A less lame day (11:30 AM)

I said on my day 3 post that I “hope I come back and do more work”… which I didn’t.

I got up early today (9 AM… which should make you wonder when “normal” is), and did some work. I’m ignoring IRC at the moment, so I can make a whole bunch of progress.

It says 'Behind' not Fehind... not that you would have thought otherwise

Been tweaking the code and rough editing interface to support multiple layers and a transformation matrix. Currently it’s limited to a single room, but neighboring room editing should be soon… hopefully today.

Back to work.

More Control (1:30 PM)

Now only displaying the layer info from the current layer.

You can't tell, but it's spinning and doing cool perspective depthy stuff

As you change layers, the camera zooms in. In game will work the same.

Fun fun.

Adjacent Room Drawing and Editing (2:30 PM)

Brown things in the background? Lets pretend those are some sort of pillar.

Camera Panning (7:15 PM)

After a 2 hour walk, dinner, and a some bugfixing (some editor alignment bugs), we now have some very basic Camera panning.

Two rooms. The one with the red tile markers is the one we are editing.

Just about done for the night. A little more minor tweaking, then movie time.

Building maps in all directions (7:40 PM)

I can now build maps in all directions.

That's where the staircase goes.

There seems to be a crash bug when I go to far (or at least there was earlier). I’ll tackle that tomorrow.

Overall, a good day.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 9th, 2010 at 9:38 am and is filed under October Challenge 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,

I have a webbuild of the Iphone game I’m working on. It’s pretty simple, but I’m getting close to my deadline and I could really use some feedback on what to focus on.

Play it here: http://garbos.itu.dk/explosivelove/game.html

Today was mostly full of bugs.
First I could’t get it to save on Boolean and an integer. This one feature that needs to be added, so I can’t avoid it.

Then I had this problem that made it not add 100 to the score. I fixed this by removing
score = 0;
I was annoyed that such a simple thing caused this.

I think there were some other bugs, but I can’t remember them right now.

I’m currently adding collision support right now. I also added the score/hiscore to the “gameplay view”. You can also shoot bullets now which is good. Also invert the game from black on white, to white on black.

Tomorrow I’ll finally add the enemy spawner and see what I need to add after that.

I don’t have pictures today, because I’m writing on my iPad. I was planing on recording a video….

Not making much progress this weekend and the next two I’m going to be otherwise occupied, but I’ll do my best with whatever time I can get on weeknights…

Just thought I’d share this:

GAME DEVELUPMINTZ?!

Our cat doesn’t approve of my game development habit :P! Other than that, nothing to see here…

*Edit: Fixed lolspeak…

Now it has officially been a week since I started the project.  I must say I am pleased with the progress made so far, although things need to start moving along a little quicker.  I am still knee deep in the editor, although wow, has it come a long ways in a single week.  If I must say so, this is likely the best editor I’ve ever made.  It has almost complete undo/redo support.  I can’t say I am pleased with the code behind the editor.  Maintaining this will end up being a nightmare, I can feel it already.  A lot of copy/paste code segments for things like add/delete checkpoints / track nodes and other bits of information.

Since I last wrote a progress update, I have added the checkpoint system, which will be used to verify the car went around the track properly, and for timing the lap.  I’ve also added camera control to the editor, which involved making the engine support the mouse wheel for zooming in/out.  Also the track nodes now contain a width modifier, that can change the width of the track in a particular area.

Finally I’ve added a start grid tool, which can create evenly spaced grids for the starting position of the car.  Only 9 tasks remain on the editor and track environment and then I will be onto a new task.  I still don’t have a good name for the project so “TBR: The Best Racer” is sticking for now.  Or it could be Tim Beaudet’s Racer…

A current screenshot of the editor with a textured track, checkpoints and starting grid.

My current plan of attack is to add objects / sprites to liven up the environment.  Trees, haybales, cones, crowds and other common trackside objects would really liven the place up.  After that I need to implement saving/loading of the track, and a car/world editor to assist when I start making the actual gameplay.  More to come in the following days.  If I have a miracle session tonight, perhaps the editor will be completed?  Ahahaha…

Hi everyone, got the basic physics engine working. Took forever but now it’s finally somewhat stable ^_____^ It still explodes at random times but its fine for now haha. I got it to the point where you can drag the little physics entities around with your finger and fling em around the screen. Next thing to do is add blood and friction. Maybe I’ll make one of those tower defense games later using the physics code from this. Oh well, back to work now ^_____^

So, I’ve been working on a Flash version of my LD11 game, Tiny Hawk.

At first I was planning on making a super fancy version, possibly with 3D graphics and overall a very different focus from the original. The original was really just a single-switch platformer where you got some score bonuses by chaining tricks together. I was thinking about making it more about the tricks instead. While planning this though, I realized it would have been a lot of work and I didn’t have a clear vision of the final product, so I decided to just port the original game to Flash instead.

Now, somewhere along the way I decided the original game wasn’t quite good enough, so I started changing things. I made the levels smaller. This enabled me to not have to put so much filler into the levels. Some of the original levels were half empty anyhow. With this smaller size, I can fill the level most of the time without repeating myself a lot. Another major thing I changed is I added momentum. This means that if the player avoids various things that slow him down, he can get through the levels much faster, and reach places unreachable at low speeds. Speed, of course is the new name of the game. Instead of a score, the player is timed on how fast he can beat the levels.

Well, that’s it for now. Just wanted to share some of my progress here also. I’m talking about the project more regularly on IRC though, also posting links to development builds. I won’t post those here since I’m trying to keep it under wraps until I get it sponsored.

Tags: tiny hawk

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 10th, 2010 at 7:38 am and is filed under October Challenge 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.

Today, after much faffing around I officially kick off my October Challenge game. After a long and heated debate between myself and an empty page in a notebook, I’ve decided to lower my sights considerably. I had intended to make a non-traditional tower defense game, I had two interesting aesthetics for this. One had the working title “In the Loop” and was centred around espionage networks intercepting information to stay relevant. The second was a hacker-orientated TD, where the towers are the various applications deployed in an effort to usurp control of the system.

Upon thinking about it, I realised that even though I have one of these ideas quite well fleshed out in design, to make it fun and interesting will take a hell of a lot of playtesting and iteration. So for this month I’m going to stick to tried and tested mechanics and make a traditional TD. The working title for this is “21 Days” since that is exactly how long I have to finish it and set it free.

My goals today are to get stand in creeps running around a tile-based map with quick and hacky A* directing them. Then get some grid-control and be able to plant towers (that do nothing yet). If I get this game polished up enough in the 21 days I might add a bit of meta-research, between levels you task scientists with researching technology dropped by creeps during the last mission, in order to develop more effective towers to help as the levels and creeps escalate. However, I’m going to focus on having a playable TD first.

Feature creep begone.

I’m developing in Flex/AS3 with Flashpunk. This is counter to my plans, as I had spent the better part of last week messing around in flixel. Flashpunk just seems that much more sensible, I can work far more quickly in it as I find its structure and usage much more intuitive, seems to me it was written more for programmers than flixel is.

Now, if I can resist the urge to play more Civilization I might actually achieve today’s targets….

Tags: actionscript, civilization, flashpunk, flex, Flixel, Ludum Dare, october challenge

Ok. I have finally decided on what game I am going to make, i have designed it, and everyhting else. other then made it. And, I also haven’t decided what platform to make it for? What would get the most sales? I am like a moderate intermediate user of python, but that is all, i want to be able to sell this. And school starts in 2 days, thats the other thing. ;P Might not be able to make this one if I can’t make the game.

Question: If anyone knows, how would I sell a game for Windows?

Today I’m feeling like I want to share my unreadable code. (code is here :D)
Thats my main file where everything I do is put. Yeah, not everything is used in the code yet.

Haven’t done much today, fixed some stuff and thats all. I don’t think I’ll be doing much til after wednesday because I have to work on something for school.

Also today I came up with the best concept EVAR, you play a dude who wants to go to the moon, but just can’t jump all the way up to it, so he then go’s and beats up gravity so he can jump to it. I’m going to see if I can fit idea into next months mini LD or make it in my spare time.

Hello there, LD community and whoever else might read this!

I’m new around here, but not totally new to game development. Some might have heard of some Free game I’m messing around with every now and then, and maybe even seen some programming example of mine, involving a pig. 😉

Anyway, after spending way too much time figuring out what tools to use, working on my new site, Olofson Arcade, and various other things, I’ve finally decided what to do, and (roughly) how.

[…]
So, some time ago, I decided that I’ll just wrap Kobo Deluxe up and finish it according to the original design goals: “An enhanced version of Akira Higuchi’s game XKobo.” Nothing more, nothing less. It’s a small, retro styled game for hardcore arcade fanatics, and that’s the way it should stay, modulo some easier skill levels for the occasional joystick wizard wannabe. 😉

Now, what to do with all those ideas that had accumulated, all the unofficial experiments, all the neat graphics tricks that wouldn’t really work without OpenGL, and all that? But of course: A sequel!
[…]

Full story here.

David

The art style we’ve chosen to utilise within our Ludum Racer has been derived from our upcoming iPad title: Dead West.

It’s a limited yet fantastic looking colour pallete, designed to make full use of the amazing high contrast that suits the iPhone and iPad particularly well.

Below are several screenshots that show a styling screenshot from Dead West, through converting it to a ‘track’ to showing where lighting effects etc are, and finally to a finished product including a horse and trap contraption that will be used in the final finished product.

The drawn on notes indicate different obstacles etc to add a bit of variety and shape to the finished track.

To stop things looking too bland, some lighting paths were sketched on, darker parts showing shadow and lighter parts indicating, well, light. This further enhances the route of the track.

Finally, with some edges defining the sides properly and some nice lighting, we’re left with something that looks much more like a track.

Our game design is moving on, and we now have a working prototype with some fancy tracks, but still much, much more to do.

So this was part way through the first conceptual idea, the green markings are bits that’ll probably change and evolve as seen fit

And this is where the thing is up to currently.

Obviously this is still very early stages, but progress is fast (And needs to be!)

More updates as and when.

We’ll be regularly blogging here and on our parent site under ‘Ludum Racer (challenge blog)‘
Further to this, both myself @deltamikealpha and Gareth @36peas will be tweeting about the project as it evolves.

I’ve made my XCode project and I’m trying to wrap my head around Box2D on the iPhone. I’m also debating on using my own game framework (that I made for Valet Hustle a year ago), or if I will go with Cocos2D. Because Cocos2D has Box2D bundled, I figured the solution was obvious, but looking further into it really all they appeared to do is include Box2D in the download. There are no actual connections with Cocos2D that I can see. And do I really want to learn another API? It’s debatable.

Either way, I’m happy that because A Lasting Impression was from an 84 hour project it has only around 15 source files. It’s in Java, so I’ll need to port it to Objective-C, but once I’ve got the physics and the rendering pathway all settled the rest should be quick and easy (Valet Hustle’s engine was one I originally made in Java and then ported over to Objective-C, so I’m already pretty good at the process).

My current target is to have the original Java game running on the iPhone by the end of the week. That will leave me about another week to add in some more entities and features, then I can submit it and hopefully get it approved just before the end of October. But that may be unrealistic – I may need to content myself with having it submitted by the 31st, but actually making a few bucks afterwards. Apple is notorious for taking forever.

I’ve wanted to enter since I heard of this, and having suddenly got a simple, but pretty cool idea last night, I’m going for it! And to make me more likely to complete my game, I’m posting publicly about doing so. That way, I can be motivated by public humiliation! 😀

Not sure I want to give away the idea yet, so I’ll just say I’m finally going to properly try Flash with Flashpunk, and Box2D. Should be very educational if nothing else!

Originally posted on http://www.over00.com/?p=991

So my solo project for October’s challenge has been submitted to Flash Game License so it should be available soon for sponsorship.

The game is named Mad Scientist Defense and is a mix of action and a bit of tower defense. At the command of a blimp you must protect the lab of Dr. Altus from monsters while he is busy doing some secret experiment.

The game has 2 modes. First the traditional waves mode where you face waves of monsters with an increase difficulty level on each wave and blimp upgrades and then the robots invasion mode which is a survival mode. This last mode was added as a way to extend the length of the game and provide quick action to those not interested to make choices about the upgrades of their blimp. While the first mode only has 20 waves adding more just felt redundant. The tower defense aspect is much more a way to provide support to the action part so that’s why I kept the number of waves limited. It just wouldn’t be possible to play a complete game with only turrets. You’ll have to work on your skills instead.

Most of the development time was spent on balancing each waves which is not as easy as I thought it would be. I needed to make sure the game would provide a nice learning curve while making sure my skills were not interfering with my perception of the difficulty level. By now I have played this game so many times that I could probably beat it with my eyes closed. The danger however is raising the difficulty level too much that it might just become a frustrating experience to new players. Again the robots invasion mode provides a nice way to give a bit more to players who master the waves mode.

Here’s a trailer that sponsors on FGL will be able to see to get a quick glimpse of the game.

Mad Scientist Defense trailer

Moving on to the The Fae’s Wyrd

With Mad Scientist Defense completed I can now focus on the team project which you can read about here.

As I said previously my work on this project will be to take care of the stuff around game mechanics like interfaces, dungeon generation and save/load features.

I just got back on this project so I don’t have much to show beside the screenshots of random dungeons I previously posted so here’s just a tiny tiny tiny taste of the work done so far. Yeah there’s not much here but the code do save and load already. More will be posted later and hopefully Brian will be kind enough to expand on the subject 😉

Tags: Flixel, machine22, psychoavatar games

OK, update! Wohoo, finally got something done.
The game is fully playable now. The next step will be some sort of menu system to implement.

You can try it out on windows. Since it’s an iPhone game, the controls are a bit awkard, making the game loose it’s spirit a bit. Please try it – don’t judge it by the boring screen shot. It’s nicely animated.

download:
get it here

Its been a whole week of development now. My games transformed into a partly working arcade shooter, from nothing.
I haven’t done much work today because I was trying to get my homework done, but in the last half hour or so, I’ve started work on the spawn and its going pretty well, a bit of work tomorrow and maybe it’ll work. I’m also happy to see that somebody has finished a game already!

Update number two coming to you at 02:00 in the morning from a dark and (mostly) sleeping South Africa…

I’ve just finished my first pass at more advanced map generation and I’m very happy with the results (actually just very happy that it’s working at all 😛 – this is my first time trying random map generation)! Most of the credit must go to the writer of this article at the RogueBasin on generating cave maps with Cellular Automata… I was looking for inspiration and found that some of the caves generated could pass for outlines of islands, so I adopted the algorithm described there and then just added some additional custom passes to make things look a bit fancier :). All in all I’m quite pleased with the results so far, but still need to add:

• Rivers
• Towns
• Maybe some more terrain types

I’ve also got a basic ship which can teleport around the screen (normal movement going gradually from point-to-point is a near-future todo).

Here’s my latest screenshot:

Cool looking randomly generated map and a semi-functional Airship! :)

(Cross posted from An RPG in a month.)

So, what’s happening at Psychoavatar? As I mentioned, we’re working on an RPG in a month for October. So, I figured I’d do a “developer’s diary” type entry. Won’t be daily, but I figure a few postings to give a glimpse at what an accelerated development schedule looks like might be interesting. Not that I shouldn’t be working on it instead….

First some organization

One of the first things I did was to settle out tasks between us and set up some tools to help. Dave is working on the visual part of the game, I’m doing the behind-the-scenes gameplay stuff, Kat’s working on tiles and logos, and Sara’s doing player and enemy art. I also set up email addresses for us on the psychoavatar.com domain, and set up a wiki to organize planning for the game.

I’ve actually been holding on to the psychoavatar.com domain for a while. A quick “whois” entry shows that I

I’m pretty old-school in my design style, so I started with Word documents. I’ve slowly grown to accept wikis as an alternative, but there’s still some problems with them. The biggest is that there is a mild level of technical proficiency required, which can discourage people from using it. But, it can also make changes to the system easier than passing around a Word document if you have multiple people who need to edit the same document. Wikis do seem to be more useful as the team grows, so I guess using a wiki for a team of four people shows some optimism in that I hope we’ll grow from here.

The next choice was which wiki software to use. I settled on WackoWiki because it’s fairly lightweight. It also has a few nifty features, like “clusters” (which I just call subpages) that help make organization easier. It also has an editor to help you with syntax, even though it isn’t quite WYSIWYG as WikiMatrix claimed it was. Overall, I think it’s working well.

Now for some design

The next step is to figure out how much of an RPG we can make in a month. I pretty much took charge here since I’m going to be doing the behind-the scenes work. I came up with an informal list of features I wanted, including:

• A party of characters
• Elemental advancement
• Randomized levels
• Randomized loot
• A simple set of spells

Then I set about fleshing out some details. One goal is to separate out the core design and implementation from the data that keeps it interesting. So, for example, I might detail a system where weapons have “ranks” to determine their power and how weapons can have randomized bonuses (so you can get a “short sword of Fire” instead of a normal short sword), but I’m going to wait to define all of those bonuses until the infrastructure is in place. I’ve also prioritized the features, so if time runs short we can decide to cut something.

I also wrote a very brief “backstory” for the game. Nothing epic, just something to explain why you’re trudging through the dungeon to no certain end.

A question of art

Given that we have a month, a fully realized 3D world ain’t happening. Not that you could do that in Flash very well, mind you. So, there has been some discussion about what style we want to use. We’ve settled on a faux-8-bit style. Something a bit more colorful than the true 8-bit games, perhaps comparable to the older version of Spelunky. This is good because it allows the artists to crank out a good variety of art, but it still appealing to more modern tastes.

We’re also working on some logos. You can see a preliminary logo for Psychoavatar on our website. Thanks to Kat for throwing that together quickly.

Current status

So far, things seem to be on track. Dave has completed some random level generation and a basic loading screen. You’ll also note that he’s working on a second game by himself, truly earning the “psycho” part of the company name for himself.

Art is being produced. Sara has created several variations for the player art: male and female, different types of armor, etc. Kat has also created a tileset we can use to create initial dungeons. Lots more art to work on here.

As for me, I finished the design last week and started working on the gameplay code. My goal is to get the basic infrastructure done this week, spend next week inputting data and tweaking gameplay to get a good game, then get something playable by the 24th. I’ll probably post a call for testers on here and on my Twitter feed, so it might be a good time to start following me.

(Also, feel free to leave comments here or on my blog.)

Hi, I’ve been working on music lately. Practicing the keyboard, going through lessons with Cubase, playing with tons of instruments. Trying to learn how to score a video game.

Anyway, if anyone wants a song for their October Challenge game, I’ll be happy to do so at no cost. Credit in the game will be sufficient. You only have to use it if you like it.

I’d like to play the game or at least know as much about it as possible, including your thoughts on what kind of musical score you expect the game to have. I can do chip tunes, dramatic film scores, whatever fits the game.

Here is a sample of something I just finished. It is my rendition of the Ultima Wanderer song (from Ultima 3).
Ultima Wanderer MP3

If interested, let me know on this thread. Thanks.