Tags: foodphoto

I finally come up with an idea and discover that MrFun is already doing it.

Breakfast: Biscuits and sausages. What no fruit!?! No veggies?!?! Well, actually there are blueberries inside those sausages. No really, they are there…. truly.

The magically ingredient to this dish is in the jar. That is genuine Vermont Maple Syrup, carried in buckets from about 35 trees to a boiling pan and then canned by ME! That is what I did last weekend at my Uncle’s homestead. It tastes AMAZING!

WOW am I full! Tomorrow I’ll have to only have two biscuits and three sausage links.

Tags: foodphoto

Well, my first breakfast was so good and I so hungry that I ate it before I realized I should have taken a picture. Here’s the remains:

So in spirit of the competition, and because I’m still kind of hungry, I decided to have a second breakfast, hobbit-style! (Though if I were in LotR I’d be more of Gandalf-stature.)

Yes that’s Golden Crisp, and yes it’s delicious.

Tags: foodphoto

Someone (partly me) derailed the IRC into wild discussion of a math problem. I think some 5-6 people were involved at some points, and we still haven’t arrived at a conclusion as far as I can tell.

Here’s an image I cooked up to help visualize the problem:

The problem is deceptively simple: Determine what angle to fire a bullet in, if it is to hit a target that’s moving past you at a constant velocity. In other words, both objects are moving at a fixed speed, and you just have to figure out in what direction to launch the bullet so that it’ll hit the target perfectly. Iterative solutions need not apply. Good luck with interpreting the image, it’s pretty confus(ed/ing).

Tags: aiming, algorithms, bullets, math

 Since most people have screenshots, and whatnot, I’ve decided to join in the fun, and show off the minimalist battle simulation.

The icons represent your health, magic, strength/attack, and defense.  There’s minimal actual text (it’s just going to be numbers, and icons).  Hopefully, I can draw some basic looking monsters to fight, so it’s not just a funky text game.  Time for lunch.

Tags: screenshot

Player movement is in! You can accelerate around and it correctly limits your speed to a manageable number. If you go near the edge, the screen starts to move instead of you. I really like how it turned out. This coupled with the screen scrolling from last night gives a really good feel for the infinite level I was going for. ‘Zah!

I want to make a movie of it, but fraps apparently won’t record pygame windows that aren’t using opengl.

Tags: journal

Crazy buoys flying all over the place. I got them under control now though. Next step is to close the buoy divider and get points for decontaminated oil spills.

Hotdogs! Yeah, I forgot to buy the bread. Toast it is. Works.

Tags: 2D, boat, buoy, crazy, foodphoto, topdown

Tags: gray, grey, minimal, screenshot

Okay, finally got something I like. When the Minimalist theme was announced my first idea was a minimalist RPG, like a Roguelike. And I’d been thinking about writing a Roguelike for a while…but I don’t think I could write a good Roguelike in two days.

After getting some sleep I thought of a very simple action game – top-down, 2D. You start in the center of a room and must avoid enemies until a weapon spawns, at which point you can pick it up and kill them. Unfortunately this is almost exactly what MrFun is doing…and he’s actually a good way into making his game.

So I came back to thinking about the minimalist RPG idea, and of course of the first games I thought of was the original Legend of Zelda. (Except that some people claim that Zelda isn’t an RPG at all. Why? Because there are no stats to improve. You don’t level up and gain abilities; all your abilities come from things you find in the world. Want more health? Find a heart container. Want do to more damage? Find a better sword, etc. I can see their point, but I don’t think I agree with it.)

And then I remembered a game I played a long time ago called Castle Adventure. It was a very good real-time RPG similar to Zelda, where you picked up items that gave you new abilities and allowed you to explore (and ultimately escape) the castle. Combat was a bit lame, however – it had Roguelike combat, where you just ran into an enemy and whoever was tougher won. I liked that there were a lot of puzzles in the game, though. You used treasures you’d already found to access new areas of the castle and get more treasures.

Both of these games seem to strip the concept of the RPG down to its roots. So I’m going to write a game similar to them, but adding improvements of my own. It’ll have Zelda-style action combat but it’ll also have Castle Adventure-style treasure collecting and puzzle solving.

And it’ll be in text mode

I finally have a screenshot, and it looks awful. Observe:

The red square is the player, the green squares are the monsters, and the white line is the arena boundary. The tearing at the top is there because my linux screenshot program doesn’t lock up the entire system the way it does on Windows.

So here’s my total progress:

• Player controls (complete)
• Render player (complete)
• Render monsters (complete)
• Render arena boundaries (complete)
• Player collides with arena boundaries
• Player image
  • Rotate player
• Monster image
  • Rotate monsters
• Monster AI
  • Approach player when in vision
  • Follow other monsters when player is not in vision
  • Wander aimlessly when nothing is in view
  • Avoid collision with other monsters
  • Avoid collision with arena boundaries
• Player kills monsters
  • dampen player’s velocity
• Monsters kill player

However, I am going to bed now because I have been awake for a very long time. Maybe I’ll know what to call the game when I wake up.

Tags: Omnihunter

Well, actually this screenshot does not look very different from the last, but I assure you, lots of things have happened behind the scenes. The game suffers a little from bad collision control and I have begun to question how fun this will be to play. And who knows? God just might show up as a supporting character in this game…

Tags: screenshot

The editor is fully functional now, and the objects are rendering quite nicely… now I need some gameplay!

Finally got a screen shot here along with a link if anyone on win32 wants to try my character test and let me know if my exe doesn’t work. Basically got my character tiles from last night all coded in and initially timed between states.

The current player character MinMo has two states. A ‘Min’ state where he is a little thin snake and a gelatinous block ‘Mo’ state where he can’t move but will probably be invincible. You are frozen as ‘Mo’ currently until the time is up where you then transform back to ‘Min’.

You use arrows to move left and right, space to transform, and ESC quits. Now for more game elements!

win32 exe available here

Tags: gosu, minmo, ruby, screenshot, test, win32

Closing the gap!

Ta da! The oil is gone! It’s magic!

Want to test download the exe (windows) or run the swf, although the swf is slower. Arrow keys to drive, space to deploy buoys.

That’s all for day one. I’m going to bed. (00:13)

Tags: 2D, boat, buoy, flash, topdown

Hey, I finally figured I’d make atleast one blog entry while still working.

This LD I started off pretty irritated at the theme, I didn’t like it at all. It felt like it constrained me too much and although IRC was supportive, I couldn’t come up with an idea for the first hour I was awake and aware of the theme. After about an hour I just started programming the framework, without any idea what to make. I figured it’d come up as I was working, a whole new approach for me. After I commented on someones entry and I suddenly got an idea. I was going to make a brain that grew and shrunk and it could overcome obstacles that way. To do that you had to increase brainwaves. This could be done by correctly answering math questions, but after a while I figured this would be boring. So I changed the brain to a pulse and with the pulse I could issue commands. With these commands I would have some guy do something.

After I programmed the pulse I got an idea how to have the guy move around. And then I felt like adding random sounds. Now, I have something that looks like this:

If anyone feels like trying the prototype: http://www.deepflame.nl/ld11/Brainwave0.2.rar

Be sure to leave comments if you try it.

16:53
Made some camera path tests. Feeling hungry, so it’s time for a break.

18:35
Went to buy a large pizza and ate part of it. Rest of it will probably keep me going for the whole compo.. after digesting it and thinking about some impl. details, I’m ready to continue
actual development.

20:18
Ditched the previous path thingy. Decided just to make numbered nodes (w/prefixes) in irrEdit to define camera/object path, and system for it is maybe halfway done now. Can’t resist myself doing small tweaks for the visuals as well.

So, Ludum Dare! Woke up a bit late today and had some breakfast to prepare for the compo while I chewed on the theme a bit. (Also this.)

Then a friend of mine called and wanted to go on a mountain trip. I needed to think some more about the LD theme anyway, and what better way to get the brain working than to starve it on oxygen by breathing much thinner air? Seemed like a good idea, so off we went.

Ate some Rislunsj first, though. This is Rislunsj:

(My food started floating about in the air at this point, not exactly sure why.)

Then we walked on said mountain for a while, and I took lots of pictures (mainly of trees), since I thought there might be a remote possibility that they could come in handy for the compo.

Anyway, at some point we decided it was time to eat something. My friend brought a portable stove and we cooked this on it:

Unfortunately we used all our water for the food, but miraculously we found we’d brought something else to drink, seen here posing in the scenery:

My friend had a Solo. Afterwards, some chocolate:

Then we went back down again.

And that was my day! Man, with all this hard work my game will surely be way beyond awesome. The product of dreams.

Tags: foodphoto

While you are having breakfast I am having a supper snack.

It is Caramel Waffle. I do not know why but I have become addicted to them. I have to have at least a couple each day.

I have opened my Flash CS3 to start but I have no idea to start with.

Here is a screenshot of my work so far.

I have some simply platform mechanics, a level editor, and keyboard / xbox 360 controlls.