After managing to seriously mess up my sleep schedule and “wasting” much of today on real life stuff, I ran into heaps of trouble with the physics library I used, forcing me to rewrite most of the code I had written so far.. and then I find out others are making the same game I’m doing.

It was SUPPOSED to be a zombie road carnage splatter fest with advanced scoring. Instead it ended up as an abortion of a physics test that you can try by clicking this link.

Well didn’t do much, still don’t really know what i want to do. Quickly made some road tiles, and a road landscape pic, which i am not sure anymore, how i want to use. Maybe a menu.

Tags: pictures, tiles

Well I’m going to call it a day and pick things up again tomorrow. I’m way behind but I know exactly what I’ve got to get cracking on with tomorrow morning. Here’s a shot of the current version:

There are some pavement tiles now! The reason its taking so long is because I had a crazy idea to generate a tile-based city procedurally on the fly, so currently my time is taken up with getting that to work. Here’s one of the many debug image dumps I’ve made of the tile map:

Its actually just a snapshot of part of the map, which is technically infinite in size. Each pixel is a 4×4 block of tiles. As you  can see, all I’m generating procedurally so far is the fact that there’s more pavement the closer to the centre of the city you get. There aren’t any roads yet (note to self: must actually get the damn ROADS in at some point…). The red and yellow pixels in a grid which you might just be able to make out – they’re marking the areas that the map is broken up into. The idea is that the game only needs to hold the player’s current area and the 8 surrounding areas in memory at the same time, allowing me  to have an infinite map.

So, on tomorrow I’ve got my work cut out for me. Procedural roads… collisions… traffic?!… I may have to revise my plan if I’m going to get something finished on time.

By the way, the other entries are looking totally awesome. I can’t wait to play them all!

I started late, still I’m only working on something for two hours and nothing has failed disastrous yet. So I have not lost hope yet.

Pulled in some libraries and with some handy dandy box2d work I got cars with reasonable realistic stearing working. So now I just need roads, AI, and all other game logic… oh and sounds effects. Did I mention not losing hope yet? Scrap that…

Well, here a screenshot for your enjoyment: It’s not much, but it’s something. Road generation is up next…

Well hitting a few road blocks that really shouldn’t be that hard to circumvent. But here’s the first screenshot of the TileEngine. Now I need to code all my units, and a way to save and load maps.

Tags: progress

So, its my first ludum dare ever! In front I was not quite sure if I should participate or not, and with the theme I hesitated even more. Guess I am in at last.

Started coding with OpenGL with no real idea in my head, but got a easy-to-make one in between. Scrapped a few hours of opengl-code because GL_SELECTION was giving me a headache – switched to gosu instead and till now I havent looked back!

My idea is a little puzzle game – you have to make a way for taxis that want to go from A to B, clicking on a tile rotates it. Taxis must not crash into each other, but the drivers are smart enough to do a 180 if they hit a dead end. No gameplay implemented, yet, but here is a early screen:

Well, I’m finishing up for the day on my Pole Position type game. I have a rendered track described by Bezier curves and have some mist, ground and sky. I even have a sort of car shaped blob (which after a lot of work is even lit properly). Tomorrow, I need to look at actually getting some game in there somewhere although only after I have improved the control so it drives more like a car.

Well, till tomorrow.

The start of Ludum Dare totally blew my mind. Looks like I’ve got only a day to complete this. Hmm…

Roads?!? You guys seriously chose roads? Man, sad news. Well okay, I’ll do it, but next time you people should do something that is way less genre defining.

So, I’ve got 27 hours to make a game. Well, I think making the best overall game is out, so I’ll go for the comedy options. The ideas are churning.

needs more collision, but…reasonably okay progress for the first day…will add basic sound effects, then catch me some sleep.

Update.. Not as much progress as I’d hoped but I still think i can get something playable today. I got car movement and pathfinding working, and more work on the maps, even though you can’t see the letters yet because there’s no texture or shading.

Also, even though it doesn’t look much different, the dark blue aand beige colored blocks are actually 3d models, i got a simple obj loader in there. Next up… letters

So, after a few hours of mucking around I have a basic scene with all the elements required for the game.  I just need to add collision detection.  Aligning the cars to the road normal directly under the car is probably sufficient enough.  The player will just walk ontop of the level.

I would really like to add rag doll physics to make the event of the car hitting you a bit more dramatic then a game over screen.  That is going to be my primary objective in the next day after adding the basic collision detection.  That way I wont have to scrap my entry entirely just because i dont have physics implemented.

Hey LD peeps! Some really cool stuff being posted here today!

I’ve been working on something for this too, but I didn’t want to post until now because this is the first time I’ve tried taking part in Ludum Dare and I wasn’t sure I’d be finishing it – but it’s starting to take shape, so here it is:

[bigger version]

It’s an experiment in non-linear storytelling – I’m taking a somewhat metaphorical approach to the theme, heh. Also there are actual roads in it, I promise!

I should have more tomorrow, all going well. I think I’m more or less done for today…

I’ve spent most of the day recovering from a heavy night out so I’ve not even begun to start yet. So without even a game name decided upon yet I’m starting with 26 hours remaining… That’s probably not possible but I’m going to have a good crack at it!

I’ve not got much to show for today so far.  I spent a lot of time fighting with some stupid physics things before I gave up and just went with the simple stuff.  Since this isn’t Gran Turismo, it doesn’t really matter.  I can flub the calcs just as long as it feels natural enough.

Here’s the latest screenshot.

The car is away from the bottom of the screen a bit, due to the acceleration.  I still don’t have anything that shows the car is moving, so that is what I will work on next.  After that, I still have the difficult task of doing the road curves.  Since this is all sprite based, it’s not going to be as easy as doing it in 3D, I would think.

The day isn’t over yet, so I could still get some good progress made later on.

Tags: ld48_13, roads, screenshot

I found the theme to be difficult because all of my ideas seemed to big for the timeframe available.  So after a lot of thinking and brainstorming I decided to just to shoot for the idea that interested me most: railroads!  I’m calling my game Iron Roads and hope it’ll be a playable but simple railroad business sim.  Honestly, I think that it is too big of a a project, but we’ll see.

The main menu! Yay!

The game. Aww.

Finishing up tonight – pause menu, driving controls

Tomorrow – people that follow you, obstacles, and a goal.

Tags: BLDR, C++, game, LD #13 - Roads - 2008, menu, roads

Well, apparently I didn’t have nearly as much in me this time as last, I’ve been procrastinating a whole lot. I have most of all the boilerplate stuff done, and a playfield, but no movement, collisions, A.I., or upgrade system. So essentially no game. Might push it really hard into the night tonight to try and get all the gameplay functioning before tomorrow. Screeny of a basic map:

Tags: Highwaymen

I have a demo. You die somewhat haphazardly when objects collide, and it doesn’t tell you when you win (but you have when all the blue thingies have reached the opposite side). I do have win detection, it just doesn’t show anything. What else… Ah, you place roads by clicking the gray tile in the toolbox and then clicking in the world. Roads make objects go twice as fast. Restart the game by clicking [R].

Demo

I’m afraid I won’t be able to add a lot of maps though… I’m aiming to do this in under 4kb (so I can submit the game to the Java4k competition as well), and I’m almost out of space.

Screenie, in case you can’t try the demo:

Tags: 4kb, java, LD #13 - Roads - 2008, LD4k

Food

Didn’t really have a breakfast. Guess I should have photographed the cup of coffee and the Gingernut biscuits.

Pictured above – Lunch, ~23 hours in: Salad roll with beetroot tzatziki (otherwise know as Pancar dip), with Danish fetta and the flesh of a pig. Banana, and instant coffee with one sugar.

Progress

Not much. Out of desparation, I started making a Frogger clone in Processing, the idea being that once it is functional, I can change some things to make it a little more than regular Frogger. We will see.

At some point this morning, I decided it would be nice to have a mobile version, eg Java J2ME / MIDP game that could run on most Java capable phones. Since there is Mobile Processing, designed for running Processing apps on phones, I installed Java Wireless Toolkit and Mobile Processing (the Linux alpha 0006 version worked for me, while the official 0007 Windows version didn’t. Go figure). I scaled down the sprites, made some porting tweaks (‘real’ Processing supports Java’s ArrayList, but it appears Mobile Processing does not, although I’m probably missing something), and set up the webserver to allow downloading of MIDP apps to my phone (hint: .htaccess needs the mimetype lines AddType text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor .jad and AddType application/java-archive .jar).

It runs ! It’s not really a game yet, but I still have time to turn it into something that resembles one. If anyone wants to try out this totally unfun useless version, you can get it here (at least for a while). The best way to get it is to go there using your phones browser, click on the download link, and it should install the game for you.

Tags: food, frogger

OK here it is,  This is totally different from the game I thought I was going to make.  I wasn’t thinking Horses, or even 3d when I started.  

I’m not too sure about the gameplay, but I’m fairly pleased with what I got it to do from a technical standpoint.

The source and everything is here

but to play it you can just jump on over to here

I think it’s taking me longer to find my way around wordpress than it is to make the game.

.

Tags: final, horse, troy, wooden

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 6:35 pm and is filed under LD13 - Roads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.