What my game is doing now:

• Setting a new standard for ugly programmer art
• Spawning buildings for the wall to crush
• Minimap at the bottom right to move the viewport left and right, the wall needs some room to grow
• Spawn new pieces for the wall(forgot to spawn any before I took the screenshot)

Next on my list is adding resources, make the interface elements for expanding the wall and health for the pieces. The wall will lose health when it crushes something, so in addition to expand and upgrade it you will have to repair it as you go.

The two red wall icons is where you can build new pieces for the wall. These will move further out as you expand the wall.

Trying to compete with X-0ut is like struggling with hurricane, but hey, I’m not ditching my project yet. Adding multiplayer features/splitscreen is the next goal.

I got my walls advancing, and the player can move around (left right) and jump. Collision detection between objects is working, but no response code written yet.

16:50
Bullets! With gravity and terrifying blast damage!

17:51
Going to a dampling making/eating party at a friend. I guess I can use a break, my mind is starting to show me weird stuff.

(Too bad I didn’t take my camera, it would have made a nice food photo…)

22:00
Back to work.

23:34
I have boni/powerups on the game, and the effects of the boni are applied with timers that have callback functions. It may be the usual stuff for most people, but I had never used these before, and it feels really cool. “oah it works”

In my original plan, I was supposed to have finished coding game mechanics by day one, to have all the time in the world for graphics and sound. Technically, my day one ends 14 minutes ago… I’ll try to have at least 5 hours of sleep, though.

Tags: journal, screenshot

Since the plane approach doesn’t look like it will be too useful, I’m going to try something with rectangles. Build rooms from overlapping rectangles. See bottom left sketch.

So I’ll get that going first, then see if I can get a character (i.e. circle) to move nicely throughout.

I’m done for the day, I’ll continue working on the game tomorrow. I’ve gotten a working menu, and 5 levels. Can’t say much, as the “done for the day” is rather sudden, and not to my will. See ya!

Tags: motivation

Well, interesting times. My allergies decided to attack, I lost internet for a good hour, and I even began to contemplate tossing out my whole idea and starting over from scratch. That’s crazy talk though, if I’m going to have any chance at all of finishing a game this weekend I better stick with what I started, even if I’m not super happy with how the gameplay is turning out. Speaking of which, I better get my ass in gear if I’m going to have gameplay wrapped up by tonight so that I can focus on graphics and sound tomorrow…

Also it turns out I’m lucky to even have power, let alone internet. A transformer exploded near here and a good portion of Salt Lake City and eastern Utah is without power right now. Mmmm dried apricots.

Back from dinner (some wonderful schnitzel), so I did some improvements on road generation and added placement of houses:

Next: villagers, so The Wall has someone to torture

I have something playable but its not much fun yet. I spent the whole morning on the basic gameplay and did the graphics on my laptop while visiting my parents.

The wall advances and leaves nothing but doom in its wake, so I guess I have everything covered regarding the theme.

The question is … should I turn the giant into a giant naked man?

Hey all

I’ve been working on something for this too, but haven’t made a lot of progress yet. Spent most of today just getting the engine done, about to move onto content now! Plan is to get the actual game finished up by tonight, and have tomorrow for graphics and music…

Because I’m just using placeholders, I haven’t got much in the way of a screenshot yet – but here’s one anyway:

The rule of Ludum Dare says that you must program the gameplay.

Since I decided to use Construct, development tool which is not verified by LDers yet, I thought about whether my game will be considered fair or not. Construct does let you program your game – though the programming paradigm is little different. So, from that point of view, my decision is fine. However, Construct provides several facilities which make game development easier and which may or may not be available in other programming environments allowed by Ludum Dare.

The following list describes these facilities:

• Map editor
• Animation editor
• Collision
• Platform movement

Everything else will be coded.

There are several disadvantages which will certainly not appeal to some LDers. These are:

• It’s Windows only
• It requires latest DirectX

Am I fair enough? I don’t know. But I am certainly going to try and finish my entry.

Cheers

Even simple graphics makes it look a lot better:

Next up are squigglier roads if I can think of a good way of doing that, more distinct cities and real wall combat and hero mechanics. Random events would probably be good too to spice up repeat plays.

Although it doesn’t seem like it from the picture, there are hordes of locusts swarming  there and back :).

I’m usually trying to learn some new technology during these short compos :). So this time I managed to get rid of immediate mode and use vertex buffer objects.

I want to finish up the base logic before going to sleep.

For tomorrow:

• tune gameplay
• design levels
• replace ugly crap with pretty graphics
• particle systems

Here’s my food collage:

And a bit of progress!  MAN that programmer art is looking nice…

Look out for the advancing wall of… doom?

Tags: food, progress, screenshot

Going to bed now. But I have a pretty good start for an awesome fun game.

Have the character in, he moves pretty well and is quite fun to fly around. The theme is accounted for. I have him dying and he’s able to move to other levels. (With cool transitions.)

In addition I’ve managed to add one “enemy” (he is a helpless guy who runs around).

Tomorrow I hope to have more challenging stuff and eventually build some levels. If I’m lucky I’ll get sound in.

Tags: aliens, blob, blood, chairs, day one, done, stupid scientists, tables

Nothing too fancy. Just drawing some planes.

Hot multiplayer cube on cube action like you’ve never seen before! Needs more assplosions and more players, but yeah, I’m getting there. I’m really loving my first Ludum Dare :))))

My wife left for a trip this morning, so she helpfully bought me this to snack on for the weekend:

(sorry for the blurry photo)

At least I’ll be snacking healthy for the first half of the competition!

Going to rest a bit. I’m at a point where I could technically submit a finished game, though it would get a 0 for polish and maybe a 0.5 for fun. It’s still too hard; although I reduced the number of tiles, their height is doubled, so they go down the board just as quickly. At a certain point it becomes a question of how accurate you are with your mouse, which isn’t at all how I imagined it. Time to stop and think about how to make it more of a mental challenge than a dexterity challenge. Latest source here.