Well, I wasn’t originally planning on doing something for this Ludum Dare.  And I thought the minimalist theme seemed familiar… (I had done an entry for LD#11 before.)

In either case, I had a brainstorm in the morning yesterday, and I put together this game: Battle Box.

It’s a simple two-player HTML5 strategy game.

I’m actually hoping to spend the afternoon adding some cloud support in, but we’ll see if I make that goal in or not.  For now, you can play with two players locally at the link above.

Enjoy!

So, I had most of my cloud code written by the time the competition had ended on Sunday, but it didn’t work.  It took me about another 20 revisions of my Parse cloud code to get things finally working (I hope!).

I must say, while I had all the concepts down; debugging cloud code was a nightmare.  And half the time, things didn’t work as I expected with their API or objects weren’t updated when I’d thought.  I really want to like their system, but this took me about four times as long as it should have.  Especially without support for transaction type calls.

Anyway, the game is exactly the same, it just now supports hooking you up with a random person and playing head-to-head.  So, if you don’t have a friend to play with, try it out here.

Please let me know if you notice anything wonky.  Thanks!

At least going to try this again.  Hoping doing a few stream sessions over the weekend will get me through it this time.

I plan to use Visual Studio and the SFML game library in C#.  I’ll decide Compo or Jam once I get going, that’s always my strategy…

Well, Allergies are taking me down hard, but at least have something on the screen after a two hour stream:

I’ll be back with vengeance tomorrow night, hopefully better rested and with passion now that I have a ‘rendering engine’ partially working…

Making Progress on Day 2, created and rendered my Hero Character with Qubicle, loaded a larger maze from a test image for debugging, and cleaned up my infrastructure.

I even have some crappy partial scrolling implemented so that it re-centers when you get close to the edge of the screen.  Now on to the harder part of adding my game mechanics which are what make it fit the theme…  This won’t just be any other maze.

Probably streaming for another hour or so tonight before retiring until tomorrow…

I can’t remember the last time I’ve gotten to work on a game for 6 hours straight.  It’s been pretty crazy, but I’ve got a ton done.

I now have incremental maze generation on the frontier with visibility tracking:

Tomorrow, I finally get to implement my primary movement mechanic… which is what the game will be all about and make it much more interesting.  Then I get to add ‘game’ things to my game to start wrapping things up, and maybe work on a title screen… and expose the keyboard control setting option to switch which way is ‘up’ (I have the input flag already in code).

Hoping I’ll be able to wrap up soon in order to submit for the Jam… gotta go back to work tomorrow…

I’ve got all the technical parts down, my shape-shifting labyrinth is working great.  I just haven’t been able to navigate it successfully enough yet in order to reach the exit…  I’m even playing in ‘debug’ mode to see the edges of the generated maze in purple… 😛

After this, I think all I have left to add is the title screen… that won’t take long, right???

Well, two 6 Hour Streams later (with an initial 2 Hour one plagued with allergy attacks…), I have a game!

I am so very tired… but I do need to zip a build and submit it for the Jam!  I at least was able to get my title and help screens in the game.

The basic objective is to escape the maze before your hunger runs out.  You can collect steaks to replenish hunger.  However, you are normally ‘dashing’ around the maze, and the maze only generates as you move, so you can dash over an area that later may not be accessible in the same way.

Thus, the shape-shifting labyrinth around you is your enemy especially as you move yourself around it.  Now, to post it!

Tags: progress, screenshot, SuccessStory, update

Swing on by to watch and or submit your game for me to play with my Eye Tracker: https://www.twitch.tv/mikewarexgr/

Whenever I plan to do this, even months in advance, a bunch of other things always get scheduled this weekend... Regardless, I finally came up with an idea, so we'll see how it goes...

Planning on using three.js and TypeScript. Have a dev environment and notes on my game idea setup at this point. Ported in a sample to bootstrap me at least, so not quite ground zero.

Will get back into things probably 16-17 hours from now tomorrow night after commitments tomorrow. Will try and stream though!

Well, I feel like it's an actual game now. Camera is messing things up a bit, so I need to hopefully have time to tweak that tomorrow. Life keeps me busy, but I'm surprised how far I made it with the few small hours I've been able to put in this time around.

Won't have my fancy visual flair I wanted, but as a puzzle game it works at least for now.

Won't get to any sort of shared high score system either, but I'm sure people can be honest about that, right? If you want to get an early start, which symbol is the odd one out in the picture above?

It certainly was a different LD this time around. The new website felt fresh (despite the unfortunate halt near submission time), but it was exciting! Can't wait to see the future features planned.

Even though I blocked my calendar way in advance, life managed to sneak its way in. I think I was able to squeeze in about 6-8 hours of dev time for the jam this time around. Which was less than I did last time, but I was able to get about 80-90% of my vision from Friday evening implemented. I was pleasantly surprised at how things came together.

If I had a bit more time, I would want to refine the visual transition a bit. I did manage to hack a suitable cheat in the last ten minutes. I'd also do a bit more with scoring and saving splits and try and get a global leaderboard. Something to do for the future.

If you want to checkout my game its page is here.

Well, I think that's going to be all the time I have to judge this time around. Would have liked to do a judging stream, but have just been super busy with work the last few weeks.

I look forward to the next time around though. Will have to see if I can actually do two in a row and spend more than 12 hours on an entry out of 72. At least I used a technology that I had already started using a bit this time! That always helps too.

Keep on voting everyone!

Odd Ball