One of my flatmates made some beetroot and pomegranate soup for us to eat today:

Pretty good stuff =)

Edit: Recipe here =)

Tags: foodphoto

I have been keeping a fairly detailed journal of my progress at my LD10 Progress Page, just haven’t gotten around to posting the link yet until now. To summarise for everybody that’s too busy to check the link (probably everybody) I’m fairly pleased with my progress and though I am slightly behind schedule, it’s not a train-smash (yet).

Here’s a current screenshot of my game which I have decided to call Glob Combat, it will be a RTS / puzzle game:

I was going for cute globs, but I’m not sure if they look cute or diabolical:

Actually, just a mock-up. I want the main character to be quite small so that he can duck and dive around projectiles while he’s being chased by waves of exploding fireworks boxes For this purpose, he should probably have double jump, and a bit of jump-time thrust. Why not. Will probably ditch the idea of having a separate button to go into defensive mode – better just to design the levels with little holes to hide in.

Things are moving forward and it’s feeling great. My game idea is far from innovative but it’s fun to code it anyway, and that’s what counts for me.

So far you can spew out tons of bombs and set them off with a pewpewlaz0r, and the chain-reaction part is the bombs chaining together of course.. The plan is that you will use this to combat hordes of enemies (the blue boxes (they can’t do anything yet (Hey! is this what lisp is like?)))

Anyway, here’s a quick screeny.. Green bombs are waiting to be hit by the laser or other bombs.. the red ones are about to detonate.

Multi-layered parallax star field? CHECK!

Big player explosion with screen shaking and shockwave? CHECK!

Score system? CHECK!

Some custom made sound effects? CHECK!

…. and other miscelanious tit-bits. Don’t let the screenshot put you off, it looks great in motion!

http://www.myrmidonprocess.com/ludum/Ludum10c.rar (Windows bin, arrow keys and z to shoot)

YAAAY LODOM DARES

-Fiona

Yawwwwwwn…

Started to add sounds, DrPetter needs to auto-win this competition singlehandedly for his awesome sound effect tool. I can’t thank you enough for this one.

Now beside chain-exploding bombs there’s also an objective of the form “bomb-the-ball-into-the-goal”.

Innovation, where hast thou gone to?

Still, i’m happy with my programmer art and it’ll look like i can deliver an albeit simple but finished entry. Yay!

Sleepy good nighty night.

Tags: Endurion, LD10 - Chain Reaction

Checked the winning theme this morning (around 7 hours after the start of the competition) and my mind was just blank. I opened up GraphicsGale, drew a bomb which I was quite pleased with, and that was it. No ideas popped into my head, and aside from deciding I wanted to use the bomb I’d drawn, I had nothing to work on or with. I then went out for the afternoon.

I got home 3 hours ago and started doodling around, until about an hour ago I finally have an idea.

It involves trying to detonate all of the bombs on a level by sliding them around so that when one explodes, it ignites the fuses on any unlit bombs next to it. At the start of the level one or more of the bombs will already be lit, and to make things more interesting, the bombs can have different length fuses.

I’m hoping to be able to come up with a range of levels of varying difficulty, but there’s only just over a day left, I want to get at least some some sleep tonight, need to get to bed early tomorrow, and I’m in the mood for coding rather than working out level designs, so I’ll just have to hope I can get the bulk of this written tonight and in the morning, to leave me a couple of hours early evening tomorrow to put together some levels.

I’ll be coding this in FreeBASIC and just using the standard graphics library, so it’ll be cross platform and work without any dependencies, unless I also find the time to add sounds effects and music of course,  in which case it’ll need FMOD.

Got to pop out for an hour now, but when I get back I’ll put together a quick mock-up screen.

Tags: bombs, freebasic, idea, puzzle

Hmmmm. Well my game still looks exactly the same as the last screenshot. Not that I haven’t been working on the code underneath, mind. But here’s a nuke explosion sprite that I just finished:

I’m pretty proud of it 😀

Hopefully I’ll get some countries blowing up soon…

A classic combination served by Ukrainian chefs – delicately braised french bread with butter sauce and fresh fruit compote, and puffed maize drizzled with Romany salt and a light cow’s milk cream blend. Paired with this we have Crystal Geyser grapeless unfermented chardonnay.

Tags: foodphoto

A bit progress here; it’s now possible to actually score! I took a really lousy approach to getting score displayed on the ground.. It’s a quad with texture coordinates, and then I have a texture for each number (i.e. 1, 2 and 3). Not very awesome performance wise, but meh.

Ok, I went the easy way and just added bombs with a chain reaction explosion. Took me hours to make those explosions in Blender. Oh, and for anyone who was wondering: Blender’s particles can not be made to cast shadows – no matter how hard you try.

Yes you can!

Time to get cracking on the enemies… and then maybe some sound? I heard that kind of stuff is great to have.

Phew it was a lot of work, but finally the technology from game side is about done. I haven’t made many shaders in my lifetime, so when I set out to do some sort of semi ScreenSpace Ambient Occlusion to my engine I was a bit scared what would happen. Well it ate plenty of hours that’s for sure, but I now have something I’m fairly happy with. It has some artifacts and it’s not perfect, but compared to no lighting or diffuse lighting only it really rocks. Here is a screenshot:

A few words about the game. I’m sad to say my imagination didn’t carry me further than explosions =). The point of the game is to have every cannon fire (the cannons see here have 4 barrels). When a cannon is first hit by an ammo it fires (only once) all its barrels. Some of the cannons are fixed to a certain position, and some you can move. All of the cannons can be rotated however, and the “starting” chain cannon can be selected by the player. Also hitting walls will make a small hole to the wall, so you can strategically blast a holy through a wall to get to a cannon.

What is still missing is basically the game =). I have the exploding  walls (courtesy or marching cubes level building), but I need to make the game logic (moving cannons, changing cannon directions, starting the game from a cannon, completing a level and choosing a new level to play). I also have to make some sort of level editor. I’m planning on hitting .NET and WinForms for that.

Now I only wonder. I use SINGLE as a gfx render target buffer (32bit floating point buffer, single channel). I wonder if that is supported on most PS2.0 hardware. Oh well, if I remember, I have to make a fallback to disable the AO effects if it’s not found.

I sacrificed two hours to go have a good meal, here’s some pictures!

I had a good amount of Pepsi, and I have more at home for tonight…

There’s the buffet table…

And here’s my dinner plate! Ham, beans, cookies, chips, rice krispy treats, carrots, roll… I’m full for now.

Tags: christmas, foodphoto

Things are really about done here.  Tomorrow is going to be all about making levels, the main menu, and polish.  I think it will be relatively fun, depending on how the levels are done.  You can now both win and lose, the former of which is shown here:

There are 15/14 barrels done because the barrel you carry is currently extra to the count (you can set it down any time, which is an important part of the strategy and a very important part of not exploding), which I think will change right this second.

I have extraneous ideas for other things levels could include, like rockets that shoot off elsewhere when lit, but I’ll probably not bother.  Just polish this up and ship!

Tags: barrels, big pixels, prospector

suppertime! turkey&ham salad and some garlic cheese toast. yummmmmm

Tags: foodphoto

For giggles, I added a grid.  I also created some levels.  I had some folks try to play them, but unfortunately, since I didn’t bother to add in a menu or anything, I’m not sure anyone actually played them.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’m going to do much more today.  I need some rest for the final push tomorrow.  I’ll be working on polish tomorrow: menus, explosion animation, shiney level graphics, music, and sound effects.  I was thinking about doing particle effects, but I don’t really feel up to the whole python+c thing this time around.

Hmm, after I told my wife that we were sort of having a food competition too, suddenly the meals got fancier.

Nabe with shimifuri Kobe beef!

This beer should help me code better!

Fresh baked cookies for dessert.

After all that, now I just feel sleepy…!

Tags: foodphoto

I’m back from the concert, we played Beethoven, Brahms, Buxtehude, Weill and some others. Here are some pictures:

Here’s a screenshot so everyone can see what I’m working on. Yay quads!

Tags: screenshot