Well, by “game” I don’t mean something you can play.  But it is something you can watch as all the (temp art, in case there was any doubt…) elements function as intended: the owls ascend the stairs and even descend again if they reach the top.  The archer as you can see fires arrows at them.  He can even kill the first one before they get past him!  The excitement is palpitatious!!  Things are going well, I think, though I am dreading the actual real implementation.

My game is this: tower defense, inside the tower itself.  Eventually, there will be a pile of gold that the owls are stealing at the top.  You of course strew archers, chefs, and yetis about the tower to stop them.  The twist is that instead of buying generic units, you buy specific heroes as they show up visiting your inn (so a random element to that).  So you might dump Archie the archer after a while for Blog the barbarian.  The end goal is something with 100+ different guys (some not too different, like an archer who does more damage or fires faster than another), and a lot of wacky variety.  Don’t think there will be 100 of them by tomorrow, though.

Tags: tower defense

Progress on all fronts simultaneously (except art and sound).  This shot depicts the Inn Menu open.  As you can see, many of the bunks are occupied with clones of Archie the Archer, since he’s the only hero in the game.  The cursor you can’t see is on one of them, eliciting that handy tooltip that describes him.  At the top of the tower is a vast collection of invaluable treasure.  Hidden behind the row of bunks, you can just barely see that the owls now have life meters for your convenience.  Every few seconds new heroes come to the inn, and ones leave, giving you an endless array of heroic selections.  Of course, they’re all Archie right now.

I guess the next step is to let the owls steal the treasure.  They drop it when they die right now, but I don’t actually know that, since they can’t pick it up in the first place yet.

Tags: Archie, tower defense

Lunch: LD baked potatoes with sauteed veggies on top.  Hard to tell that it says LD, but I swear it does.

Dinner: grilled cheese with tomato soup and horchata.  We tried burning LD into the bread by putting butter in the shape of the letters, but it cooked evenly anyway.

Tags: foodphoto, horchata, taters

In classic autumn colors, it’s a delicious crunchy, nutty, raisiny cereal, with a side of the world’s finest juice (right, PoV?).  My wife was really upset to find I had put the juice in that cup.  She really hates when the food is the same color as the vessel.  But it’s all so lovely and autumnal!

Tags: foodphoto

Can’t show a screenie since I am currently working on the offline computer, the only one with decent art programs on it (stupid Vista won’t run PSP9 or Max5).  Thusly, what I am doing now is art!  I’ve got lots in so far, though endless hours spent doing it.  Six in fact.  Still need some stuff for the buttons you click on and the title screen, and the treasure the owls are stealing, then I guess art is pretty much done.  Then I’ll need to get some challenge/point/structure to the gameplay, and some sounds.  That should pretty much do it.  I’ll need more heroes than I have to reach that point, but I’ll just reuse my existing art for those, because man, I’ve made a lot of little heroes.  I think about 8 unique characters.

I wanted the game to include a skill tree for boosting all your heroes, but I think that’s something for later.  You’ll have to be content with the strategy/luck involved in which heroes you get.  Not much luck needed at this point, since the pool of heroes currently is the same as the number of rooms at the inn, and you’re allowed to have multiples of the same.  I want to change that, but can’t until there are a whole lot more heroes.  Which probably won’t happen by the deadline.

So I’m off to do that.  I’d also like to have more than one kind of monster, but that too will have to go by the wayside.  Hordes of ordinary owls is interesting enough for now!

Tags: tower defense, words

Let’s get eclectic!  For lunch, it’s pizza, egg rolls, and corn on the cob.  I’m not a giant pig – this is food for two.  Iced tea for the lady, pineapple juice for me.  Speaking of giant pigs…

My cat is so fat, he needs two chairs.

Tags: fat cat, foodphoto

Rise Of The Owls

It’s a TD game that takes place inside a tower. You will enjoy it if you learn the hero abilities! It’s fairly easy to win (though sometimes it seems insane) once you know how, but to get a high score requires great skill and daring.

win32 version: Click On Me (1.12mb)

If it doesn’t work for you, you can try the command line argument “opengl” to run it in openGL instead of DirectX. Probably won’t help, but hopefully it works anyway!

Tags: final, owls, tower defense

I’ve got two ideas for this weekend.  I’m pretty sure I’ll do #2, but it sounds hard, with lots of math.  I don’t like math.

#1 – Pixel Editor

This is a unique idea.  It’s a paint program, with features intended for pixel art, lots of zooming and whatnot.  So what’s special?  Well, it can ‘render’ in various ways.  Think of the Puppygames type of look – big pixelated things, but they’re done up all nice in photoshop with glowing outlines or whatever.  You can take your pixel creation (zoomed in to at least 2x) and render it with several different effects, saving your work in a 32bit png:

– An outer glow around it in whatever color you like

– ‘Tetris blocks’ (each pixel is a shiny block rather than a single color)

– An overall highlight, treating the whole shape as one huge tetris block – if a pixel has no left neighbor, shade its left edge, if it has no right neighbor, brighten its right edge, etc

– ‘Piping’, highlighted stripes on the internal edges of the shape

– Other!?

I think that would be a really cool tool for making that nice modern-retro art.  Almost a SFXr for graphics, in a way.

#2 – Hitsuji Editor

I saw people talking about doing this in the chat too.  They called it a manikin editor.  I just want to take the concept of the editor I made for my long-ago LD entry Hitsuji and make it nice and more powerful, so you can do freeform creations instead of sheep holding swords.  The concept is to make models by stringing bitmaps together with pivot points, then you can rotate and translate them all (scaling would be nice too).  Then you make animations for them, and it stores it all much like a 3D model, only it’s 2D.  Then obviously you can put that in a game and animate it all nicely and smoothly.  I love how it’s trivial for such a model to transition from one animation to another.  I could see a lot of potential for games made with these types of characters.

#1 sounds a lot easier than #2, and it’s more original.  But it’s definitely not as useful…

Tags: mini ld

Here’s a screen! You can’t actually get hurt yet, but I can tell it’s nearly impossible so far. Kitty is a ninja in the shinobi style – that means he can teleport dash through the air freely. And he clings to walls and ceilings and throws stars. The only controls are left mouse to dash to cursor, and right mouse to throw stars.

Nukebots, of course, contain nuclear explosives inside. So killing one will cause an explosion that will hopefully help you, but might kill you too. And all those yellow blips are the absurd amount of firepower the robots currently have. They also have way too much life, or you do way too little damage. The color of the Nukebot tells you its abilities. The less green it has, the faster it moves, the less red, the more life, the less blue, the faster it shoots (I know less is weird, but there’s logic to it, I think).

This design supports absolutely any colors you want, not just the official ones! Of course, black=walls, white=space, and FF00FF=player start. But other than that, it’s all robots. And those big colorful blocks make for an awful lot of robots.

Tags: kitty, ninja, robot

It’s done! It took longer than the alloted time by quite a bit, not to mention I massively cheated (about half the final code is from existing work, not new). But it’s fun, in a weird and weird, weird way. It’s a goofy game. But it’s got skills and leveling up, so that makes it good. it’s also very hard with most of the maps I found, but they all seem winnable if you got ninja skillz.

Enjoy Ninja Kitty’s neverending battle against the horrid Nukebots.

Download: Windows EXE (660kb)

Tags: final, kitty, ninja, robot

YOU CAN’T FRIGTH BACK AGAINST BABBY OF TOWLR!!!

I did a cover of PoV’s Towlr from LD12. Good luck figuring out how to defeat it.
Download it (Windows only, 670kb)

Tags: babby, cake, epilepsy, final, towlr

I have a functioning screen that you can press ESC on, and a font that prints!  It’s miraculous!

I bounced zillions of ideas around last night, never found anything that struck me square in the face until I gave a moment’s thought to Night Of The Cephalopods.  It’s not a very good game, and I don’t think it does anything very impressive in the realm it sets out to impress in, but it’s a fun idea: having the game narrate things as the player does them.

Well, my game is no action game, in fact it’s a point & click adventure.  So narrating that is more akin to building a story that is being read to the player, based on their actions.

Or in this case…. a poem.

I chose this project because it will be *extremely* easy technically, yet a huge challenge in terms of content.  I’m going to have to invent rhyming lines that work in various sequences so that any path you take continues to conform to the poem’s meter.  Basically, I chose a project that I will have fun making as opposed to something you will have fun playing.  But it’ll probably amuse you a time or two.  It’ll certainly be interesting.

So prepare yourself for Two Roads: An Interactive Poem.

Tags: narration, poem, roads, screenshot

Two Roads is my entry for LD13 – Roads. It’s extremely simple to play, and you’d have to be sick in the head to not have the most fun ever in your whole life enjoying its extremely innovative and immersive gameplay.

POST COMPO UPDATE!  This is not cheating!  You can go ahead and download the 17mb compo edition below, or you can be smart and download the 5.4mb post-compo edition instead!  It’s the exact same in every way, except all the sounds are changed to OGG files, and all the images have been converted to 256 color.  The only code change was to change “wav” to “ogg” in the sound loading code.

Win32 download: http://hamumu.com/goods/ludum/tworoads.zip (17mb! It must be good!)

Obviously I slacked off a lot this weekend, since this is only my second log entry… oh well. I hope you enjoy my game! It was a unique experience creating it.

Tags: adventure, final, mouse, narration, poem, roads

Behind The Dumb Episode 6 is out at last!  It’s the first half of my timelapse and journal for LD14!  Check it out.  You don’t need to rate it, because while I did FILM it all during the weekend, I certainly didn’t have it all edited and ready by then.  And the second half won’t be out until voting is over anyway.  Still, it should be amusing to some.

Tags: behind the dumb, LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009, timelapse

Behind The Dumb Episode 7 is available now!  Thanks to the handy extended voting, it is available before voting is over!  Of course, again, I filmed it all during the 48 hours, but didn’t edit and release it anywhere close to that time, so probably not valid for voting.  But I hope you enjoy seeing what kind of sandwich I ate, in one of the most epic cliffhangers since Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger.

Tags: behind the dumb, timelapse

After extensive fidoodling around with Flixel, I have managed to make it so it has a .raw image embedded into the SWF which it reads and uses as map data.  Voila!  Now I will be able to edit my map in Paint Shop Pro as is the standard among my people.

It’s saturday morning, and thanks to Flixel doing pretty much everything for me, I have a robot rolling around and jumping (gonna have to take that away soon before he can earn it back).  I like his run/roll animation, it really expresses his desire to have a kitty.  The scary space monsters are actually just solid blocks right now.  I guess implementing them is next.

(you say baby, have you got enough gas?)

Well, today was a huge bust.  I worked a little in the morning as my previous entry detailed, then it was off to a very distant lunch (about a 1.5 hour drive).  All told that chewed up 6 hours, after which I was home with a big headache and very tired, so another 2 hours spent napping.  Which of course made me feel worse, so popped some tylenol, ate some cake, and gradually recovered not doing much for a couple more hours.

At long last, I did some work for about 2 hours maybe, and now the game is basically what it needs to be, minus most of the content!  You begin with no abilities, and you can pick up the jump ability as advertised and use it.  The screenshot shows the second power, Shoot.  That’s not actually implemented at all.  Also, the enemies are harmless (but the evil OUCH zone is quite lethal!).  There’s no money to collect and spend on these powers like I wanted, but I think I’ll skip that, so I can just spend tomorrow making the actual game content.  Should be fun and easy!

Flixel seems quite limited in what sort of game it will manage, but it makes that particular type of game real easy.  If you wanted to make anything but a side scroller, I think you’d have to fight it so much that you’d be better off just making your own code from scratch.

I realize this looks like my only journal entry for the whole compo, so click here to see the actual deal.  I really did do some!  Not a lot, just some screenies yesterday, and I’m about to do one more today, which shouldn’t be too tough with 4 hours left to go.  LDs are exciting, but draining.  I am ready for rest and WoW now.

There it is!  Can’t believe it’s been 20 entries.  Can’t believe how long it took to make the collage!  Actually, I don’t think I ever submitted Space Cruise, but I was making it for the contest, and I still have it partly done, so there you go.  If you want to check out any of these for some reason, visit www.hamumu.com and search and search until you find them!  A couple aren’t available there, but those are some really really bad ones.  My first one goes back to LD#0 – Indirect Interaction (in 24 hours, not 48!).  Beat that, n00bZ0rz.

Credit to Jovoc for the artsy hexagonal layout which I stole.

Tags: collage, montage