This was my lunch a couple of hours ago:
An out-of-focus cheese and onion toastie!
There’s nothing to show with the game yet. I’ve been messing about trying to get a damn fullscreen window open. I may actually start making the game soon. I should probably have used a game library to save all this time *eyeroll*
Tags: foodphoto
I have a basic level editor, some tiles and a good idea of the direction my game is gonna go.
In the year something-or-other, a huge tower has been taken over by a hostile alien species. No one has been able to make any contact to anyone inside the building, and everyone sent in… Never comes out.
After 3 days of throwing lambs to the slaughter, the military decides to send you, a yippie-ki-yay-mofo, has been brought out of retirement to erradicate every alien in the tower. Floor one awaits.
The game is going to have a huge horde of aliens running around. Due to the ridiculous weapons I’m planning aliens wont just die – they’ll explode.
Anyone who has played the likes of Alien Breed and similar games will know what to expect.
Here’s my rudamentry editor –
Here’s my first screenshot – a quick mock-up of stackable cats. Notice that if you put two next to each other, you can also stick another cat on top in the middle upside down. This is important!
I’m doing this entry with haxe and physhaxe. It’s my first time using either (or, any flash development for that matter), and I’ve been pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get up and running with these tools. This program will be about 99% physhaxe and 1% game.
It started off as ‘The Amazing Human Tower’ — a bunch of acrobats joining hands and feet together to make a big wobbling structure. I suspected this was going to be too complicated though, so went with rigid cats instead. I’ll throw a few other things in too if I have time.
Tags: cats
Here’s rough and unexciting rundown of the story so far:
Tags: journal
For anyone using flash.. let me direct your attention to a mod player which has been released recently:
http://gimme.badsectoracula.com/flashmodplayer/modplayer.html
http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?p=168442
I don’t really now where all the time went, but at least there has been some progress. Added drawing of the tower with variable number of levels. And initial building of it. And getting and assigning workers to resources. And getting resources. And a bit of ending turn. And simple UI. … Well, so I guess I’ve done more than I remembered at first, but it’s still not a game, far from it. Here’s a screenshot.
And I’ve just had supper. What do you think it was?
That’s right. The toast subclass of bread. With a little butter. It’s really supposed to be a lot of butter, but I ran out of it, and wasn’t clever enough to buy more earlier when I was shopping. So now I have something fun to do before breakfast tomorrow! Yay!
Tags: foodphoto, log, screenshot, toast
My wife just cooked a delicious meal for us, “fishballs and chinese cabbage in ma po -sauce”, or something of the sort.
Oh and I have had some progress with the entry as well. Mostly just structure and algorithm design, since I’m still having only a blank screen.
(1 days 11 hours 56 minutes left)
Tags: foodphoto
Perhaps something similar to this is being done by many others, but when I think of ‘tower’, I think of only one thing: building with blocks. My main goal is to make it almost as much fun to play with blocks in a virtual world as it is in real life!
It remains to be seen how well I can transform a 40-year old, pixel-constrained, utterly inhumane piece of computer hardware (i.e. the mouse) into something even as crudely delicate and artistic as a 4-year old’s hand. It’s a formidable UI challenge for sure, so I’m looking forward to giving it my best shot!
That being said, i wouldn’t hold your breath. 😉
Well I’ve created a simple cutscene system to go along with my game. It autoprogresses every 5 seconds. I think it’s good enough for ludum 😉
Tags: journal
So, I made a game in about 3 hours, which is so simple that I could submit the final and call it a day. No matter how hard I try, there’s just no way to expand or polish this idea beyond what it already is.
I think I’ll start from scratch, and keep this as a backup option in case I don’t come up with something better.
Pancakes!
And of course…
I don’t think I’m working fast enough…but here’s something:
Tags: foodphoto, screenshot
Crude, hacky physics that is. I’ve got some pipes which will eventually become drain pipes of some kind but at the moment they just flop around on the map and look limp.
And it still looks very ugly. That’ll have to wait until tomorrow I think.
13 hours in, and I have something! It’s not much, but it can at least conceptually be seen as a building (see the levels?). The brown things are stair cases between the floors, which should probably end at the latitude where the next level up starts. But those aren’t things you think about until you try explaining it to someone.
The little stick figure is the player, and right now it goes back and forth and up and down, with reckless disregard for walls and viewable areas. Next up: collision detection.
Read on, for more trials and tribulations of the first 13 hours…
I wasted about an hour trying to get Java to handle the transparency of a color key, and learned quite a bit about image filtering, but it looks like that wasn’t the way it would work. So I regrouped and figured out that I could say the transparency in the image using a GIF, thus saving myself the hassle. I think it’s fair to say that this is lesson learned #1.
Also, I suffered my first keyboard fatality of the weekend. Well, I guess it’s more like keyboardslaughter, since I willingly popped off the keys to get some gunk out that was sticking the arrow keys. The keys are those fancy scissor keys, so I think I broke a plastic tab or two in the process, and by the time I realized it had happened, I broke another tab on the same side. So the down arrow is about 3 mm higher on the right than on the left. That, and some splotching backlighting (it’s illuminated) after a cider spill a few weeks ago, and I think it’s time that it be retired.
And here’s my pre-grocery snack. I’ve started in on the caffeine already…
Edamame beans, yum! And FreshDirect better get here with my groceries within the hour, or I’m going to be eating raw spaghetti squash for lunch.
Tags: foodphoto, screenshot
Ok, basic gameplay is inplace (no win conditions yet…)…
I’m trying to play it, but the game reveals itself impossible in lot’s of conditions: for instance, in the screenshot below, you can see that there’s no way I can transform that block into something that doesn’t screw everything up…
I wonder why most my games in LD48 end up like this: impossible… I should think things through better before coding…
Anyway, I’m gonna try and find a solution…
Tags: journal, LD42, log, screenshot
Pixels are good for you.
Well. With no idea after 12 hours, I finally decided what to do:
(drumroll)
A platformer.
You play an owl, and start at the bottom of The Tower. Then you have to jump up all the way to the top of The Tower. What I got so far is:
What I need to do next:
Optional, if I have time left:
Well, this is what I’ve got so far. Not too much – though I have been sleeping for roughly 8 of the 13 hours of the competition that has elapsed so far. How do you feel about the mutant kamikaze bat with neon purple eyes and a green mouth? Should that be interchanged? I don’t know. I’ve never had a chance to meet up with one, let alone inspect its cavities.
Well, I’ve something that’s working reasonably… and plays very poorly. It’s just too hard! The idea as it is now is to climb the tower using a limited amount of, uh, jumps? And touching as many walls as possible on the way up.
After a nice night of sleep (8 hours yay), I’ve started actual coding. I’ve got most of my data structs and whatnot done, handling for those etc. I’ve got my general design in my head and my checklist written out in a text file. Milestone 1 will be getting a screen with all basic elements displaying. I’m aiming to have this hopefully no later than 5PM tonight, but we’ll see. Nothing with screenshotting yet, so no screenshots. I may post a pic of my workspace later when I get access to my roommates digicam.
I’m hoping what I’m working on will in fact be interesting enough to play; I have been dubious. It’s a tough theme since there have been SO DAMNED MANY tower-themed games made over the years. I’ve got a backup idea if this one doesn’t pan out, but it may come down to the wire if I have to run with that one.
Some specs of my work environment:
Lenovo Thinkpad T61, 2.4 Core2 Duo, 1GB mem
Slackware 12.1
XFCE4 for my wm, though I am more partial to e16 usually
Straight-up C for language
vim for editing
GIMP for graphics
Probably sfxr for audio, though I may get fancy with my guitar if I have time
I also have a tower with a tri-boot Slackware 12/WindowsXP/Debian64 setup; I’ll be using it for judging games that I can only run on Windows, so I don’t have to screw around with wine.
I’m using the allegro lib for most everything; I don’t need anything special so it works fine.
More later!
So I took a risk in deciding to code some “proper” physics myself insted of just fudging things and having pipes that don’t collide with anything. It seemed to work, but now I’ve let the player grab hold of one end it all goes horribly wrong. The pipes tend to get stuck on the rather angular levels so it stretches and goes wrong in all sorts of horrible ways.
Unless I can figure out a quick way to make this stable, I think I’m screwed. 