By some surprise, it turns out that the end of my finals week is celebrated by yet another Ludum Dare. I think I’m going to give this challenge a try, though I’m not fully sure what I’ll be using (leaning to opentk with c# because it’s the most familiar environment for me, heh). I’ll use all the favorite utilities like sfxr, of course (did they make the vvvvvv soundset via sfxr? it’s churning out some surprisingly similar things)

In terms of random fun facts, this wouldn’t actually be my first try at this. I tried last time for LD21 and failed horribly. I was rushing and not planning things out, resulting in very messy code and me doing idiotic things like trying to reinvent hashtables, and eventually I couldn’t get my singular unnamed character to collide or move against anything in the world. She’d walk straight through castles and fortress, as well as mountains. She could also jump over eight times her height. It didn’t work very well, and the graphics weren’t great either. I’ve figured out where I went wrong, though, and I hope to actually get something working this time around, especially since I won’t have anything important to do afterwards.  I think to get myself into the spirit, though, I’m going to try to make a quick little game beforehand, though. It will be a platformer based on a more ambitious idea I have that would likely be a 3D FPS in space. It will involve people walking around a floating world while they shoot people with guns. Nothing special, but just a fun little project.

I’m still in but I’m debating moving my project over to Java (w/ LWJGL for rendering) for compatibility reasons. I was originally going to go with C# and OpenTK, but I’m not sure how much people want to install the OpenTK frameworks on their computers to play. Then again, can I even bundle LWJGL with my application?

This may or may not be my downfall, however. I’m pretty terrible at java but I have SOME idea of what I’m doing with it, considering that I’ve been using it to develop a dungeon crawler for the past few months or so. I had made a prototype for my engine in C# which was going to be my warmup game but it ended up being too ambitious so amusingly enough I’ll be finishing it AFTER my main compo game, heh. But, I have about 8 or so hours to get most of my test engine working in Java. I’m probably just going to port the rendering and basic gameplay logic bits, so I don’t have to deal with too much that I lose my motivation. Rendering is going OK, but I need to ensure that my game logic timing is correct. I’m too used to OpenTK just giving you a GameWindow where you can set the tickrate of your game without the need to do timing yourself. Meh. I’m just happy that the rendering is going good, though loading textures was a pain. At least my texture manager system seems to work OK. (just a key/value pair where the key’s the filename and the value is the texture name/id)

In LD48 tradition, here’s a crappy shot of my workstation:

(click for better)

The purple circle is an Interstel Security Access Code Wheel, and you can see a star chart shoved into the distance there. Anyone remember StarFlight? The Mousepad is an OOTS mousepad I picked up a few months ago, and the keyboard is a Unicomp Customizer 105 I’ve had for several years now. The DELL mouse is what you get when your mouse breaks and you have only one available. Under my main monitor, you can see an old computer manual, from my 386, and I have no idea what the crap behind my monitors is, heh. I don’t use that space.

I’m surprised to see how far some of the implementations are already, though I guess some of them aren’t focusing on graphics yet. Anyways, here’s what I have so far:

It’s going to have snow, fancy snow effects, houses, forests, and lots of things! But for now, an infinite plain of snow and trees is the only feature implemented so far.

The player has animations now, can move across screens, and I’m making environments now that the player will exist in. They will have monsters and stuff that the player has to fight off, of course.  (Well, technically “avoid”, as the character has no means of defending herself). She need to find secrets of her past in order to escape her confinement, but two things pose a great obstacle: the perpetual snows of outside, and the fear that builds up in her bones. Get too scared, and you might just have some serious problems.

Enter the ghosts. They bounce around and scare the pants off of you. Oh, and they hurt you. Oh, and if you have 75% fear+ and you get hit, your wounds get a lot more serious and you’ll take additional damage from enemies.

It’s a camp, but it’s guarded by two ghosts. You can either run and warm up at the fire pit quickly, or leave it, try to find another source of warmth.  Lighting a fire cures 10 fear, as the girl is desperate enough that even the slightest victory gets her hopes up. Standing next to a fire will very quickly drain your coldness bar, and I might add torches, which while they won’t cure your coldness bar, they’ll prevent it from increasing (unless you enter icy water, in which your torch will be extinguished and all benefits lost.

Ice water! Very bitter cold water that you can swim in… but don’t swim in it, as you’ll freeze in a matter of seconds.  Ice water is so cold that even if you’re somehow magically right next to a fire while doused in it, it won’t help you one bit. You will not be required to swim in it, but there’s a few point where monsters can throw you into it if you aren’t careful.

For my game, I decided to make it a puzzle game, where you have to elude the monsters in your attempt to survive. However, I’m not very good at puzzle games, heh. Therefore, what I have is a primitive basic item hunt where you gotta get all the items without dying from the monsters. There’s a few interesting ideas in there, that I don’t want to spoil yet, but I’m not feeling good about this thing at all :/

I have no ideas at all, I’m a terrible game designer.

When in doubt, redesign. I started actually playing with the “elude the monsters rather than kill them” mechanics more and I’m actually really enjoying the end result. Not sure if I’m going to make it for the main compo or the jam, but this thing WILL get finished soon. And I will be happy about that.

I’m running out of time here and things are getting a bit crazy at my house, as we need to clean it up entirely, so I’m doubting that I’ll be able to make the compo deadline. I don’t want to abandon this, however, so I’m going to shoot for the jam if I start running out of time. It might be the best move in general, honestly, but we’ll see what happens.

I just don’t have enough time to implement everything I want, but I’m not going to let that deter me! I think I’m going to shoot for the extra time of the jam, so I can make this game better than it is now. With this, I can also relieve a little stress I’ve been having over this lately, as the stress is not really doing good things for me.

This is one of the puzzles I’ve implemented, and it requires a tricky form of interaction to get across the stream (you can swim, but unless you have a million potions that would kill you very quickly), which I hint at in the game. I’m not sure how obvious it is, though. Hopefully enough. I’m not going to go out and tell the player exactly what to do, though.

After coding for 48 hours and preparing myself for the jam, I’m relaxing tonight. I’ll spend time tomorrow working on making the game fun and playable, but for the rest of tonight, I’m playing other video games. Maybe some of your submissions, and some of my favorites.

Let me tell you though, after closing Visual Studio for the night, I instantly started feeling much better. Looking at lines of code for who knows how long gets tiring.

The current college semester decided to throw a curveball at me at the just the right moment so I’m not exactly certain what this will do with my participation status.

Past experiences convince me that it will do absolutely nothing and I’ll still attempt to cobble together a silly game in 48 hours. It will be great fun! I doubt I’ll be doing warmup though, need to keep my coding motivation high. I’ve been hacking away at some of my smaller projects in the meantime, though.

And, hopefully this time around, people will take note of the fact that I mentioned that I’m kind of in a 48 hour game jam and not schedule critical events (not critical enough that they have to be done on said weekend, though) for the upcoming weekend. :/

And, also hopefully this time around, I won’t fall into a sudden TF2 addiction. heh

EDIT: since people enjoy talking about their tools, I’ll talk a bit about mine. Uh… I don’t know what tools I’m going to use yet! I’m barely resisting my urge to use the Descent graphics libraries (ported to modern operating systems via the DXX-Rebirth project in software mode) which are unfamiliar to me as a gimmick, because gimmicky side projects are what I thrive on. That’s pretty much an instant failure for me though, so I’m probably just going to stick to what I know (which means Java with LWJGL or C# with OpenTK). I should honestly look into some of the more popular game creation libraries for these languages, though. Unity sounds really nice. I’m kind of in a crunch right now about what my favorite graphic making software is, so I’ll probably ignore my debates entirely and pull out Paint.net again and make some silly graphics (actually in the four months I’ve improved a bit with my art). The sounds will be made via whatever sound generator happens to be popular at the time.

Web technologies are an unfamiliar territory for me, and I kind of want to fix that. It seems like the most accessible games are the one where you can click a url and you’re playing instantly, rather than having to dump an archive somewhere and run an executable, especially when other libraries are needed to make said executable run. (Then again most web environments need a plugin also from what I’ve seen).

For the game itself, I honestly want to try something 3D for a change, with procedurally generated levels based on basic models (probably made in Radiant or another quake map editor, for convenience), but collision and physics in 3d space is a mystery to me, so unless I can find a good library to simplify these things, it isn’t happening. Meh.

It turns out that due to some school weirdness I have to be at my school on sunday to do some work for a project with my classmates.

Will this interfere with my code at all? Hopefully not! If it does, there’s always the jam, but I’m hoping to avoid that if I can.

And really, I think I need to create some reusable tile-based engine thing because I’ve pretty much written the same engine for the last two LDs. It’s silly.

I cleaned up my desk for the sole purpose of getting this picture! Oh, and because it was a complete mess.

And, this time around, hopefully I’ll get something submitted. I’m feeling pretty good after that interactive keynote, heh.

If anyone is curious, that painted black thing in the background is my curtain. So uh… my youngest sister had a halloween party, like seven years ago or so, and they all painted a black plastic thing for some reason. And then the blinds in that window broke. So lacking any alternatives my parents hung that up instead. Every other window in the basement has had normal curtains except that one. They keep on saying that they’ll get real curtains for it soon, but it still hasn’t happened, heh.

My current game idea involves a Heavy-sized magical gunslinger that runs around tiny fantasy worlds (containing nothing more than a few buildings, and their inhabitants) with a shotgun. He has to jump between these worlds to do things.

So yeah… it needs some serious plot work.

(click for not suckish)

My graphics so far. Meh

I kind of regret not doing this in 3d but there is no way I would have been able to pull it off at all. Egh. At least I should be able to make it fun in 2D.

(click for not ugly again)

I’ve gotten entities mostly working, so it’s time to take a break and work on something also important — the tiles. This is one of the first times I’m happy with a tileset I made, and I’m getting advice in #ludumdare to make it even better now.

I have dirt paths, stone paths, grass, trees, tall grass, and water. More is coming, so I can construct caves, buildings, and maybe even cliffs.

(as always click for less ugly)

Well, the basis for the gun system is now in, you can fire guns and shoot monsters with your weapons now. I’m trying to debug some serious accuracy problems with the shotgun though, where you can stand next to a monster and somehow manage to mostly miss. That just ain’t right.

I’m not over happy with the “RECHARGING” meter though. I might just replace it with a little bar of some sort to indicate the time between fires.

So, while making my shotgun code, I created a quickie terrible hitscan method. However, I actually managed to neglect entity positions when checking to see if it intersects an entity, so as a result the line attack method would always harm the first hurtable entity in entitylist.

I guess this explains the terrible accruacy issues I was having with my weapons. Well, they seem to be fixed now.  And then in five minutes I’m going to find another horrible oversight like this. it’s fun! 😛

College happened. My original plan was just to pretend it doesn’t exist until I’m done with my game, but my game was taking way too long and it was pretty much critical that I got these assignments done. So er, I just kind of stopped working on my game, and vanished from here entirely.

I’m probably going to jump into one of the minijams happening over the summer to make up for it. I’m not certain yet what I’ll be doing with my failed project. Maybe I’ll take the tileset and use it somewhere else sometime. I’m not sure yet. It’ll get improved by that time, though, as I’m not entirely happy with it in reflection.