As the end of day one approaches dauntingly, I’m getting progressively more hopeful that I might have something to show by the end. Saying that, I have very little to show-off at the moment, as there is absolutely no finese to anything I’ve been working on – it’s all just a jumble of quads in various sizes and colours. FUN!

It took me ages to come up with a decent idea (I wasn’t particularly pleased with the ‘roads’ selection) but I’ve managed to cobble together some sort of LittleBigPlanet -vs- Tetris rehash. It’s very hard to explain, but suffice to say I’ve spent a lot of this evening getting Cars and Helicopters working to a decent degree. I’ll start doing some more regular posts over the course of tomorrow (this should be a good-time for time-lapse work shots!). Here’s what my project current looks like, go on. Laugh. 😀

Anyway, my iPod is in the red (battery wise) – so when it dies, I’ll goto bed! Best of luck to those Brits/Europeans out there still working!

Tags: 2D, physics, RoadBLOCK

Looks like some others had the same idea as me… drive on a road and run over zombies… but maybe I will add a twist to it.  So far only have the road, controls, and background, no zombies.  The car sucks as well, I need to update it…    Need to add some gas stations, collision detection, maybe bullets. This is my first ever game so hope I finish!

Hrm… wonder where it is you’ll go.

Well I got started a bit late.  Started thinking about the theme when it was announced last night… pondered for a few hours and then went to bed.  Got up at about 10:30 and started, with a few cups of coffee and a few Diet Cokes.  Pre-work Desk-Shot:

Yeah I typically sit on the floor.  I dunno.  If you squint you might get a hint about what road you’re on in my game.  Anyway — something more fun to look at:  In progress screenshot!

Tags: deskphoto

Road To Pain Video
Weird, I posted this before and it’s gone. Well, again, here’s the video after 24 hours. Play as Chuck Norris and knock the bad guys off the road, and don’t hurt the Texas Ranger trucks. The trucks aren’t in this video, but have been implemented since! Project is being done in C++ With Opengl.

Tags: Road to Pain

Well I’m still working on my RTS game. Based on Roads of course… Currently have the units working, and an engine to control the units. Hopefully I’ll get them moving correctly in the next few hours, till then here’s a shot of the selection working. I don’t think I’ll get pathfinding going, so I’ll stick with vector movement. More to come…

Tags: progress

Deep dish pepperoni and mushroom pizza has become a bit of a ld48 tradition for me.

Tags: foodphoto

Here’s my first screenshot:

I know there aren’t a great deal of roads yet — I’m thinking the concept will be that the roads are more of ‘path’s, where the bullrushes and other plants will be much more dense to clearly mark them.  I think the game will have something to do with fireflies, but I’m not really sure what the mechanics will be yet.  It’s been a very late start this year!  But the alpha blending seems to be working, and displays the fancy bullrush plant pretty well!  

Tags: bullrush, firstscreenshot, plants

I forgot to take pictures. But, I found some nice Google image search results that look kinda like my food.

Let’s start with a nice garden salad, hold the dressing! Mine consisted of romaine lettuce, tomatoes, onion, radish, carrot, and maybe something else I don’t remember. Yummy!

Calories: 200

Two yummy hot dogs! Can’t have a meal without something that looks overtly phallic, can I? Mmm, so yummy to slide into my gaping mouth piece. Ketckup only, please. Mustard is for British people.

Calories: 500

Ravioli stuffed with dead cow. Now that’s good eating. I had some Ragu on there to give it a little extra kick (I got it from Aisle 2).

Calories: 800 (2.5 servings = 1 package)

No I’m not fat yet, but it’ll probably happen. In other news, I made a sprite sheet for my game. It’s going to run at 8-bit NES size (stretched to 1024×768) with only the NES colors. Sweet! And don’t worry about the irregular positioning of every sprite, I’ve already got a utility I made that automatically scans any sprite sheet of any kind and saves them all as properly sequenced OpenGL textures.

Oh yes, did I mention that my game is called, “Exproad, Improad, Reroad!” Yes, indeedy. PS it is a little bit politically incorrect, and has very poorly drawn Asians and zombies.

Gone through two Amps,  but I’m headed off. Units are movable (Through commands now) and I Randomized the tile engine so the grass looks better. I still need to figure out how to have units fight other units, and how the AI will work. Sound would be nice too, but I’m trying to get the main game working before anything else. I’m up to around 1200 lines of code (Horribly commented code) but getting closer to an actual game. I’ll post another screenshot once I can get it to load and save maps.

Tags: Amp, progress

Well, as the clock ticks down and I find myself with less than 22 hours left in the competition I am trying to keep my spirits AND energy up.  While I am pleased enough with the work I’ve done, I have worked much more slowly than I wanted.  Not sure what this will mean for the adventures of CoMuTor but only time will tell.

Here is a “tech” demo if anyone wants to check out my progress so far.  You can basically move CoMuTor all around and jump and perform his flip car attack though sadly there are no cars yet.

The win32 zip is here

And here is the screenshot for the sake of completeness:

Tags: comutor, demo, exe, screenshot

Tags: foodphoto

I’ve spent a lot of time today fighting with buggy path finding.  The code is supposed to find the shortest path from any road tile to the city.  It’s mostly working, but it occasionally produces incorrect results when there are loops in the graph.  Frustrating.  I haven’t implemented any game play yet because I’ve been trying to get this right.  In the future I think I will need to take a more planned approach to this sort of thing, and work out my algorithm in advance instead of just hacking together the first idea that comes to mind.  Either that or modify my game play idea so it doesn’t require any path finding more advanced than a flood fill.

Dinner this evening involved hors d’oeuvres at a Christmas party.  There always seems to be something else going on during LD48 weekends.

Taking a picture of my food in the middle of a crowded room in a formal setting was a bit weird.

Tags: foodphoto, screenshot

Just became dawn, on day two.

Coding all night. Even so, taking it easy, not working at the same frentic page as last time.

Have got a fair bit done at the same time, game is shaping up to be quite different, but should be fun.

Hoping to get mostly code complete tonight, to allow time to balance it a bit tomorrow.

Also including a screen shot of the game as it stands – haven’t done much graphical work yet – that’s tomorrow…

Finally, my game is finished. If I had more time, I would’ve added a lot more stuff. But I am too tired of this game, so I am just going to release it now. If you have any problems, comment!

Made by: Game Maker 7.0

Difficulty: Depends on how you play.

Length: I never finished it, but should take 30 minutes-1 hour.

Screenshots:

A battle:

A screenshot of the map screen, taken from the beginning of the game.

Game:

http://host-a.net/kaderli/Lost%20Roads%20Release.zip

Source Code:

http://host-a.net/kaderli/Lost%20Roads%20Source.gmk

Tags: action, final, hybrid, strategy

More progress, but not on the gameplay side. I wanted to use Cg shaders in the game this time and learn how to use fxComposer. I’ve done a lot of shader stuff before but not with CgFx and FXComposer. 

My road shader is a modified version of the default FXComposer phong shader. It works in FXComposer (on the right) but I can’t figure out how to get the second sampler (with the font image) to work in my program. Grrr.  I’m going to sleep, I’ll take a fresh look at it in the morning. A word game won’t be very fun without any visible letters. 

Well, back to the grindstone then. Took forever to get to sleep last night, my brain was just buzzing with ideas, probably a good thing, but quite frustrating nonetheless. Work up feeling kind of tired, but still plenty motivated, so I decided to start double buffering my tea consumption.

Taking my hot brown beverage consumption total to 7, rock and roll!

I spent the last hour or so crafting a bunch of progressively harder levels to ease a player into the game (it is, I suspect, pretty damn confusing if you just get thrown into it). Definitely glad I took the time to make an in game level editor. It also means it’s really starting to feel more like a game and less like a dodgy prototype, which can only be a good thing.

Still loads and loads and loads I want to get done though, so I guess I’ll just keep plowing on.

Tags: food, levels, screenshot, tea

Plan: get up and implement things that kept me from getting sleep last night. Still working on gameplay and struggling with the Python API in BGE.

It’s triple the stuff from yesterday 😉

I managed to get water streams working in the game. Don’t worry, they don’t be so straight in the final game, these are placeholders. So right now the gameplay is starting to take shape, and the player dies once they hit the road. Bridges work properly now too, and in general it doesn’t feel too bad. I’m going to work as fast as I can to nail the rules of the game. I really hope I can get it finished to some state today! D:

coffee will keep me going! D:

Tags: foodphoto

Well, it’s not looking too good. Got an idea late, and i don’t know if ill be able to finnish it.I’m also trying to think of a simple backup, that i could do in a few hours, just in case. 

Here is another code shot. In game screen should follow soon.

Tags: code shot