Tags: cute, fuzzy, useless


Ok here are my plans:

step 1 - navigation

Tags: plans, recycle, robots

New screenshot! Yay!

As you can see, I’ve got the selection pallet at the bottom working (sort of, there’s only one choice right now), I’ve got text up in the HUD at the top that’s actually real (mostly), score and funds work, enemies walk around, cannons shoot them, and the timer counts down. Finally starting to look like a game. Too bad the art sucks, hopefully I’ll get a chance to improve it some tomorrow. I’ve been humbled by all the awesome art you guys are posting, great work! I hope they’re as fun as they are beautiful! The voting’s going to be more fun than making my game I think.

So I had my yummy dinner of homemade wedges, little cheeseburger and salad which was yummy of course

I had fun watching Archimedes defy gravity by hanging on with his tiny feet

And I’ve been toying about with the main menu, however this is totally work in progress

Got a few more hours of work in me at least, so I hope to get as much done as possible

Upgrades!

You get to put 5 of these on your space ship.
You win them from killing enemies.

And a neat looking glitch for luck.

This is my first Ludum Dare, and it’s a great excuse to make something, however small. I’m taking the opportunity to play with HTML5 and the Canvas API, creating some neat vector imagery as I go. Gameplay-wise, what I have now is more of a tech demo than anything, but I have some concepts lined up (think of those lines above being enemy bullets, and go from there). I’m hopeful that I can finish in time, and if I don’t, I’ve still learned a ton.

Well given how sleepy I’m feeling now that I’ve eaten I think it’s probably time to call it a night. I’d hoped to get a *little* bit more done than I have today, but I think I’m still on-track.

Spent the afternoon/evening finishing off and tweaking my core game mechanics to a point that I’m really quite happy with.

Also managed to fit in an hours run, which was completely invigorating, but is probably conspiring to make me rather tired now. I’ve a beautiful local running route that I can hit within 5 minutes of leaving the house, there was rivers and cows and horses and the beginnings of a sunset. I’d have taken photos were my camera less unwieldly.

Oh yes, and completing my days food photos, I had a quiche (store bought I’m afraid, but I did make the salad dressing myself at least):

Tags: build, exercise, foodphoto

Dear C#,

I know we got off to a bad start. I was prejudiced against you, despite what my friends said. But in the end I gave you a go, because Visual Studio 2008 is the only IDE on this, my Dad’s laptop, and I didn’t want to use C++. I mean, me and C++ were good friends. Good friends. But she’s too awkward to work with.

You didn’t meet up to my expectations, when your console output was so slow; when you only allowed a few, predefined colours. I could see the good in you, see how you were trying so hard.

Then today, well, I’ve had enough. I wasted so much time today, when I should have been writing game logic, searching through your documentation, trying to find how to draw one image onto another. Eventually someone helped me know how to do it, but it’s still awkward. Why does it involve another class? It’s a basic, fundamental thing to do.

But the final straw was window sizes. When I want an 800×600 window, that means the inside. I wouldn’t mind if there was a way to know the border sizes, but there isn’t, and they vary between operating systems. There is simply no way to do it. Or if there is, it’s not worth the hassle.

Goodbye, C#. It’s not me, it’s you.

(Relatedly, I guess I’m out of the competition now. Bah!)

Space mess

So far, I implemented the usual Newtonian physics, that is, the ship has a thurster control, which makes it accelerate in the current direction, and speed and position are integrated from it.

To control by hand, it’s a bit unusual, but we get used pretty fast. Especially since I coded a control that turns you automatically to the direction opposite to your speed, so you can “slow down”.

However, I’m stuggling to build an AI for something as simple as “go there and stop”. The easy way seems to be to first slow down to a stop, then turn to the point, accelerate half the way, deccelerate half the way. But that, of course, fails if the target is moving.

More naive solutions can work too, but they all seem to “diverge” in that if you aim at a fixed point, the ship will oscilate around it, on an increasing orbit.

Anyway, despite allowing for pretty nifty curvy trajectories, I’m affraid Newtonian physics are actually not fun. You almost never point at where you want to go, and you spend your time doing “straight” accel/deccel trajectories, because they are easier to visualize.

The solution I see is to go back to a more “arcade” system, where the player controls directly speed, instead of acceleration. Pressing the thruster button makes you go forward, period. Of course, in space it’s very impossible, but that’s the kind of behavior we are use to on Earth. Thanks to friction on the floor, cars, bikes and stuff are controled by direction.

On the other hand, I like the idea that you can aim at somewhere you don’t go, especially if weapons are aligned with the ship. That way you can do fly-by shootings, and looking around without actually moving erraticly.

Maybe I can try a hybrid system, where ships have proper Newtonian inertia, but as soon as the thrusters are on, the speed is fixed to the forward direction. Maybe also some sort of damping to avoid brutal speed jumps then.

Dunno. I’m getting tired and I haven’t done much yet. Also I’m far from any game at all.

Tags: screenshot

(If AtkinsSJ is addressing his language of choice…)

Dear Flash,

I know I’ve been hard on you. Bragging about Java being better at applets, bemoaning “Crappy flash games”, and thinking of myself as “above” playing on sites like Kongregate.

I want to admit that I was wrong about you. I can see something in you that’s different from other engines, from other languages. I get the feeling that… That you just want me to have fun with what I’m doing. You want me enjoy my work. Today you and I had a rocky start, but we had a good time regardless. Using FlashPunk, you let me dive right into game logic without hesitation. After using only Pygame and other SDL-based libs for a long time, I can’t tell you how good that felt. With Flixel, you show me the sophistication that you are capable of. Even that little bit of time I spent on Kongregate proved that prejudice yet more baseless. I’ve seen what you can do.

Tomorrow, we’ll begin again. Hopefully we can get a real game going, huh? I have to say, Python’s never given me that. Hm.

I know you and I can be great friends. You’re powerful, you’re high-level, and you’re very fun to work with. We’ll definitely be seeing more of each other.

Thanks for proving me wrong,
–Mr. Dude

I think I’ve been neglecting my screenshot duties, so here you go:

This pretty much sums up the extent of my game at the end of day 1. There are some enemies, you shoot at you. You can shoot at them and collect their broken hull.

I had really hoped to be a lot further along, but that’s always the way it goes. Tomorrow I’ll get the whole enemies-as-weapons thing in there, player damage, enemy patterns, etc etc. Right now it’s time to do some serious sleeping.

Good night!

Tags: end of day 1, screenshot, sleeptime

So, 21 hours into LD18 and here is what I have to show for it:

Who ever said Java had poor framerates?

It may not look like much, but that is the start of a game.

I have functioning:

• Sprite sheets and animations.
• Action system and input bindings for actions.  This also ties to the animation system.
• Attaching/removing actions for objects.  This lets me switch controls to different objects when the player mind controls an enemy.
• Camera follow attachment.  This lets me focus the camera on any object.
• Mouse aim / character rotation.

Major things left to do:

• Tile map loading.
• Collision detection.
• Enemy AI.

Hopefully I can get something playable in the next 12 hours.

Tags: journal, screenshot

Last hours have been most productive… I added 4 types of enemies (soldier, archer, dragon and wizard), each with their own special strenghts and weaknesses, and different types of attacks (melee, ranged, aoe)…

It was easy adding them in my data-driven system, which is totally awesome, at least that’s well design…

There are still balancing issues, although not many… still not a game, missing the power gems (to restore mana, health and “wall strenght”), game over and win conditions, m…ore levels, title screen and instructions… Instructions are particularly scary, since the game is quite complicated already from a mechanics standpoint… and I didn’t even add more spells and RPG-like attributes like critical strikes and attack speed.
Some graphics need lots of work aswell, and it would be nice if the characters would face whoever they’re attacking, but that will take much longer than I have, specially considering my drawing skills…

Tomorrow I own’t have much time to work on the game, since I have family visiting… going to try geting most of the work done in the morning and at night, specially late night (after 11pm or so until 3am, which is the compo’s finishing time in my timezone). Want to have a complete game with sound, music, title screen, instructions, game over and several levels… the rest of the stuff I’ve been pondering about (more spells, RPG-like damage system, etc), will be left for Monday (so it can participate on the Jam aswell).

Anyway, nice for about 10 hours of work… all data-driven and such…

…the first one, actually XD
Well, i have about 1/2 – 2/3 of the game logic done, and a beautiful set of filler sprites that will gouge your eyes out with their ugliness. here’s a screenshot (notice how mt filler sprites have the same colour pallet as last LD :D)

Physics Galore

Yeah, see each of those outlined blocks? each one has it’s own rudimentary physics :facepalm:

<sarcasm>

making HUGE progress

I can move a rectangle around now

</ sarcasm>

My first ever Ludum Dare day is nearing its end and things aren’t really going as planned, which was expected. 😉

After getting up pretty late today, I originally planned to work until early in the morning, my concentration however is declining rapidly (I just wanted to control the cursor in the WordPress editor with “hjkl”…). So to be fit tomorrow at least, I better get some sleep now!

Progress wise I got a few other Ideas which all evolve around a platformer however, so I’m implementing the basics for that currently. I’m still not that stoked about the concpt and it is getting clearer and clearer that I will never finish it in 48 or 72 hours, but I’m going to keep going with it now.

Oh and despite all those bad news… did I mention that I’m having a boatload of fun? 😀

Good night!

I have a prototype but no real gameplay yet.

Play here.

In my game you are a little spaceship where you grab enemy ships and throw them at their friends!

I am using Java this time and it got fancy particle effects and stuff.

Ok, I doubt I’ll get much more done tonight (if anything), so I’ve made a small vidcap of what I’ve got so far:

LD18 Day 1 gone

As you can see, not much, lol.  I have basic sprite animations and scripting support (move or turn), plus the spritesheet took me ages to do.  Here’s hoping for a more productive day tomorrow, and an actual playable game 😀

To my mixed pleasure, some friends called me around seven and invited me over for dinner. It was good dinner, don’t get me wrong — but throughout the evening my thoughts were dominated by three distinctly anti-social questions:

• What is the next milestone I need to hit for my Ludum Dare entry?
• When is the earliest socially acceptable time for me to bow out and get to work on said entry?
• Dammit, I’m eating during a Compo and I don’t have a camera.

Not all was lost: I worked out the details of my course editor over a glass or three of wine. And behold! An hour or so after my return, here it is:

If you're reading this, Celia, I'm only kidding. It was an /awesome/ dinner.

I’ve also settled on a visual style that doesn’t make me retch. It’s amazing what you can do with a bit of Photoshop glow and additive blending. Mmm, blending.

Oh, and the food I failed to photograph? Homemade (vegan) pizza. Mmm, despite the distinct lack of, well, anything I’d ordinarily put on a pizza. Since I don’t have a picture, can you just envision it? Maybe?

Ah, there you go. No, wait — you forgot the sweetcorn.

Mmm.

Tags: pygame, python, screenshot

Okay, im starting to get pretty tired. Its not very late (midnight) but I think the lack of sleep last night is catching up with me. Im gonna get a few hours kip now then back up early to start again I think.

As for progress. I have a basic enemy type in, it doesnt do much except bleed, and it doesnt look too good (I really cant draw!) but oh well.

As before I have done a build that you can “play”:

(on my blog: http://mikecann.co.uk/ludum-dare/ludum-dare-hour-22/)

So the next task for me when I wake up is to add some sort of scoring mechanism and ofcourse to add the ability to use the “Enemies as Weapons” 😛

I’ve been making some headway on “Digging Deep” that’s the name of my game, it’s been the name from the start, I just didn’t think of letting you know that 😛

Anyways, I’ve got a few more rooms down, and some progression to the storyline. I’m hoping to finish making the next “Chapter” tonight, and then work on the last section tomorrow. I also realize I haven’t been using the theme that much, enough for it to work, but not that much. So I have a few Ideas for more enemies and stuff.

Have a picture to make this more interesting:

Hey!

Not posted or taken part in this before so hello! Me and my friend Pete are taking part in the Jam – our game is called March of the Rorgers and features (hopefully) the enemy-as-weapon mechanic of different kinds of enemies hating each other more than you and attacking each other preferentially, like a rock-paper-scissors mechanic. It’s being written in Delphi as a win32 app, and is coming along better than I thought we would be at this point – here’s a screenshot:

We’re also liveblogging our efforts on a game news website, Nukezilla, at this link.

I’m doing the coding and he’s doing art and music, he’s also asleep right now. XD

Will post more status later, but if you want to see what we’re up to you can check the link above!
Kieran

Just need to clean the GMK and is good to go. Although I need to know something, I’m using a dll that makes the online highscores possible, and to make that dll work I need to use some scripts that come with it. Is this permitted with or without an explanatory post or ins’t permitted at all?

The site where the high-scores are hosted is this. On the paper icon there’s the zip with the scripts that I’m using.

Day 1 is so to say finished… But I didn’t get much done. Apart from sleeping too late, my original idea didn’t work out so great either. So yep, it was back to the drawing board for me. Hopefully I’ll get it done before the time runs out. If not then I’ll make it a Jam entry (if it’s allowed)

Maybe december  I’ll have an entry.

As it’s looking now, I doubt I’ll have anything playable.  At least I got a stafield. Right? If I get anything done by 2am my time I’ll let you know. If not, maybe a post or two will have my withdrawal.

Til then, cheers and good luck all!

(really wanted to finish for this theme too, darn it)

Well I’m back at my home after a fun day of in person game development with two other LDers over in a Portsmouth NH cafe. It was so cool to meetup and work in person a bit and share game progress and talk shop a bit.  Plus it was great to get the odd looks of people while I photographed my lunch and while we talked about our game mechanics.

Stopped by my favorite Indian Restaurant and picked up some Chicken Tikka Masala and Vegetable Pakora. Time to enjoy this feast and then get back to the game dev!

Tags: deskphoto, dinner, foodphoto, home, masala, pakora, tikka

...took longer than I wanted to, art is horrid, buuuuuut I'm that much closer to actually completing something.

This has kind of taken longer than I wanted it to, since I’ve started with just Allegro, GIMP, SFXR and Milky Tracker. I thought I’d try going from scratch without any basecode at all, just for kicks.

Still, the finish line is in sight.

Next to be added: the protagonist, and the ability to control him/her

Tags: enemies as weapons

I’ve made pretty good progress for the first day (personal record), considering how much time I had to spend watching rugby and entertaining guests :P! I’ve got 1 enemy type fully working, as well as the mechanic for taking control of enemies and using them to blow stuff up – obstacles for constructing a maze are also working…

I’m a bit worried that I won’t have enough time to add content tomorrow like levels and add polish tomorrow, but I figure it’s better to attack the remaining coding bits tomorrow morning when I’m fresh (doing so now will result in disaster). My rough TODO list for tomorrow is:

• Code levels & transitions.
• Code level exit.
• Add 2-3 additional enemy types.
• Design & build 4-5 levels.
• Add sound.
• Polish, polish, polish!

Oh, yeah – here’s a screenshot:

Going to get some sleep now…

After spending a little while yesterday lamenting how my first Ludum Dare had to have such a difficult theme, I composed myself and eventually settled on an idea. Using C as my programming language and SDL for tiles (and possibly sound, when I get around to it), I’m making a “mini-roguelike-like” game of sorts.

The gist of the game? Well, you’ll move around a small “dungeon” (which I hope to spice up a little) shooting, zapping, or bumping into robots to “kill” them in order to acquire their weapon and shield equipment. Every time a creature successfully attacks you, your shield will be weakened, until it finally runs out of power and a creature hits you and you die. And every time you attack a creature, your weapon will expend energy/ammunition until eventually it has none left.

Sounds a bit complicated and maybe a bit lame, but I hope to make it vaguely interesting: the trouble is, I’ve got less than a day left…

(Also, can I ask for clarification on one point: is it okay to use line-of-sight code—that I have full rights to—that I developed earlier for another game? Or is that against competition rules?)

(My breakfast: a peanut-butter roll on the left and a tomato-and-cheese roll on the right.)

So I’ve been slacking off brainstorming design ideas for a while now, and have settled on something like a fast-paced arena shooter. And a title. Right now I have tentative player movement implemented, and… that’s about it.

Here’s a playable build… Still rough mind, and a lot of content to go.

Come on!

I managed to get lots of stuff done for Metagun today, including the first mini boss fight and some basic level progression.

And sfxr is the best program ever made.

I’ve uploaded the latest version here, so you can play it:
http://www.mojang.com/compo/metagun/

I will go get some sleep now, then tomorrow I will just focus on cramming in as many screens of content as I can, adding new features and blocks as I go. There’s some pretty interesting bullet hell mechanics going on that I will probably explore further, and I need to make the title screen for the game as well.. But I feel like I’ve got plenty of time, so I’ve got a good feeling about this. 😀

Good night, y’all’s!

Dang, one night down and hardly anything to show for it.  It’s annoying that I most of the code I wrote yesterday is all stuff that I’m sure others have written in the past, all just things to make stuff work.  I really wish that I’d found a Javascript library that did the things I wanted it to and not had to spend so much time trying to work out how to make it do those things myself, rather than just spend that time actually making game code.

Ah well, 2 hours to go until the half way point.  What I’ve got running is next to nothing, just random map generation that’s not in the final shape I want, along with some other classes sorted.  I’m going to sprint through as much code as I can over the next 2 hours, just throwing in a bunch of pseudo code of how things should work, and slowly fill that in.

Also, spagetti with pre-made sauce from last night (now I’m actually having more banana toast).

Though I didn’t start very early, at least I have a small game coming up.

Though the screen may not reveal a lot, it’s a platformer with a twist. The main idea is that you defeat enemies, then craft their spoils into equipment. A platformer / adventure hybrid of sorts. Also, the code looks better than the screen does 😉

http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1282434023

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Eh hem. You are presented with the player ship, and an enemy prototype. Press x to make the enemy fire. Run the player into the bullet that is shot. Have fun.

Attempting to fix.

(next time I’m doing a platformer)

I stupidly decided to update my Ogre installation and have had hordes of problems getting CEGUI to compile with the new Ogre so while compiling over and over I worked on graphics.

This is the heroine of the game. She is on a quest to become a lich and uses the bones of her enemies to make skeleton pets to help her on her quest.

This is a rendering from Blender because right now all the “gameplay” I have is the title screen I made before I tried to update ogre. This may end up running till Monday and be a Jam game =\

The game is coming along great! I have had some issues with the game logic so i had to make some changes in the main idea of the game.

What still needs to be done:

• Main character graphics and animations for him
• Audio is still missing
• Nuke- Jello Graphics and animation
• Fixed functionality for the missiles
• Win- Screen

Cant think of any other things but im sure there will be more, urgh i think ill go and get some hours of sleep.

It’s not a great game and it has a minimalistic gfx. For now no sound cause my framework is in an early stage.

You can check it out from http://code.google.com/p/outofammo/source/browse/#svn/trunk as well as download a binary version for mac os x [intel] and linux [i’ll upload them asap edit: asap == tomorrow 8p sorry].
It should not be a problem to make it compile under windows.

I think i’ll use tomorrow to polish it and maybe add some music.

Now, back to work 8)

So I figure I may have about 5 more hours of game dev in me today. My goal is to get as much code finished as possible so that tomorrow can be mainly 12-14 hours or so of game tuning/polish, graphics, sound, and music. We’ll see what happens!

Tags: day1, plan

Progress is going well, the animation system is fully setup, the renderer is fully setup, I know that the sound system will take no time at all because of the preparation I did (see my initial post to a link to the framework I started with).

Right now I have zero assets, I do have placeholders for my animations, but they look like this:
Imageshack Gallery of some dodgy artwork

This is enough for testing the basics of the animation stack; I can confirm that when a creature is hit it plays its orange “pain” animation and then continues with the white “idle” or green “walk” animation, and that when it dies it plays the red “death” animation and then freezes on the last frame.

I’ll do some screenshots when ive done the HUD. I need a readout of the stats of what you currently have selected, and a row of buttons, one for each ability of the selected character, as well as a readout of mission objectives.

My second meal of the day is not as elaborate; boiled brown rice, chilli con carne out of a can, and my typical addition of grated cheese.

I added a ton of chilli powder though, because the stuff out of a tin is never spicy enough for my liking. Actually, this meal was so good, I ate it while still writing this post.

Coded non-stop, lots of work done. I also worked some on artwork (they have eyes now). And I learned a lot about chipmunk. This is the first time I’m using a physics library of any kind but I’m very positively surprised. Chipmunk does everything right. C API. Simple, does just what it needs to. API makes sense and is easy to use. Good documentation and examples. Probably the first time I don’t find anything to criticize about a library I used. So, despite learning the API and spending time watching the examples, I probably saved a bit of time compared to if I had used my own line-line collision function as I did in the past. However I lost all that time because I decided to write my own XML parser instead of downloading expat or something. The problem is I need level data and just drawing them in Inkscape and reading in the .svg files seemed like the easiest approach.

What I have left for tomorrow is: Different kinds of monsters. Then using the weak monsters (the only ones you can really fight on your own) as weapons against the stronger monsters, beat the final boss.

If I had the time I could also add actual graphics and sound effects and music. And more gameplay effects like more varied monsters and more varied attacks. Alas, I have to work all Monday, so have to get up right around when LD ends – so I lose the last 6 hours or so. I also stupidly slept for the first 6 hours of the compo because I stayed up right until the theme was announced. And I’ll sleep another 6 hours now since I’m too tired to go on.

You can knock your enemies over now!

You knock them over by.. touching them! Then the knocked over enemy can knock over other enemies.They release particles when they are defeated, and you also release a bit when you touch them. yay

Tags: gameplay, particles, screenshot

Alien Super Mega Blaster - WIP 1

Only managed a couple hours of coding so far this weekend.  At present have all the game state up and working.  I’m using XNA and have a tried and tested pattern for it.  So even though I’m not using a library other than XNA, its quick initial step and I can get this up and running withing 30 mins.  All the coding from now will be components, so for example if I run out of time and have not implemented a “display screen in game play component” then it will not break anything else.

You can see from the attached link that I’ve made some progression on the game play aspects.

Ludum Dare 18 – AlienSuperMegaBlaster 2010-08-22 01-20

Fair bit today and lots of family stuff for tomorrow.  So touch and go for the compo, but should be able to submit for the Jam.

PS Watched Tron earlier today and if nothing else been mildly influenced by the colour scheme.

PS: Keep forgetting to add titles to posts.  Sorry if this pops back to the top of the list.

I’ve been working on a bit of AI, and this is how it’s turned out.

A & D to move Left / Right. you cannot jump.

click to place portals. blue sucks, red blows (thankyou Douglas Adams). placing a red underground will make the terrain higher, if you are standing on it, you move up too. dropping ground on an enemy kills it, turning it into what is basically a ground tile (which you can use as a “weapon”, along with the rest of the ground)

DLlink

I have a video of the New England LD Meetup, but I’m having uploading problems.  For now, I’ll just post a couple of images of my game’s progress.

While hanging out waiting for HybridMind to arrive for the meetup, I was chillin’ with billknye.  He was working and I was trying to think of a concept.  I joked about finding inspiration in the local newspaper, so I picked it up and mentioned the front page headline.  It was about a fair-sized fire nearby and billknye made some remark about the gamability of it.  It stuck, I guess.  It turns out to be a creative take on the theme.  Enemy?  Fire.  Weapon?  Fire.  There you have it, a game about fighting forest fires.

I first got the player moving around and then some fires drawing onto a grass buffer:

Then I worked the rest of the meetup time on getting the fire to spread in a good way:

The implementation is surprisingly simple, so I’ll be able to polish this baby up…  Like all babies should be?

Two delicious chicken burgers and a couple of slices of watermelon, washed down by a glass of coke.

I started way too late, but I finally (after 10 hours) got something working that I’m almost okay with.  You can try out the current build at: http://garbos.itu.dk/ludumdare/ (Windows or Mac)

It’s made in Unity and is still a bit buggy. Also you can’t die yet.

Boom

Kaboom

Now that the Red Bull is wearing off and I’m losing my gift of sight, it’s time to call it a night and finally admit I’m halfway through the weekend (UK time here). Progress has inevitably not been as good as hoped, partly due to having several hours of my day stolen by my call into work (damn you day job!). But at least I have the idea, a foundation with a player character and a level, and all of Sunday still to come.

The idea will involve turning hostile robots against each-other using nothing more than your awesome hacking skillz. Not that I even have the enemies just yet…

Tomorrow will be a busy day...

Ok so I didn’t manage to find the time to work on both LD and the other game jam that was organised by friends, but I wanted to combine the two together so at the very least I can show my work over here as part of the Jam.

Its been a slightly bizzare setup as I am in Copenhagen and the sound guy and artist are over in Norway….

Because of that I’ve been posting regular updates of my progress over to them in the form of video screen captures

So here is a link to my videos… should you wish to see the evolution of our Whale game.

Linkage!

Our theme was code within code, whale and light..           and we decided to scrap the code within code bit and go with whales and light.

Hi all!

It’s gone 2am, which is not ideal considering that I intend to join the other Cambridge guys in CB2 again in 8 hours. I shall be off to bed soon, but here’s a quick progress report.

I’m collaborating with my buddy George, so we’ll be entering the Jam, not the compo. Here’s a screenshot of our progress so far:

It’s a bit like Asteroids, except enclosed within a circular play area, and you can’t destroy the ‘asteroids’ directly. Instead, you can push them around by firing lasers at them. To destroy the ‘asteroids’ and score, you must collide them with each other.

I’m pretty pleased with our progress. The game is basically playable, there are sound effects in most places where you’d expect sound effects, there’s a scoring system that even I’m happy with, and I even wrote a little bit of ‘music’, but I’m not sure if I’ll put it in since it’s painfully repetitive (like all my music). The only major remaining gameplay issue is that sometimes an ‘asteroid’ will spawn on top of your ship and destroy it without warning, but that’s easy to fix. Once we’ve fixed that, we intend to introduce some new mechanics to make the game more interesting – and more challenging as it progresses.

Frustratingly I spent about three hours today trying to make the ship and ‘asteroids’ bounce off the arena wall in a convincingly elastic fashion. The eventual code to implement that was about four lines long. One and a bit lines of code per hour is not particularly good going when you’re working to a deadline. I owe a debt of gratitude to Alan who gave me a hand with my dodgy vector math code, which got the bouncing working as expected. (I think I’ve got the right Alan there, but hopefully someone can correct me otherwise.) Other than that, everything has gone surprisingly swimmingly.

You can follow our progress on GitHub. If you want to build the code, you need Flex and a little bit of nous. There’re no build instructions because, until the contest finishes, we have better things to do!

I have to say that a lot of the other entries are looking absolutely amazing, given that they’ve only seen a day’s work. I’m eagerly anticipating the finished products!

(Semi-crossposted to my personal blog).

It’s 2:15am and I am sleepy, so off to bed I go!

The game’s starting to take shape, but it’s still not “fun” so to speak!

The game as it is now…

… and me coding on the train back from Cambridge!

Staying at home in Wiltshire tomorrow. Had an awesome time with the CB2 Indies, and looking forward to seeing them again!

The title has a double meaning.

A) This is what the game looks like after 2 hours:

B) It’s past 2am so i’m going to bed!

Later guys.

I had a few delays today — slowing progress down a bit, but I feel like I’m getting back on track.  Here is a screenshot of how my game currently looks.  It has almost no gameplay — just a tilemap and basic character controls.

Hero standing near some water.

My game has all of the really important elements, and I’m pleased with my progress thus far.  Though it’s designed for iPad / iPhone, it should work on all Webkit and Mozilla browsers as well.

Todo list for tomorrow (in no particular order):

• Splash screen
• Better player movement
• Score
• Difficulty progression
• General funness
• Sound
• Detecting end of game
• High-score list
• More enemy types
• Some way to dispatch with the last enemy
• Background image
• Graphics for player
• Explosions on bullet impact

If any of you find any bugs, please let me know.  Any thoughts you have about what might make it better would also be appreciated.

Well, I figured I’d give it a go this year. I got off to a bit of a late start, but still 24hrs to go

Not much gameplay at all so far.
Just messing with tech right now. Hopefully it’ll all come together in the last hour or so…

Smores attack is finally in progress after a day of mostly life delays, and with coding almost entirely wrapped up in cobbling together a simple way to handle my graphics in a java applet. That part is finally working, leaving only the game guts, which i should be able to do pretty quick. I can see why so many people use a code library, a framework, or “not java” haha.

Well, it doesn’t feel like I’ve gotten a lot accomplished, but when I look at my todo list it seems to be getting checked off pretty well. I guess it’s just perception.

I’ve implemented 3 out of the 5 weapon types, and partially implemented all 5 aliens that serve as various types of ammo. The levels transition, but there’s nothing to indicate you cleared the level and are proceeding to the next. No menu or game over screens either. I may drop one of the weapons to save time. Implementing the upgrades should be faster than weapons, so I’ll definitely try to squeeze that in. The graphics are crap, but I’m not an artist so I don’t really mind. Music and sound goes at the end, as usual, and may get cut if I run out of time.

With a little cleanup I could submit it now, the gameplay is functional, it’s just not as polished and featureful as I’d prefer. Here’s hoping the next 24 hours will be productive!

Home stretch! Lets finish this together!

Ok,…let’s end day one.

Actually I’m a jMonkeyEngine-User but this time I want to create an android-app for my new phone. I use gdx that should help me a bit with that. Still I don’t feel too comfortable with that….until now I have build a TileMap-Reader that read my txt-based tilemaps with additional meta-data (postions of player and enemies). Actually there is no game play, yet!  But that will change tomorrow.

Here a screenshot:

This is more or less one to one to the android-version! As soon as there is some interaction I will publish an apk-file.

I’m not sure if I’ll go with that game title, since it’s kinda taken, but here’s another screen:

Obligatory Cat Photo

Shooty stuff, and enemy groupings in queue.

I think I may be abusing flash's glow filter

You can play what I have so far  if you want, though it’s still really rough. Both units autoshoot and turn towards the mouse.

I’m rethinking Starrior.

I… I dunno. It just doesn’t seem that interesting. I’m kind of lost now.

I wish I had *good* news to post. I don’t, though.

I’ll still (hopefully) turn something in, but it probably won’t be Starrior.

It was slow going… I took a NAP AHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Tags: foodphoto

Finally animated all the sprites…
Still so much to do.. I don’t see how I’ll meet this deadline but I’ll try!

Gosh, I’m reeeeaaaalllyyyy tired ¦D… Nearly 4am…

Anyway, meet the main character, Reddy ;w;

It’s coming along.

Gonna write a ship AI so I can actually play it.

yea its a spaceship + tractor beam game

Tags: screenshot

I’ve not gone to bed yet because there are drunken people outside shouting. So here are some enqueued food pics from today.

Afternoon tea and pain au chocolat:

Dinner:

All from CB2 and thoroughly delicious, too.

As an aside for the one or two C64 fans I know are participating, here’s something cool I received in the post today:

Looking forward to playing that after the compo, although I’ll try to give the compo games priority!

It’s quiet outside now. Nighty night.

Look at this. We’ve got instructions AND pants thievery!

Tags: money thief, screenshot

Just ate this.

Tags: brisket, food, foodphoto, off-topic

I’ve gotten http://code.google.com/p/physics2d working with my code, and bullets flying around.  Now collisions.

Tags: foodphoto

I had some fig bars as a snack as the evening wore on.

My fantastic and amazing girlfriend made me a taco dinner, which was so delicious that my taste buds were fist-bumping each other.

I went to a party my friends were hosting so I could take a short break and get some much-needed social time, but I came back home shortly.

Looking at The Big (Cork) Board, I can see that I’m almost done with the first iteration of work.

Unfortunately, I still have 6 more big iterations to do, and a lot of it is doing AI path-finding and other AI things I’ve never done before.

And the deadline is looming.

I’m feeling pretty screwed.

Wait a minute. I think I have some Red Bull shots in my fridge…

I don’t drink caffeine usually, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Let’s roll.

Tags: cool, foodphoto

I’m finishing this son of a bitch if it kills me! >:S

I’ve spent the first 25.4 hours of LD48 making it so I can do a parody of the Sega Master System bootup screen. Hooray! Now it’s time to actually make a game.

Code is GPLv3, too. Like dev shot 002, as well, I forgot to state.

http://pubacc.wilcox-tech.com/~greaser/stuff/ld18/gm-d003.jar

and I’ve got something playable. We’ll see how it shaped up in the next day…

screenie


Ok here are my plans:

u can jump around the level with the vehicle use arrows left/right/up
http://www.athanazio.com/ludumdare/ld18/version2010aug220028/index.html

Tags: recycling, robots, update

for about an hour
Gues what i need to do? HOME-FREAKING-WORK!
at least it’s science, it aint too bad

Well, I managed to have time during the chaos to make a little roast:

My game, however, is still pretty half-cooked. Here’s what it looks like at the moment:

Those guys stuck in the box at the top are just stuck there because they spawned there. They’re not really supposed to be there.

Anyways, I barely have any gameplay, my movement suck, and the graphics are all tmp. Making a platformer is harder than I thought.

Play me!

I forgot that my internet has been going down for eight hours a day in the evenings this week for some reason. Normally I’d kinda like that because usually no internet means more productivity, but since I have no idea what I am doing in Unity or with 3D modeling or any of this it’s kind of affecting my schedule. Still, got my basics set up and some atmosphere happening.

This is the screen capture from abuot 6 hrs ago, but the game pretty much looks the same.

Alright! Awesome! So I have a playable working demo of my game concept. So anyone want to take it for a spin?

http://upurload.com/dl/?n=3627

W to GO FORWARD!

Mouse to aim!

Left mouse button to BOOST!

Boosting changes the direction of bullets!

Destroy all the spikey spinning thingys to win!!!

Does this post need more exclamation points?

YES!!!!!!!!

I tried out some Gimp effects to make the level prettier and to make the fire look less like red circles.  I’m also animating the fire through three images.  I’m pretty surprised my computer can handle this!  There’s a lot of spawning and scaling going on, and those things spread like…  I’m not gonna say it.

It’s way past my bedtime.

It really took me a while to come up with an idea for a game that I thought was worth making. “Enemies as weapons” is not an ideal theme. Nonetheless, I’m making good progress now that I’ve decided on a reasonable and doable concept. It’s got it all… helicopters, belly flops, and trampolines. Wait, what?

Yes. All of those, and more. Maybe a visual aid would be helpful.

I’ll let you make of that what you will… for now. I will also make you all very hungry by showing you what I had for dinner in order to sustain myself during this quite difficult and daring among competitions!

Deeleeeecious.

You got many of your main food groups (sorta?), with such great foods as noodles, salad with Caesar salad dressing, and a delicious homemade garlic pesto on rolls. Just what I need to keep working on my project. Onward and upward!

Tags: foodphoto, journal, LD18

So here I am, desperately seeking approval of the internet, and I don’t have a camera. How can I post pictures of myself on 4chan or show you guys what food I eat during LD if I don’t have a camera? I can’t, that’s how. So what do I do? I make really shitty stuff in GIMP and hope it’s about the same.

(The hotdog isn’t actually that big in relation to my head, I’m just behind it.)

And with just twenty-two hours till the deadline, what have I accomplished?

Moving, riding in robots, and shooting. Still to do: obstacles, at least one other kind of robot, some sort of interface for HP and whatever, and lots of other stuff.

If anyone’s curious about the idea for the game, then it’s this: the world has been overrun by robots, and you just happen to be able to hack into them and turn them over to your side and ride in them. Before going back above ground you managed to broadcast a global “no kill” beacon to all the robots so they won’t kill humans anymore (that is, they won’t kill what’s left of them), but they’ll still consider any robot who doesn’t appear to be on their side (a remnant from the initial defense measures, trying to kill robots with robots). So you can walk around all the giant robots freely, but as soon as you get into one, they’ll all start trying to attack you. The goal is to kill all the robots (or stop them from being hostile). For the compo, the best I can see myself doing is having just fighter robots in a city that you have to go turn against each other or control against other robots, but I might manage to get some more stuff in for the jam part of the event (I want to have about five different kinds of “robots,” with the abilities of each to essentially allow for basic base-building). Fighter-bots, fuel-tanker-bots, turret-bots, electric fences, and builder-bots (for moving the three non-fighter bots).

So now Imma go code some more and hope I manage to get something presentable (or at least close) by the deadline.

Unfortunately I have a plane to catch which I had to pack for and can’t finish the game as I would like. While it is lacking anything close to proper art and neat functionality, it is playable and keeps score. The goal is to get the seeker missiles to crash into each other by jumping around and dodging them at the last second. I might finish it eventually when I get back from this trip. Good luck to everyone.

Okay, 26 hours and 30 mins in, mostly feature complete, though I’ll have to tweak the controls a lot to get em just right (gonna have mouse, arrows/ZX, WASD/something, etc to allow for peoples’ preferences). I also need to get the enemy generation running better and add more enemy ship types, but other than those, gameplay is all there. After that it’s just gonna be a mad dash to texture it all up pretty (almost every texture in the shot is placeholder) and add particle effects everywhere.

At the moment I have the enemies’ colors set to their health for debug purposes:

I now have improved player controls, animation, backgrounds, and bouncing enemies.  I have no idea how the gameplay is going to work, but I’m thinking of this Pied Piper type guy being able to tame different enemies with different instruments.  Then they follow him around like Yoshi’s eggs in Yoshi’s Island.  I’m not sure what happens next.

Bouncing Enemies

So my ADSL router decided to stop working this weekend. I spent a while trying to fix it, but in the end I gave up and bought a new one. As for my game, it’s called “Killer Knife-Robots from Knife Planet K” and I have a demo available for download (requires Windows). It’s not playable yet, but it does have spinning blades of doom. I am probably going to make it so that you can take control of the robots and use them to destroy the other robots.

Spinning blades of doom!

Tags: demo, journal

Starting to implement enemy behavior. Not a lot of progress, but it’s something.

This is actually going to be an actual game with actual gameplay, I promise.

Got up nice and early this morning (nearly 06:00 here) and I’ve had an idea!

I spent so long working on the baddie’s spritesheet yesterday (they kinda look like vampire robots), so I needed something a bit quicker for the player character, and I decided an egg on wheels would be good.  Anyway, basic premise:

• You control Egg-bert as he is faced with hordes of vampire robots
• Use you zapper to disable the robots, turning them into harmless (to you) blocks
• Whack the blocks into the other vampire robots to kill ’em

Now let’s see if I can get this done in the remaining time

My battle system is finished!!

I’ve got fighting, capturing, running away, experience gaining, leveling up and the strength progression that goes with it.

Happy times. 😀

Now I have a lot of work to do on the overworld and tons of content creation. (Lot’s of Daremons to make!)

First image from my game is up and available! Enemies will attempt to make it from the bottom left door to the top right one! Next I need to put in the code to have an enemy move from one to another!

Simply hide the fact that you’re art-challenged behind bad lighting.

Please watch this thread for a link to a first playable (win32 only at the moment, sorry).

I hope this soon turns into something,

What kind of  something, even I don’t know…

Well, I know something, I’m not embeding anything into this swf. If I cannot make it coding, then it won’t be done.

Desperate times,
Desperate measures.

Too much for today,  I’m going to get some sleep and see what happens tomorrow.

2010-08-22-01 Ludum Dare 18 on YouTube

Posted my third playable version of my game.

Spent the last part of the first day here getting the preloader, menus, highscores, and other assorted UI ephemera working. This way I won’t have to think about all that stuff during the last day when my brain starts shutting down trying to do game state flow. Always a recipe for last hour bugs!

The third version still needs a bunch of gameplay work but I have activated the local and global highscores.

I finally picked a game name of “Avoidal” too for this creation.

I have my plan for tomorrows code, graphics, sound, and music. Time to get to bed (about 1:30am here) and wake up in about 5 hours for the last day of the compo. What a marathon this LD beast is.  Good luck everyone!

Tags: avoidal, flash, screenshot

Aloha … sleeppppyyy zzzzzz….
update on the task list:

Ok here are my plans:

ok - add the head
ok - move the head


there is a demo online
http://www.athanazio.com/ludumdare/ld18/version2010aug220221/index.html

Tags: flash, recycling, robots, update

I don’t have the skill I guess. Since there was a joke entry, I guess I could make a joke game. Anyone know how to fold a box out of paper?

I should make a note to not visit the ludum dare site while making the game come december. I make myself sick. ‘Oh my art sucks’, you say.Then I take a look, my jaw drops. Seriously, anything I’ve seen on here is better work then mine. Well, except for the smiley face target. Nah I take it back, it still looks better.

Implemented enemy grabbing, flinging, and damaging. Now we’re actually getting somewhere. Still debating how exactly bullets are going to work.