Hey ho. I’m on a very limited (and flakey) dial-up connection this time around, so I will be working on stuff that compresses well.

I had a hard time getting away from the obvious chain reaction ideas.. and ended up settling on one of them. Explosions. Whatever this game is going to be, I know that the chain reactions have to be big, chaotic, pretty, long-winded affairs for them to be satisfying. From this premise, I arrived at the concept of a fireworks factory.

For once, I could start off by drawing a run cycle. Just like the good ol’ days.

The story: There is this abandonded fireworks factory, see. It’s full of fireworks in storage, and noone knows how to dispose of them safely. It’s time to call in Mr. Splode.

Mr. Splode has a special fire-proof cloak that he can hide under. Most of the game consists of throwing matches into large stacks of boxes full of fireworks, and taking cover.

Would you believe my luck? I’m 12, I know how to program etc. I want to take part in Ldum dare, but, as its a weekend and I can’t set my alarm I really overslept, still I have some strange idea for a game.

Basically its something to do with a train, and you need to drive it into pillows, cushions or something, and such a force it’ll do something else, I really need to fill in those gaps though.

Running app, chipmunk physics and really ugly art. But where are the chain reactions? I don’t know

Fully functional level editor!  Lets you draw the map, and saves and loads.  And check out that hardcore artwork!!  Hopefully I will update that later…

Tags: editor

Ok, still no fleshed out idea – but somehow, it goes like this: Santa wants to light up all trees for Christmas, so he has to do some electrical wiring in the forest to cause a chain reaction lighting up all trees. So far all I have is some mockup drawn in Blender:

Ok, thought of proto-idea last night. Got a lot of sleep. Refined idea this morning in bed and in shower. Started work on framework code etc (kind of happy with it). Finished that after some 2 hours. Put in a few placeholder sprites and coded simple map drawing.

Prediction: Come voting I’ll get flak for blocky graphics and questionable theme adherence. Just the way I like it. At least this time it won’t be a sidescroller.

More info to come as I implement stuff.

Five hours after waking up and finding out what the theme is, I still haven’t been able to come up with a good idea. I’m kind of surprised that so many people voted for “chain reaction”. Anyway, this is probably going to be some kind of puzzle/action game with bombs, so I started implementing some basic tile stuff.

I thought using photoshop’s vector tool and exporting the polygon as a ai file would speed up the dev process… seems I was wrong. One point is just not where it should be.

One main character in my game will be this arachnid.

Gameplay!  Nothing explodes, but your gunpowder fuse burns after you as you run.

Tags: fuse

Huzzar! After about 3 hours of Recursive Pain I finally discovered what I did wrong with my implementation of the A Star algorithm. This has now been fixed and my clouds are making a regular run for the exit! I am really pleased with this, because I was getting frustrated. 😉

– Deepflame

I’ve decided to change it so that you now need to see how far you can make the pillow go, which will lead to some obscure chain reaction.

Now the fun part…coding starts. 😀

Woo, first screenshot:

Seems I’m going with the vertical shmup idea after all. I think it could turn out to be fun.

Tags: screenshot

Okay guys I drew an asteroid and made a particle system… PARTICLES ARE PRETTY THIS IS ESSENTIAL FOR THE GAME. OKAY!

http://www.myrmidonprocess.com/ludum/Ludum10b.rar

-Fionas

I’ve been working on this quad for the better part of the last 11 hours or so. It’s a pretty awesome quad though.

Tags: screenshot

Ok finally got some code down. I was planning on doing a plain C++ application this year (I haven’t made a C++ entry to LD48h yet) but XNA and C# got the better of me. Here is a screenshot of the first version. What this is, is 3 spheres defined mathematically (2 solid spheres and one substracting one). Then I run the marcihng cubes algorithm to the scene and this is the resulting mesh. It’s not perfect but probably good enough for my needs. I’m planning on adding boxes and capsules as well. The coloring is just a test that my shader rotates the vertex normals correctly.

I finally got a working claw on my heli! Yay!

The controls are really hard though. Its like… controlling a 1ton heli with a keyboard from remote that has a 1-2 sec response time. I guess I’ll have to fake it a bit.

Tags: 2D, chain, chain reaction, claw, heli, physics

http://iki.fi/sol/ld10/partycle_rc0.zip (~756k win32 binary)

Phew.

First playable done. The game is pretty much “complete”, in a way that there’s multiple different stages, the player’s ship has been tuned a bit, etc. Audio is missing, and the game, quite frankly, isn’t fun. But it’s a game!

Unfortunately I have to leave now, I’m playing the double bass in a concert tonight (with a symphony orchestra and choir). Of course I’ll be making a recording on minidisc, which might be useful for background music in my game .

Always a believer in good eating, I put together this sandwich.  I was out of sandwich meat, so I put in some chips to give it some substance.  I feel healthier already!

Tags: foodphoto