LD11 April 18–21, 2008

breakfast post

Well, sitting during breakfast. I have a decent idea for a game. I already have a crappy piece of artwork done with my wacom for the background. The game will be an economy simulator, but in this game you might have starve, kill and put people in slave labor to get the economy growing profitably. I might add other ai players that try doing the same, and you try beating them. Its gonna be top-down 2d, the “workers” will be tiny pixels i think, but they will have a large array of variables that could kill them. Basicly, you work your people to death just enough so not alot of them die, or you have a good reproduction rate vs die rate.

food.

first ld11 breakfast

Tags: foodphoto

WIP (2)

So, I’ve worked a bit more and implemented some more backend stuff and some hacky quad rendering. If I have time, I’ll replace it with an antialiased version later. Why software rendered? Well, mostly because I’m a bit crazy, but there is another reason that will become more clear later 😉

sgstair - ld11 - wip2

I think I might try to get some sleep pretty soon- Remember; sleep is for the weak!… and we’re all just weak. …weak… puny… humans… won’t deserve to live when the robot uprising comes 😛

Tags: journal, LD11 - Minimalist, screenshot

Playable!

Here’s what I have so far, in source code form. I can’t be bothered packaging it up properly right now, so you will need Python and pygame to run this:

Click to download

How to play:

  • Goal: Reach the exit
  • Left and right move
  • If you’re not holding anything, spacebar picks up crates from in front of you
  • If you are holding something, spacebar drops it in front of you
  • Don’t touch enemies
  • Enemies die if you drop a crate on them
  • Press a digit 1…9 to skip to a level.

If you die, the game will quit. If you win the game, it will also quit. If you’re running from a console it’ll tell you which was which, but otherwise you have to guess! Just my way of fighting back against the evil GUI oppressors.

If you need to restart a level (either ‘cos you got stuck or died), quit the game, restart it, and press a level skip button. I’ll code in a restart level feature later, don’t worry…

Obligatory screenshot follows. The Anonymous Game Hero (he isn’t E.T.’s Ugly Twin any more, I redrew him more simply – I mean, more minimalisticly!) is shown here holding a crate, waiting for the Not-So-Big Bad to wander over and offer itself up for a squishing.
Another work-in-progress screenshot of my game; much more progressed this time

Incidentally, and coincidentally, this game scores highly on the time-to-crate index.

Tags: playable, screenshot

Comments

19. Apr 2008 · 10:47 UTC
Hah, I love the minimalist graphics! It reminds me of pre-16 bit games.
saluk
19. Apr 2008 · 12:18 UTC
Level 7: impossible, or imPOSSible? Pretty fun game! You are practically finished.

Mid-day Saturday

leaf on water

Unfortunately, I can’t share much info on this game, as part of the minimalist nature of it is the lack of information you are supposed to have going into it.  That’s a big shame because it means I can’t share the most fun bits.  But anyway, it works so far!  I’ve got a leaf, see, and it falls on a still pond.  Working as advertised.  Pretty cool.  It also reflects.  I’m going to totally lose the journal contest, but it’s worth it – I don’t want to give away the surprises!

Tags: leaf, pond

The butler did it

After being otherwise occupied for several hours and eating tea, it was good to get back to work on the whodunnit. In the last few hours I’ve not written any code, nor drawn any art, but I have produced a prodigal amount of waste paper. The end result is that the algorithms which drive the scenarios (it’s dynamically generated each time) seem to be working – at least on paper.

The camera’s gone walkabouts, so pictures of the mess will be up later. Tomorrow is implementing everything, but for now I’m off to bed.

Tags: day1, journal

Second Screenshot

My triangles and stuffs are moving almost the way they should, they leave almost pretty trails after them and they shoot at the other sides thingies if they are inside their fireing arc.

Now lets let the player control the units a little.

Tags: screenshot

Comments

rollbak
19. Apr 2008 · 11:33 UTC
It seems like a minimalistic Galcon… 😉
tirpen
19. Apr 2008 · 13:04 UTC
Yeah, at least graphically I guess it does. :)

Got rigid objects working with Chipmunk, after eventually realising that adding the static body to the space is bad and makes it all go horribly wrong… No gameplay yet, but a mostly working editor mode (lacking load+save…)

screen2.png

Oil spill

Oil spill

Great, I had a tough bug haunting me for some time. When it finally was fixed I got the game up to speed. I can have 2000 oil spills at good framerate in flash on my laptop 2ghz centrino. Thanks to some dynamic sectoring.

Next up is to wrap the oil spills by dividers that will be dragged by the boat. And then some islands.

Tags: 2D, boat, oil, topdown

Supper

Mmm… pizza.

05supper1.jpg

Well, it’s basically just a sandwich.

Tags: foodphoto, pizza, sandwiches, supper

breakfast

There seems to be people with prototypes already so maybe it was a mistake to see my girlfriend last night…

Oh well, let’s have some breakfast and play catch-up!

breakfast

Tags: foodphoto, journal

Comments

HybridMind
19. Apr 2008 · 12:40 UTC
you cleaning your floor this morning? 😉

Hello

I’m a complete novice, but so minimal should be my specialty if it’s not too late to throw my hat into the ring :) I want to make an rpg, but that’s probably more than I can achieve in the time given since this needs to be a complete game (I imagine that means at least complete level).  So I’m going to make a basic platformer and hope my near complete lack of artistic ability and musical talent doesn’t hobble it too badly. I’m developing on an iMac using Ruby and the Gosu ( http://code.google.com/p/gosu/) development library. 

Breakfast

Was at Mcdonalds with my son – wrote a page and a half of notes.

The game is simple but I thought of 6 different view points for the AI to have – so I have stuff to keep me busy.

Early screenie, and a glitch

So here’s an early screen shot of the current state of my (puzzle?) game (it’s based on the paintings of Piet Mondrian … more about that later).

Mondrian early screenshot

I’m currenty experimenting with the gameplay rules and mechanics … but at the moment same colour squares annilate eachother, while different colors breed when they touch, generating new squares in random positions. The player moves the black lines to allow the coloured squares to expand.

Here’s a screenshot of a glitch that shows what sometimes happens when two different colours touch and the whole system starts breeding with itself.

Mondrian self-breeding glitch

That’s not supposed to happen. I’ll fix it in the morning.

Tags: glitch, journal, screenshot

Comments

27. Apr 2009 · 17:36 UTC
I loved ur game…

id love to see this glitched one!

it seems very interesting!!!!

Breakfast and LD Toast

Well, I got about 6 hours of sleep and feel pretty good. I decided to start the morning out right with some french toast and orange juice. Also, yes I put peanut butter on my french toast. No I am not crazy. Why yes, it is quite awesome, thank you for asking.

Saturday Breakfast

You may notice the attempted ‘LD’ done in powdered sugar. The L turned out pretty well, but the D is second rate at best.

LD Toast!

Tags: foodphoto

…and…start!

So, when are we going to start?

What? When was this?

Oh, cwap!

sat morning breakfast..

mmmm.. breakfast sandwich and OJ.  Good morning ludum dare 11.HybridMind’s Saturday Morning Breakfast

My girlfriend said she’d make me a breakfast sandwich as long as I post it to the LD blog, so how could I refuse?  It was gooooood too.  😉

In other news, I got about 6 hours of sleep and am working on getting my basic character functional in a code test so I can post something game related soon.  :)

Tags: breakfast, foodphoto, oj, saturday

After breakfast

I took off an hour for breakfast and other things. Mostly I’m posting just to log the time I spent on this project, as the only progress I have made so far is setting up the general framework of the application. It runs, but hardly displays anything.

Tags: Omnihunter

Pixelman 3

Woot! I’ve made some good progress on my game. Its a 2D platformer (how inventive, eh?). Unfortunately, its really hard not inserting all my ideas in, since the theme is “Minimalist”. Anyway here’s a screenie of my prog:

pixelman 3 screenshot

And believe it or not, everything you see on there is in one file! Now that’s minimal 😉

Tags: early dev, pixelman, pygame, pymike, python, sequel

Comments

Saurabh
19. Apr 2008 · 12:24 UTC
Hey thats nice. You can easily modify the graphics in future, just keep adding more code.
NULL
19. Apr 2008 · 12:36 UTC
Nice, I liked Pixelman 1 and 2.

Stop those vehicles! Early screenshot.

Well, this guy failed. Obviously the grey dude is the main character, and a tank. Obviously the pink square is a regular car, the yellow thing is a bus, and the blueish thing is a van. And apparently none of them know how to park (but that will soon be remedied). All the graphics are being made in KolourPaint (which is pretty much just like MS Paint, but for Linux), using only the colors that are there when you start it up.

If you let what happened to this guy happen to you, you are failing at minimizing the competition for the blue goodness…

early pepsi

Tags: screenshot

Breakfast: Biscuits and sausages

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

Ludum Dare 11 Saturday Breakfast

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

Comments

HybridMind
19. Apr 2008 · 12:45 UTC
I live in VT and can attest to the the quality of our syrup… and cheese! 😉
19. Apr 2008 · 14:07 UTC
Oooo…. Cabot Sharp Cheddar…. Mmmmmmm…. might have to run to the store!
HybridMind
19. Apr 2008 · 14:13 UTC
I’m down in Brattleboro.. you know, the ‘banana belt’ of Vermont.. 😉

Well, nice to see another Vermonter here!
19. Apr 2008 · 17:54 UTC
Ah yes… I love the names areas have around here. My Uncle lives in the Northeast Kingdom.

Breakfast

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:

empty

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.)

cereal

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

Tags: foodphoto

Distractions Deluxe

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:

salvation.jpg

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

Another in dev screenshot

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

Early Game

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 – 33 hours remaining

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

Hotdog with buoy action!

Bouy frenzy

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.

Strange bread

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

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

I’m Ready!

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 :)

Progress

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

Some progress

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…Second screenshot

Tags: screenshot

More Physics-y fun

screen3.png

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

MinMo screen shot and win32 test file

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

MinMo Screenshot Char Test

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

Comments

19. Apr 2008 · 14:11 UTC
Works with no problems… looking good!
thedaian
19. Apr 2008 · 14:11 UTC
Worked for me, too. Nifty.
HybridMind
19. Apr 2008 · 14:15 UTC
Thanks for the feedback. Still working out kinks with rubyscript2exe so that is good to hear it is packaging up everything so far.

Decontaminate that oil!

To be decontaminated

Closing the gap!

Decontaminated!

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

Brainwave the game

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.
200804192018-small.png

Minimalist game development!

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.)

leverpostei.jpg

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:

rislunsj.jpg

(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:

gryterett.jpg

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:

urge.jpg

My friend had a Solo. Afterwards, some chocolate:

sjokolade.jpg

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

Supper Snack

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.

Caramel Waffle

My first screenshot

Here is a screenshot of my work so far.

I have some simply platform mechanics, a level editor, and keyboard / xbox 360 controlls.screenshot_001.png

A menu!

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

menu

Tags: menu, pixelman, pygame, pymike, python

one lap behind start

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. :-)

My desk

Comments

19. Apr 2008 · 17:49 UTC
Greetings fellow Japanonian, I am in 福山 (Fukuyama). Good luck!

It’s definately something

firstscreen.png

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.

It’s a Sammich!

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:

Saturday Lunch - It\'s a Sammich!

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.

Water Jug 31 Hours 47 Minutes Remaining

Tags: foodphoto

Breakfast

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

breakfast1.jpg

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

Tags: foodphoto

Time to start working…

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…

rep1.jpg

food21.jpg

rep2.jpg

food3.jpg

food4.jpg

Tags: foodphoto

Breakfast of Champions

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.Large chai, Sugar-free Rockstar, and a bran muffin

Tags: foodphoto

So Let Me Build A Bridge…

…For I cannot build a castle…

Oh, wait – YES I CAN!

He's happy 'cause he's in a castle.

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

soup n soda

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

Back At it again

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.

Comments

SpindleyQ
19. Apr 2008 · 16:04 UTC
My brother and I play Rock/Paper/Scissors a lot. It’s been my experience that novice Rock/Paper/Scissors players disproportionately choose scissors as their opening move. When I discovered this, I consistently beat my brother for about six months before he noticed the pattern. It’s really kind of spooky. The two people I’ve tried this on that haven’t chosen scissors have chosen rock. No one’s picked paper yet.

Progress

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.

ld11_shrt_1.png

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

Tiny skater skates on

Tiny skater, bigger level

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

Tiny skater skates on

Tiny skater, bigger level

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

MinMo screenie #2 and journal update

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.

MinMo Screenshot 2

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

Screenie

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

Mini Mal

screen_shot_1208646754.png
LOG
====
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

GEvOlve

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.Fooooooooood

^ 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:

Work Desk

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 😉

Comments

19. Apr 2008 · 17:43 UTC
Go Scotland!!

Not a bad stretch

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.

Entering dangerous territory

Lunch: Corn chowder with a steak sandwich washed down with a Fosters.

Ludum Dare 11 Saturday Lunch

I’ve got the basic idea worked out now and starting to put the pieces together. I’ve reached the point where I need to refactor some of my code because it is starting to get repetitive. This is a dangerous area of me because in LD 7 I never got past this stage!

Second screen shot of my minimalist turn-based game.

Tags: foodphoto, screenshot

PoV Food – Double Feature!

Twice the food ’cause I’ve been busy!!!

Anyways, day got off to a crappy start.  Overslept huge, going on 2 PM.  Well maybe only a couple hours over, but I’d planned on only 5-6 hours of sleep instead of 10.

But I started my day right, with cereal.

Part of this complete breakfast.

Part of this complete breakfast.

Then somehow it was 6 PM, and I’d made plans to go pick up a PC Engine Duo from a guy in town.  Turns out I went to college with him.  What are the odds of that? :)

Going on 8 PM, I wasn’t really in the mood to cook.  Had I seen Erik’s pizza photo beforehand, I would have run out to Little Caesars.  Instead, we had leftovers.

A taste of yesterday

Fajitastic leftovers!

I thought I’d shake things up going with a can of Sprite instead of orange juice.  It’s been months since I’ve had pop in the fridge, it’s been a nice change of pace.

So now, all my errands are done.  It’s going on 9 PM (24+1 hours to go).  I’m not quite sure where I stand with my entry.  I have a couple hours tonight, and if I sleep well, 14 tomorrow.  I’m gonna say no entry, just in case I miraculously pull something off tomorrow, I’ll be a hero.

Ta ta ladies.

Tags: foodphoto

Return of the blob!

screen4.png

My pet blob is back… and it’s almost a game now :)

As well as the graphical style, the controls are quite minimal – just the left and right keys

Real life gets in the way.

So looks like real life has once again managed to get itself in the way of compos! 😀 I won’t be able to finish my ludumdare game, I had some interesting concepts but there’s no way I can get them done in the limited time I have between all the stuff thats going on this weekend.

– Good luck everyone!

Off to a slow start this morning

dogs.jpg

While it doesn’t compare to mountain climbing and concert performances we had some outdoor action too… today we had to walk our dogs down to the park to get their shots.

akiko_and_cosmo.jpg

Success!

Time to start working on enemies, hoping to have some that crowd you (touch damage) and some that shoot, turrets or something.

Basics Done, Now the Rest: “Framed!”

Well, after my algorithmic failures last night, had got some rest, and had to drive down to my folks, but I’ve put a couple of more hours in today. Right now, I’ve fixed my generating algorithm to be perfect, and was able to get some nice padding for the frames in:

I’ve also added some basic animation, figured out a game mechanic, and a name “Framed!”. Now, I just need to justify it with a plot? Naw… Though, I should make a basic menu and add some sound effects, as well as let you know when you win the game.

I’m excited, hope everyone else’s projects are going as well. Any objections to my color schemes?

End of day1 update

spacebattleintro

Well, there is definitly a game here now.  It’s my take on a minimalist space battle.

The ships move around and will automatically shoot if they see an enemy in their weapon arc. The player controls the red shipsby clicking on one, holding down the mouse and moving it left or right, this determins if the ship will go forward, turn constantly to the right or the left. The mousewheel controls the speed of ships under the pointer and right click will activate some special function on the different ships.

The game can be paused at any time and orders can be changed while paused. Not sure if I’ll keep that feature though.

TODO for tomorrow:

  • At least some kind of AI for the opponent,  at the moment they just go forward or in circles.
  • Levels, Goals, Score, Structure of the game
  • Some more graphical special effects
  • Sound
  • Music?
  • Possibly more types of ships. There are three at the moment

Oh well. I’m happy with what I’ve done today given the distractions, pauses, and so on. I can’t wait to see what kind of insanities everyone has made when I wake up tomorrow. :)

Tags: goodnight, intro, screenshot

Re: Distractions Deluxe

My solution:

So the problem is to figure out the direction a player (moving in 3-d) has to shoot to hit an enemy (also moving in 3-d) given their positions, velocities, and the speed of the bullet.

The approach I used was to solve the equation

time it takes the enemy to reach a position = time it takes the bullet to reach the position

for the time.

First, redefine the vectors so that they are all relative to the player. This
leaves you with only bullet speed, enemy velocity, and enemy position. The
points in question are the points along the enemy’s trajectory, so express the
above equation in terms of t:

b1.png

This can be solved with the quadratic equation:

b21.png

Note that there may be zero, one, or two solutions. Negative solutions reflect hits in the past. If there are no positive solutions it is not possible for the player to hit the enemy.

Once you have t, it is simple to calculate the position.

Edit: forgot the exponent on the bottom of the final answer.

Tags: aiming, algorithms, bullets, distractions, math

Comments

DrPetter
19. Apr 2008 · 19:19 UTC
Looks great… in all its gritty mathyness. I might inspect it in the morning, but that hour of equation-wielding on irc bled me dry for the day so I will just take your word for it until then 😉

More progress

Had some troubles with math earlier, but that should be fixed now. Here’s a shot of a more complex model in action, where some blobs have been shaken off to the left.

ld11_shrt_2.png

There’s still one major issue with the ArcBall implementation (to rotate the model intuitively) which really needs to work before it’s playable.

Lunch after nap

Well, I was super groggy after the nap, but lunch has made me alive again. Though it was pretty minimal; ham sandwich and grapes with apple juice.

jach’s lunch

Tags: foodphoto

Need coffee

I made a solar system with a sun, planets, and killer asteroids entering the system, which you supposedly have to blast (with ultra-dense pellets of fissionable material). So this is kind of asteroids on steroids, or something. Kind of hard to avoid the system degenerating into a gas of particles though, especially if everything gravitates:    

Calling it a night

Well, I’m calling it a night as its 11pm here and I swear that I’ve go down with what ever was going around the office. As to my entry it’s looking good as I have the main maze working, the player can wander around it and crush or push the blocks about as they should. Next are the enemies…

First day’s results

My Workspace time lapse

At Hour 0:

Work Environment

At Hour 24:

Work Environment

I’m rusty with libSDL and haven’t made too many games in general, so I am breaking out reference books left and right.

Tags: workspace

Focus

menu screen

I was getting a bit discouraged — my game is pretty complicated, even though it’s stylistically minimal. So I made a main menu screen, that always cheers me up a bit. Not that it does anything  yet.

Tags: LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008

Tired

21:27
Felt like making some music for the game, so now it’s done (for now).

22:14
Seems I was longing for more break from developing, as I tweaked some more visual tricks for the level, and spent quite some time with sfxr making some funny sound effects.

22:34
Ate some more pizza, now I’ll start hacking with the code again.

01:41
Time to stop for now and go to sleep. I already took a break, i.e. I didn’t work fully for the past three hours. I got new path stuff done and also made an aiming arrow which follows mouse.
200804200141-small.png

Pizza

mmm… greasy, greasy pizza.

pizza

Tags: foodphoto

Adventure?

sshot.png

I spent way too long getting this to work..  Need sleep now.

Tags: screenshot

Shiny Particles

A game with shiny particles is slowly emerging. With a little bit of luck I’ll be able to implement god tomorrow…

Shiny stuff

Goat Cookies-O-Rama!

So the wife made goat cookies today .. I helped decorate.

img_0494.jpg

img_0500.jpg

img_0504.jpg

Tags: foodphoto

Goat Cookies-O-Rama!

So the wife made goat cookies today .. I helped decorate.

img_0494.jpg

img_0500.jpg

img_0504.jpg

Tags: foodphoto

Shot 6 – all gameplay done !!

Well, I got all the game-play and core graphics done.  Tomorrow I’ll wrap it up with some music, sfx, and a title / menu screen.

phil6.png

I was able to use my pug gui engine to render those dialog boxes.  You get crazy combos in this game if you can keep up!

Tags: screenshot

Final Entry! (I guess…)

Well, I guess I finished my entry, though I might add some more levels tomorrow. Gonna go chill out and play my DS now… Cheers 😀

Source Code: Download (53 KB)
Windows: (I’ll upload a binary later, hopefully)

pixelman3-screenshot-final.png

Tags: pixelman, pygame, python

Comments

NULL
20. Apr 2008 · 04:43 UTC
Nice!

Almost Framed

Well, I’ve got a menu now (well, minus one graphical glitch), and all that’s really left is the winning condition check and seeing if I want to add music… Not sure if I want to add anything else, that game’s pretty simple. Somewhat of a take on the “same game”, but with frames!

Day 1 Dinner

Dinner with my family is fried rice!

dinner.jpg

It’s actually much better than it looks. There turned out not quite to be enough for everyone, so I guess I’ll have a large snack later on.

Tags: foodphoto

Sun attack

I hit a wall this afternoon. After lunch the sun started to warm-up my side of the building, my brain slowed down. I tried to pound out the new GUI system but eventually relented and took a nap. So I’m back in action now with a little help from my Dr. Pepper.

Post nap pick-me up

Tags: foodphoto

Comments

sgstair
19. Apr 2008 · 21:32 UTC
yeah, got pretty hot here this afternoon :\ I’m doing some cooking and waiting for things to cool down a bit.

Breakfast, ~24 hours in

 Hot’n

Coffee (lovingly prepared by my girlfriend) & Hot’n’Spicy vegetable juice. I’ll probably have some biscuits later on too.

The game is moving along, but I’ve gotta get cracking if I’m going to have something semi-finished by the end of today. Onward … to the level editor !!!!

Tags: coffee, foodphoto

Let there be art

I finally have graphics. These are SDL RectFills that are using random red, green, and blue attributes, and the offset matches the mouse cursor’s position:

LD11 Minimalist with graphics

I plan on providing a sprite and making sure that there are other sprites in the playing area. I want to detect when your mouse-following sprite hits other sprites, and you will win or lose depending on which you touched.

The part that took me so long to get here was figuring out that I was using the variables incorrectly. Maybe I need more sleep. Or caffeine.

Just over 24 hours to go…

…and I’ve nearly finished the core of my game engine.

After the uproar on IRC at the choice of topic for this competition, I thought it would be entertaining to interpret it in a silly fashion. So I’ve gone for a minimalist interpretation of “minimalist”, namely “minim”. I understand that minims are more commonly known as “half-notes” in the USA.

The concept is fairly simple: a stream of semibreves (particles) appears on-screen and you have to guide enough of them into a container before the time runs out. You do this by drawing minims on the play area, which deflect or accelerate the semibreves. Part of the difficulty is drawing good enough minims; badly-drawn minims don’t do anything.

All the difficult graphics, physics and drawing recognition is (I hope) done now. I still need to add creation of the semibreve streams and a place for them to be collected. Once that’s done, I can start thinking about adding some concept of a level and some levels to play. Perhaps if I have time I’ll add sound too.

I’m afraid my meals have been fairly ordinary so far this weekend. For breakfast I had cereal (Just Right) and hot chocolate. For dinner I ate some pork with carrots and potatoes, followed by fruit and biscuits. For supper I had a selection of meats, cheeses, bread, biscuits and tomato soup, followed by fruit and a yoghurt. Isn’t that exciting?

Minim Madness at end of Day 1

Tags: food

first prototype

rawr, bullets shoot and curve etc..

Working copy of the game, have one of my friends here playing it with me.. The merging of the planets now goes to an appropriate position, but generally happens too fast so you just get a few of them in one point.. Momentum is not conserved yet either but it still seems to look ok.

Each ship can shoot 5 sets of bullets (each has its own  “trail”, as you can see in the picture above, which lets you see it curve etc..), whenever the bullets hit the edge of the map, another player, or a planet, they let you shoot again. Bullets now curve appropriately based on the gravitational pull of the planets. I removed the background because not only does it look more minimalistic without it, but it also looks better without it.

Next step is to provide a “stability” factor for the planets, where they will split into several planets if its not stable enough, the stability can be decreased by shooting the planets. This should help offset the fact that all the planets just merge together, I’d also like to get some particles flying round the screen that nothing, just to give the feel of the scales when the screen zooms out.

Since i’m making pretty good time with such a simple idea, I will also be trying to get an AI done for this.. although the only previous experience i’ve had with programming an AI was for “hunt the wumpus” (check wikipedia).. so no guarentees of its awesomeness.

Once all thats done i’ll be making some config file loader (like an ini file) for changing settings, because currently the only way toproperly customise it all is through the source code.

time to engage warp engines

ok. I haven’t spent much time today as I should have on the game. Instead I raced online in the fsr league today on Bahrain (http://www.formula-simracing.net) and got 7th place, yay.

I am gonna get the ball rolling tonight on getting the graphics done and basic design document im gonna follow for tommarows crunch. Meanwhile…

25hr screenshot, didnt spend much of the day on this

2nd food pic, 25hrs left

Tags: foodphoto

Lots of AI = performance hit

I woke up about an hour ago and added most of the AI to the monsters. The only thing they don’t do yet is avoid collisions with each other, but I hardly notice it when the green squares overlap. When I add images it may be another story, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

Here is a zoomed-out view of the action. Note the clusters that form when monsters wander near each other. I think it looks great in motion, except that I can count the framerate on one hand when there are this many monsters in the arena.

I’m taking a break for dinner, and when I get back, I’ll work on optimizing the AI so it doesn’t take up my entire processor (and then some).

Tags: Omnihunter

Comments

DrPetter
20. Apr 2008 · 07:50 UTC
I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t have a clear idea of what KD trees would be… but a simple and effective method would be to use a good old rectangular grid and store a list of occupant ID:s in each grid cell. So for each tick you start by populating the cells (constant time per entity, grid[y/cellsize*width+x/cellsize].occupants.pushBack(me)), then when you need to find neighbors you just step through a few of the nearby grid cells and check the occupant lists of those. If you just need very close neighbors you can take the surrounding 3×3 block of cells for example.

This should nicely reduce the complexity from N^2 to roughly N (for all but the most clustered cases).

Elementary Chemistry

So, I got some sleep, but forgot to take the sun into account; and since it got a little warm outside, it got pretty annoyingly hot in my nice insulated room full of computers. So I’ve been not getting much done. I did however take the opportunity to examine the following chemical reaction in detail; Here are the reactantssgstair - food - chili (before):

And with the judicious application of heat, and careful attention, you can expect to see results such as the following:

sgstair - food - chili (after)

I must say that this specific reaction does take a lot of time and effort to ensure success; But the results are delicious, and certainly worth the effort.

Now,  my game’s tech is still done, it’s severely lacking in gameplay though. So that’s what I’m doing next :)  Then I’ll even post a screenshot!

Tags: foodphoto, journal, LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008

This is why I am using my couch instead of my office

Since drZool asked about why I was using my couch, I bring you evidence of why:

Why I Use My Couch Instead of My Office

Hmm, I suppose it doesn’t look too messy, but I would need to go through each item on that desk and find a place for it. Some of it needs to be filed. Some of it needs to be thrown out. Some of it needs to be paid, as I am sure there is a bill or two in there.

I suppose I could use the kitchen table, but the table and the chairs wobble a bit. The couch is a bit better, although I do have a problem with my back hurting after marathon coding sessions. Like this competition.

Island in the strea… breakfast, day 2

Juicy

Ahhh that coffee was great!

Islands are temporary up, No collision responses yet and uglyishly(I made up that word just now), randomly placed. I made all islands fit a circle, to simplify the collisions a lot, fits the theme as well. I’m gonna put the islands in a separate sector manager. Next is collisions and neatly placed islands.

Tags: 2D, boat, coffe, day 2, foodphoto, island, juice, topdown

Saturday Dinner

I took a really long break, which I’m now regretting, to watch battlestar galactica and make fajitas for dinner. I also broke out the coca cola for the first time, finishing almost half of a 2 liter of the wonderful, caffeinated beverage. I’m now back at the helm, ready to make a solid push before a quick nap and the final stretch.

Fajitas

Tags: foodphoto

Screenshoft after the first 24h; foodphoto!

Hmhmhm, I’ve been annoyingly lazy and slow today, and I know it will come back at me tomorrow — but at least I managed to have the first playable level :)

This game is also inspired by the popular one-button helicopter game, but transferred into polar coordinates, with an overworld, enemies and kind-of quests. So it’s my minimalist version of Starfox on microplanets, or something :)
In other news, I found some leftover veggie BBQ stuff to photograph… and eat! Nom.
Foodphoto

Tags: foodphoto, gosu, ruby, screenshot

Comments

LunarCrisis
20. Apr 2008 · 01:01 UTC
That’s looking awesome!

Food Photo

A late lunch on day 2 (Sunday), we picked up pizza to maximize coding time.
Triorph on the bottom left, I’m on the right.

Tags: day2, food

Bed time!

It’s 3AM, and I’m going to sleep.

I have a mouse cursor image, and I have a second image, and I can determine when the two are colliding. I’m getting close to a game.

Saturday Dinner

I decided to eat a quick dinner.

LD11 Saturday Dinner

That’s a vegan pizza. Now, this isn’t a fake cheese pizza, so don’t get disgusted yet. This pizza is just made with different ingredients. It’s actually quite delicious, and it only takes 10 minutes to cook.

Unfortunately, I also found out that my fridge is leaking. I’m not sure why, but it has to have been a recent development.

Tags: foodphoto