Tags: academic costume, advancing wall of doom, ld48_14, motivation

Good morning! Well I guess this is a pretty late start even for us GMT’ers…

“Advancing Wall of Doom”?!

Last night when “Yo Dawg” was in the top 5, I started planning for the worst case scenario and actually came up with a pretty good idea for it – some kind of Warioware mini-game affair where our protagonist must race against the clock to make a game with a “Yo Dawg” theme and halfway through realises that he can make a game about making a game about making a game about…

But anyway, I sort of have an idea for the Advancing Wall theme. I’m about to start scribbling on paper and flesh out the design.

So, here are my weapons of choice this time around:

• Python 2.6 – such an awesome language
• PyGame – really does take the “C++” out of game development
• pythonutils – a library I have lying around with some basic utility classes
• Eclipse IDE with PyDev plugin – people tell me to learn Emacs but having written Java for so long I just can’t part with my IDE
• Graphics Gale – best thing I know of for creating animated sprites
• GIMP – for any CG artwork I might need
• GoldWave – for editing sound effects
• Cakewalk Sonar – if I actually get time to rustle up some music for this one
• SFXR – Dr Petter’s incredible sound generator tool – like MsPaint for sound effects
• Pen, paper, food, maybe even sleep!

Tags: first, ideas, tools

08:12
Decided to go with some kind of destroyable wall of doom. Throw stuff at it to detach pieces, and thus slow the progression. For now I’ll try to work on the geometry bit.
10:03
Stupidely made my own vector library in Lua. Didn’t like the others I found, but inspired from those. Now the fun begins.

11:35
I can has destroyable geometry. Just a line and you dig holes in it.

12:03
Corrected lots of bugs and made the computations more general: more case are covered, includind when you “cut” a bit by drilling all around it. Hungry now. Food now.

Tags: journal, screenshot

I’ve got basic IO stuff & a game Idea – more of a Falling Wall of Doom than an Advancing one, though.

The 1.5l pitcher of black tea has been drank and have made way for the 1l of coffee with cream & sugar.

So I’ve got up, showered, done some morning yoga, had breakfast, done my weekly grocery shopping and now I’m ready to go.

Luckily for me the wall of doom theme was the one theme I’d already been able to come up with a concrete idea for.  It’ll be called ‘Die, you stupid hurdlers!’ and you’ll play the part of a wall who hates hurdlers, and tries to set traps to trip them up so he can crush them (hurdlers obviously run faster than walls can).  It’ll be a bit Tower Defence-ish…

My desk:

(the bear in the corner is an Atari Punk Console I put inside a teddy bear – you twiddle the knobs in his ears to play him.  He probably won’t be getting used for the competition)

Morning all from sunny Huddersfield.  It is actually sunny here for a change but sadly I can only see a tiny bit of the outside world from my prison for the next 48 hours, I mean delightfull cellar workspace.

It’s my first Ludum Dare and my first game competition so I’m not sure how I will get on but I’ll give it a go.  The theme seems a bit limited to me but that is probably my just limited saturday morning brain.  Anyway I just wanted to say hello and good luck all.  I’m looking forward to playing all the games, I just hope we don’t all make the same one ; )

P.S. No exciting breakfast photos here sadly as I’ve already eaten it.  I’ll try and remeber to take a photo tomorrow. Of tomorrows breakfast that is, not of todays breakfast. That would just be wrong! Back to the code face.

Tags: hello, morning

Not my most favorite theme, but already starting working a bit.

My game will be a strategy, where you as a farmer will fight against locust, who will eat your crops. Still deciding, if I should go for 2D or 3D.

Here is the motivator anyway :).

So the theme was one I thought I liked earlier in the week, but decided for the final vote that I was wrong.  Of course, it was selected so we’ll have to make due.

I’m still not sure I can get something totally fun done before the self-imposed deadline of tomorrow night.  If I don’t get it done by then, it probably won’t get done since I have a party to go to and then the second game of the Sharks/Ducks playoff series.

I stared at the computer screen, helped with my kid’s bath and watched some TV before I settled on an idea for the Advancing Wall of Doom theme.  The idea is simple:  The wall goes from left to right, and words go right to left.  The idea is that you have to type the phrase before the untyped characters run into the wall.  Essentially a tool to help practice touch typing.  If you can do that, then you get a new phrase, and so on.  If you make a mistake, the wall creeps faster.  Successfully completing the entire set of phrases in that round may reset the wall, or just give you a short reprieve, I haven’t decided.

So far I have the text scrolling and typing stuff done.   It keeps track of what character you are on and knows when you’ve typed the wrong one.  The wall creeps to the right, but nothing happens on collision yet.  I created some sound effects using sfxr by DrPetter.  It’s quick, easy, and awesome.  I may mess around with musagi later tomorrow for backround music, we’ll see.

There isn’t much to show off, so I didn’t bother with screen shot tonight.

I think it’s time for sleep.  See you in the morning.

Tags: advancing wall of doom, ld48_14, typing

mmmmmmm oaty clumpsters

Realizing my breakfast is more delicious than it is interesting, I’ve gone ahead and given it the Andy Warhol treatment. Now it looks like fishtank scenery.

Tags: food

Obligatory Working-area photo!
The most important piece of equipment here is the cup of coffee.

Finally got Pyglet loading tile maps exported from Tile Studio, and doing collision against the edges. Loading a y-down tile map in a y-up coordinate system is surprisingly confusing when you’re tired. ¬_¬

Physics next!

Tags: progress, pyglet

Hi all! This is my first post. I woke up at about 8:15 AM to check the theme and realized that it didn’t really appeal to me that much. So I slept over it a couple of hours more, it’s now 11:26 AM, and I decided to toss away my high ambitions and just make something for the sake of being able to enter in this frenzy at all. So, a little board game/RTS hybrid is my current crappy idea.

Just made myself a cup of green tea to get me started. My tools:

• the D programming language
• SDL
• OpenGL
• a couple of homebrew classes I regularly use for game programming; vector math, font rendering, that kind of stuff. No time to post that now, but it’s online in a couple of places, so may link to it later.

First step: read up on hex grids and implement one.

Playing right now: De Stijl by the White Stripes to power me for the day. This is exciting, let’s get started.

The basics are in, plus squishy purple plants, but I think I’ll add a space suit to protect the player from the total lack of atmosphere.

I’ve got some students over watching The Fifth Element now. I think I’ll take a break and sit down with them for a bit. I’m hoping to get the engine and graphics finished tonight so the only thing I’ll need to worry about tomorrow is adding the couple of small levels I have planned.

Tags: progress

I have a car. It can drive. It has a wall of doom attached to the front of its hood.

11543 instance? WHY? WHY? I have no idea, but magma seems to create much more magma than it should.

Edit: Solved…

I just woke up. Wat is dat!

Man, it’s too early for this. Morning apple pastries, with apple juice for fuel. Apparently I’m going for the GBGames style of LD nourishment this time around.

Did some concept art last night, which I really don’t remember — things got a little bleary around 5am. Still no good ideas, so I guess I’ll just go with a dumb one. Hey, you work with what you got.

Tags: food, LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009

It’s still too early; but people may like it.

Link: Mirror 1

Description: Don’t forget to look at the picture to learn the controls, and rules.

Still clueless about my concept, all I finished so far is a menu system. Wow.

Hope, I don’t have to drop out this time.

Here’s my LD48#14 starter breakfast…

Some delicious coffee (french roast) and two Karelian pies (Finnish specialty) with salty raw spiced salmon (also Finnish specialty). With some biscuits from the bag on the right which are baked with oil and don’t contain any trans fats. I didn’t eat any of the small tomatoes, at least for now. I just put them in the pic to fool you.

Tags: food