I’m too slow!

but i post a screenshot anyways:

I made good progress today.  Making something a little like captain forever.  Not ready to post an exe but here’s a screenshot.

it’s not there to try and look pretty.

Okay so I wake up this morning. I have no idea what time it is.
Because of this:

So much for a day of programming, but the power will be back soon right?

Okay, so that’s 6 hours gone, but I can still record music on my mobile phone for a while, right?

One battery bar. Great.

This is part of my song. “The Flying Elephant” was a title for a song that I never wrote, perhaps 10 years ago – so the song was written today, the title 10 years ago. Hope that’s within the rules.

I’m finally starting to add some graphics to my game that aren’t colored rectangles. Gameplay is coming along… we’ll see how it turns out!

Almost Rainbow Almost All the Way!

Tomorrow I need to get enemies hitting the target, pathing, defenses, allowing the player to place defenses, losing state, and winning state. Hmm, sounds so easy!

Breakfast with a black beauty. She’s eyening my bacon, but it’s all mine!

a bit less than 19 hours left now. I had an awesome progress last night and I hope I can keep it up today. But there’s quite a few bits and pieces that I need to do. For example, I need to change the graphics! It’s awful! It has a bit low priority, but still. And I need to add a third enemy. And I need to add the boss fight at the end. And I need sounds! And I need music(?) and I need to add something more to the game. At the moment you walk up to the first zombie, punch him silly, pick him up, hurl at second zombie, repeat until highscore is beaten. One of the last things I did last night was to change it so the zombies wakes up if they’re still on the ground or being carried, but it wasn’t enough to make the game more challenging.

I will spend some time to try and do what GBGames are doing with that cork board. I need to plan. Once I have a plan I will try and be awesome!

Greatly scaled back the scope of the game from wicked baddass epic side scroller, to high score survive as long as you can deal

I actually did that much earlier this afternoon, but just now admitting it (stupid 48 hours)

90% of the game’s element is there just need to add my tractor beam and test, after that its all fluff, unlike most of my LD games if you figure out a way to cheat on this one, it will screw you over! the game’s score is based on time, so if you manage to hit a spawn (its randomly generated at start, and randomly manipulated per cycle) that allows some dead space that you can hide in, the asteroid fragments quickly increase in velocity assuring you a quick “death”

so, if we were to have a high score contest, its in your best interest to interact with the game (evil laugh)

If I have time in the next 18.5 hours I would like to have a win situation, and I have an appropriate idea of how to do that, but time will tell

oh yea, screenie

Tags: progress

demo 2 (windows only, but should work in wine?)

Haven’t added the levels/scoring yet and it needs balanced/shinified, but the basic idea:

You’re in charge of a sound-powered ship. Sadly all you’ve been able to fit on board are a few drums, which are only powerful enough to charge the engines. Fortunately, amongst your enemies are three rather noisy ones, whose presence on screen enables you to fire your 3 wave-shaped weapons. Flying close to them gives you greater firepower, but be careful not to destroy them, otherwise you’ll be left without weapons until they respawn. Arrow keys to move, mouse to aim, left click to fire.

I’m considering making two games in one here – the original plan was a side-scrolling shooter with pure keyboard controls, and if I’ve got time I’d like to add that as an option for those who find keyboard and mouse control a bit awkward.

Seriously, play it, and share your high-score!

Tags: demo, flash, money thief, screenshot

The game is almost in a fully submittable state, however I can’t really show you guys and gals anything since I’m temporarily using graphics from my No More Sweden entry. That will of course change in the following few hours. I’m aiming for a happy coulourful character in a black/dark “full metal alchemist” inspired world that plays sorta like super mario, hopefully I can pull it off

Hit more, for images of what I have eaten this far during the event and

where I make awesome games

lunch: hönökaka and kaviar

some newly made orange juice and notes of my game

noodles and non pictured spring rolls for food

breakfast: strawberry yoghurt with banana

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

Up I get and enjoy a healthy bowl of Frosties! Today I’ll be coding at home in Wiltshire instead of at Cambridge, where I was yesterday. This means, instead of gorging away on biscuits and Kick, I’ll be getting proper home-cooked food. Thanks, Mum! 😉

These infinite bowls of cereal will take a while to finish…

Tags: foodphoto

Well, this is my first time doing a Ludum Dare, so hopefully I’ll be able to finish in time.
That said, here’s a bit of progress I’ve made so far (controls are WASD, aim with mouse):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2149322/Ludum%20Dare%2018/LD18.exe

The idea is a top-down rotational shoot-’em-up. When an enemy is killed, it becomes deactivated, leaving it motionless and unable to fire. However, it attaches to your ship when you touch it and then fires whatever it was firing before. Essentially, you’re “converting” enemy units to your team. I think I could get some cool things going on here, but if anybody has any feedback or suggestions, that would be great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8g-iYGHpEA

Don’t forget to turn on speech recognition! Enable “CC,” then get the CC submenu, and choose “Transcribe Audio (BETA)”

I went to bed last night thinking my LD48 was over, after wasting so much time trying to make a fundamentally incorrect depth-sorting algorithm work for my isometric objects/tiles… I stripped it down to something much simpler (ground layer, tiles/objects layer, simple sort based on one depth value) that worked well enough – but I’d lost a whole lot of time.

But I got up this morning, and decided to give it another push… and it’s amazing what a difference a sky texture and some very simple lighting makes:

Loads and loads still to do, though… map loader, player logic, enemy logic, collision detection, and more…

I’m happy!  Ahead of the game here…  17 hours left in order to get a nap then work on some levels.  Woo!

Sorry, no playable snapshot at the moment.  But here are some screenshots:

An idea of what is going on:  You are an infiltrator into a military base which has been occupied by two armies.  Resources are low, so you have no weapons, but your mission is kill everybody in the base while making your way to the next area.  Enemies can be made to respond by your approach.  From there, you can either use in-world hazards or other enemies to dispatch them.

Hi folks,

game is still not playable… *panic*

But here is some energy particle madness for you:

And of course some food:

pizza (vegetarian) :and breakfast:

YAY! im done with “Sun Attack” 😀
http://www.yoyogames.com/games/141231-sun-attack/download
thats where to download it!

(read the read me)

have fun and dont forget to comment!

Tags: doubleyou

Well its been quite a while since my last progress report. I have mostly been sleeping (well 4 hours of it anyways).

So progress is coming along nicely STILL no gameplay tho :S

So far you can shoot and destroy the enemies and then collect thier giblets before they become part of the terrain. The idea is that you can then shoot those giblets back at the enemies. Take alook if you are interested:

Have to play it on my blog as flash doesnt work here
http://mikecann.co.uk/ludum-dare/ludum-dare-hour-31/

Oh I just noticed I left some debug sliders on there I was using to try and hone the bloom levels. Have a play with them if you want.

Right. Gameplay.

Tags: destructable, particles, physics, terrain

Finally, we’re getting somewhere.

I don’t know if it’s finishable in the time allotted, but this is DEFINITELY better than my past attempts, and it’d be very doable by the jam deadline, at least.

A real playable, this time: http://yetanotherbrokenlink.net/game-assets-transfer/ld48-18_build_2.zip

Well I noticed I was spending too much time on my other game ,which got messed up.

I stop coding my game.

I will continue watching you guys, and look into java.

I may see you in 3 months :]

-Folis

And I noticed I like the word I …

I was going to use my “engine” but ended up fighting memory leaks, threading issues etc. Instead of wasting time there i’m gonna use torque2d and make something playable instead.

Playable is not here yet, but ill leave this for now.

Mockup

Hopefully if i take a break again today i can get something playable uploaded. For the info read this http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/21/sentient-code/ and, the red things are bugs. Programmers create bugs which destroy you/your code base. Stronger code fights the ability to create bugs and the bugs themselves. The white bigger blocks are programmers, which you need to convert to your cause (to use as a weapon). This makes the enemy (the programmer) the weapon for taking down the world/etc.

Tags: LD #18 - Enemies as Weapons - 2010

come on

It is a thrilling battle between the forces of good and evil, as clearly represented by these lovingly-crafted models.

Tags: screenshot

Background of my game.

Here is a new screenshot of my game 😀
i’m going world-of-goo style graphics

Still quite a bit of graphics to crunch here

Well it’s been a fun Ludum dare so far, I dare say I might actually make the submission date. The game I’m working on is about a guy with a chemical agent that causes enemies to go rabid. You have a limited supply of the agent so ideally to do well at the game you would focus on stealth and using the chemical agent in largely populated areas so you can take out a lot of enemies at once.

Watch a preview on youtube here (can\’t seem to embed it into the post).

I’ve been up for about 2 1/2 hours now, and I’ve been doing the rest of my graphics.  Here’s a picture of some of the additional fungi:

Now I’m going to do the music and SFX while the paint dries, then scan everything in (after lunch?).

Forgot to take a picture of my breakfast, but it was just some weetabix.

Garden of Earthly Delights is fairly prominent in my head right now.

Tags: deskphoto

Same drill. What’s your NUMBER?

Tags: demo, flash, money thief, screenshot

Last night I played a concert with a symphony orchestra at a “street festival” in Wageningen. There was a wind orchestra that played after us who didn’t have any basses, so we played along with them as well. I was home at 1.30 am and was very tired. Now I’ve slept well and I’m ready to start working!

My camera is so poor you can’t really tell, but it’s a beautiful morning.

Here’s a lazily assembled breakfast:

Just need to eat it and wash and I shall be off to CB2 to finish off our game.

I’m awake, breakfasted and ready to start hammering out code again. This is my priority list for the next few hours:

1. Player death
2. First enemy weapon
3. Ammo counter
4. Flight pattern system
5. Level scripting system
6. See where we go from there

Tags: breakfast, morning, start of day 2

First Try. Cost some time to build this up.

My entry finally has something in common with the theme. It’s not much, and it’s only fun for about 12 seconds, but you can now use enemies as weapons against each other.

To celebrate, I tried to capture a video to show. It bought my computer to its knees, and then crashed it. So I wrote a function that saved frames to disk (the framerate varied depending upon disk write speed), encoded them (an hour learning about directshow filters), and then figured out how to put it into an HTML5 video canvas.  It probably wasn’t worth the time, but at this point I’m not going to finish my entry anyway.

So, watch the video (firefox/opera), or download the file.

I very nearly just gave myself a heart attack. I’ve been trying to hack in some simple particle effects (whee! collision-splash!) for what feels like ever, and glanced at the clock as I finished it up. “10:30!” I exclaimed. “But it’s still light out!”

Oh. That’s 10:30 AM. Very, very cool — I’ve got all afternoon and evening to either design a bunch more courses OR polish up the map & score server. Since the course editor is part of the game (hey, I needed the tool, and it was the easiest way to implement it…) all I need to do is provide some mechanism for players to share their courses. Also, some incentive. Fun fun.

Blending is such a cheap/glorious effects tool, no?

Now, onward to an options screen, followed by some LAMP hackery!

Tags: pygame, screenshot

Prototype number 1, playable in your browser. With music and a couple of teaser levels.

In this game, you entice block things to destroy each other, without destroying you. Use the arrow keys to move, and press Space to restart a level (which is sometimes necessary).

Enjoy, and please share your impressions!

Sincerely,
Hamburger

Tags: leave me alone, playable, prototype

Yeah, it is WRC (World Rally Championship)-Time. At the moment they setup for the race through the city right in front my house. Actually quite cool cars, nevertheless I will switch to my office as this will go on like this the whole day and that cars are really “silent” 😀

Too bad that the race itself is not viewable from my house.

Okay,…time to start bombing some fuzzy-guys on my android-phone:

Keep on rocking and see U later!

I woke up after about eight hours of sleep, shuffled to my computer to get an early start, and checked the LD news stream. And it was full of awesome screenshots and even cooler, screenshots of games I saw yesterday, but they look much nicer now!

You guys kick all kinds of ass!

even though it’s sounded like a game for the past few hours.

Look, screenshots:

And now for the dev snapshot:

http://pubacc.wilcox-tech.com/~greaser/stuff/ld18/gm-d004.jar

I have 11 levels of my game complete, thought I’d put it up for someone to poke at.  Still placeholder graphics, time will tell if I get around to fixing those at all.
Clickable link!

Spent this morning polishing off the game. Now doesn’t break for people with lower-than-average pc’s. Also contemplated adding UFO’s, but i can’t draw them at all

So i submitted it, final entry is found here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=2507

Here is what i have learned during the past 30 hours:

• Simple ideas can sometimes turn out more fun than complex ones
• It doesn’t matter if you are a terrible artist, as long as you are a consistant one
• There isn’t enough accordian in games these days
• Adding a simple 3-beat drum can make a sinister theme even more menacing
• Passing around a struct of system classes is much cleaner and easier to use than making everything a singleton
• I can make a game in 48 hours or less! I really suprised myself! (for reference,  the second fastest game made by me took a month :O)
• You can never eat enough noodles + bread

It’s been fun. Especially knowing that i’m not the only person who has the time and enthusiasm to take part in an event like this.

I’ll definately be entering LD #19!

-Adam

After a short breakfast (woke up WAY too late):

I added a starfield, fixed a lot of the physics stuff and collision handling and now – I will actually make it into a game:

My girlfriend had this idea that the player will need to collect stuff to fix his ship and go home, so I will do just that! You will have to collect 3 wrenches floating in space, and in the meantime, use the asteroids and spaceships to fight off enemies, I hope it will be fun, or at least, more fun than it is now…

Hope I will make it in time! Thanks for the comments!

Daniel

We’ve just started into our second day of developing “Helgas Word Domination”. Yesterday we’ve finished the game as itself. Today we gonna do some tuning, and adding some features. Seems we will be just in time with our game.
Now we are working on new levels and implementing them into our game with a new gameStat for changing names, choosing the level and stuff like that.
Won’t keep you away from work and coding with this post, so long
bazingaProductions

As I went to bed last night I had almost given up because all of the issued I had with the gameplay. I couldn’t make it fun.

But after a good nights sleep I knew what didn’t work and had some new ideas, so now I’m up to speed again.

Some fun and exciting stuff going on here — I’m anxious to play the final entries!

Spent nearly half of the past day developing an editor that I’m not going to use. Impact on the game is that there will be only one enemy type and multiplayer is going to be confusing.

To make my game eligible for competition, I need to complete a game mechanic that will involve writing a physics engine and a depth-first rasterer. Once I finish those (hopefully without too many bugs), I have way too many things to work on.

Not really sure how much I’m going to finish before the deadline.

Alright… here goes!

Oh man, I’m pumped for tomorrow. Seriously, I haven’t had this much fun making a game in a LONG time, I can’t wait to show you guys the finished product. You have no idea how glad I am that I decided to stick with this. Thanks to that one guy who made me feel guilty! (I’m too lazy to check what his name was otherwise I would mention it BUT HEY he knows who he is)

Anyway, at this point I’m pretty hesitant to show screenshots because I’m afraid of spoiling things, but I’m in a good mood so what the hey.

The second dungeon of three. See those big ghosts? You can’t kill them unless you upgrade your snake whip to level 2 … and they kill you in one hit. Still wondering if that was a good idea lol

Anyway, good luck to the rest of you guys!

In order to help Dr. Destruction create the ultimate weapon, you must get a high score on a series of minigames.

As of now, the only minigame is memory, lets hope I can come up with at least 3 by the end of the day.

Last night I took a 2 hour nap, which somehow turned into a 9 hour sleep fest, basically the same mistake I made last compo.

Also want to shout out to DrPetter for the awesome Sculptris:

http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1282471204

no art yet but it’s sort of working??? gotta make puzzles now i guess

oh whoops the circle bot doesn’t kill yet

done with flixel and flan (my first flixel attempt! thx for the tutorial http://wiki.github.com/AdamAtomic/flixel/seifer-tims-tutorial#intro)

So having quite a late breakfast this morning, I woke up hours ago but I had to do a load of housework so got that sorted now I can get back onto working (although I did a little earlier as well)

Yummy bowl of fruit and yoghurt again, although only raspberries and blueberries today, didn’t feel like a peach as well, maybe I’ll have one later

Here’s to some good hours of work

Time to ead food stuff! It’s mainly leftovers from yesterday, and a couple of sandwiches.

Progress is relatively good. Refactored the throwing code so it’s now a bit more generic. And now I also have boxes! I will change it so zombies can throw stuff as well, in an atempt to increase difficulty.

I also tried to do some Agile inspired stuff, like what GBGames does… I, uhm, have a bunch of “stickers” on the screen. I add some when I get an idea or see something that needs to be fixed, and I remove stickers that’s fixed/implemented. I could do this with a pencil and some paper, but this feels much more Agile, even if one could discuss that. 😛

I’m still streaming at livestream.com/depstv is anyone wants to take a look. It can be a bit laggy because I’m doing 101 things on this little macbook. It holds up amusingly well.

I <3 my macbook.

Woke up, had breakfast (dang, forgot to take a photo) and got back to work… won’t have much time today to work on this (unfortunately, my mind is full of ideas for this game!), so I’ll have to make time count…

Working on main game logic (intro->main menu->level->level->game over->main menu, that sort of things)… Hope I have time to make a small cutscene like in my Exploration game… That was really cool… if not, I’ll do text and static images, which work aswell… probably will do static images today and cutscene tomorrow for the jam…

Anyway:

Gems give mana, health or wall-strenght… going to draw the game over screen when the enemies grab the ring (there’s 7 rings, and none of them can be caught, those are the levels).

Then, to make the level time thing to allow the player to go to the next level, and main menu… after that, design the 7 levels (only have one so far), add some instructions and music/sound… Lots of work still ahead and about 6 hours to work on this total…

Since my game is pretty much finished i was triying to pull up something hearable with SFXR and Fruity loops with no results, i definately suck at making music 😛 (specially 8-bits music)
Aaanyway, im posting some screenies of my entry now, the game, as i said is pretty much finished, ill use the rest of the day to eat ice cream and poolish what i got so far:

Yeaah, you can rotate the world! yay!

Who says hearths are harmless?

Yummy

Well, I’ve spent the last 32 hours staring at the walls trying not to vomit, being ill. LAMEEEEEEEEE!

So I’m out. I feel good enough today to be able to sit up and type and things, but I figure I’m pretty screwed if I want to try and enter something, so its going to be laying back, chilling out, and soup for me!

I’ve written a pretty extravagant event system with dialogue boxes, world objects, other characters to interact with and trainers that catch you to battle. Also done map switching.

I’m done with most of the real game writing code, it’s world building and content making from here on out.

TOAST

Good morning Ludum Dare. I had one bite of my toast before I snapped out of it and realized I NEED A PICTURE OF MY FOOD!

Made my coffee.  Opened the window blinds. Eating my toast.

Got 5 hours of sleep again last night and am trying to stay both calm and pumped for the next 15 hours that remain. My game will hopefully change and improve a lot over this day.

FLASH GAME HIGHSCORES TUTORIAL

One thing I wanted to post about that I remembered last night as I finished dropping in online highscores into my Flash game was that with such a large and new crop of LDers here there may be a few that use Flash and haven’t got an easy highscores option to encourage some friendly competition on their score based game.

Well have no fear! One option is to check out a tutorial I made here a year ago about how to drop MochiMedia global highscores into your game. You don’t have to use their wrapper or ads or anything–you can use just their highscore widget.

You can check out my tutorial here and feel free to ask any questions that may come up if you are using Flixel or FlashPunk I know people here have used it with those though sometimes you have to adapt my tutorial a bit I think.

Plus you can see how they work in my current LD entry here.

Tags: deskphoto, flash, foodphoto, highscores, morning, online, sunday, toast, tutorial

Ran into performance problems – one of my procedural animated boxes is fast enough, but a hundred of them slows the machine to 10 fps.  Even if I turn off animation.  Which is pretty bad news, as I was planning to do the terrain from these or similar ones, and a 10×10 square terrain is pretty minimal.

I’ll see if using vertex buffer objects instead of direct rendering will speed things up, if not I may drop to the Jam and write my own lightweight scala scenegraph on top of LWJGL instead of using Sgine, or maybe just redesign my terrain approach.

My entry is on gihub if anyone is interested, it also contains a detailed development journal (sorry about the lack of line wrapping, github doesn’t seem to do it automatically for text files).

Overall I fear I spent too much time on nice procedural models and too little on actual game mechanics..

Good news: we have a player!

Bad news: collision detection is pretty crappy ATM.

Really bad news: The VDP emulation isn’t quite up to scratch (you can see when you walk up a hill)

Have a look if you want: http://pubacc.wilcox-tech.com/~greaser/stuff/ld18/gm-d005.jar

Oats and Tinned apples - Breakfast of champs v1.1

So yesterday I had to go into work, losing me a good 8 hours and I slept a good 11 hours waking myself up by passing gas loudly … but hey! It did the job!

I’ve got a FPS controller running around with a gun that launches gameobjects, a big placeholder boss and a sentry gun which tracks and shoots at the player.

Things to do today:

• Give the player a hoover that can suck up the turrets, turning them into ammunition.
• Give the player an ability to spawn turrets
• Make a big boss dude and give him a rather lovely health bar
• Make art and sound assets for everyone involved
• Menus

My body’s cranky from missed gym time and eating poorly, but I can fix that 14 hours from now. My brain is energized, and I had some pretty weird dreams relating to the compo… but lets not get into those.

This morning I’m reevaluating what I can get done. I think I was (once again) slightly optimistic with my feature set, so I’m going to cut a few things that wouldn’t add much to gameplay but would be heavy in development time, leaving me more time to work on graphics/sound/music for the rest.

DON’T GIVE UP!

You still have 14 hours! Even starting from scratch you can still produce something for the compo! If you really need more time, just submit to the jam instead, problem solved! You’ve still got time to make something awesome, take advantage of it!

Ludum Dare 18 Compo ends in 14 hours, 12 minutes, 26 seconds

Okay so I’ve got less than 15 hours left to get this done and I’m sure about half of that will be slept sleeping tomorrow morning but I at least have the enemies spawning now and following various paths and such. I’m pretty happy with how it’s going now. This is the latest screenshot.

Now has movement and bg. Also just made lunch! :9

There’s 14 hours left and i still have a lot of work to do! (I overslept >.<)

LETS ROCK.

Another day at the Cambridge bistro with a team of LDers working on projects. Not got my phone cable so no photos of the obligatory bacon sandwich. However I did just make this guy and I think he’s pretty special:

Also Terry whinged at me yesterday until I changed the name of the game from the pretentious: “What I would give for one more chance” to the much more senisble “Inside Job”. Spoil sport!

Well adding features for my game idea and codding found a flaw with algorithm for collision detection I was using. Sadly some features were dependent on some features of that algorithm so quickly switching to other algorithm is not an option aether. So spending time for now reading about similar algorithms and thinking on how to fix it or write a different one with similar structure. Considering that 14 hours are left that probably means I am out of LD18 Epic fail on my part 😀

That’s it, my game is almost completed. Everything works as intended, I just need to do some tweaks and add more enemies!

It’s a simple shooting game where your health is the same as your energy, so you must shoot with care. Shooting is not the best attack, it can kill ball enemies with 5 shoots, but anything else will take 25 or more shoots! What you must do is use your “attractor” to grab debris, and then shoot them to other ships! (this is the only thing that has something to do with the theme, meh…)

Forget the cursor arrow, that’s PrtScr capturing it…

Anyway, you can actually play it <here>! Go and try it!

Is hard to get high scores! my average is 400. I need to change some things about damging and scoring, though.

The game logic works now nicely now. It’ll just need the rest of the game graphics, sounds and more levels.

It doesn’t show in the end, but building a decent discussion tree is HARD. I had to write it down, and now… I’m selling my soul.

I wrote my first goto in the game logic.

I’m going where I can’t return. Wish me luck.

So I went for a walk to go get some taiyaki and think about what to do.  I’ve ended up spending so much time getting the basic useful classes I’ve been wanting for working with the canvas sorted that I totally don’t have time left to make what I was originally intending.  So while munching the aforementioned taiyaki (pictured below), I decided on the best course to take now.  I do like the game plan I had in mind and would like to keep pushing at it after the compo, but I also want to finish something for this, so the logical option: Branch the project.

Now it’s a matter of taking these last 13 or so hours, working with what I’ve made so far and making something fun, slightly flashy and not too tricky to code.  Not too much of an ask there.. right?

Nom'd off fish face

Tags: Foodum dare, LD18

The gameplay is almost complete. Now I have 12 hours to cram in some sound and some content.

I’m Making cutscene’s!

I should probably be finishing the main game first, but that’s coming on pretty well too. I’ve done all the level design at least, and it’s all looking pretty good:

Just hoping I’ve got time to pull all the other pieces together before the deadline.

I’ve started doing the pathfinding: this is going to be difficult, ive never done pathfinding before.

The following things have been finished:
KB / Mouse input
Loading textures
Layout of GUI
renderer set up pre-shader
Animation(VERY IMPORTANT)
Picking (logic laid out as psudocode and partially implemented)
Tileset Rendering (brute force right now, with lots of glVertex calls. Will refine once game logic is working)
Moving around of camera
Placeholder artwork (everything is [1][2][3][4][5] images in various colours)

The following things have not been finished:

Detection of game conditions such as game over
Pathfinding (this might be the end of me)
Any real art ( Looks like it’ll be programmer art, but im not going to touch artwork until the game is playable)
Objectives in game
Sound (This wont take long, thanks to the framework I started out with)
Spells ( this is a problem, you need to resurrect / consume / Discard monsters)
Attacking (some enemies shoot, others are melee)
Loading of levels from disk; right now they are all solid blocks of passable terrain with random tiles set on them.

I’m thinking I should go with a procedural level generator, which goes through the following sequence:

Create a grid of streets with larger gaps in random places
Line each street with small buildings
In the larger gaps, put an enemy base

Here is a screenshot:

It’s not actually as bad as it looks; if I can get the pathfinding working, I’m on the home stretch.

Player blob is in, with controls and basic collision detection. Enemy ‘attack’ logic is in, and they can be made to destroy each other (although they just disappear for now)

Unfortunately, the game is probably going to be much simpler than originally intended, with just one enemy type. I’m going to concentrate on making it a bit more playable (game progression, player death, etc), then decide whether there’s time to add another enemy type, or to add death/destruction effects for the enemy/player/rocks

Hahahahahaha No.

An Awesome Logo

Really? You’re a terrible audience.

In other news, I got a new bike, as I got hit by a car last week!
http://s.wiggle.co.uk/images/gt%20aggressor%2007.jpg

YouTube: AlienSuperMegaBlaster 2010-08-22 13-54

Writing code in 10 min chucks whilst rocking baby and keeping other kids alive. Context switching hell keeps your velocity low

Staring to see the theme coming through “Enemies as Weapons”. As the aliens get killed they in turn become bullets/shrapnel that kills others.

The player will have limited amo, so goal is not to fire madly but hit the big guys that create more shrapnel.

That’s the theory…..

Still have 12 hours to go, so hopeful to have something to submit by then.

Not very pretty at the moment!

But it exists! as does an End game screen with stats!

A very main menu

After I had one false start: the idea was just too complex to be feasible, I’m returning to square one and restarting everything. I already have an idea (a defense-like game) and think it will be feasible in 12 hours. Time to go coding.

Just want to show the latest screenie:

At the start of the day I didn’t feel like I was making much progress, but now I think I’m getting somewhere. I’ve decided that the objective of the game is to survive as long as possible before the robots eventually kill you. My original idea was that the player would be able to take control of the robots (which would actually fit the theme better), but I’m too lazy to implement that :).

My plan for tomorrow is to get up early, ingest lots of caffeine and sugar, and spend the rest of the time polishing up my game.

There is a playable version of my game available for download (requires Windows).

Title screen

And now I’m off to bed.

Tags: demo, update

Here’s a playable preview of our Jam game.

It’s working and it’s almost fun. Just need to make some iterative improvements to the mechanics and aesthetics.

Use your laser cannons to push the balls around. Knock two balls into each other to destroy them and score points. You score more points for destroying faster moving balls.

Yeah, this is real.  Java applet screenshot, with moving player and enemies, as close to from scratch as you could get.  The movement is not super fluid, but the graphics do NOT flicker, and the enemies collide with each other and pursue the player.  Now I just have to make it so you can pick them up and throw them at each other, shouldn’t be too bad to get something reasonably close to that.  The time lapse video of me making this is pretty cool, even if the game itself is simple, even building this with the time I really had available is no joke!

Not being able to get to sleep is excellent for redesigning.  I’m now happy with the design for my game, and I even naïvely think I can finish it in time!

Design is:

Space-based sidescroller.  Player given the usual 4-way control of an unarmed ship.

Progress through an (absurdly unrealistically dense) asteroid field.  Asteroids are static and there is always a fairly large safe path through the field.

From behind the player, homing missiles fire!  They are fairly easy to avoid as they react quite slowly to your movements.  The missiles can be tricked into colliding with the asteroids.  Avoiding them provides a moderate challenge when combined with navigating the asteroid field.

Every X seconds, the missiles stop being launched and instead a gunboat flies through the game area.  The gunboat fires volleys of bullets in pretty patterns which the player needs to avoid.  The gunboat can be damaged and destroyed by luring missiles into it.

The trick to the design is that the safest way by far to deal with the missiles is to quickly trick them into hitting an asteroid so that they’re destroyed.  So if you want to damage the gunboat (for mega points) you’ll need to take the risk of keeping a gaggle of missiles alive.  Not only does that mean there’s more missiles trying to kill you, but keeping them all safe from asteroids can become quite a challenge.

Hopefully the end result is a game with dynamic difficulty that is determined by the player’s skill and willingness to take on risk.  A less skilled player can play through just dodging everything, whilst an expert would make sure every missile ends up hitting a gunboat.

Obligatory screenshot:

So I’ve added the music, the sound effects, the drop shadows, and I’ve done a new ship.  It’s getting there:

Among the things still to do are falling boulders when you kill enough fungi, various particle effects, and a tutorial or explanation screen.  I should have it done in plenty of time for the deadline.

New playable 😀 Still buggy!
Try the current build at: http://garbos.itu.dk/ludumdare/

introscreen from Robots <3 Monster

I.E. They played music when I asked them to

Some progress screenshots on the graphics. The game still needs more levels and some music and it will be finished.

Tags: breakfast, foodphoto

Hi all, i’ve added a binary release for mac to the google code project.

You can find it here: http://code.google.com/p/outofammo/downloads/list

Asap a linux binary

I’ve done the basic layout of every area in the world and linked all the maps up properly. Hurrah! Next up is making lots of Daremon to populate it. Then adding trainers everywhere.

Busy, busy…

I’ve added a linux[and macos too] build to the download page on google code, go check it out!

http://code.google.com/p/outofammo/downloads/list

I decided to throw in the towel. I’m way behind schedule, there is no gameplay to speak of and I’m generally demotivated. Till next time then :).

Got a new playable version posted. The biggest changes have been making the game 20 pixels taller to move the UI off the playfield, making the yellow mines have a lifespan which ticks down till they explode showering the screen with very damaging spikes. This is too add a final bit of player tension and motivation to collect mines quickly.

Tags: exploding, flash, mines, screenshot

I’m finished!

The game isn’t.

But it’s as complete as I’m going to get it. Sadly, I didn’t get time to put any graphics into the game, nor any scoring, nor a win condition (or a loose condition). You’ll require a bit of imagination to play it, but surprisingly, it’s fun. Download Zombies as Weapons and give it a go.

Because it has Zombies. And ragdoll physics. And you can pick the zombies up and throw them at each other.

Like this:

And this:

The game’s a 213KB zip file, and currently only works on Windows:

Zombies as Weapons

Good luck, good night, and good zombie hunting.

Tags: final

So I managed to get around the big issue I was having with my game *yay* so now I think it’s just polishing up everything art wise and recording some sfx and making some music!

I’m having a late lunch, but then my breakfast was around lunch time anyway but my teeth have been hurting like crazy, I’ve got a couple being sensitive and playing up, and it’s not helping with my concentration, hope they feel better soon Hopefully the cheesy beans will get my mind off them

Tags: food

My brain had almost completely rebelled, refusing to do any more work, so I bribed it …

Just what I needed

Now, while I’m working on that lot, I’m creating a to-do list and realising how much work I still have left … but I knew that, since I barely have anything implemented 😛

This is as good as my drawings get. Don't except any awesome in-game graphics though :)

Hi there!

You can’t play my game yet, but I can show you my title screen which is arguably the best part of my game! (so far)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=2490

This was my first LD and it was pretty fun!  Thanks for everyone that makes this event as awesome as it is.

The game is a bit buggy at times but (hopefully) there aren’t any groundbreaking problems. The source is not clean at all, as I may clean it after the LD. Now I need to rest…

This is the name of my game! You can’t have it.

Lootrate seems a bit to high need to just. The ammunition should be special and rare and not cover the whole screen.  -.-

Yay, i’m finished! There isn’t much i can say here that isn’t said on the submission, so go take a look!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=1844

Screenie

The upgrades work.
The enemy has good AI.

Now, to finish it!

The game is beginning to come along nicely, the gameplay is much more fun now. Just one level so far though, and no menu or instructions.