Woohoo! I have a menu! Yeah, its not the best looking menu in the world, but it works 😉

Tags: menu, pixelman, pygame, pymike, python

Hello, everyone. It’s my first Ludum Dare!I start to make my game now. because i worked hard today and now i’m coming home.

now midnight time(2 am!) in Japan, so I will sleep tonight and making game is tomorrow….

good night.

I’ve had something semi-playable for awhile now, but I think I’m finally to the point that failure is possible, meaning it’s reached game status.

It starts out as a simple platformer, but the meter at the top, rather than health, is actually a sort of “fuel” meter, which restricts how many times you can jump, or dash. (Walljumping is free though.) Thus challenging the player to beat the level in the most “Minimalistic” way possible.

I might keep the placeholder graphics, in spirit of the theme. Although that seems a tad too easy.

I tried to install Pygame 1.8 because I wanted to use the new Surface.get_bounding_rect method, and the proverbial shit hit the fan. It hung, then panicked, then ended up nuking my original pygame install as well, so I uninstalled, restarted, and went downstairs to get some lunch. Behold! The fruits of my labor:

That’s a roast beef, salami, cheese, and lettuce sandwich on french bread, with a banana and some gatorade. Mmmmmmmmm.

Also, a water jug update. For reference, this was at 31 hours 47 minutes remaining.

Tags: foodphoto

Okay, it’s a little late, but I was up late last night!

Yummy scrambled eggs, served on toast with garlic butter, with plentiful amounts of purple goop (blueberry and banana smoothie!).

Tags: foodphoto

I’m just back from a rehearsal day with an orchestra, we played Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Mahler. I made recordings, but this isn’t minimal music so it’s not really usable. People brought their own sandwiches and later we ordered chinese.

Now I can start working on my game…

Tags: foodphoto

There’s a coffee stand on the North side of Franklin in Eugene, OR (just across the street from the main entrance to the University of Oregon). The place is called Espresso Milano, and they are awesome! I always get a large chai there, and Christa is wonderful to me.

Tags: foodphoto

…For I cannot build a castle…

Oh, wait – YES I CAN!

(Yes, I know those aren’t the right lyrics. But that’s how most people hear it.)

Time to start working on some code, but not with a tasty little meal

minestrone soup, sourdough bread toast, and Hansens creamy root beer

I’m not sure where my digital camera is, so I’m using my crappy webcam

Tags: foodphoto, root beer, soup

Ok I have picked the simplest puzzle / strategy game I could think of – Paper Scissors Rock and am trying to make a polished presentation of it.

I have 6 AI’s laid out on paper – there is a 60% it will pick on of those randomly and a 40% change it will pick the one of those that has gone the best historically. Or that is the plan. I hope to make it pretty tough.

Lunch was 2 slices of banana bread, probably going to have a big supper and while my 4 year old is napping I want to get some code done.

Not much to show, but I guess that fits the theme perfectly. The reason is that I have spent all my time on coming up with an idea that
I didn’t hate.

What you’re seeing here is a 3d model infested with nasty stuff. It’s your job to shake these things off.

Needs some tweaking and levels, but it’s basically doing what I want now

Tags: screenshot

Here’s another screenshot. As you can see, I’ve colored the skater sprite. I hope that doesn’t detract too much from the minimalism. I’m thinking of making the graphics more colorful in other ways too. I think the minimalism of the gameplay is quite enough for me, as the game still works with just one button, which you use to jump, grind and wall jump. You jump by pressing a button, grinding and wall jumping happens automatically when you’re holding a button when hitting a rail or a wall. I was going to make it timing based, but I didn’t want to make it very hard. So far the game doesn’t really have any goals other than collecting all the red gems. I’m thinking of having an exit you need to reach within a time limit, with the gems giving you more time. Like in N and N+.

Tags: screenshot, tiny skater

Here’s another screenshot. As you can see, I’ve colored the skater sprite. I hope that doesn’t detract too much from the minimalism. I’m thinking of making the graphics more colorful in other ways too. I think the minimalism of the gameplay is quite enough for me, as the game still works with just one button, which you use to jump, grind and wall jump. You jump by pressing a button, grinding and wall jumping happens automatically when you’re holding a button when hitting a rail or a wall. I was going to make it timing based, but I didn’t want to make it very hard. So far the game doesn’t really have any goals other than collecting all the red gems. I’m thinking of having an exit you need to reach within a time limit, with the gems giving you more time. Like in N and N+.

Tags: screenshot, tiny skater

Here is another screenshot of MinMo. I have got a basic ‘block’ class defined and working for the land now. Basically, keeping to the concepts of the theme with min and max (or mo?) the blocks will be moving up and down possibly signaling their moves with color changes ahead of time. Another minimalist thing I’m trying to incorporate is that your little MinMo player guy can’t jump. You will have to use the moving of the ground blocks to get around the world. You WILL be able to fall though and I’m still thinking up what kinda of implications this may have. I am still brainstorming other aspects of the game (enemies, goodies etc) but nothing too concrete yet.

So, now I’m off to a birthday party I’m throwing for my girlfriend so I won’t be back for about 6 hours or so. Then it is a late night sprint on the game, some minimal sleep and the final crunch on Sunday to pull this thing off. Good luck all!

Tags: gosu, journal, minmo, ruby, screenshot

This is my firts ludum dare. I worked on my game today.

My game is playable now and tomorrow I’m going to write the menu and make more levels. + Bugfixing.

Screenshot: nullgames.awardspace.com

The goal with the game is to keep the ball as small as posible. If it gets dirty it grows

LOG
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AEST GMT +10

2008/04/19 17:13:53 AEST GMT +10

2008/04/19 17:53:39 AEST GMT +10

Don’t have internet at home, but going in the competition anyway…

I saw the theme at about +1 hours after the competition started (about 4-5 hours ago) in an email when I was at a cafe checking my email on the free wireless.  I have been coming up with a basic idea since then, but not giving it all that much thought.  I was thinking about drawing lines on paper, and scanning them in… then making minimal beep noises…

But then I wrote the name of my directory for the game… mini_mal… and aha!  Mini Mal was born.  I haven’t even to the ludumdare website since the comp started, but I imagine someone else has come up with the idea for ignoring the theme 😉

So the idea so far is this… Mini Mal the stick figure, with minimal beep noises.

MOST OF THE COMPETITON I WON’T HAVE INTERNET.  Bugger.

I accidentally had skellington game framework on my computer, along with pygame, and python.  So I’m just going to do a pygame game… with basic stuff.  Luckily I also downloaded the pygame documentation and examples… also lucky the python objects have documentation built in, also lucky I have been maintaining pygame for over 3 years now.

… now my todo…

DONE – window up, and basic event loop.
– basic animation program…
– draw line, click point, click second point.
– select point.
– draw end points of lines with rectangles.  Use collision functions to see which points are selected.

– lines are in each frame of the animation.
– to not show lines in one frame, you can mark them as invisible (somehow do invisible lines differently).
– key frames.
– can add/delete key frames.
– interpolation happens between key frames.
– frames per second.  Set at 30fps.

2008/04/19 18:30:03 AEST GMT +10

I made a line class, which subclasses the Rect class.

It can draw itself, with it’s own color…  oooh.  A white picture with a black line on it.

… now to make a screenshot function I think… maybe when I have something a bit better.

– draw line with end points.

2008/04/19 19:20:13 AEST GMT +10

It can now draw a line, and select the end points – and move the line

Now to go and get some junk food.

– make a Lines class, that has a def handle_events(self, events): method.
– make a Lines.new_line method.  So you then click to make the two points.
– make a Lines.delete_line method, which deletes any line selected.

2008/04/19 20:38:37 AEST GMT +10

Went and got some junk food.  A few lollies, and chips.

Then I had dinner, and then came back to work on a Lines class.  Almost there with being able to draw multiple lines.  Whilst coding, I’ve been thinking of how I can structure the animation editor.  Like how I can make collections of lines play at different positions.  I’ll have to translate the positions of the lines somehow… perhaps I’ll give each set of Lines a transform   Then allow selecting groups of lines, so I can animate multiple groups on the same screen.

Then I’ll need a way to load and save Lines… probably with pickle.

Now to finish off my new_line, and delete_line methods.

… oh, and I need to figure out the actual game part… hrmm.  that can come later, once I’ve figured out something cool.

2008/04/19 21:30:11 AEST GMT +10

the lines can be drawn pretty easily now.

Accidentally I came across a way to have the lines join up at the vertices.

Now I have a mode where I can select multiple verts to move at once… which allows a primative form of welding of vertices.

2008/04/19 21:46:28 AEST GMT +10

been playing a bit with drawing more… it’s kind of fun.  I’ve made it slightly easier for me to do things, and also experimented with line thickness… That could also be a fun thing to animate.

So the lines could grow thick from frame to frame.

… but how to save them all.

2008/04/19 22:34:24 AEST GMT +10

I think the pygame.Rect subclasses only pickle the pygame.Rect attributes.  Oh well.

Perhaps I can replace it later with a vec4d subclass… or something.

Anyway… this is what I want to do I think:

Frames
Frame
Lines
Line

So then I think I can just pickle the whole lot, and reload it.

2008/04/20 09:09:17 AEST GMT +10

I put a basic screenshot function in there.

– Create Frames class, get basic animation working.
– Make a box select.  So you can easily move many lines at once.

Tags: illume

Shooting!

It doesn’t do anything at the moment, but you can shoot, so hooray!

Tags: journal

So there’s about a day and six and a half hours left, and I’ve pretty much just finished up on the game design I’m planning on doing.

I did go to sleep last night ( since it started 3am here in Soggy Scotland ) and didn’t really get up till about 10am.. then had some stuff to do and started a bit of code at about 12:30pm but hunger struck and I decided to go eat instead.

^ The food and stuff which shall keep me going the rest of the competition 😉 Yay for Tea and Irn Bru!

And since I haven’t done this yet ( even if I am stupidly late with it ) here’s my work desk too:

Yes, that’s a code munkee on my desk 😉 along with rather scary amounts of hardware.

In the next six and a half hours, I’m going to get the GL Renderer in my engine working and hopefully get some basic game logic going! I’m heading for a rather odd AI based game where the player has rather little control over their minions. Each race is a set of geometric shapes ( more than likely just two sides – squares and circles ) with their colour depicting which role they play in their little community – be it Attacker, Forager, Builder or Male/Female Pleb ( which make more little shapes for you when they meet ). Although you can’t directly tell your shapes where to go, you can influence their task in the community. This may get changed later if it just doesn’t work right… but yea the minimalist theme is catered for in the graphics and the lack of direct control you have over the entities running around in the world.

Will give an update when I have something running.. the timelapse video is somewhat amusing as most of today has shown IRC and my screensaver, hehe .. so some editing may need to be involved there 😉

Got another shot at the computer – couple slices of banana bread.

I have picked Rock – Paper – Scissors (as minimal of a game that I could think of) and have written 6 different but very basic  AI’s and 40% of the time will pick which ever one of those has the best track record (that part I have to write yet).

Then for the first time I will use sound with java, and pacakge it up. Considering my wife works 24 of the 48 hours and we have a little guy. I feel Ok with this. I have no vision of winning, I just wanted to get my feet wet with a Ludrum’s again.