We got the foundations of the foundations laid out here

• Gravity and collision!
• Dynamically adding properties to objects!
• Input and stuff!

NOW TO PREPARE FOR THE HARDEST PART OF DEVELOPMENT:

To allow these properties to be changed at a dynamically added rate!

Good luck to everyone else and their possible walls of blocks!

I have been working on it for most of the weekend, but I don’t have anything that is actually solid (D:)

I WILL FINISH SOMETHING

Things I thought I did good or better

• The game is playable! (compared to my last 2)
• The game has sound! (not good sound, but it’s the first time I made a game with sound)
• The game has levels! (A first for me)
• I didn’t spend all the time thinking about the messy code! (Progress shot up)

Things I thought I did bad or worse

• The game is super short! (2 minutes to go through)
• The sound and art is sloppy! (Drawing and music is a weak point!)

As for whether or not to use a framework…

My first Ludum Dare was made without a framework, and it was better than my second.

My second Ludum Dare did use a framework, but it was terrible.

My third Ludum Dare used a miniscule  framework which is so small, it is basically starting from nothing, but this is defiantly the one I am the happiest about!

What I want to do now

1. Make a framework that doesn’t suck
2. Make a game outside of a game jam (because making a game and trying something new and awesome = learning and realization from failures, and it would be good to do this more often!)
3. Stop stressing over “not having a good enough coding structure” whilst making a game. (I need to focus on the game more than actual re-usability of the code, because this isn’t boring software, these are GAMES!)

TIME TO PLAY YOU GUY’S GAMES!

Lets do it!

Greetings hard-working game people!

I know your all working on the October Challenge, but I just wanted to give some news.

The Arbitrary Game Jam is beginning its’ 3rd contest in 2 days, and all are welcome!

Its a more laid back game jam with looser deadlines and submission rules than Ludum Dare, but the core idea is the same: Finish a game. If you are itchin’ to participate in a game jam, or if you want to brush up on your skills as a game maker, come check it out.

4th Dare!

This time around, I will am spitting out my pride by using one of these awesome game engines! My goal will be to make something playable dangit!

Tools!

• jMonkeyEngine 3 for the engine!
• Audacity for sound!
• Paint.NET for graphics!
• Blender for modeling!

Lets have fun!

My first game ever was Ludum Dare 25: Ethan’s Bike,  which I LOVED making.

You are playing as Ethan, a little 6 year old boy who wants
to buy a brand new bike! However, he has no money! To make things worse, the bike
is off store shelves in just 15 days! Be villianous and steal from you neighbors!

I plan to redo the whole game and apply everything I learned to make the game a little better in my eyes. Goals are:

• Make it less interface-based.
• Make it so it takes a little strategy to steal things.
• Have fun revisiting Ethan

Good luck to all for this mini-LD!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18002

Here is an ity-bity thing I whipped up for the Jam, just includes some matrix math and image loading methods (Because I am sick of writing the same stuff over and over and over)

Enjoy

Got a TON of important number-data crunching done yesterday, but I still have a lot to do in that department…

Progress is still nice though.

Today:

1. Finish crunching
2. Rendering code
3. GUI with all info

All those text tables have paid off!

Assets would make this look a bit better

Closing the gap for the GUI work, still tons to get done mechanically.
Right now you can build buildings and place units, but I haven’t even started on the core mechanic yet (oops)

Next up: a few assets and army management!

Steps to implement army managment

1. Flowchart it
2. Sub-flowchart it
3. Refactor to fit flowchart
4. Implement flowchart thingy

The plan with army management

• Left-Click on armies to select them
• Right-Click on armies to deselect them
• Left-click on a square to start moving to that square
• Left-click an adjacent enemy army to attack that army
• Hovering over an army tells you what the army is made up of

Ok… here we go

• Army movement
• Exploration (kinda)
• Turn-based stuff

I found a funny bug where each army would mutually decimate each other no matter how unbalanced the sides were, so I gotta redo the combat code.

Resource management coming up after that!

Phew- Now I just gotta implement building construction, turn counting, and barbarians and then I am finished!

I got pretty much everything done! Except the barbarians; which could take longer than I anticipated. I have never done AI before, and it was foolish for me to think it would be easy.

Home stretch people! Lets do this!

Theme song of the whole weekend:

My Tools:

• My personal library (it has Javadoc included in the .zip! Here is the source for it)
• My Flowchart editor for planning (Post about it)
• If I get the guts to do a 3D game, jMonkeyEngine and Blender is what I’ll be using as my IDE and modeling program respectively.
• Paint.NET for 2D drawings and such.
• If I am doing a 2D game, then I will be using the Netbeans IDE.
• Audacity for sound recording and editing (I never really put sound in, but maybe this time will be different!)
• Coffee & Tea

This is the math library that I made, and I am going to be using it from now on. It can do stuff like:

1. Transform 4D vectors!
2. Make 4D transformation matrices!
3. Get the inverse of 4D transformation matrices!
4. Be documented by javadoc!

Excitement!

I know:

• What it’s about

&

• What’s in it

Tomorrow I will turn it from mind to reality!

I am not sure if it was worth the 6 hours of work, but I like it.

It took about 3 and a half hours to create “level 1” with the little text parser, so it was worth making considering how long it would have taken without it.

Don’t got any polish, and I haven’t even finished the behavior of the entities, so push time.