I’ve very little experience in game development, but I’m keen to give it a shot so I’m in.

I haven’t decided fully what I will be using to create my entry (I am waiting to see the theme), but I’d really like to try something in Java using libjcsi since I’ve recently re-discovered rogue likes and I feel they way they represent complex scenes and environments with only basic character sets is really beautiful.

I’ve been practicing with both canvas and libjcsi so I know how to create a basic game loop, take input, and render stuff to the screen, but that’s about it. It should be interesting to see what I can come up with in such a short time.

As for a theme, I’m hoping for either Stealth, procedural, artificial life, or adventure I would like to explore some of the more abstract themes, but I fear they lend themselves to scopes far beyond my abilities, and I have a thing for Stealth games.

As for a code base, I may cannibalize some stuff from the practice stuff I tinkered with, but there’s not much there, but I’ll throw a link up later once I’ve found somewhere to put it. Edit: https://github.com/RootSecks/PracticeRL/

Coming up with an idea ended up being much more difficult that I had initially anticipated, but I’ve settled on a path that I believe embraces an interpretation of “Tiny World”, be it either a physically “Tiny World” or a  microcosm. I’ve also made headway on the game itself, as per the below screenshot I’ve made a thing:

Lost are we?

I’ve gotten map transitions working to a certain extent, with procedurally generated maps persisting once created, but I’ve now got to try keep track of which doors go where and what NPCs are in each map, and then it’s on to dialog and AI. In any case I’ve completed quite a bit and now it’s time for a short break

What I’ve done so far can be found HERE.

OK! Map transitions and persistence now works, as does NPCs, I’ve also implemented the dialog engine and started working on the quest. I do not believe I will be able to achieve my initial idea within the time limit, so I’ve had to modify my plans :S Still I hope to have something at least partially playable by the deadline. Below is a screenshot of my progress

I’ve run out of time, so I’ve gone ahead and submitted my effort.

One one hand, I’m glad I finished it within my personal time constraints, allowing me to contribute to the 1000 game goal as well as my own personal goal, and I’m glad it came out as playable from start to finish!
On the other hand, there is a huge list of things I wanted to do that had to be left out, so content is a little sparse, there may be bugs, and I had to cut a lot of the procedural content generation that I had begun work on because I felt it would have taken to long to complete.

That being said,  I feel like I’ve learned a number of lessons that will help my future efforts, and really I think that’s the a definite win!

This has been a lot of fun, and I look forward to submitting a better entry in the next LD48!

My 2nd LD48 is over

My Game: SimpleWorld was an attempt at distilling open world sandbox survival gameplay down to a minimalist core….unfortunately I ended up spending so much time on the upfront engine implementation, that I ran out of time to implement all the features I wanted.

That being said here is what I did achieve:

* Working sandbox with deformable terrain (Dynamic mesh building using the LibGDX Mesh class).
* “Chunk” paging: Chunks are loaded and unloaded from/to disk.
* Multiple “Biomes” and terrain layers.
* Working (Though intermittently buggy) collision detection.
* Player physics.
* BAD NPCs, Bad AI, AI Collision Detection and Physics, “Attacking” (Basically reduces players health by some amount on touch).
* Player health, inventory, limited UI.
* Day/Night Cycle.

And what I would have added, had I the time:
* Trees!
* Better terrain generation.
* Procedural Buildings.
* Player combat
* Underground enemies and structures.
* Doors <_<
* Non badguy NPCs
* Audio and Music

Still, I came up with a playable and functioning game that is quite complex in implementation, so I’m happy with that

Some details/observations:
* LibGDX is powerful and super easy to use (I’ve never made a game with it before).
* I really like having as many variables as possible pulled from config files, then distributing those values throughout my application. I feel like it can allow people to “Mod” the game really easily, as  well as allowing me to do balance stuff super quickly.
* Dynamic mesh generation is pretty simple once you wrap your head around how to build things out of triangles made up of verticies and indicies (I’ve been playing around with this recently outside of LD). I imagine this could be easily translated to native OpenGL once I get the hang of the syntax and displaylists or vbos.
* I really need to read up on physics/collision detection. I was rushed and just kind of hacked it in.
* I still have problems with scoping my game jam projects.

All in all, this has been another rewarding experience, and I look forward to seeing and playing what other people have come up with!

I’m in again.

Java
Last time I created something that was pretty interesting technically, but had very little value as a game. This time I hope to make something fun.
In terms of resources, and depending on the design I end up going with, I may reuse generic basecode from last times entry: https://github.com/RootSecks/SimpleWorld-Src

I have submitted my entry

My 3rd LD48 was a tremulous affair.

True to my previous entries, I started with a bold and over scoped idea. Unfortunately, after a day and a half I was getting no where and had to scrap it. With little time remaining I decided to checkout Flixel-GDX, a re-implementation of Flixel in Java leveraging LibGDX. Following Flixel tutorials and the example project for Flixel-GDX left me with the absolute basics of a platformer in about 15 minutes(A pleasant change in pace)…the remaining hours were spent fleshing out the game and adding levels.

My biggest take away from this is: I need to leverage tools to do the leg work. Without Flixel-GDXs built in stuff, it would have taken me a few hours at least to get the basics of the platformer working with LibGDX in Java.

Some interesting trivia:

• This entry is the first I’ve done for LD that didn’t have procedural content.
• This entry took to least amount of time from start to finish (Following my failed start).
• This entry is a bit of a cop-out, a platformer with a 10 second time limit per level.
• This entry, of all 3 of my LD entries, is the closest  thing to resembling a game, having some gameplay value.

Also, Flixel-GDX is awesome and I’m looking forward to trying again in the next LD48.

Now onto the voting!

I’ll most likely be using Java/LibGDX or Flixel-GDX.