http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtRYRdmdWg0

So here’s a video I made today. It’s actually a bit outdated by now, but there’s still no real gameplay. Enjoy the video. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get you guys a better video with actual gameplay. Now, I need some sleep.

I was going to do a video blog about this, but I’ll do that… later.

Here’s my idea: Guy the Sword Guy was out on an adventure (He likes to have adventures, which is why he became a Sword Guy), and his ship wrecked on a Great Big Rock.

Guy came to on the shores of a tiny island that wasn’t on any map. In fact, when he looked around, Guy saw that the island was in mid-air. Now, being a Sword Guy, Guy gets pretty hungry. Doubly so because of the harrowing experience that had brought him to this strange place.

Guy pulled himself together, got up, and explored a bit. It really was a tiny island. However, he found food growing on the trees. In fact, he found cheese, ham, and donuts growing on the trees!

Guy greedily devoured a great deal of food before stopping to think about how to get home. He missed his girlfriend Matilda, his brother Patrick, and his dog Grendel.

Guy explored a bit more and found what looked like a magic gate. However, it wasn’t turned on. A bit more exploring yielded a key, which Guy insterted into the side of the gate. The gate then turned on, and Guy stepped through, figuring that the trees on the island would run out of goodies eventually anyway.

Thus, our hero’s adventure begins!

Again, the video blog will wait for when I’m not so groggy, and possibly even then only once I’ve got something worth vlogging about.

first draft !

map edited with TileStudio, loading of the map based on Flashpunk tutorial,

click here to see working
http://www.athanazio.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/ld17/draft1/index.html

Tags: draft1, fight the flood, islands

Yes, it’s slowly coming together! Next I should start thinking what I want to do with this engine…

I spent another hour or so pluggin away at things (collision/player control always seems to need endless tweaking to get right). Then stopped for a bit to cook a worryingly healthy spicy vegetable soupy thing for lunch.

The weather was so good I couldn’t just bolt it down and get straight back to work, so I spent a quarter of an hour dozing in the sun and listening to music. Waste of time? Possibly. Worth it? Definitely.

After that got back to work and started putting some gameplay building blocks in:

Check out the latest build to check out what’s actually going on. Still looooooads to do, so time to fetch yet another cup of tea and get back to the grindstone.

As I’m participating for the first time I began to wonder if it’s ok to use the default cursor and buttons in CEGUI.
Here’s what my game looks like at the moment. The debug overlay will be taken away in the final version but I would like to at least keep the cursor. Though if it’s against the rules then I’ll take it away.

Here’s my first timelapse video, for the stuff I worked on this morning. I am still where I was here visually, but I’ve written some code since then. Nothing to show yet, but stay tuned…

EDIT: Due to the fact that this wordpress here keeps removing my embedded video, I re-posted it to my blog here.

Okay … After spending age to creates better tiles than this and the player caracter , I came up with this : The fish will need water to breath and to explore land to get bonuses. #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 */

The concept is that you play an isle, with certain properties, over time you shift and change in different ways. As you change you become more magnificent, depending on your view of what is a magnificent island (rich in natural treasures, home for an intelligent civilization of living creatures, pristine beaches, world-shattering volcano, or whatever else is on your mind).

That’s the general concept of the game I’m planning, since I have lots of homework it won’t be much but I intend for it to be something at all. So far I have only the general idea of how things will be handled. I was very surprised at the chosen theme, seems kinda boring. Considering how so many posts are either about pirates or isles-in-the-sky, I’d say it’s not very inspiring either.

Oh, and it’s mostly multiplayer.

thoughts and ideas are welcome

New build showing projectiles that move faster than you. This is done by having the main loop call as a function pointer; when projectiles exist it temporarily changes to the code that forces you to watch a frame of the projectiles mid-flight. Somehow, I made this build exactly 30 minutes after the last one. As before, arrows, WASD, space, and /.

Click it, it’ll take you to magical places.

A cool (I think) interpretation of the “islands” theme just struck me: Islands of human waste! It’s a real life phenomenon: http://www.falloutearth.com/documentary/garbage-island/

Also about every 50 times or so restarting my game I notice that my compiz window manager (default on ubuntu) bails out and I have to restart because metacity causes nasty tearing in my game! If you have this problem, drop to a virtual terminal and execute:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

Or I guess do it from xterm with “nohup”

So I dicked around with crossing the theme with Pretentious Art Game and doing something about “people as islands” and making connections between them (d’awww), but I wasn’t able to come up with mechanics which reflected the idea I was trying to get across while also sounding like fun.

So I tweaked the mechanics a bit and ended up with this concept: Island Repair Man! Your floaty island in the sky has been broken apart by an attack of Giant Flying Island Rodents, or something like that, and it’s your job to rope it back together.

So far I have a glorified molecular dynamics system / particle simulation. Now with added verlet. Woo.

The white bits are the island pieces which you’ll have to jump between and thus rope together, and the spiky red bits are Generic Bad Guys to avoid. They repulse each other with inverse-square forces so everything floats around and makes a nice dynamic playfield. Now that I’ve changed themes I should probably swap out the art; but gameplay comes first!

The roped-together islands will be constrained to stay at the same distance they were at when first roped together, so you’ll gradually put together a neat-looking structure as you hop from island to island. Hopefully that won’t make anything explode. Verlet integration is supposed to be able to take constraints in its stride, so it should be okay.

More importantly, I have no idea if this will be fun at all; I guess I’ll find out tomorrow. Or rather, later today, as it’s past midnight. How the heck did that happen. Sleepytime, pronto.

Tags: screenshot

Posting this a bit late, but here is my breakfast from local coffee shop favorite, Coffee By Design.

Double shot Cafe Mocha with a fresh locally made blueberry scone.

Tags: foodphoto, LD17

I just spent 5 working hours brainstorming and doing research.  I now have a set of ships (with various tonnages, cannon, speeds, and costs) that I *think* will be fairly realistic and balanced in terms of gameplay.

I haven’t written a single line of code, which is… atypical for me at this point in an LD.  But I did want to have more of this game designed up-front before I started, and it is almost completely designed at this point.

Tags: journal

ok, I don’t know how, but I’m participating and this is my first LD =)

Here is a first screenshot of my work in progress:

Micro Silent Hunter v001

I called it: Micro Silent Hunter

I almost forgot, I’m using ActionScript3 with FlashDevelop

So far its a bit of a poor physic simulator with a few gameplay mechanics strewn about, so far the only interaction is being able to control your ship/ufo/character/home-island and move other islands. This results in a elastic-y madness until you let them go.  I’d like to say it looks much better live but …. yeah.

The actual premise I set for myself is far from achieved, but I’ll start putting that in soon.

GREEN FUZZY CIRCLES!

ANSI colors are pretty limited, and I’m having trouble getting the ‘bright’ variations to display, but perhaps I’ll get some pity votes in the graphics category 😉

I’ve done some thinking with the gameplay.  Islands will be traditional room based areas, where you can explore, fight things, find and bury treasure, get peppers.

Players will be able to buy boats that let them sail throughout the world by setting directions.

Hopefully I will have time to implement some sort of nautical combat and piracy.

Lemon Sole

If I’d remembered to take the picture before I ate my lunch then you’d have seen a rather delicious Lemon Sole, but I was so keen to eat that I forgot. That was a great way to start a Ludum Dare weekend.

I’ve been out and about, including taking my family to lunch to celebrate a birthday, so I haven’t got down to the serious business of coding yet. But we don’t get to see the sun around here very often so it was wonderful to sit at an outside table at the restaurant, to eat some fantastic food and drink a beer and to think about what I’m going to do for this theme.

I’ve been chewing over ideas including: a side-scrolling Choplifter-style game; a capture the flag game; a few variations on a theme of turn based strategy; an evacuation game; something involving a volcano (thanks Iceland); something with lots of boats, and even a shmup because I’m old and I like them.

My ability at programming far exceeds my ability at art, so whatever I do is going to feature somewhat retro programmer art. But in some respects I’m counting my chickens – I still haven’t selected a theme.

Good luck to all entrants. I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with.

Tags: foodphoto

A young stranger, lost in a world where land floats lightly in the sky and no one lives on the ocean-covered surface, becomes an enterprising skyship captain looking for a way home, or just to make a few bucks on the high winds of adventure.

Tags: progress

After a while of banging my head against the desk I found a neatly hidden bug, so the legs don’t get stuck in islands anymore. Island inhabitants appear:

Also, snack time!

Tags: flash, foodphoto, progress, screenshot

I made some progress on my submission last night, but it’s looking like I’m going to scrap that idea. I did get some reusable code out of it like a level loading function, though, so all is not lost. Here’s a little shot of what I had working:

Now I just got to get myself an idea that fits and is reasonable for me to get done in time… I’m leaning toward something grid or tile based. We’ll see.

Tags: journal

My terrain generation is really le big suck.

Tags: screenshot

And once more I’ve done the most horrible collision detection system ever, a tangled web of ifs and elses, special cases and other horrible things… it works well, though, so I’ll probably just touch it the least I can…

Player can jump and fall, move left and right and that is all animated… of sorts…

Going to add a nice gradient background (that blue is getting on my nerves), have lunch and then get to make our own clouds appear…

This is a “non-report” that I’m doing just because it’s becoming a habit to blog what I’m doing constantly. I took the last half hour or so to fix up some tutorialization issues in Deep Sea Descent pointed out by the kind people at Flash Game License – I just happened to catch the message minutes after it was sent. Nice, simple changes, and I think they made a big difference. So – if nothing else comes up on their end – they’ll have it approved for bids in a few hours, by the time I go to sleep. That would be nice

As far as Pincer goes, I guess I’ll try for limited ammo, a HUD, walls, and explosives by the time I go to bed. Still have more features I want to get to though – pirate AI and player death, gold, maybe some crates to push around….I’m approaching this game as “throw features at the wall and see which ones stick.” I can only do a few more before starting the polishing process though.

Well after waking up at 8am to find out the theme is Islands, I’ve set about to work!

And here is the first pic!

Run red square! Run from the blue wave of death!

Just place holder tiles in at the moment, the green tiles will be the “islands” with you attempting to place tiles of land in order to save the people (red square) from the water (light blue). Not many mechanics as such yet, the water spreads out, the red man runs away, he gets squished.

So we will see how it goes!

I am making another game with islands in the sky :S (I saw the other posts).

The idea of the game (for now) is to jump from one island to another using forces like worms2 for example, activating a jetpack of a jumper guy. There would be another challenges like moving islands or things like that.

Here are pics (low def) from my working desktop, from the whiteboard with the first idea and at last one starting shots of the game template (using gimp).

What not to do in LD:

1. Don’t put off thinking about your LD game till the weekend is 25% over.
2. Don’t decide to learn Flixel over LD weekend.
3. Don’t decide to also learn Musagi over LD weekend.

Doing what not to do is often a worthwhile experience, as you never know quite what will happen.

I do not know quite what will happen this weekend.

Hamburger 20:10

Well, I missed the last 2 LDs because there was way too much work to think of joining. And what do you know – the same is true this time. However, I’m trying to reserve some time this weekend for LD anyway (or rather, just forget about all the other stuff and see what will happen :P). So, well, what did I do so far. First I put the the Monkey Island 1 music on endless loop to inspire me for the islands theme, then watched a video of a goat pulling a cart with… the typical LD entrant in it. Then spent several hours to get my code to export and import a Blender model and display it in OpenGL working again.

Behold, I can display my island now:

Right now I’m getting at the right direction, I just need some more enemies and all that crap. My game is a platform shooter where you have to defend your island and also make sure you don’t hurt yourself. I’m also copying the concept for the graphics off of a game that I tried to make earlier (but failed). Here’s a pic:

Apple, 3 scrambled eggs, 3 thick strips of bacon and club soda with a lime.

Tags: foodphoto

Another build, this one came almost an hour and a half after the last one. This one now shows the controls so I don’t have to go and write that here every time 😛 It also has limited ammo – you get one shot from the pickup.

Something cool I used for this is a bit of code I had lying there, not sure that it would come to use: Layout.

This is Layout:

package fireball.gfx.util;

import flash.display.DisplayObject;

class Layout
{

public static inline function sTopbTop(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(px);
}

public static inline function sTopbCenter(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(px-ti.height*0.5);
}

public static inline function sTopbBottom(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(px-ti.height);
}

public static inline function sCenterbTop(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.YRES*0.5+px);
}

public static inline function sCenterbCenterY(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.YRES*0.5+px-ti.height*0.5);
}

public static inline function sCenterbBottom(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.YRES*0.5+px-ti.height);
}

public static inline function sBottombTop(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.YRES-px);
}

public static inline function sBottombCenter(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.YRES-px-ti.height*0.5);
}

public static inline function sBottombBottom(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.YRES-px-ti.height);
}

public static inline function sLeftbLeft(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(px);
}

public static inline function sLeftbCenter(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(px-ti.width*0.5);
}

public static inline function sLeftbRight(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(px-ti.width);
}

public static inline function sCenterbLeft(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.XRES*0.5+px);
}

public static inline function sCenterbCenterX(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.XRES*0.5+px-ti.width*0.5);
}

public static inline function sCenterbRight(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.XRES*0.5+px-ti.width);
}

public static inline function sRightbLeft(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.XRES-px);
}

public static inline function sRightbCenter(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.XRES-px-ti.width*0.5);
}

public static inline function sRightbRight(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.XRES-px-ti.width);
}

}

Very simple, but highly useful. On all the functions that take an x and y coordinate, I can pass in Layout functions to transform them.

However, I have a flaw in how I’m doing font rendering that is going to limit the utility of Layout for this game. The flaw is – Flash does not autosize TextFields at the moment of instantiation, as far as I can tell. Not only that, but I don’t use TextFields directly; I render them to bitmaps, because I want to cache that data. Hence to get around these flaws I’m oversizing the surfaces I draw the text to with a bad heuristic(32px height and width per character).

I think that in the future I may switch to a solution based on the Polygonal library’s font rendering solution. Although it’s a little bit cumbersome(compilation process vs. drop in a ttf), a little bit less Flash-friendly, this will give me good data to work from, and the basic render speed is faster too.

Normally, I’m against quitting this early, but after spending some time thinking about the theme, and trying to come up with an idea that could work, I decided to try for a trading game.  Then I started to realize how much time I’d have to spend on graphics to make something that looked even half good, and then decided that the scope of a trading game is bigger than I can manage in less than 48 hours.  I might have been able to make something that sort of resembles a game, but I’d rather spend the weekend on my main project (a Sim Tower remake) instead of something that I wouldn’t be all that proud of.

I’m looking forward to playing the games that people come up with, and it looks like there’s a few trading sims being worked on, so good luck to everyone.

The current final level, complete with random bridges.

I also added music, a mute button, a main menu, and 10 levels total. The level displayed is the (current) final level.

Tags: flash, progress, screenshot

Is this progress?

Last night I did some planning and some programming, but it’s not a complete plan, just a start. And the programming part wasn’t super far along…

So let’s see where we are in a few hours!

Well here’s what I have after 7-ish hours work:

Those things on the rock platforms are placeholder cannon graphics.

Hopefully my game is going to magically transform itself into a sort of turn-based strategy game where you have to fire cannons at the enemy (a la Worms), from islands in the sky.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get Fiona’s timelapse program working this time round and I didn’t want to waste any more time setting up a capture program. In retrospect I really should have had that prepared before the competition started. So no timelapse from me I’m afraid

So my first bit of progress includes looking at character controller scripts, learning how to write a script that will allow me to use a flying island as a ‘vehicle’, initial tweakage of character attributes and thinking about what i’m going to do for NPCs that attack.

I’ve been using tutorial scripts from the Unity website as references. Not copying and pasting, instead completely re-writing them out and trying to understand each line of script and what it does. Also looked at the Unity forums for some starting points on the ‘using the island as a vehicle’ ala ‘Press e to enter’. I hope this isn’t against against any rules as I don’t yet know how to just sit there and have code flow out of my hands! But I’m trying!

After realizing I had no time to make a deep strategy game, I finally decided on making a small, adventure/exploration platformer.

So, I’ve got a few things up and running. The graphics on walls change with the background, so my job is much easier.

Since I don’t have time to make a platformer deep, interesting gameplay, I will just try to add stuff to make things interesting.

Phew! Making your own skybox, water, and wood from scratch is time consuming but fun. Rules is rules! No pre-made textures for me.

Play with it here http://richard.brooksby.org/2010/04/24/ludum-dare-17-islands/

Progress!

I love breakfast. Here’s my first breakfast of the day. A tasty Americano with 49th Parallels Epic Espresso beans plus a yummy Pop-Tart. Mmmm! Sugar and caffeine! Day Begin!

Some of the stuff I’ve been working on this morning.

Music

Don’t really have a proper idea yet, hence why I’m spending all my time on music and tiles..

Not shown is the orange juice I’m having at the moment.

Maybe I’ll post screenshots soon.

I added bombs. You can “disarm” them by running into them, or shoot them to cause an explosion(an effect which builds on the two-frame bullet firing code). Right now the explosion doesn’t do anything, but I will soon add player death and environment destruction to the mix. Then things will get interesting….

I’d run off another build but I’m getting sleepy at this point(~7pm to ~9am…that’s….5+9=14 hours awake) and would rather conserve some energy.

Got all of the tiles done finally! now i can move on to actual game mechanics and whatnot.

So as you can see, and as I’ve just said, all the tiles are there. (dirt,tree,wood,stone,sand,ladder,window,light,ore)

My next step will be fixing the destroying blocks bug, which i know how to do so now. then make items, and a way of sorts of getting all the tiles/items. A big problem I’m having is dealing with lag, so we’re back to the one small tree island for now. hopefully i’ll find a way to have multiple islands without lag before this is over!

Lunch for the Discerning Fruit Lover

I had fruit for lunch!

The juice is pretty good, but it’s all about the whole fruit.

The apple was very juicy and got all over my hands, and the orange left me downright wet.

Juicy, wet, sticky fruit FTW 😀

Right, now to make some artwork!

Spent most of today drawing walk cycles. Done some collision routines, got player movement and attacking. Got destructable barrels. Particles and debris system is in.

I’m very behind.

My progress is incredibly slow this time. I’m using just my laptop, and I think using 3D/Unity was a very bad idea. Nevertheless, I will persevere, and revise my design if I need to in order to get this finished.

The game is about a turtle ferrying cats (and perhaps other animals)  between different islands. I hope I can get it together! -_-;;

The newest build has, as I wanted, destruction, explosions, and player death. It restarts when you die.

I just noticed a bug in it though – didn’t make the ash passable. Oops.

Hi gang, in this LD i’m going to be making a platformer, taking place in a series of islands, inter-connected by the floating bodies of dead sailors killed in the battle that precedes the events of the game. They’ll act as buoyant objects, weighed down the more you stand on them at a speed relative to the size of the body (fat dudes are more buoyant!).

Here’s a mockup that i’ll take the sprites out of, went super super low-res pixel art style, mainly because it’s easy but also because if I feel like it I can mix it in with the Pretentious Art Game theme and do some references to Passage.

Yeah i'm terrible with art so the dead bodies don't look like anything at all really!

Just got to do the enemies and some smaller props, but because i’m using Unity and i’ve done a few platformers before I don’t think i’ll have any problem getting the coding done and somewhat playable by the end of the night. I’d like to do some fancy animated water (ala Dock’s tumbledrop) but we’ll see.

Ciao for now!

Might’ve gone a bit overambitious…
http://imgur.com/2I1Yv.png
http://imgur.com/Lbogq.png
http://imgur.com/sGZM3.png

My little procedural engine can generate 1 island of any size. Only problem is, it likes to hang up when you start making the island size larger ;P I’ve got an idea for a workaround floating in my head, and I’ll try to implement after I have some lunch.

Weapons of choice:
FPC 2.4.0 w/ Lazarus .9.28.3 beta
Andorra 2D
SDL_Mixer
GIMP
sfxr
Anvil Studio (run through GXSCC to make boring midi into 8 bit deliciousness)
Free Audio Editor (because Audacity BSOD’s my computer)
media-convert.com to convert wav to ogg

I’ve got a working title screen, 1 song (24s, loops), and a couple of sound effects (which seem to have issues playing slightly delayed…)

Alternative builds for other operating systems will be created post-compo. I’ll be able to create a linux x86_32 build (and windows x86_32) build, and while there is a Mac in my house, it’s a PPC, so I don’t know how it would build things :/

I’ve realized that the scope of my ‘be the island’ game is way too big. I’m starting again, gonna try do an x-com-esque strategy game called ‘Island Assault’. You’re going to assault an island. Good times.

At least for interesting map generation. Hopefully.

We’ll see if it gets much past the ideas stage though I’m feeling a bit slow today and I’m going for a meal later.

Now back to learning maths.

I don’t have a whole lot to show game-wise, so the next few posts are going to be about my dinner!

After years of making pizzas and never being entirely happy with the results, I finally perfected my recipe a couple of months ago.  It starts with dough:

That’s ~100g plain flour*, half a sachet of yeast, and some lukewarm water.  This is after I’ve kneaded it for ~20mins, and it’s currently sitting on top of my radiator, hopefully rising.  I’ll come back to it in an hour or so, once I’ve done yesterday’s dishes and started the sauce going.

* – A lot of people will tell you to use strong (type-00) flour, but I could never get it to work right.  The dough would always kind of ‘crack’ in an odd way, and it didn’t taste as good.  Plain flour’s the way to go, if you ask me.

Started kinda slow. In the usual fashion, spent all my time on art… But because the islands are so large (and so so hand drawn) it took a bit longer to get anything playable. Next, GUI and design and more art! YAY!

My original plan for this was too big, and a bit… diluted. Making it simpler now, so it can be tighter (and get finished, perhaps with music, for once!)

Totally failed to get my own engine up and running or to set up a good environment for coding, sleep wasted quite a few hours, and I still haven’t decided between a racing game or a golf game nor can I think of any way to avoid the decision by combining the two (at least not one that suits the Islands theme)  but I still have 33 hours, and even just starting something for this LD would be a first for me. Possibly going to go the coin toss route with this.

Hi, I am making a game with a mechanic  similar to galcon but trying to add a twist having upgrades, different kinds of islands (with a reef, volcanic, etc).

the office

lets see how the weekend goes

Tags: deskphoto, java, progress

The game now has enemies and a scoring system. If you’re quick, you’ll be able to catch the helicopter on the east end of the map; in the final version, this will come periodically, and the quicker you are rescued the higher the score multiplier will be. There are also some fun little caves with air pockets and mountain lakes.

Play it at: http://ludusnovus.net/previews/islands3.swf

You’ll still need to click on it to give it focus.

Uh oh!

I’ve just been putting in sokoban-like boulders in (although it might not be obvious yet I do have a plan here!) It was pretty irritating to do, and it was something I’d picked as “oh, that’ll be easy”, so also somewhat annoying.

The difficulty came from having sokoban-like elements in a game that has smooth-ish player movement, complicated further by wanting the boulders to be affected by the ice and springs in the same way as the player is. In other words, “Now entering Special Case City, population YOU!”

I expect there’s a few odd cases I’ve not caught yet, but I think (hope) the worst of it is over now. Check them out in this build.

This game has some basic combat going now.

First you have to cross along the line of fire of the pirates(who, at least in this incarnation, just shoot in cardinal directions) to get to the ammo.

Then you have the option of picking them off like a sharpshooter, weaving in and out of their fire line, or blowing up the bombs, which will conveniently chain their explosions. It’s awesome, albeit a bit hard to read with the colored blocks. I think I will go to bed in another hour or two, add a few additional forms of AI to vary things, and then do the level design and polish.

Genesis 1:9. An Ceiling Cat gotted all teh waterz in ur base, An Ceiling Cat hadz dry placez cuz kittehs DO NOT WANT get wet. An Ceiling Cat called no waterz urth and waters oshun. Iz good.
(slight god complex here…)

Now with fully rotative camera, gamepad controlled

Still no precise gameplay in mind, but it will imply raising water level, probably something RTS-y.

Also, I added some Perlin noise to the heightmap. Now it’s almost always nice.

Tags: screenshot

So, I’m entering, but I’m not using Java as I had expected. I do not have too much time this weekend, so I decided to go for a simple web game and focus on making some content instead. We’ll see how that goes – didn’t make too much today, and I’ve got to leave for the evening.

Anyway, here’s a sneak peak of the title screen graphics. The game’s tentatively called “Islands: Through the Sweep of Stars”, which is a perhaps a bit more pretentious than I’d like. Any suggestions?

See you all again tomorrow!

Tags: islands, LD17, stars, Sweep

Just added the gameplay system that enables the player to convert clouds into floating islands for a short period of time:

It works great, but I’m not seeing this game turning fun anytime soon… I’ll persevere in the hopes that I have a moment of inspiration and I find a way for the game to work as a game (challenging and fun)…

Already thought a lot about scrapping this, but I like taking things until it’s bitter conclusion…

There is now a score counter, a rescued people counter, and well, people! They’re stranded on islands, so you have to rescue them and bring them to land. Still need to work on the getting people to land thing, and change how the islands work so the people disappear when you rescue them other than the whole island disappearing. Maybe a max capacity of people on your boat too.

Still no clouds. It’s disappointing, I know.

I slept in longer than I meant to. Anyways, I’ve started on some of the happening stuff. As you can see, the boat circles that were created at the dock squares are sailing around the sea by following paths and making ripples as they do so.

I’m not sure if I have to declare this or not, but I will be using Game Maker for my project with an external library called “supersound”, for playing OGG music. I’m pretty sure this is OK but I just wanted to make sure!!!

Still no gameplay, though. Next up, procedural map generation.

Argh, I just don’t have the motivation to finish this time. I just haven’t found the gameplay idea that I would want (and could) to do in this timeframe. This is the first time I’ve not finished. (3 out of 3 entries finished before this so I guess I don’t have to feel that bad)

I have decided to try something different. I have always wanted to do interactive fiction. So this comp, I’ve decided to try to make a text adventure.

I am using inform 7, which is about the coolest language I’ve ever seen. I’ve played around with it a little before. But this the first full game I’ve tried to build with it.

Writing the text is going fine, but is a steep learning process trying to learn how to do cool stuff.

It is kind of a meta game that I think everyone entering this contest will identify with.

Hopefully I can finish it. It is definitely fun and nice not to have to worry about graphics for once.

got some stuff done since last time, not much, nothing visible, so no screenshot I’m afraid!

so now you can’t build blocks in the middle of the air, they need to be adjacent to other blocks (makes sense). I also fixed the bug i’ve been talking about. I have all the item sprites and i’m going to implement them right now!

currently my todo-list is:

• add items
• add a way to make items with your resources
• a point to the game (a way to win?)
• day+night
• enemies of some sort

so yeah!

Lost a lot of time, but no excuses. Will probably have to cut back on what I intended to make, but I’ll be damned if I dont have something playable by the deadline.

Finally some progress.. My experience with F# has been relatively smooth and I’ve been making good progress. What I have up now is a fluid simulator and on top of the fluid I can drop “boats” (those dots in the image) and they will float with the fluid. The fluid simulation is a fast implementation of the Lattice Boltzmann Methods (LBM) and it seems to work relatively well here.

The goal of the game will be that there are 2 colors of boats, red and blue. The boats start from the left and the fluid will push them to the right. There will be 2 goal areas, one for red, one for blue. Any crashed boat or boat that enters the wrong goal area will substract one “life”. Lose too many and it’s game over. What the player does, is that the player can grow and shrink islands (so the obstacles in this image are only for testing the fluid dynamics). By growing the islands correctly, the player can the steer the boats to their destination.

This is the best idea I could come up with (spent hours in thinking) and I’m sure there will be tens of games like this in this LD17. Oh well, can’t win ’em all in originality..

Tags: LD17

Currently still experimenting with SDL on my Mac, but in the meantime I got 2 ideas for my games, one would be more like a stratety tile-based board game and the second one is more like an adventure.  Will see how this afternoon goes.

And if you are interested in seeing what I am doing you can check my live stream here :

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/quebarium—ludum-dare-17/v3

So, here’s the dough having risen (and then fallen a bit when I removed the bowl’s cover:

And after the cut, you can see it stretched out, and the sauce bubbling away on the hob.

Here’s the sauce:

That’s half a red onion, half a tin of tomatoes, a pinch of sugar, a pinch of mixed herbs, and (the secret ingredient) a touch of white wine vinegar.  Pizzas cook so quickly the next post will probably be after I’ve eaten it (and watched Dr. Who), but there will be more pictures.

Well, now we can Jump and Die if we fall to no island. I added clouds to make the idea we are really high 😛

Here is a video of the current status.

I added some simple diffusion for a vaguely watery appearance. I intended the player’s dot to be a boat, but with this palette it looks more like an island in the making.

I figured my other AI could be a pathfinding one. Surely I could just reuse some pathfinding code for haXe? No, of course not. The library I found showed several signs of poor manufacture(particularly, using the extremely slow Enum construct to identify whether nodes are start/end/clear/blocked instead of, say, an integer value) and threw an exception in use.

Now I’m left torn between writing my own pathfinding code(done it several times before) and integrating it into the Roguelike collision system, or to go with dummy run-at-player AI. The latter would be a much safer bet, but I think that having a pathfinder mob, besides being useful library code, would add more dynamism to the game – with the water and bombs, there’s plenty of opportunities for the player to snipe at them or send them into traps, rather than it always being a head-on combat situation.

This is probably one I should sleep on, really. I’m at the end of my day.

I got the basic gameplay features done. It’s probably quite clear from the image that I’m making a tower defense game. Not very original, but it was the only decent idea I could come up with
There doesn’t seem to be many other tower defense games from what I can see, so at least there’s that. The camera can rotate and travel freely in the world, but there’s probably not much point in it other than if one wants to take a screenshot from a cool position or something.

Now I’ll just have to decide whether to improve the visuals or make the gameplay better… At least I’ll be needing a money indicator or something. Then maybe upgrades to the towers.

I should have done an update last night, but I didn’t really have much to say.  I don’t really have much more to say now, but I wanted to post something before it got too late.

Islands is the theme, and it’s not too bad.  I could have restarted last compo’s game, Exploration, since my idea for that was island based, but I decided to go in a different direction. My entry for Islands is going to be a puzzle game where you walk around different islands in order to get to the goal, avoiding traps and other dangers. Here’s a screenshot.

First screenshot. Simple tiles, simple graphics.

Basically I just used Photoshop to create simple tiles.  I have some art sketched out, but it needs to be scanned and colorized. I’ll do that later, but for now I need to work on the actual gameplay.  So far, the smily can move around and the tiles each have bounds that will stop the player, but that’s it.  I also recorded a little bit of sound effects, but those haven’t been moved over from the Mac yet, and either way, there aren’t many game actions to tie them to yet.

Next up is to work on the movement. Right now, it’s dependant on KeyDown presses, which are limited by keyboard delay. I’m going to implement KeyDown/KeyReleased pairs to change this.

Tags: ld48_17, screenshot

Atollery is playable and public, right around somewhere… Oh. Here.
Have fun. Instructions are in the game. Don’t forget to comment, I’ve hit a design dead end and don’t know what to put in the game now. This is pretty much finished, just needs some polish.

Download the most recent build here

Edit: Note, You need the DirectX Runtime installed and the .Net Framework, (This is Windows only, sorry Mac/Linux users!). /Edit.

it’s an island colonization and expansion game… it has no goal… yet..

I’m thinking population target over all your islands, which will force players to colonize more than 1 island..

I’m not sure, your thoughts on the way it’s heading is most appreciated.

(WASD to move the game camera around, Escape to get out of an island, Left click for everything else!)

click on the empty spaces (where the info boxes pop up) on the islands to build the discribed building..

Housing increases population, stonemasons increases stone, woodcutters increases wood, Farmer increases food.

Dock will (eventually) build ships which will allow you to colonize other islands (Although at the moment you can colonize any island anywhere without penalty or requirement.

Happy developing guys!

All batteries fire at will

Oh yeah, I ate a pizza slice. There won’t be any in the game though. The enemies will be balloons with little turrets underneath.

WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN

So, I came up with a name for my entry and drew a quick title picture for it. Isn’t it… well, I can’t draw. There is more puzzle design and tedious default stuff waiting for me, so I needed a quick distraction.

Hour 16 and counting! *headbang*

Tags: progress, title art

I liked both of the top two themes (Islands and Escape), so I decided to incorporate both of them. Basically you’re in the Isle of Man when a zombie plague breaks out. You’ve got to run your ass off to get out of there in time, all the while fighting zombies who are getting in your way. Picture a side scroller with a horde of zombies coming at you from the left (so if you hit the left side of the screen you die) and individual straggler zombies on the right. Couple that with occasion humans getting eaten alive in front of you and there’s a game concept! To win, you need to get to a boat and escape the island. You can’t die from individual damage, but the more you get attacked the slower you’ll be getting out, and the closer the horde will get to you.

Screenshots later.

After scrapping my original game idea, I’ve come up with something that’s a lot more feasible. I also think it will be a lot of fun to play, so that’s a plus. Progress has already been made, and here’s what have so far:

There be islands, my man! I have a pretty good idea of how I’m going to progress from here, so progress ought to remain steady for a while, which is a good thing. Now, onto food photos!

As we all know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day…

You know it!

Oops, spilled some juice!

Uh oh...

Tags: foodphoto, journal, LD17

Super duper gameplay footage awaits in the mysterious depths of YouTube! Hurry up and click and save the day forever!

Hello, i have yet a first game screen that do somefing. An army of naughty pirate are looking for the treasure…

Ahem, anyway…

I’ve taken the derelict scroller and rewritten it from the chunky scroll to a smooth scroll.. though, I’ve lost it’s “smartness” where it’d only draw what it could see.. now it draws every sodden tile ( otherwise, it gets lost and starts blanking out tiles before you’ve moved over them, and not drawing quick enough.. hmm.. some investigation later is needed. )
I’ve also added mouse support into my engine and exposed it to Lua. Need to do something with it now!
Finally, engine wise I told it to spit out a delta time properly… may as well stop making everything frame-dependent 😉

Currently have a large (100×100 tile) map loading in and being rendered. Actually, it’s technically two maps that get loaded, one for the background, and it keeps another for collision stuff.. may change this later as it’s taking it’s time per frame ( probably due to the rendering of all those sodding tiles! )

Anyhow, time for dinner.. here’s another screenshot in the meantime:

Greetings ludarriers, I’m about to start making a game, here we go!

I’m getting a pretty late start, I was learning salsa dancing when LD started, and have been walking the clouds ever since, but now it’s time to find an Island to land on.

I started learning flixel/actionscript 3 a few weeks ago for research at school. I’ve made a basic platformer and Pong, and I’m going to use flixel for LD17. My next research project is to make a clone of River Raid (Atari vertical scrolling shooter/shmup) and I’m going to get half my research done for LD17.

My vision for this game, as of now, is to make a scrolling shmup that scrolls in the direction of the player. The player will fly a plane over water and land on islands. Islands will be a source of fuel and ammo for the craft. The player will shoot down enemy craft while traveling between islands. Islands will sometimes be controlled by an enemy, and the player will have to shoot down enemy craft and drop bombs on island fortifications. Stuff I probably won’t get to is commodity trading for profit, purchasable upgrades, craft, and fortifications.

This sounds like a good start. I’m quite tired right now and I’m probably only going to get about 12 hours of work done all weekend, but we’ll see. I’m working in a public library today, chair is pretty comfy.

I’m calling the game Tail Spin, a spin on the 90’s cartoon Tale Spin, which involved flying planes between islands.

Idle on land

Take off! Last frame or so to be repeated

Also, tiles are done!

Swoosh, Swhoosh, swoosh! You can see the waves moving. Can't you? :)

And now it’s time for small break!

I really, really, really wanted a scarf. Oh well, antenna will have to do.

“Premade engines, libraries, basecode, and game makers are allowed. Ludum Dare is about creating games, not about writing A* for the 8th time. If you want to start from scratch, great. Lots of people start from python + pygame, or just with DirectX. But other people prefer to start with a higher grade engine, and that’s OK. What’s not allowed are libraries that other people don’t have a reasonable chance to be able to use. If you had to sign a NDA to get it, it’s probably not allowed. This is to strike a level playing field for everyone.”

I’m guessing that means, if I found a hover engine for MMF2 earlier (an engine for a game maker) then I’m sure that’s allowed. I’ll just have to look at it and then franken-code it to make it unique to fit my needs. Although I wish an admin would make that more clear.

Decent progress since this AM. I’m more certain about how the gameplay will be structured, I have flocking and angular velocity/momentum for the whales (luckily it turns out I don’t really have to do collision for them!) and I’m starting to look at some behaviors for the pod.

You’re going to be a glowing intelligence that is worshipped, leading a pod of whales on some strange planet. You can fly from whale to whale, who’s backs are slightly emerged (think of them as sentient moving islands). You can commune with them, designate as leader, and so forth.

Each whale will have it’s own personality and your goal is to try and get them through five stages.

We’re ludumdaring together here in Cambridge, England!

From left to right, Terry, Dock, Roburky, Titch, Perrin and Nora Shishi!

I’m way behind. I’ve spent all morning grappling with flixel in an attempt to make a map that wraps around. I feel like every time I try to use flixel, my game idea includes something just far enough outside flixel’s boundaries that I spend twice as much time working around it as I would have doing it without flixel.

For future reference: if you want to set a FlxGroup’s x or y coordinate directly, you have to use FlxGroup.reset(x, y) instead. Otherwise, it sits there like a stupid lump and doesn’t update anything.

What I have now (the turtle does move around, at least):

Tags: progress

Awesome?

So I’ve been thinking about removing the double pixels; my game would be bloated up to 800 times 800 pixels with ’em and that sucks. Also I like the look of it with single pixels. Look at the little fella, ain’t he adorable? Input appreciated!

Tags: progress, question

I’ve decided to adjust my idea somewhat.

Instead of floating islands with meat and cheese growing on the trees, I’ve decided on plain islands with fruit growing on the trees.

The fruit will have magical-type properties that affect your characteristics, and possibly some that give you special abilities If I Have Time.

Also, he now has a hammer instead of a sword. Swords are overdone.

I’ve gotten a bunch of sprites of this Guy:

Our Dashing Hero

I also had a some cereal:

Chocolate and Banana Nut Cheerios in one bowl

Now, data loader, then test, then terrain tiles. YOW! 😀

Here is what I ate for dinner:

I also had a salad, I forgot to take a picture of it. I’m just taking pictures of unhealthy food. 😉

As for the game, there is not much code there, but (nearly) all the graphics are done including some animations. Take a look at that wonderful title screen:

(It’s actually pre-rendered and the pixelated texture look is intentional, I didn’t want to invest any more time on the title screen as I’m behind schedule.)

Tags: foodphoto, progress

Tags: motivation

Ooh, Dr. Who was good.  I was worried since the previous episode was terrible, and I really couldn’t see the point in bringing back the angels, but that was up there with the first two episodes of the season.

Anyway, here’s how the pizza turned out:

The dough didn’t turn out as airy as I was hoping, but it was still pretty good.  Another picture and some more details after the cut (I realise no-one’s interested in the intricacies of my pizza recipe but, well, I’m proud of it).

I use the pre-grated kind of mozzarella, because the stuff that comes in a ball is always too watery for my taste, leaving a soggy pizza.  Also, it should be obvious, but you need a hot oven to cook pizza properly, so turn it up as high as it will go.  My own oven’s probably not quite hot enough, but if I pre-heat it and stick the pizza right at the top it does a decent job.  Finally, I usually cook the base on its own for a bit before I add the sauce and cheese.  Here’s a picture after it’s had some time to rise:

Right, I’ll stop talking about pizza now and get back to my game.