrides reading this, you have my deepest apologies…

This is what it’s meant to look like.

Next step: ink!

LD17 started on 3AM at my place, so I’m a bit behind, but I’ll try to catch up on the rest of LDers. I woke up at 7am, read the selected theme, then returned to bed and comfortably contemplated about the game until 9am. This is the result that my half-sleeping brain was able to produce:

Neat breakfast followed (in co-op with my better half):

And here is the initial design

Tags: breakfast, foodphoto, progress

Basically the idea of my game is that you control a robot who has crashlanded on some planet with a lot of islands in the sky. To survive you must find a steady supply of electricity, build shelter to be safe from Mother Nature and find stuff to repair your shuttle.

Well, here is the first screenshot:

And here is a sketch I made a couple of hours ago which summarizes the gameplay (although I changed human survivor to robot):

Once again I am taking part in Ludum Dare, had a tough decision this year as I could have gone to a discussion on Alan Wake and met Sam Lake, however that was cancelled due to travel issues (plus I chose to go with Ludum Dare when deciding anyway).

So I’ve started my day with an awesome breakfast

Beans on Toast (apologies for the low res image, having internet issues so i had to keep it small)

I have an idea for my game, just gotta start getting it altogether now, I would mention it, but I want to keep it a surprise Hopefully nobody else will be using my idea, keep it nice and original, that is as long as I can finish it in time

Oh yeah and I’m using Game Maker, as I can hardly code.

Tags: beans on toast, ideas, islands, LD17

I’ve written up my first update (6 hours) here, with a screenshot.

It wasn’t nearly as productive as my first Ld16 segment, but I’m feeling good about it.

Heading to bed, but pictures will be posted in the morning!

Good morning everyone.. Just woke up and trying to get started.. “Islands” as a theme.. Not the worst of them all, but it will likely some time to figure out something original.. Also the tech is totally open. I’m somewhat tempted to go with .NET, F# and SlimDX. Meaning at most 3 people will try out the game, so it becomes more of a story + screenshot competition. Good luck everyone and have fun creating your entries!

Tags: LD17

Hi everybody!

Islands sounds like a good theme and I’ve already got a fairly good idea for a game which I might just be able to pull off in the next 48 hours.

So for this entry I will be using:

* Python
* Pygame
* Pygame-fenix
* Pycatcher (If I can get it working)
* Graphics gale
* GIMP
* Rosegarden / Cakewalk
* Sfxr

One of my main goals this time round is to get some music in there, so I’m going to have to round off my gameplay and graphics with plenty of time to spare for that, I think.

Anyway, good luck everybody!

Tags: hello, theme, tools

Ok, I’m in. And I’m hungover. This will be interesting.

I’m moving pretty slow, I admit.  But I do have a little bit to show.

Jealous Gods: Prototype #1

There’s not much to see, but all the internal structure data is in the game.  Level definitions, where to position the islands, what their initial populations are, etc.

food is crap, well sorta a nice hot cup of stout tea, and a pre-packed honey bun

So progress, starting to feel nappy, hence the tea + sugar, I have been up since 7am, worked a full day and am now on hour 7 of ludum dare (4 am the next day, hardcore!)

have love loading my collision map no problem, and have the ui part of the game pieced together, about to start on the water animation

game mechanics seeming to be ok on paper, so far, so good

Workspace #1: Starbucks.

I’m all done for today and I still have enough caffeine in my system to keep my dreams strange. I goofed off a lot during these first few hours and didn’t get any real work done. I did come to the conclusion that my favorite audio sequencer available for Linux is now Renoise. It’s not open source, but damn if it’s not a cool piece of software. It’s not Ableton Live, but then, Live doesn’t run on Linux, and it costs three times as much. I feel a little silly sticking myself with a new tool to learn in the middle of the contest, but I’m determined to get some music in my entry, and also work completely in Linux while I do it. Good night!

Tags: linux, music, workspace

Since I’m late, I’m obviously not ready yet.

OK, now i set up my enviroment and am ready to go:

Coding: C + Allegro + AllegroGL + Code::Blocks
Craphics: GraphicsGale
Music: FLstudio
Colour theme: “Borland nostalgia”

So I’ve inked the map and scanned it in:

…and I think I’m going to try and use watercolours to colour it.  I’ve not used watercolours in ages, so this may turn out to be a bad idea (test colours after the cut).

The large blue green blob at the bottom right is probably going to be the sea, with the grey-ish one in the middle being the land.

If it all goes wrong, I at least have the plain inked map on my computer as a backup.

My first screenshot of some generated islands. I’ve done the preliminary graphics, and constructed the generating algorithm. Now I have 256 more or less unique islands to choose from.

I have a solid idea for a game of sorts, and I’m positive I will be able to finish that. But it’s probably not the best of ideas. Still I don’t have a very good track record for LD entries. I’ll take a short (family forced :P)break, and think this over. Maybe I can come up with something better that will incorporate these islands.

Tags: generated, islands, screenshot

I’m not even remotely an artist, but I do like my pixelz in this lil’ prototype!

Tags: flash, pixel art

Oh Ho Ho! The island creates itself! Now to work on water and the player movementation.

Woke up, had a small fit with the theme ( my original ideas wouldn’t fit for it ) so made some tea and had a think.

Hmm… Islands…

After some scribbling in GIMP, I ended up with this.. so a piratey game sounds like it could be fun to do!
Also, I’ve already done most of the tiles I’ll need now, and they’re not too horrendous for a change either.
Enjoy the test tile grid I created.. now to actually get some code done!
Decided I’ll be using SGZEngine again… but perhaps gutting bits out as I go in preparation of redoing the thing.
More details about YARGH! ( working title, though it’ll probably stay ) as I think of them!

YARGH! Tile Example

Initiations are today, and papers/finals are starting to collide now, so I’ve come to accept that I won’t be able to finish a game this weekend. Still, I hope to learn a lot so I can compete for real next time.

Tags: newbie

Ok, it’s my first time in LD and I hope I can make at least something playable. I was looking forward to the theme parallel universes and had some interesting ideas for that, but I guess islands will have to do

First hour I spent figuring out what I was going to do. Then I got a half decent idea and had to decide whether to do it in 3d or in 2d. I wanted some animation to it and I don’t like sprite sheets, so it had to be in 3d.

I’ll be writing it in C++ with OGRE. I hope to have something playable in about 6 hours.

Here’s something I made for it in about 40 minutes. Models are made with 3ds max and textures with paint shop pro. I’m a lousy artist but I guess this will do.

oh god. I 100% want to make a rebirth of Republic … a political simulation. It will take place in vienna and i already extracted a smaller set of rules and am ready to go.

Not sure how to strap islands onto that pig, though. We’ll see…

Tags: concept, simulation

So, after staying up till 4 AM waiting for the theme announcement, and then staying an extra hour thinking about ideas, I finally went to sleep after I got a decent enough idea.

It’s morning, and it’s hour 8 of the competition, and all I have so far is an idea that I’m trying to think of how to implement in 3D and without dreaming up any fancy artwork (because I am capable of none!). I went through the posts people have made so far, and I can already see I’m behind, people posted their first screenshots already! I guess I better get coding!

But, I think I need some breakfast first…

Thrown some graphics together, let’s write some code.

Just woke up and had breakfast, after a quick peek at the theme… Islands?

I won’t say I hate islands, but I kind of did a game with islands on the last competition, which sucks…

No idea on what I’m going to do, but I’ll try to stear clear of the exploration, Sid-Meier-esque thing…

Time to think about an idea…

It workses. It does. Yeeees.

http://swampwitchgames.com/stuff/ld17-Ina.zip

Okay, I’ve been plugging away for a few more hours, putting player movement + collision in, adding stuff so I can load and save levels in some way.

Annoyingly I wasted about half an hour on a completely silly bug that I really should have spotted sooner. If you’re relying on a variable to be different in each instance of a class, make sure you haven’t made it “static”.. Grarghh..

Liberal application of tea and ginger biscuits got me through it though.

Feeling rediculously hungry already, but it’s only 11am here (UK), so I’m going to try and hold off on lunch for a bit longer.. In the meantime, more tea and biscuits!

Build Two

You can walk around, between screens, and can’t walk of the islands.. There’s a few glitches still, but nothing horrific.. Next step is probably to add some actual gameplay mechanics, might need to do some design work first though, my ideas are still a little vague.

The theme kind of surprised me! I didn’t see it in the final round I think but it’s better than what I feared the most! Actually, I like it. It made me think about couple of games which utilized world ‘island’ as the core concept. Games like Adventure Island, that indie game Stranded 2, the less known IslandBiz game and a couple of others.

In short, I’m interested and would like to finish my entry this time.

I will keep you updated.

–Miroslav

Tags: Flixel, tigs

OK, ten hours have past already, but I just woke up. Breakfast at 13:00, no problem. Have kindof an idea for the islands, but not really sure yet where it’s going.

Also, it looks like I’m going down a very dangerous road, of trying 3D stuff. First time, yay. I’ve been playing a bit with my setup before, going through the Redbook, but never actually applied to a game. We’ll see…

Of course, since 3D is so hard to make look good (how the hell did they do Gears of Wars out of triangles, I’ll never understand), I’m going for a very minimalistic “retro” style, with flat shaded polys (no textures, except maybe for some UI elements)

Also I find the title “Islands of Misericord” to have quite a sound to it, although I’m not even sure it means what I want in English, and also I have absolutely no gameplay or background idea as of now.

Bah, all in good times.

Yay, greenish heightfield!

Also, for the curious, I’m using my own lib evöL, more or less a SDL wrapper, along with LuaGL, which despite being quite the suck on some points, is pretty cool.

Also, I’m planning on making the main input device a gamepad (with of course equivalents on the keyboard), because I have one, and it’s cool.

Tags: screenshot

Yo. This is my second Ludum Dare, but my first post. So hi.

I was a little disappointed with the islands theme, but with a little creativity and bending of rules, I was able to use my concept.

In this game, you play as a hunter for a small tribe, and you explore your island and gather food, slaying warthogs and other beasts.

I plan for three playable characters: A shaman who can control animals and cast healing magic (gathers plants), an archer who can shoot arrows and has several arrow shooting enhancements (gathers meat and plants), and a sword using warrior (gathers meat).

Currently, I’ve made the title screen (http://i43.tinypic.com/15y7mew_th.png) and got my character walking around (http://i41.tinypic.com/29pus6b_th.png).

I’m loving the wobbly character movement, and the cute art style I’ve got going.

I’m coding this in Flixel.

Unfortunately, I probably won’t finish this in time, because 1) I won’t be staying up all night and 2) I have homework.

But I want to see how far I can get with this.

Ciao, Ashkin.

Islands. Feeling very uninspired. It would be so easy to make a clone of any game that features islands and there’s plenty. I guess I could do some kind of a joke game this time since I have some ideas for that and the blog is already full of all kind of “actual/physical” islands… I don’t want to go anywhere near those. I wish we could pick some much more esoteric themes. Pretentious art game would’ve rocked, maybe I’ll do that then. With islands. Right…

I’ve been trying to get an idea.. The only thing that rolls in the mind is some sort of heightfield. No idea about what the game would be, though.. Better start coding and see what lies ahead. I think I’ll go the F#/SlimDX route. As part of preparing, just went to the store and bought 3 liters of Dr Pepper, pistachios, some candy and beef jerky (hot cajun flavor). Also ran a daily World of Warcraft heroic instance, just to set the mood.. =) Better warm up the compilers, then..

Tags: LD17

My breakfast

Breakfast is served…

Welp, Islands. I seem to be alone in being pleased, as Islands was actually my firm favorite all the way through the voting.

My game isn’t going to be massively original – one of those “You have a load of islands, joined by paths (shipping) lanes. Move your forces from island to island, crushing the enemy tribe as you go” type games. Still, it’s not setting the bar too high, and it has challenges of its own –  a basic AI, and procedurally generated maps, for one thing.

It’s hour 8 (almost 9) but I’ve only been working for two and a bit hours because of timezones. Add in the fact that I’ve got 8 hours of work at the shop over the next two days, and it’s all the more of a squeeze. Still, nothing ventured nothing gained.

Got an idea… a sort of “Rainbow Islands” game, with some other things thrown into the mix…

The player controls a knigh/wizard and has to get to… somewhere… well, no matter, player will have to transform clouds into floating islands to be able to get to his destination, using the environment as well (floating islands already in place), which can have monsters and stuff…

Still need to clear up lots of details, but in the meantime I can start drawing and stuff…

First step, create the player character, so that I know what size everything will be…

First screenshot:

Impressive, I know!

Hey, I’m entering this, despite starting a little late. I’m working on a little Zelda-ish adventure game called Mega Mountain. Here are some early screenshots.

Tags: gamemaker

Terrain

Something on screen…  got some fairly smooth terrain being generated (brute-force, no LOD, rendering a 128×128 grid… so the islands will have to be fairly small).  Not sure if there’ll be water around them or if they’ll be floating in space…  Still not entirely sure what will happen on these islands, but I expect it’ll involve particles…

Tags: screenshot

concepted some fishies:

and made them grappling-hook-able:

oh, and theres palm trees now too see this post in full for the embedded game.

Controls:

• WASD to move
• spacebar to jump
• mouse to aim
• left click to fire grappling hook (if its the only thing in your hand)
• Q to swap back and hand items
• E to drop hand item (cant drop grappling hook)

Tags: fishing, grappling hook, unity

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2010 at 9:07 am and is filed under LD #17 - Islands - 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Hi all,

Second Ludum Dare for me. Suffering from a bit of a hangover but have managed a few hours this morning, so far…

I was originally planning on using FlashDevelop & Flixel, but after seeing the theme, I’ve gone with C++ and my own base-code (again). I recently put some “planet” terrain rendering into my base-code, so it seemed natural to make a game about islands with that… Hopefully I’m not breaking any rules by using previous code! I’ll have to try out Flixel some other time, as I was quite excited to give that a go.

Anyway, here’s where I’m up to, so far:

And here’s the obligatory desk-pic:

Tags: deskphoto, screenshot

So, well… islands, yeah. Basically, islands. I don’t like this. I guess I’ll just have to wait for a spark of creativity to begin.

I’m going to use Game Maker 8, Photoshop and (probably) Fruity Loops. I want to make a game with good visuals.

Right.  I faffed about too long in Photoshop, making my little pixel islanders.  But they’re done, at least.  I won’t have to animate them anymore.

Latest build is “playable” if you click on the screenshot.

Tags: screenshot

The project is codenamed “Pincer.” Short snappy codenames are always useful, much better than “the game” or “src” or “Lousy Off-the-Cuff Title.”

The blue square is the player. The grey one is the “dock” he came in on. The red is beach, and the green is grass. These colors are quite arbitrary palette picks, I didn’t align the way they were generated with the tiles using them. I ran into my first difficult bug getting the player to move – because I was doing a translation of linear to 2D coordinates on the map with the y value instead of the x, so he was actually spawning outside the map. Foolishly, I didn’t take a close look at this information before tearing into the collision code.

For dinner I went out to Jeffery’s, a diner just down the road from home, and had a burger, coffee, and coleslaw. Then I saw Goonies. Great ensemble movie, there are few films that feel so rowdy. It got me thinking about my coincidental choice of pirates in the theme too. I can include more in the way of traps – building them, setting bait with gold, etc. I might go that way instead of total destruction. We’ll see.

My sleep schedule happened to be screwed up coming into the start of LD, by the way – I woke up a few minutes after it started. So I’ll probably keep going until dawn breaks or something. I want to have at least a little gameplay before I go to sleep – some pickups and destructables, I guess.

So, yeah, I’m going with a pirate theme. A bit overdone maybe, but it should still be fun to work on.  Also, that’s just the working title. =)

Time for bed.

Here is some artworks of my upcoming game! I will start coding something now.

Well, my game is coming along quite well, the engine seems to be working OK (at least for now)

Screenshot:

Red=mini dudes, Green='islands', blue=spawnpoint, Circle thingys= bridges (placed by user)

Just a black screen for now

I got the ogre framework code running, and I’ve already started stripping down the demo code. I should start making some progress now…

Tags: screenshot

Turns out that everything is against me this weekend. Visiting people, and I have some assignments I need to finish for next week too. Bah! I’ll have a go at working on my game anyway, as I do have an idea I want to try:

Some guy, or a race of some guys, have kidnapped all the islands, which are thus illogically floating. You must fly your airship (yay, airship!) to islands, where you then battle some guys, stop the whatever-it-is that makes the island float, and it falls back in the sea with a satisfying plop as you escape on your airship again. Rinse and repeat.

That’s the basic idea, but there are a few ways I could go with it… Originally I was thinking trading between islands. Or maybe there’s a shop you need to go to to buy ammo/weapons/ health packs/etc. And randomised levels, but I always try level generators in LD and they always take most of my time and turn-out awful. 😛

I was gong to give Flashpunk a go with this too, which I have no experience in yet.

So yeah, doomed to failure. Good luck everyone else!

Tags: bah, busy

No man is an island?

WRONG

but I find it looks quite pleasing. It’s just pseudo-perlin noise with a variable gradient map:

Tags: progress

I’ve got a title screen now.  I’m not entirely happy with how the watercolour turned out, but it’ll have to do.  There’s going to be clouds obscuring part of it, which will hopefully make things look a bit more interesting.

Lunch below the cut:

Nothing special, just beans on toast and some Irn Bru.  You can see my Scottish Fairy Tales book though, which maybe gives you an idea of what I’m going for with the game.

Islands concept art

So here’s a quick concepty scribble with oil pastels.

I imagine a floating island piloted by a single warrior, attacking and scavenging stuff from other islands to make his island fly higher.

Let’sa go!

Power has come to the volcanic island!

It’s not scientifically accurate, but still works!

is there!

http://swampwitchgames.com/stuff/ld17-Ina.2.zip

I’ve got the bare basics going. Selection and movement and combat all work, so now I have to get the actual gameplay going. I am coding in BlitzMax. It’s going to play just a lil’ bit like Euphoria when everything is set. I plan to enhance the graphics with more variety later if I have the time.

I now have pickups, but it isn’t enough to show that I’d make a screenshot for it. And I took some time to refactor how I did actor-to-actor collision – not to the point of being wholly generic, but enough so that now I call player.checkActorCollision() at the end of each turn and it handles all the player interactions – so I just repeat that template for each actor needing its own collision events. This’ll let me control the order of collision events pretty finely, which is good in a coarse, turn-based sim like this.

It always feels kind of ugly to me to figure out which actor a collision event should occur on – since even though the events always involve two actors, only one of them has to initiate the tests. (even if you have a generic shape-testing system – or in my case, a Roguelike point-testing system, you still have to find a place to do all that “what type of actor, is it invincible, etc.” stuff…) Something I’ve got a few ideas swirling around for. Well, that’s enough writing for now.

According to http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/04/21/ludum-dare-tips/ I’m supposed to post my “Hello world” here. Not sure why, but here it is!

Exciting, huh?

Not sure if it is going to be a good day or not. I have stripped out some code from my last Ludum Dare entry and am now starting on the prototype for what I had in mind. I see that some people aren’t having the best weather, so I thought I would share a view from my front porch here in Portland, Maine.

Tags: LD17

Got my supercool XML level loader up and running now. I’m almost certain that I’m doing something wrong with it, but meh, I suck at XML and it’s working, so that rules, I s’pose.

Wait, what?

Tags: flash, progress

My forest went wrong!

Well, its 10:15 here in Sydney, and i’m off to bed so i can start earlt tomorrow.

Here is a timelapse of the 7h or so today

Ludum Dare #17 Timelapse Part1

yaaaaahhhh good morning brain ! had a busy night hã ? will feed you with some crackers and grape juice, and now make the fingers move and lets code this game, that you spend the whole night thinking about.

Tags: food, foodphoto

I was too excited to follow through on my “sleep normally” plan.  Because I’m down with the sickness, there will be no solid food for me.

Nectar of the gods!

Tags: foodphoto

Got a map on screen. You’ll be fighting for support in those districts by doing actions at the locations (red circles)

I already wrote quiet some simulation code for the serverside – next step: make the GUI react to what the simulation says

Most of the features aren’t implemented, but if anyone wants to try it, it is working…

http://www.box.net/shared/7y9dcpyj8m

For obvious reasons, it’s not a good idea to use immediate mode (gl.Begin() gl.End()) with an interpreted language (lots of slow function calls).

I therefore tried to use vertex arrays, since it’s apparently recommended by the Redbook of OpenGL. So be it. ‘Twas fine, until I realised that LuaGL would flatten arrays of vertices at every frame, which is slow as hell.

I therefore transfered that part of the code to pure C. Once I have my nice mesh in Lua, I flatten it once, copy everything in one C array, and then uses this one with glDrawArrays. It’s a looot better.

However, I wonder if my EeePC is really a 3D  beast, because the following scene:

200*200 heightfield, with 2 triangles per cell --> 80000 polys, rendered twice (filled, outlined)

runs at about 4 fps. Laaaame.

OK now I never did 3D before, so maybe I’m just not doing it rite (insert kitty picture).

• Vertex Arrays not supposed to be used like that? For now I have all the coordinates of all vertices of all polys one after the other into a 1D array of size (n tris * 3 vertices * 3 coordinates). So lots of vertices are repeated. Is that wrong? I see we can also use glDrawElements() to avoid repeating vertices, but that implies using an array of vertex indices. Would that be faster?
• Better technique than vertex arrays?
• Just plain too much polys, try to do level of detail, or manual clipping before drawing?
• Get rid of the nice outline (um, which gives as about 5 more fps…)?

For now I’ll just reduce the size, try to get some proper terrain generation, and gameplay into that. Cause yeah, it’s supposed to be  a game at some point…

Tags: screenshot

I wrote a simple TODO list:

I’ve also done some coding, here is what I’ve got so far (move using cursor keys):

And as a reward – delicious chicken with potatoes:

Tags: flash, foodphoto, progress, screenshot

Enough said:

Just finished the walk cycle of my main character, and it is UGLY! :\

Took me almost 2 hours to come up with something this horrible… I wish I could just steal art from some place so my games don’t look so terrible!

Anyway, now to build some “island”, “cloud” and “ground” sprites so I can do the actual game work… I’ll get back to this later if I find the time…

I realized that my “tags” (integer identifiers on each actor) would benefit from being combined with their position data, rather than put off in a separate component.

After another brief bug hunt(this one caused by there being two sets of identifiers for the player and pickup, one in the old tag code and one in the tile code) this is now working and the rogue-like collision, which I’ve made part of Fireball’s libraries, is that little bit more useful.

Now, I should really stop dicking around with tech. I’ve got a game to write

Ok. 6 hours of almost non-stop programming… finally I can lunch!

Now the progress of the game…

The title screen

The game has the titlescreen completely created, and the music too. It also has the character drawed and the island’s terrain tileset made.

Here you can test what I’ve done: http://aberustudios.co.cc/games/CollectAndProtect/

Tags: 2D, and, as3, collect, flex, Flixel, journal, protect

Both of which are pretty derivative, it must be said;

– Pirates Roguelike

– Tactical turn based variant of carrier command

As the former would be a client-side javascript game, and the latter as a proper web app, there’s a lot of divergence in the development process.

While I vacillate, have the sum total of my island-based efforts so far.

For some reason, my visual text editor for this site broke, along with just about everything else on the “new post” screen. Anyhow, a screenshot of what I have now.

It was important for me to use this font in the first game I have attempted to make in over a year. I received this font in the final email I will ever receive from an important friend of mine.

Rest in peace

I implemented a win condition(touch the “end dock”), 8 (test) levels, and a level skip key (/). The basic framework of the game is almost done – just needs a title and a win screen. Progress!

Or at least you can swim around and collect some stuff. There are some graphics. Obviously, I haven’t yet created player art. Click the screenshot to try it out:

You’ll need to click on it to give it focus. My last WIP had control issues in Ubuntu; I have no idea how to address these, so they’re probably in this version too. Suggestions are welcome.

I’m working with Game Maker 8 and I have done:

• Main Menu
• Level Selecting Menu
• A save system for the game
• Platforms engine

The graphic style will be “retro”, with 200% zoom, as many recent flash games.

I hope I’ll post an image soon, good luck!

Got an idea, finally.. Been dabbling with F# and SlimDX in the mean time. I ported the simple SlimDX triangle example from C# to F#. Shortly thereafter I decided to ditch SlimDX completely; 3D just takes too much time to make properly. So I’m now working with F# and WinForms and normal .NET 3.5 runtime should be enough in the end. It will be interesting to see how well the game runs as I’m planning on doing some fluid dynamics and stuff..

Tags: LD17

Been sorting out a camera system, and making the “islands” & sea look a bit nicer.

Tags: screenshot

Fiddled with my particle generator to get some clouds that more or less work the way I want them to.  I should probably start making the actual game part of the game now.  I seem to have spent most of the time so far getting the title screen right…

Slow progress, but some progress.  The heightmap is now ‘island-ized’, and I can run around it in first-person. It desparately needs a sky and some water

Off to a BBQ soon, so I’m going to lose the most productive LD-ing time, the saturday evening…  Not sure if anything will come of this one…

At least my ground sprites don’t look all that sucky…

Now I need to get the wizard moving on these, jumping and falling, with camera tracking… the usual stuff for platformers…

Arne's LD17 concepts

Basically, you’re playing a large floating creature (an island of sorts) who raids islands. The creature can abduct human slaves which it uses for labor. The slaves can build factories, turrets etc on the back of the creature. As the raids go on, the island inhabitants get more and more upset, and defensive forces around the islands grow larger.

The strategy of the game is to figure out which islands to attack, since they offer different resources and different defense. A more developed creature will be able to grab more loot per raid, but the opposition will also be tougher later on.

The turrets could go in three groups (A,B,C) which can be fired individually. For example, the player can choose to put medium distance flak in one group, and long distance sniping in another. Aiming is done with the mouse. Each level (island) has a certain scroll distance to go. During the scroll, the creature is attacked by various enemies. They vary in terms of damage type (some might kill population), movement type, hit points, defense type, bullet trajectory, etc.

Now I have some shooting action going. The projectiles spawn, move, and despawn correctly. I probably still want to add the “two steps per turn” thing though. It just seems like it would make the puzzle aspects more engaging to have to calculate relative speeds like that.

Build is up. Arrows to move, space to pass a turn, / to skip levels, WASD to shoot.

At least I have some graphics right now. I don’t know how to proceed, nor do I have any idea as to what kind of a game I will be making.