Exciting stuff… I will be using the following:
Engine: Scirra Construct
Gfx: Photoshop. And possibly Sculptris / Max / Flash if for any reason I’d need it…
Sound: SFXR if I go retro. Else I’ll have to get creative with a mic or something…
Music: Guitar Pro if I go retro. Real guitar if not.
Good luck all!
First evening down. Bed time.
Pretty butt ugly at this point… have just been trying to block in the basic functionality.
End of day two for me. Got a good chunk of gameplay figured out. Need to finish that up tomorrow and still leave time for replacing all the placeholder art with something that actually looks good (those arent sausages and potatoes in the inventory).
Also still need to do music, geez…
Maybe entering. I am still contemplating whether I’ll be able to do this. I’ve got to attend a going-away party for a coworker on Friday night, so that cuts into quite a few hours of my time, especially since I may be staying overnight. But I’m hoping that I can pull off some LD48-ing anyways.
I guess it largely depends on the theme. I’m gonna have one of my friends text me the theme because I likely won’t have internet until I get home. In case he forgets, can someone make a mention to @Bananattack on twitter to tell me the theme? I’ll try and brainstorm horrible ideas while I’m boozing and partying.
So essentially I’ll have to treat this as a rather condensed contest, and probably make something more along the lines of a < 24h game. I will purchase energy drinks, crappy microwaveable meals and junk food to prepare myself.
Aside from that, I guess I better lay out some tool decisions before I get into this:
Yeah, so I haven’t messed around with Flash in a while. I might need to get some quick reacquiantance before this contest begins. Hopefully it won’t be too painful to relearn.
Let’s do this!
—
EDIT:
Okay, so I thought about it a bit more. Depending on the game I end up making, I might end up having to use a tilemap editor. I might use tiled (http://mapeditor.org) and possibly dig into its source code here: http://gitorious.org/tiled/tiled-qt
Alternatively, I might end up using Verge‘s maped3 tool for maps, and use my converter tool to convert to tiled format (or possibly adapt this to dump to a new format as necessary, during the contest): http://github.com/Bananattack/v3tiled
Anyways, we’ll wait and see.
Okay, the party in Guelph wrapped up, and I got back to Hamilton about 30 minutes ago. I’ve been coming up with a theme before I crash for a few hours. But I think I’ve got an interesting “twist” on this silly theme.
Basically, it’d be a depressing, trashy cityscape covered in garbage and sketchy looking people (Probably kind of like Hamilton). It’d be raining, and you’d be this scrawny looking sad lonely guy. You feel alone. You visit the dumpy looking medical clinic, and the doc there says your lonely condition is “dangerous”. They write you a prescription, which you are to take hourly. Suddenly things are happy, the sun is out, and people look normal and happy.
But it doesn’t last forever, when they medication wears off, things return to their dumpy, rainy condition, and you hear the voices. The voices which can only be silenced by more medication. You’ll have some sort of “anxiety” gauge, that goes up when you’re off your meds. External factors like people, lightning bolts, and mud puddles on sidewalks, slowly drive you crazy. And you need food to take your medication, which forces you to enter public places to buy meals to go with it.
Your ultimate goal is to put an end your loneliness, by hooking up with someone. which will in turn squash your reliance on pills. But you only have a limit set of pills, so you need to hook up with someone in the limited time window where the meds still take effect.
Or something dumb like that I dunno. It’ll maybe make more sense when I make art I think.
Time to learn me some Flashpunk and see how tricky it is to get going. Yep. But I might sleep soon, cause it’s almost 3:30.
Okay, so I started making progress on my Flash LD48 game.
So far I’ve accomplished this not so impressive screen:
I’m using a font by Zaratustra that I found on Fontstruct, and is CC licensed: http://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/zaratustra_bigital
Anyway, stay tuned for more later.
I decided to work on the art aspect of my LD20 entry instead of coding for a bit. But it’s going slow as hell, because I haven’t pixeled “seriously” in a few months. I wasted a bunch of time drawing brick tiles, before realizing it was ugly. So I backstepped that, and tried to make something a little simpler.
Needs more work, but here we go!
Alright, well, I better take a supper break soon, and then I’ll resume work.
Okay, so progress is going slow, and I’m a bit sleepy. I implemented basic movement and rain particle system in my game. Getting animations to work in FlashPunk was sort of a pain at first, because I hadn’t realized I needed fractional animation framerate to get things to display at a reasonable speed. But it makes sense.
And played around with emitters to make the rain system. It also occasionally flashes lightning on random intervals. It was pretty fun.
But yeah, I think I might do a bit more setup work for the game’s engine, and call it a night. I’m getting sort of exhausted.
I didn’t finish in time, sadly.
This is what I accomplished, which doesn’t look like much, but it now features NPCs, with a few different customizable move behaviours (going straight forward, pacing back and forth, random direction). Regular map entities are y-sorted to allow you to walk in front of and behind guys, depending on where you are positioned, relative to them. It also features buildings, which you can walk in front of, behind and “underneath” (through the door when it’s open — which occurs when you step into it).
Eventually, there’d be a bunch of buildings, some interiors, and stuff to collect and do.
Sadly, I ran out of time, so that’s all for now. And I can’t do the jam, since I work tomorrow. However, I will try and be dilligent and continue my game progress anyways. A lot of projects that don’t finish in compo deadlines usually don’t get finished, but so far I don’t feel disgruntled or anything. It’s just slow going.
Part of that was the decision to use FlashPunk, which I had never used before. And it has a lot of little weird gotchas, especially when it comes to the collision and rendering systems, which could use a lot of work, in my opinon. Thankfully, with a bit of cleverness, I was able to work around most of the hiccups I had, but it did mean I spent a lot of time reworking small things.
I’ll try and make an effort to finish my game down the road. Obviously, I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try anyways.
Well, I didn’t finish my game, but I managed to record a timelapse of me not finishing my game using Chronolapse. Unfortunately, I simply ran out of time.
Ludum Dare 20 – Timelapse – (Unfinished) It’s dangerous to be lonely, take these every hour.
I decided to take the “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.” theme and make a game that was about a depressed main character that was prescribed pills by his doctor, and you had limited time before your anxiety kicked again and you started hearing voices. I started development with FlashPunk and FlashDevelop. Unfortunately, I couldn’t finish the entry in time, because I still barely had an engine by the end of it. The idea had long way to go. But I have art assets that I could see myself reusing on a later date.
Music is “Surfing on a Sine Wave” by FearofDark (Copyright © 2011 Stephen Hemstritch-Johnston, and released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence.)
About to head to bed.
Just been working on basic controls and physics stuff. Here’s the glamorous screenshot, WOW! We’ll see if this goes anywhere 
Mechanics and some art are done. Still need to build out a lot more of the level, make more tiles, player anims and music / sound… 😐 Would also like to add some intro/end game screen but man not much time left.
Yeah finally done! Kinda… Still a lot I didnt get to add, like gruesome decore, music, harder puzzles… Maybe I’ll add to it someday but I’m sick of it at the moment
It’s submitted under the jam since I went over the Compo time limit. Here
Bed time!
Hey there, this is Overkill.
I am entering this compo! I have no idea if I’ll actually finish (probably not), but I am entering the legit Ludum Dare, with my extremely work-in-progress Gameboy-Z80 assembler, wiz, which you can view here: https://github.com/Bananattack/wiz — getting this to do mostly-complete code-gen is my number-one priority, followed by making actual stuff.
I will try and hatch something game-like together in the time limit! I’ll let you know how it goes.
— Overkill.
Hey all, Overkill here.
So yeah, I scarfed down a bunch of food, and purchased snacks and energy drinks, I think I’m good to go finally.
So yeah, my idea for the Evolution theme, is probably a combo of that theme and the theme I wished actually won, Tunnels. The result? Evolving Tunnels. Since I’m hoping to make this on the Game Boy, I will probably stick to something really dumb and cheap and barely innovative, but hey whatever. Also, yeah, I have my work cut out for me.
The assembler needs some serious work before code-gen will actually work. Hopefully the thoughts I had last night to move the burden of optimizing jumps from the compiler (which might be impossible given circular label dependencies in jumps) to a syntactic burden on the user will be changes that pay off.
Instead of assuming a jump is absolute and trying to optimize appropriate labels into relative jumps (which takes an arbitrary number of semantic passes, and might never be possible to resolve without a fixed upper bound/some janky heuristic), I’m going to assume jumps are relative, and error if you try to jump too far. To do absolute jumps, you need to explicitly indicate that in your source code. This makes for a bit more work for the consumer of the language, but not too much, since the errors will go away as soon as you reduce your label distances or actually promote the jump into an absolute one.
Example, using low-level constructs:
goto! label // absolute jump (16-bit unsigned) ... def label: ... goto label // relative jump (8-bit signed PC-relative distance) // 16-bit jump destination, but '!' is not needed, because // 'hl' is a Z80 register, not an immediate value, so there is no ambiguity. goto hl // call absolute (16-bit unsigned), no '!' needed, because there is no relative 'call'. call label
Example, using the high-level structured programming syntax:
compare a to b if! < then // absolute jump to elseif when false. ... elseif == then // relative jump to else when false. ... else ... end
repeat! ... end
Anyway, uh, that’s all I’ve got for now. More code now.
— Overkill
I’ve gotten further into the code-generation journey for my Game Boy Z80 compiler, which you can dive into here https://github.com/Bananattack/wiz/commits/master
Plenty of annoying obstacles to deal with, so I’m nowhere near done yet, but I’m making a steady pace.
The good news, is that my compiler’s code is starting to call my bluff when I write dumb, syntactically valid nonsense in the example source I feed to it! The bad news, is that sometimes it will incorrectly report code that is intended to be valid as erroneous, and part of that is because my compiler is currently assuming all expressions are resolvable at compile-time, which is untrue. I can’t tell you exactly how many times I’ve forgotten a ‘break’ after a ‘case’ in switch statements, but I can tell you that it’s been a lot by now.
* wiz: version 0.1 >> Building... examples/test.wiz(32): error: prefix operator '[' cannot be used in constant expression examples/test.wiz(32): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'STAT_MODE_MASK' examples/test.wiz(32): error: expression could not be resolved as a constant examples/test.wiz(75): error: 'b' was declared, but could not be evaluated. examples/test.wiz(75): error: 'c' was declared, but could not be evaluated. examples/test.wiz(75): error: expression could not be resolved as a constant examples/test.wiz(83): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'hardware_type' examples/test.wiz(90): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'step_event_bank' examples/test.wiz(91): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'scan_event_bank' examples/test.wiz(92): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'draw_event_bank' examples/test.wiz(95): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'gb.ram.map' examples/test.wiz(101): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'GB_VRAM_TILES_MAX' examples/test.wiz(103): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'tiles' examples/test.wiz(104): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'gfx' (in 'gfx.load_tiles') examples/test.wiz(111): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'map_width_lo' examples/test.wiz(112): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'map_width_hi' examples/test.wiz(113): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'map_height_lo' examples/test.wiz(114): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'map_height_hi' examples/test.wiz(115): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'map_width_shift' examples/test.wiz(118): error: reference to undeclared symbol 't0' examples/test.wiz(118): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'GB_VRAM_MAP_WIDTH' examples/test.wiz(118): error: expression could not be resolved as a constant examples/test.wiz(119): error: reference to undeclared symbol 't1' examples/test.wiz(119): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'GB_VRAM_MAP_HEIGHT' examples/test.wiz(120): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'metatiles' examples/test.wiz(121): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'gb.ram.map' examples/test.wiz(122): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'world1' (in 'world1.map') examples/test.wiz(123): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'gfx' (in 'gfx.load_map') examples/test.wiz(126): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'textbox_init' examples/test.wiz(129): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'map_begin_tile_buffer' examples/test.wiz(130): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'map_end_tile_buffer' examples/test.wiz(133): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'sprite_buffer' examples/test.wiz(133): error: expression could not be resolved as a constant examples/test.wiz(134): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'gfx_sprite_copy' examples/test.wiz(137): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'scan_scanline' examples/test.wiz(138): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'gb.STAT_SCANLINE_ENABLE' examples/test.wiz(153): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'hardware_type' examples/test.wiz(157): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'gfx_load_pal_greyscale' examples/test.wiz(162): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'GFX_PAL_BG' examples/test.wiz(163): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'background_palette' examples/test.wiz(164): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'gfx_load_pal_color' examples/test.wiz(169): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'GFX_PAL_OAM' examples/test.wiz(170): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'sprite_palette' examples/test.wiz(171): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'gfx_load_pal_color' examples/test.wiz(183): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'map_start' examples/test.wiz(190): error: 'request_redraw' was declared, but could not be evaluated. examples/test.wiz(190): error: expression could not be resolved as a constant examples/test.wiz(208): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'scan_scanline' examples/test.wiz(211): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'timer_hours' examples/test.wiz(214): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'timer_steps' examples/test.wiz(217): error: 'hl' was declared, but could not be evaluated. examples/test.wiz(217): error: expression could not be resolved as a constant examples/test.wiz(233): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'redraw_request' examples/test.wiz(247): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'redraw_request' examples/test.wiz(251): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'map_buf_data' examples/test.wiz(254): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'sprite_buffer' examples/test.wiz(254): error: expression could not be resolved as a constant examples/test.wiz(255): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'gfx' (in 'gfx.sprite_copy') examples/test.wiz(258): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'redraw_request' * wiz: failed with 59 error(s).
A lot of those are undeclared symbols, but they’re occasionally other, useful things. Alright, it’s almost 4, time for sleep soon.
— Overkill
When I wasn’t spending my time eating food to survive and doing laundry, I was click-clacking on my new mechanical keyboard that arrived today. I bought this nice MX Cherry Black model from WASD Keyboards, and I customized the look of it a little bit with some colorful keys and such. So far, it’s got nice and pretty comfortable, I think I like it a lot more than my previous keyboard.
So yeah, using that new keyboard, I typed things! Words and code and stuff. I think I finally finished the partial constant folding business of the assignment statement code-gen stuff in my Game Boy Assembly language, wiz.
Here’s how it looked before I removed the debug messages:
examples/test.wiz(32): error: Howsdfsdfsdfsdf is that even examples/test.wiz(32): error: YAH examples/test.wiz(32): error: HUUAAA222H examples/test.wiz(39): error: Howsdfsdfsdfsdf is that even examples/test.wiz(39): error: NAH wiz.ast.infix.Infix 16814 examples/test.wiz(77): error: DAFUQ examples/test.wiz(77): error: HUUAAA222H examples/test.wiz(39): error: NAH2wiz.ast.number.Number examples/test.wiz(77): error: Howsdfsdfsdfsdf is that even examples/test.wiz(77): error: YAH examples/test.wiz(77): error: HUUAAA222H examples/test.wiz(85): error: reference to undeclared symbol 'hardware_type'
So yeah, this is good news, because it means I can start generating code for runtime computations in source expressions, that occur after the left-most expression of the source is loaded into the destination. This means that
a = 100 * 3 - 4 + b + c
will essentially become:
a = 296 a = a + b a = a + c
Hooray! I think I can do this. There probably lots and lots of bugs I’ll introduce before I finish, and I’ll have to do lots of cleanup, but we’re getting somewhere!
— Overkill
Yeah, I never quite finished my assembler this weekend as I had hoped, but that’s okay, because it still tricked me into being productive! Maybe by NEXT Ludum Dare, it’ll be ready to rock.
— Overkill
Have some of the basics of gameplay working, here is a cropped screenshot from our game. Environment art is still work-in-progess..
We couldn’t get started till earlier today, so this is our first progress update. The idea is fairly simple and we’re doing the Jam so we’ll have monday to make up for some lost time.
Here’s the idea explained perfectly with my amazing sketch 😉
My good friend and artist extraordinaire, Dtran is working on the characters right now. Here’s his player character:
To be continued…