Theses fuckers .

Not much to look at yet but I’ve got something on the screen at least:

Slowed down a bit this time because I’m trying to use proper VBO’s instead of doing everything in immediate mode/display lists. I might try shaders, i dunno yet.

And I still have only a vague idea of the gameplay. Or rather, I have too many ideas, not sure what it will focus on.

As always, you can peek into the current state of the project code at my google code dump.

Hi All,

This is the first time I participate in LD48,  and I am having a lot of fun!

This is a first screenshot for my “Islands” game idea – called “Mauritius”, the small Indian Ocean Island that was home of the now extinct Dodo:

Mauritius Screenshot

In this game, you play a Dodo (probably the last Dodo). I hope to make it run away from all the things threatening to kill it, from hunters to cats to rats. I still don’t know exactly how it will be in the end, but we’ll see – being on an ISLAND will make escape for this flightless, swimless bird, very hard…

The game is written with C++, using ClanLib as a graphics library. Graphics are with Graphics Gale, Paint.net and Tiled for tile maps.

Anyway, thumbs up for everyone here – I’d be happy to hear your comments!

Thanks,

Daniel

This is important, honestly, no, really!

Also, I made myself some chorizo and red pepper pasta for tea. Which was pretty great, and I made too much of it, so I’ve got some left for when I undoubtably get peckish later.

Here’s a collection of my food photos thus far.

Freshly baked bread, coffee grinder and press (with cozy), dinner (Friday night). some extra drinks in the fridge, and a Limonata.

Tags: foodphoto

Just started working on LD17… so im way behind.

Heres what ive got so far

FWOOSH! WHEE!

Now, to make the fireballs actually do something to my poor little islanders…

Tags: screenshot

My entry for LD17 is Forgotten Isles.

You are a character who awakes on a shore, with a quickly fading memory. You will travel from maze island to maze island trying to figure out why you’re on on the island, with the intent of escaping. Click the screenshots to enlarge them.

Don’t Be Forgotten
One of the major elements here is memories. The character has a timer which represents how much of himself he can remember. It will decrease incrementally. If it reaches zero, then he’s forgotten who he is, and will fade away, into the Forgotten Isles.

You can restore memories by finding people or items which you have memories of (such as the dead shipmate in the screenshot above). These act as checkpoints, and restore your memory timer to full. You can return to them as many times as you like, attempting to restore your memory, and retain your sanity.

The Isles
The island itself is a maze which tests your own short-term memory. Environmental elements, such as the shore, trees, ruins, etc will rise out of the ground based on your proximity. This prevents you from ever seeing the full island, and therefore finding a way through the maze ahead of time. Only the elements in your immediate proximity are revealed and once you leave, they’ll sink back into the island.

The Game
It’s a maze game with a story. The challenge likes in being able to make it to the next checkpoint in the alloted amount of time. It will progressively become harder and harder to reach the next checkpoint because the maze will become tricker and more complicated.

I wanted this game to have some deeper message, which will probably not be finely polished by Sunday, but it will be present, in a rough form, within the story.

Tags: journal, screenshot

Prepared for battle!

(Also a build menu!)

Food stuffs

Woke up with a nasty hangover. Brainstormed some ideas for my entry and started to work. 12 hours later I have decided to throw it all away. I’m stuck! Starting from scratch, as soon as I can get an interesting idea.

Here’s some pictures:

Tea time!

Breakfast

Cookies and buns!

Tags: foodphoto

I now have a somewhat working prototype of the game mechanics worked out and a screen shot! It isn’t too much to look at right now, but what I have works pretty well so far.

Here is the screen shot, I will explain what’s going on below:

So basically the idea is that you are this penguin (white rectangle) and you must avoid the enemies (sharks or whatever eats penguins) here represented by the red squares. The brown squares are islands and while on an island, you can not be eaten. However, the islands only stay around for a short time before they disappear and reappear somewhere else. You gain points through a combination of how much time you spend off of the islands and how many fish you eat (the green squares) which also appear and disappear.  Oh, I forgot to mention, you have no offensive ability.

I still have a bit of work to do, like implement the enemy AI, figure out the score calculation and play with the mechanics a bit. I also have a really interesting idea for the graphics that I want to create tonight that will replace these rectangles.

Tags: first screenshot, LD17, screenshot

Or something like it. I don’t have much right now, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to do a lot more tomorrow. There is about 10 minutes of gameplay right now. If I add some writing, music and unlockables, I hope it will be enough for the game.

Current Status:

Our hero (Walter) is practicing his new ability of red energy ball throwing.

Added jump support (took me a while :/) so jumping up on the islands (by pressing the X key) is now possible.

… and dinner

Tags: flash, foodphoto, progress, screenshot

So far I have working cannons which can fire and I have explosions =]

the music is almost done, and the island is fully animated =]

here u have a screenshot you know what to do 😉

My sreen looks exactly like it did 8h ago – but now all the info displayed in the browser is loaded from the server.

Which means i’m pretty close to actually seeing some simulation gameplay. Tomorrow i think. I’ll leave it for now and go gambling…

Todos to make it somewhat playable:

* issue tasks to characters via text message
* test / extend serverside game logic
* test/extend clientside display of game model

should be doable.. to some extend …

I was tiring of fiddling around with the game engine, so i made some graphics for it instead. Quite pleased with the results, I think i will be sticking to a black/white colourscheme. I haven’t

New screenshot. Now with added awsmoeness

got around to the sprites for the mini-dudes yet.

Against my better judgement, I went ahead and implemented Dijkstra’s Algorithm. The time cost was large: 3 hours, most of it spent on a bug that I resolved by not being macho and using the 2D field class I had been using for every other 2D grid(tiles, collision) and really should have used for the nodes from the get-go.

But it works. I need to give the pirates a proper LOS check though. That can come tomorrow.

More progress, yay! Now the islands can be painted and removed with the mouse (left button paints, right button removes). The fluids automatically adjust themselves to flow around the islands. Seems like the boats can still hit into them too easily, so I’ll have to fix that probably somehow.. One idea I had was to make the boats indestructible, but impose a time limit on how long they are alive. So if a player isolates the boats, they will still perish after some time. Would probably add more strategy as well so I think I’ll try that.

Also tweaked the fluid look a little better. The first image was from the fluid density, this one is from the fluid velocity. The whole system started acting a lot better once I added a bit of dampening in it. So far I’m quite happy with how well it works.

Next, colored boats and goal zones..

Tags: LD17

Well… soon anyway!

All i have left to do “gameplay” wize is to add boats and prevent players from colonizing any island they wish at any point….

Then i can work on making the graphics look a darn sight better than they currently do.

Here are some images so far.

A very main menu!

The wide open sea

A very happy island!

join me here for a live stream of me developing, and grab a recent build here

It took longer than I tought… I fucking need to draw everything.

Still need to add the shark monster and the projectiles system (powerups). And menu and maps etc.

Fuck.

Tags: motivation

There is far more going on here than it might appear. Tomorrow is going to be a frantic content creation fest.

Pretty pleased with the tricks I came up with to place the islands semi-randomly, without overlap, relatively centred in the play area, and not too bunched up.

I’m actually getting pretty far in my game, and I’m confident that I’ll have lots of time to finish my game and touch it up tomorrow. And wow, some of these games (most, actually) look really fun and creative, can’t wait to play them!

Here’s some pics:

Flying tanks???!!!!

Lots of fun to be had!!

It shows up often in my games.

But I finally started working some more on my game and should finish it, but until then…

...

Tunnels? In a floating island?

I think I’m probably going to call it a night.  Here’s what I have so far:

Note the authentic hebridean clothing of brightly coloured pointy hats 😉

The basic gameplay is there, and you can win (or lose) the game, but the cut-scenes don’t have any pictures, and the gameplay feels a bit lacking.  I think I need to add randomised pickups that help you out (a faster boat, hints about which islanders know the way the enchanted isles).  I’ve still got to do the music too, though that hopefully won’t be too hard.  The whole game’s inspired by rockettothesky’s Medea (e.g.), so I’m going to try for a similar feel.

I have to head out for a few hours so I’m having an early dinner. My wife made me a lovely bbq pulled pork quesadilla from the left overs from dinner the other night. This thing is massive and I will probably only be able to get through a quarter of it!

Tags: foodphoto, LD17

Okay well… here’s a picture from my game .. Not sure if this will be a final image. But I think I NEED to get my engine working so I can start nailing together the logical flow of my game so that I know what other pictures I need to draw.

-Phil

If you can’t tell, the player can now bring the people to land! The boat can only hold twenty people (a lot for such a small boat!). You get 20 points for rescuing people from an island, and 50 for bringing them to land.

Over 9000 ours in paint…

So, each island in the world can now be owned by a player. This doesn’t sound like much, but it took quite a while to get working – I’m doing a flood-fill algorithm on any “tiles” that are sitting above sea-level, and that collection of tiles then gets assigned an island ID. The flood-fill took far longer than anticipated… the spherical terrain is a distorted subdivided cube, and  I had various issues with grabbing the adjacent faces (and correct coordinates at the adjacent faces) of the cube. This had to be done to ensure that islands could cross from one cube face to another.

Anyway, screenshot time. Each colour represents a different player (this is a debug view, I don’t plan to keep the multi-coloured islands!). There’s a tank in there, too (on the left), that I modelled earlier today. Hopefully I’ll have some actual gameplay for the next update!

I think I’ll leave this here for today. I’ve now spent 13+ hours on the game, and I’m almost perfectly happy about how it has turned out. If I have time, I’ll try to make the user interface as easy to use as possible, because all of my earlier entries lacked horribly in that department.

First screen shot of Island Hopping.  The artwork will be replaced in the final version. The basic idea is to fly around and rescue people from rising waters and exploding volcanoes, and whatever other islandy things I have time for.

It uses chipmunk for physics and Gamebox and Rubygame.

Island Hopping

Tags: game, image, screenshot

Although I was psyched with this compo, the fact that the theme is islands sapped my will to finish this game…

Nothing wrong with it from a technical standpoint… no bugs, no nothing, it was terribly easy to code, to be honest…

I did an island-based game last time, and bar remaking that one and improving it, I’m not having decent ideas for games, and there’s no point in wasting a whole weekend on this if I’m not having fun…

Next competition I’ll be back… And hopefully, I’ll be able to come up with a better idea that I actually want to finish… and I’ll practice my sprite animations, so I don’t lose 3 hours making a stupid and terrible walk cycle…

Good luck everyone! Last screenshot for the road:

This is not going as well as planned. I’ve spent the first few hours writing a working PPU emulator, and up until now mostly writing high level utility code to make the PPU easier to work with. I also finished the landscape generator, it still needs to put foliage and stuff there, but that shouldn’t be all that painful! Have an unimpressive screenshot of it:

Can't really make much of it, but I promise it's generated a landscape.

Bizarrely, I haven’t written a line of code yet.  I’ve been working on the concept and the art, but no code.  Jpfed from LDs of yesteryear would be FREAKING OUT but I am bizarrely calm for the proximity of the deadline and the amount of caffeine in my system.

This isn’t gameplay, but a mockup that should resemble it fairly closely (minus menus and minimap)

Mockup!

Tags: journal, mockup

Leftover spaghetti in all its glory! Greatest luncheons!

In other food related news, I had an egg-cheese-and-ham sandwich for breakfast. That I didn’t get to take a pic of, though.

Hi there.

Haven’t made many progress yet :/
Had an idea but not sure if it’s very cool. Basically you have to move a little pirate, Jelly Bones Elmer around each island to accomplish something, either opening a chest or anything like that. I think I’m going for some turn based stuff. Today I basically did something to load a tile map and show what you see on the screenshot.
Since I was still elaborating the idea I spend most of the time drawing something to keep me busy.
Now that I have a sort of goal I need to put the turbo coding on =)

Sorry bout the art but I’m not very good at drawing.

Btw, I named my game “Ten Thousand Stilt Islands”

Tags: Ten Thousand Stilt Islands

10 of them in fact, busting up the good’ol mine (altough seemingly missing the whole island). In this picture you can also see the connection lines of the selected island (the one with black borders). I think i have a pretty much complete game system in my head, hopefully i can make it in time, and hopefully it wont suck to bad.

Your finished plane.

Well, here’s a completed plane. Pretty convenient that I have some of the parts already.

Nah, I’m gonna redraw the wing, and an engine piece. Tail looks decent as far as I’m concerned.

There was this old movie we watched when I was a kid. It was about missing luggage and this plane would fly over a set of islands with primitives on them. The luggage would drop out of the plane, and two guys found some. Wanting to know where more of it came from, some how, they manage to get into some city and cause hilarious havoc. And then get back again. I don’t know what it’s called. Extra bonus points from my judging to anyone who knows what it is.

Since my last update, I’ve worked on the player movement using KeyPressed and KeyReleased, so it moves whenever the keys are down and doesn’t fall victim to the keyboard key delay. I also implemented some bounding boxes so that the player cannot move off the screen and cannot run into other objects. Their bounding boxes don’t have to be the entire tile, but they are limited to being rectangles. I would have liked circles or an array of rectangles, but I think that’s more than I need at the moment.

The level manager is working with the tile manager to load levels. I can now edit a text file and make changes to the map. It’s stored using a basic text format with some metadata and a grid of letters, numbers and symbols to determine the tile types. Here’s the most recent screenshot.

TileManager and LevelManager are loading levels from text files.

You can see my bounding boxes in the image.  The tiles and the player have their own boxes and the player’s box cannot overlap it without the collision detection saying that he can’t move there.  The cyan colored box on the inner edges of the W’s is actually a reverse bounding box.  The player’s bounding box must overlap that box at all times, or the collision detection will not allow the player to move.  This is just a trick to keep the player from moving off the screen.  At the extreme, the player’s box will overlap by one row, and at that point the player is in the outside edge of tiles.

Now I am going to move from using the generic GameTile class to more detailed tile classes for each tile type.  After that, I believe it’s time to scan the doodles and put in the final graphics.

Tags: ld48_17, screenshot

Hi everybody ! It’s 11H30PM here ! Time to go to sleep.
Before, I will make a list of things that I have done since morning.
– Draw text
– Build buildings
– Evolve buildings
– Residents can work

Tomorrow, I must do :
– Screen which describe the buildings
– Help for how to play, what is for what
– Needs for the residents
– Content ! New buildings, texts, evolutions, ….

Screenshot :

(sorry, maybe it’s a few small)

Good night for everyone !

First screenshot

This took way too long and looks really bad…

…but it’s something.

I’m making a platformer game set on a tropical island, in which players compete to collect coconuts. They do this by jumping on the tops of trees and shaking coconuts into a moving basket below. Right now there’s only one player but it will eventually support multiple players on a single PC.

I started this project backwards; I did the sound, music, and art before I started coding. I don’t think it’s really affected how likely I’ll be to finish, but it is nice to know I won’t have to do very much except code for the remainder of the project.

Well I spent far too much time creating graphics for the cannons, even though I rendered them:

You can also see one of the soldier sprites I’ve drawn in this shot. He’s currently defying gravity.

I’m calling it a day for today, but tomorrow I hope to do some serious catching up (as always!) I may have to scale down my ambitions for this project. I want to get some kind of turn-based aim-and-shoot-stuff game in place as early as possible tomorrow, then I can see where I’m at and decide what to prioritise.

Tags: cannon, rendered, screenshot, soldier, sprite

Finally finished the items in ISLAND WORLD, have a screenshot!

So as you can see our little character man is telling us to press the spacebar, why is that? because we have enough resources to craft an Axe! the axe is one of the very many (6) items in the game, the axe, of course, allows you to chop down trees and collect wood! the items are:

• Dirt Pickaxe — mine stone
• Stone Pickaxe — mine ore
• Sword —  attack pirates
• Torch —  light up the darkness at night
• Spring — Jump 2x as high
• Axe — chop down trees

Brief descriptions of the items like i just gave are shown when you mouse over them. The character is even handier now too, not only does he tell you when you can craft something, he tells you to press R when you get stuck under a tree (they have gravity). the respawn point can be set with ENTER as well.  I’m also slowly adding on to the island towards the right, since i noticed more resources were needed, and to make the game longer, prices will be made higher, which means more island to exploit!

My next step is Pirates, i decided i had to use cliché island enemies, they’ll arrive by boat *hopefully* and attack during the night (which i will add after) the pirate ship will also be the only way to get Ladders, Lights, and Windows. you’ll have to *hopefully* sneak into their ship to do so.

WOW! Get a load of this! Crazy fantastic work in progress game demos await behind this link!

Also, keep staring at me on my webcam thingy because I’m weird like that!!

uuuuhuhu eeeehehevil

Since I’m to dumb to code at the moment, I made a new tileset and background for Pleochorism’s night levels. Which are devious.

So now, after 20 hours of almost completely continuous LDing, I bid you farewell. For now. I shall be back after a couple hours of regeneration.

I’ve taken to the sky.

I’ve had some trouble with my previous idea, and now I just experimenting. Maybe I can still put something together, I kinda like how these images look.

Tags: clouds, Sky

Diamond dude has a view on the sea!

So mmm yeah, more distant guys are just square, closer ones are diamond shaped. Oh and I get about 10 fps. Myeah. I wonder if the final product will actually be playable.

The guys run away from the approching seashore. And if they’re stuck on an island, they DIE! Mwahaha. Ok so now, gameplay. Saving the lil’ dudes.

Tags: screenshot

Yo peeps!

So it’s 23:08 here and slowly getting to the end of the day…and 50% through the competition! And what do I have to show for it? well…

Just showing how the first level has been made and can be won/lost, so hopefully I can spend tomorrow on those all important gameplay features! Having spent ages today on getting the UI all working nicely.

Also todo: Sound, Music, Graphics, Polish!

Chicken, mix vegetables and a club coda with a lime.

Tags: foodphoto

All that’s left to make this game presentable is a decent computer opponent (it’s quite broken at the moment) and to fix the numerous bugs involved with turrets. After that I’ll be adding a ton of bells and whistles to keep the game exciting.

Oh no, looks like diplomatic efforts have failed. Not that there were any real efforts to begin with, because people seem to like blowing stuff up. I’m not sure what the deal is…

This should be good.

There is now a decent computer player to fight against, and the core functionality is working just fine. Coming right along.

Tags: journal, LD17

Got my tiles all ready on a grid!

Also I mispelt my music link last time woops: here

Still need to do some kind of pick ups and other stuff, but I need to get on with actually coding now!

edit: forgot to mention, I’ve re-jigged my 16 colour palette, as I needed a proper skin tone for the large scale hand graphics. I dropped grey for it, replacing the greys with light blue. Also meant I could brighten up the yellow a bit as it’s not being shared with skin-tones any more.

I’m finally getting somewhere, I wasted far too much time trying to do music I don’t have the experience to make, but now i’ve done the majority of art, got a bit more animation to do and i’m nearly done with character movement.

Here’s the current build (in Unity so plays in the browser):

http://www.billyfletcher.com/LD/Build1.html

WASD or Arrow keys to move around, that’s all it does at the moment!

11:33pm Saturday Night

Lots of love,
brian

16 hours and 30 minutes of almost non-stop of Ludum Dare.

The screenlogger has a lot of screenshots. And my game it’s so advanced.

Here it is! (click the screen to play)

Collect & Protect

The graphics are not definitive… trees and mines and the treasure are not mine.

Here are the instructions:

Move your player with arrow keys.

Get resources from a tree or a mine (rock or gold) pressing SPACE near it.

Build things using resources pressing SHIFT to go to the build menu, and then select the building you want to build. It’ll be built in front of you.

If you press SPACE near a building you will access to its upgrade menu system.

You have to defend your treasure from pirates as long as you can!

Good luck!

For now, you can only take resources. After the resource provider dies, it regenerates 1.30 minutes later.

Good night!

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

Some islands (with nothing on them and way too tightly clustered), some UI elements, invisible skyship. Bedtime.

Tags: progress, screenshot

I’ve made some sprites of my old friend Robinson crusoe

I’ts late i’m going to sleep now.

Well, I added lots of stuff:

• Camera control
• Airship control (the airship is the  flat box with steering wheel in the screenshot)
• Vertex colors
• OpenGL fixed-pipeline vertex-lighting
• A second island
• Clouds
• HUD display

What I’m still missing:

• Gameplay
• Collision detection
• More and better models
• Textures (won’t have time)
• Audio (won’t have time)
• Skybox (won’t have time)

Man, what a day. This is my first go at LD, and nothing could have prepared me for it.

It didn’t help that I had to be out of the house for four hours – and the same tomorrow. I can’t even work into the night because I need to be up early.

So here’s the plan: Work like mad tomorrow, and right up until the deadline if need be. It doesn’t matter that that’s 3 in the morning, as Monday is my day off.

It’s been a lot of fun today. I’ve learnt all sorts of fun stuff – what bezier curves are, why the static keyword can be very evil, and just how bad my art skills are. I can’t wait for tomorrow.

A thing of beauty.

so I got some McFatness++ stuff.

Along with that, some kind of concept art:

He doesn’t seem to approve of my meal.

Tags: concept art, foodphoto

Here it is, I’m turning myself into a sleeping  Eli, and this is what it looks like after ~~10 true hours of coding throughout the day:

As you can see, things are kind of blocky, but they are moving along. The protagonist is the intrepid Pale Yellow Square, as pictured in the center of the screen.

There may be an visual island theme, but the story is quite relevant. In short, your task is to make islands stop being islands.

Well, it is 2am now. I hope to conclude this successfully tomorrow.

ps. amazing WIPs so far!!!! You guys are unbelievable.

Tags: screenshot, wip, work-in-progress

Lakes, mines, trees, palm trees, dirt, and sand hooray! The final island size will be approximately 5-10x larger, but I’ve not done so yet because I haven’t made a way to scroll the map.  

Wish me luck! There’s still no gameplay yet. I hope to begin working on at least some gameplay tonight, finishing it up tomorrow.

(But I love the concept I have going here so much, that I’ll probably spend the week after LD finishing it up to my liking. Networked multiplayer is something I’m thinking about.)

Even more functionality!

Now we have:

Bridge: solid, can be walked on and underneath. can only be placed to the left or right of something

Box : solid, acts as a platform and/or wall. has physics (aka, it falls)

Jump pad: can only be placed on floors. makes l’il dudes jump

Screenie:

Wheee!!!!

Desert islands AND floating sky islands! Why not?

So, halfway in and my game is working, but it’s very short — and boring! Since I’m doing this with no fancy frameworks or basecode, I had planned to spend day 1 on the engine and day 2 on the content. Well, the engine’s done, and so is some of the content, so tomorrow I should be able to flesh this thing out a bit.

(I know I’m not going to win any originality points for going with floating sky islands, but they’re just so cool!)

Due to limited time this weekend, the basics of the game are working but I haven’t done any assets yet. I just got the puzzle loader working- the puzzles are loaded from .png files, with different colors becoming different tile types or entities.

A few more fun things going on here. Looking forward to spending tomorrow polishing things up. Fun times! 😀

Tags: island, screenshot

I’ve finished making all the levels, made the sounds, plus a beginning and an end screen. So why am I not done? Well, currently the game takes about ten minutes (at most) to beat. Also, it’s kinda boring.

I’m not sure what to add, so here’s a demo.

Wow! You can even jump!

Try to escape the giant floating island! Go!

Please let me know what you think.

I havent reported in yet today so yea, things are going smoothly, almost done with my map view after that its some simple path AI and balance the number system, the birth of a game

Twisted provides a network reactor framework for Python that simplifies network programming down to implementing methods on a class that inherits from one of their base classes. You can have an arbitrary number of classes and instances of those classes managing the chatter with a particular connection.

My current problem with it is that it doesn’t seem to provide an API for adding more sources of events to be handled. Pygame is equally uncooperative in this regard. I can’t, for instance, tell a Twisted reactor to listen to another arbitrary file descriptor and how to handle it. Glib has “GSources” which encapsulate this notion, and are abstracted well enough for applications which have to poll for data readiness that is unrelated to a file descriptor. Rarely in a *NIX environment will you ever have such a thing, but platforms like MSWindows have a whole slew of data sources which you can’t select() on. (That may be out of date. It’s been a long time since I’ve done MSWindows API.)

The compromise I’ll have to make for LD17 is to use a timer-driven callback which pumps my Pygame event loop. The Twisted API for this is the callLater() reactor method which accepts a timeout and a callback function as arguments.

Anyone know anything better?

I’m going to start just now (it’s midnight here), after a full day of helping other people with computer-related problems. I still don’t have an idea, but one thing is for sure: ASCII.

I think I’ll do it with Python this time. I’d really like to upload something that gives at least a bit of fun 😛

PSnake

Well, I’ve been thinking about joining Ludum Dare for a while now, but because of my almost terrible game creation skills, i’ve resisted for a while.

But here I am! I’ll try to join the next ludum dare, but until then, good luck?

The game is playable now, I have added new images and finished the basic gameplay. I want to upgrade some things like the movement using some physics engine maybe.

I have a new video of the game, the game has sounds but I recorded the video with the game muted.

Here are some of the assets of the game:

Fortress Leviathan WIP graphics

The game mechanics are very simple, just a drifting blob which shoots on other drifting things. Not sure how long this game will take me to code. Tomorrow I might have to budget 6hrs for the code, 6hrs more for the art, 2hrs for tax declaration and 2hrs for surviving.

It’s approaching bedtime here. I’ll have to get up at 12 tomorrow… today.

(Click for bigger version)

So, alright, this is it for day #1 – its “space islands” aka asteroids something. Bascially this is going to be a RTS in which the player has to harverst ressources, build stuff and defend against some kind of aliens. I really dont know yet – the art is mostly temporary right now, except for the abstract icons, this is the style I really want to go for.

The green polygon is some kind of indicator for ressources, the blue icon is a mine/harvester, the red thingy is a factory, and the box is a storage

Here’s what I’ve done so far. It’s not playable yet, but the framework is in place. Saving/loading of maps and configuration. I think it’ll become a turn based strategy where you conquer territory and battle the ally over the territory? Maybe..

Who knows where this will go

sure the shadows are kinda cool...

So, I stayed up till about noon today working on this. Eventually I passed out, largely due to sheer exhaustion, and largely due to the fact that I was no longer capable of writing code, and all attempts at writing music came out as weird drones and the sounds of cats making love. This is unusual, given I have a much stronger musical background then anything.

The interesting thing about it, is after playing my game, the effects sleep dep had on my sanity where instantly apparent. Check out the screenshot.  You can actually watch me loose my mind from lack of sleep. The player sprite (the weird ethereal looking chick,) was the first bit of game art I did. After coding her movement, I decided I needed to add in enemys, and came up with the first game enemy, the weird shadow ghosts, at this point I was kind of tired, but the results are actually pretty neat. Im happy with them, despite them being kind of horrible from a pixel art standpoint (They are MADE of jaggys, nothing but jaggys… wtf?)

The point I wish to draw your attention to are the clouds. Sometime around 10 am I decided that this game needed some sort of bg (totally acurate, it did. Flying around a blue screen doesnt really convey much sense of motion.) That being said, look at the second one down from the top right, that cloud is made of squares. In my sleep addled brain, square clouds made perfect sense to me. Square. Friggin. Clouds.

The really funny bit, is they just may make it into the final build.

I also need to optimize so much code from last night its amazing.

Island Hermit Hop!

I didn’t have any ideas when I saw the theme last night. This afternoon I decided on a little island-hopping platformer. So far I have a guy who can jump around and swim. I think it needs sharks.

Well, I did have some time to work on it. Not enough for me to think I could finish anything, so I’ve sort-of dawdled. But I’m learning how to use Flashpunk, anyway, so that’s handy.

Current build of my “game” is here. You can move with the arrow keys and… that’s it. Yeah. PRODUCTIVITY HIGH SCORE!!

What’s this…? ANOTHER DEMO?! That’s so crazy!

Savory Sea Hoss

After hours upon hours of struggling to come up with an idea that satisfied me, I decided to go with SAVORY SEA HOSS, a high seas adventure about a radical guy with radical intentions.  You deliver delicious goodness to castaways hungering for tastiness. The only catch is… Sea Hoss has terrible aim, and he’s been known to accidentally murder the very people he’s trying to save. KEEP YOUR MURDER PERCENTAGE DOWN AND YOUR SAVORY SAVIOR PERCENTAGE UP IN THIS GOOFY ISLAND-THEMED ROMP STARRING A PURPLE THING WITH AN ORANGE VEST.

All stupidity aside, the game looks kinda neat with the ‘squigglevision’ / Crayola art style I’ve chosen.

It’s also funny seeing starving castaways getting pegged in the head with hotdogs and falling into the ocean.

I MAY ACTUALLY FINISH ON TIME!

WITH MUSIC AND SOUND EFFECTS!

MAYBE!!!

Tiles I think are mostly done.

Lets see, graphic wise, I need some item parts, bushes, trees, and, uh, interface.

So, time to hit the random generators!

Wooah, pink!

There is now a simili beginning of gameplay… The player places beacons all over the map, and the dudes within their areas of influence will be drawn to them.

Now we’re still far from actual game mechanics, or even winning condition.

Tags: screenshot

Been programming for almost 24 hours now, and my game is still no closer to being a game. Time to move onto some kind of game logic now I think, I’ve left it too long – I don’t know what it will be, but I’ll make something work. Anyways, heres a new fangled screenshot – now with poor reception!

Should have invested in oxygen free copper AV cables...

The API Reference for SDL.Net isn’t working.  I’ve googled like craZy and can’t find an alternate.  Anyone know where I can find an alternate?

Again lots of progress.. Now there actually are two types of boats, reds and greens and 2 goal areas on the right. If the boat hits the correct goal area, the goal flashes bright. Otherwise it will flash dark. There is also a spawn system which will spawn more and more boats. Also tweaked the fluid dynamics and boat moving. Now the boats stop if they would hit something and also they try to steer away from close-by islands. So the boats act a lot better gameplay -wise.

Testing the game, it’s kinda interesting how the mechanics work. If you close off a section completely, because there is little/no fluid flow there, the boats will move a lot more erratically (currently there is a minimum speed for their movement but not sure if there really needs to be). So you need to keep the fluid flowing in order to guide the boats.

Not much to go in order to have a fully functioning game, btw. Just counting the score and lives left, menu screens and some instructions.. Then there is the question of sounds and such. But feeling pretty positive over-all. I think I’ll stop development on this for tonight and continue tomorrow.

Tags: LD17

Sun’s gone down… switching from beer to whiskey. Think I have an economy system worked out, but since I don’t have a GUI in place, I can’t actually see the prices to know whether they make sense. Guess I know what my next task is!

Now there are enemies, food, and a progress bar for your size.

I think the next step will be to add the villagers that go on your back. And maybe have the enemies move around.

Tags: progress

Well Ive been working pretty much solid since the theme was announced, and am finally at the stage where I have an emergancy build that I can submit if everything else goes horribly wrong:

Angry Stan And The Island Of Doom

introducing “Angry Stan And The Island Of Doom”,

The basic Goal of “ASATIOD” is to collect all of the gold coins from the island before the tide gradually comes in and drowns you, if you dont get to the coins before the tide washes them away, you have had it.

It still needs a lot of tweaking and tidying up, also the collision responce is acting really weird and making it look like Stan has Parkinsons (mabee thats why he’s angry?) anyway Im going to take it off my bug list and add it to my feature list because I think its kind of cool.

Hoping to either use allegro’s font handling to create some better text, or use sprites.

Also still need to add a menu and congradulation screen.

My game is starting to take shape… I have a player that I can move, even though he’s only drawn as an axis right now.

these are just temp art (i hope), my plan is to get the engine going tonight and then leave tommorow for content.

One nice thing is that I’m using the OGMO level editor, and it was very easy to make a layer for elevation and another layer for tiles.. so even though it wasn’t build with this kind of game in mind, it’s flexible enough to support it.

Still not 100% sure what the setting/theme will be… but the general idea is that gameplay will be some sort of narrative roguelike.

More progress.

I also have written two songs for it! But I can’t upload mp3s… You’ll just hafta play it when it’s done, hmn?

Here is what i have so far after 6 hours of work.

Now just to do AI, island control, upgrades, music, and sounds.

wow thats a lot…

yeah i made some more updates and he looks really freaky now.

Come and play!

http://www.probegames.webs.com/

Now you can play “AlienIslands”!

Click Here to play!

I finally got the watery effect I was looking for, and learned a thing or two about LOVE’s SpriteBatches. (I ended up dumping Java+Slick for what I know and LOVE.)

Menu screenshot for Ahoy!

A brief aside, if you will.  In the game “Oregon Trail”, you can manage your wagon-ride every which way, but in the end, everyone I know fondly remembers hunting as “the fun part”.  There was all this incidental stuff about fording rivers and getting typhoid fever and that was nice but everyone just wanted to hunt.

I had brainstormed out this big resource-trading mogul game, and thought that every once in a while there would be ship-to-ship combat.  Then I realized- combat is probably going to be Ahoy!’s “fun part”.  If you have trouble getting into the trading-resources-to-grow-an-empire sort of game, you should at least be able to immediately dip into some action.  Which is why there’s a “Combat Minigame” option right under “Main Game” on the menu.

This will also serve as a fallback in case I can’t finish the Main Game (and it’s complex enough that I might not)- I’ll still have an entry, because I’ll be finishing the combat part first.

Tags: journal, progress

I added that floating island enemy from my last post into the game. It drops mines that blow up people on islands (onos) and the boat. You lose all the people you’re carrying and lose 50 points when you get hit. Three hits, and you’re dead.

Uploaded a video to them tubes, to show off actual gameplay and stuff. And for testing. Click the image below to watch it and stuff:

Also, after taking the videos, I finally added CLOUDS!!!

Tags: video

check it out so far! this is for ludumdare 17!

Go here 2 play!:

http://www.probegames.webs.com/