Hi all, looking forward to my first ever attempt at Ludum Dare, should be a learning experience at the very least

In the interest of upfrontness, and because it seems to be the done thing, have a link to the *extremely* primative base that I plan to use mrpiglet_base.zip.  It does very little, just provides a bit of a wrapper around some SDL + SDL_Mixer and OpenGL functionality.  Can’t imagine it’ll be of any use to anyone, but use/abuse as you wish anyhow.

Now I think it’s time to try and sleep off the Friday beers, see you all tomorrow for the event itself.  Cheers!

Tags: middleware, preparation, warmup

Roads it is then, fairly happy with that as I’ve got a vaguely plausible idea for it. Time will tell just how plausible I guess. Woke up at 6am this morning, which is officially too damn early, but I couldn’t get back to sleep so I decided to get started instead.

Important Stats
Hot Brown Caffeinated Beverages: 0
Food Consumed: NULL
Time Spent Coding: 1hr
New Lines of code written: 53

Obviously I need to change some of those, and soon! For the moment however have a hour one screenie

Well, just past the 3 hours of implementation mark. What do I have to show for it?

• A tile based world
• Restricted player movement in said world
• In ‘game’ level editing
• Level saving/loading

So all in all I’m pretty happy with how things are going so far. The problem is I now need to figure out how I’m actually going to make a proper game from this. I’ve got some vague ideas, but they seriously need fleshing out. Eep!

Important Stats Update
Hot Brown Caffeinated Beverages: 1
Food Consumed: NULL (this needs to be rectified immediately)
Time Spent Coding: 3hr
Total new Lines of code written: 296

Finally a new progress screenshot, it’s not desperately exciting yet, you’ll just have to trust me that I loaded the level from a file, and the ball bounces around the ‘roads’ compellingly.

Important Update!

I finally have breakfast. Porridge with Golden Syrup and tea (what better breakfast can there be?!)

Tags: food

A little while since my last entry, but I’ve been pretty busy at least. I’ve come up with some slightly more road like graphics (I kind of miss my old hyper abstract ones, but it feels like I should work the theme in when I can). I’ve also added some AI opponents, so now instead of one blob there are several 😮

Each enemy has somewhat different behaviour, kind of like in pacman. Actually the whole thing was starting to become very pacman-esque which was a little worrying, I didn’t particularly want to make a clone of something if I could avoid it. I was getting a bit bogged down generally too, so decided it was a good time to get some fresh air, go to the shops, and stock up on some food. It worked pretty well, I’ve got a much better idea of what to do next now, and I’m much less worried about the pacman thing (there’ll be similarities, but I don’t expect it to feel like a clone).

Got back from the shops, was hungry, so mades cheese on toast for lunch, served with more browny beverage goodness \o/ (my count is now 3).

Tags: food, screenshot, shopping

Well I’m definitely getting back on track, the past few hours have been rather productive. I just love the feeling rolling out lines and lines of reasonable code, I’m really enjoying myself at the moment.

I’ve mostly been doing stuff behind the scenes stuff. I’ve put in an entity spawning system so that player+enemy positions are all stored in my level data. Rather happy with how it’s worked out (I’m wondering why I haven’t done something like it in the non-compo game I’ve been working on recently).

Then I’ve put the groundwork in for some rescuable stickmen things, I’ll come clean and say the *idea* of rescuable things that follow you I’m pretty well ‘borrowing’ straight from my other game. Having said that, time is (obviously) at a premium, it’s a concept I’m particularly fond of, it looks pretty cute, and it’s going to work a bit differently here, so, *shrug* I don’t really feel bad about it.

Here’s how it looks at the moment (the stickmen things bob up and down a little, it’s kinda cute).

Oh yes, and finally, why the title? The suns going down now here, and I started working before it started coming out. The bulb in my rooms light has blown, and the bulbs I bought to replace it don’t work for whatever reason. So, coding in the dark it is!

Tags: screenshot

.. but MrPiglet does!

Please excuse the blurriness.

I’ve been taking a couple of hours break for a shower, food, and some general mooching, figuring there’s no point getting burnt out too early. Back to the grindstone now though, time to make this game a game!

Oh yes, also about time I did an Important Stats Update
Hot Brown Caffeinated Beverages: 5
Food Consumed: porridge + cheese on toast + quiche
Time Spent Actually Working: around 8hrs
Total new Lines of code written: 727
16×16 Sprites drawn: 17

Well, I’m calling this my halfway point. I now have a (single) fully playable level, with goals and dangers and a timer to keep track of how well you did. In other words I have a game! (woo, yay, fireworks etc.) 15 hours ago none of this existed, so I’m pretty happy to call day one a definite success

I’ve still got a long way to go yet though, still to do:

• Tutorials of some kind
• Several progressively harder levels
• Score tables
• SFX
• Music
• More graphics
• Some sort of menu to glue it all together
• Polish! Polish! Polish!

So.. it doesn’t really sound like I’ll be twiddling my thumbs tomorrow either then!

I’m actually really enjoying this 😀

Well, back to the grindstone then. Took forever to get to sleep last night, my brain was just buzzing with ideas, probably a good thing, but quite frustrating nonetheless. Work up feeling kind of tired, but still plenty motivated, so I decided to start double buffering my tea consumption.

Taking my hot brown beverage consumption total to 7, rock and roll!

I spent the last hour or so crafting a bunch of progressively harder levels to ease a player into the game (it is, I suspect, pretty damn confusing if you just get thrown into it). Definitely glad I took the time to make an in game level editor. It also means it’s really starting to feel more like a game and less like a dodgy prototype, which can only be a good thing.

Still loads and loads and loads I want to get done though, so I guess I’ll just keep plowing on.

Tags: food, levels, screenshot, tea

Right, well I’ve got a few levels worth of simple text based in-game tutorials in, so it shouldn’t be so bewildering to people that start it. Not really sure what I’m going to look into next, but not because I lack things to do to it! I might try and get some sounds and/or music in.

I also had some breakfast, I was going to cook some bacon, but I felt hungry and lazy, so just had some toast with peanut butter instead. Will have to do something more exciting for lunch. More tea was also involved (of course).

Tags: food, screenshot, tutorial

Just a quick post lunch post. Decided to cook something properly (i.e. from scratch) for once, so I cooked myself some pasta with spicy bacony sauce.

It was great but then towards the end my plate decided to go walkies, and I’ve now got a pretty good tomato sauce splatter pattern on my jeans, grr.

Game is going well, though there’s nothing new worth screenshotting. I’ve put in some irritatingly retro sfx, bumped the number of levels to 10, and polished the interaction a bit. I think I’m going to put in a bit in a bit of saved out level progression + time taken data. I’ve also got an idea for an alternate game mode that should be very doable and nice to have, so I might have a look into that too.

Tags: food

Well, I’ve put in some level progression/record stuff, and now it staring to *really* feel like a game. Which is an incredibly good feeling. I also just spent an hour or two just tweaking/adding scenery sprites, adding some sweet motion blur and generally making things prettier, completely superfluous on one hand, but it’s been a nice break from other stuff, and I’m pretty pleased with the results too, so yay!

Well, I am completely shattered now, but it’s been worth it, because now it’s done! \o/

http://jwhiting.nfshost.com/coding/onlyforward.zip

I spent the few hours implementing a special ‘Survival Mode’ that is unlocked after completing level 5. Apart from that, general just generally tweaking and fixing up bugs.

Final important stats update
Hot Brown Caffeinated Beverages: 12
Time Spent Actually Working: around 24hrs
Total new Lines of code written: 1216
16×16 Sprites drawn: 20
SFX Generated: 9

It’s been a lot of fun, cheers for the support everyone

Right, now it’s time to sleep for an age.. Hang on, work tomorrow, grahrg!!1

Tags: final, screenshot

Right, now that I’ve taken steps to correct the control irritations in Only Forward (see below for the updated version) this seems like a good time to write up a postmortem for the competition.

What I aimed for:

LD13 was my first Ludum Dare competition, and whilst I’ve previously dabbled in coding with tight time limits it’s the first games competition I’ve entered into, so it was all pretty new to me.

My goal from the start was to try and make a game that was essentially complete/polished etc.  I was less worried about managing something technically impressive, or dramatically original, I just wanted to *finish* something in the time.  This ended up shaping the majority of the game, I picked the concept I did because it required minimal simulation, the graphical style because I wouldn’t need to make too much etc. etc.

What went well:

I’m really happy with the direction I took, and particularly my choice to bite off as little as possible.  I ended up being able to get the core gameplay, graphics etc. down very quickly, and that left me with a lot of time to polish and polish.  Were it just a prototype (say what I had at the end of day one) I’m not convinced it’d have been very good, but I’m pretty happy with the fleshed out version.

Following (not quite to the letter, but not far off) the Survival Guide paid off to, it’s a very good set of advice.  I think even the time I spent blogging/on irc/or cooking all ended up helping me keep sufficiently distanced to be able keep polishing and improving something despite being so close to it for such a short length of time.

What went badly:

The controls!  I was a little bit worried about them from the very start, and with all the time I spent polishing the rest of the game I could have easily taken the hour or two I’d have needed to do something less frustrating.  I think the problem was that by the time I had the free time to deal with such things I was so familar with the controls I’d put in earlier on that they just felt natural to me.  I should perhaps have got more feedback during development (and listened more to that I did get).

The other issue was that I couldn’t really see a simple solution and I didn’t want to spend time faffingiaround on something that might not have even worked.  The solution now seems very trivial with the benifit of hindsight, you just allow directions to be pre-selected before the junctions.  It’s the only thing I’m *really* unhappy with in the game, and as such I spent a little time fixing it.  The updated version can be downloaded from http://jwhiting.nfshost.com/coding/onlyforwardfixed.zip it is perhaps worth mentioning that the only thing I’ve changed is the controls, and also that if you’re still judging entries do play the genuine entry instead. The updated version for the unlikely event that anyone wants to play a better version after they’ve made their mind up.

Conclusion:

Wow, that was a bit more epic than I was expecting, congratulations if you’ve just struggled through all of it!

Overall I really enjoyed the competition, I’m definitely looking forward to the next one (fingers crossed I’ll be able to enter it).  It was all a lot of fun, and some extremely impressive stuff was done (just not by ‘safe option’ me).  I’m quite looking forward (only forward, har har..) to seeing the results tomorrow too, I never thought I’d care about that side at all, but it’s kind of exciting nonetheless.

Tags: postmortem, update, updated

Hey all, haven’t yet decided how involved I’m going to be in this mini-ld, I’m not feeling rediculously commited, but we shall see.  I’ve spent the last couple of hours working on a system to generate a load of semi-randomized species of odd pixel insect flying things.   Kind of a poor mans version of this sort of thing http://www.davebollinger.com/works/pixelrobots/

Seems to be working okay, so heres a first screenshot thing:

Good luck all

Well, progress has been pretty good today.  I’ve been using LÖVE http://love2d.org/ for the first time to do this, and it’s been a very pleasant experience so far.

I’m up to the stage at which I’ve got something that is basically a complete, if unexciting game, which is a really nice place to be at the end of day one. Still not sure how motivated I’m going to be tomorrow, but ultimately I’d be okay with going ‘final’ with what I’ve got now, so I’ll be happy even if I barely touch it.

A screenshot to show how things look at the moment:

The idea is you sift through undiscovered lifeforms, naming them as you go, and ultimately hoping against hope for a sample of one particularly mythical species to arrive. It’s distinctly casual in nature, to the point of being more a toy than a game. That sits oddly with me, but I think trying to force challenge into it wouldn’t feel right either, so I’ll guess I’ll stick with the way it is.

Well, it looks like I’m not going to get any further on my entry, pretty bored with my idea now. Having said that this *is* a complete entry, it’s just not as fun/interesting as I’d hoped it’d be.

So yes, here it is: fauna.zip faunasrc.zip

You can browse through the vast array of remarkably similar species, and name them to your hearts content, there’s even some internet based sharing of names, (but it’s decidedly flimsy, and involves lame command prompt windows popping up momentarily).

*sigh*, not my finest hour, I think I might stick with a more conventional game idea next time around, and/or only enter if I’m actually feeling fairly commited. It was good for trying out LÖVE though.

Obligitrary screenshot:

Tags: final

Hey,

I’m Jonathan Whiting, aka/formerly MrPiglet.  Haven’t done one of these seriously since LD13 (Roads), though I’ve often meant to other commitments kept getting in the way.  Seems I’ve got a properly free weekend coming up though, so I’m in!

Flex is my platform of choice at the moment, and seems rather suitable.  So I’ll be aiming for a Flex + Gimp + other random things approach.  I’m going to use  home rolled base code that has support for blit-style rendering, simple animated sprites, truetype text, and the highly useful as3sfx. It also has little bit of very lightweight generic game/fe framework so I can hit the ground running on Saturday morning.

My work enviroment looks like this:

If you’re getting ‘corner-of-a-bedroom’ vibes from it, that’s because that’s exactly what it is. Not much exciting going on, two screens, well-used notepad acting as a mousemat, ever-present mug of tea, and some highly macho desktop wallpaper. So, basically it looks like I’m pretty much set, roll on Saturday, I’m ready!

Will probably be lurking around on irc (as JonathanW) for most of the duration, and I love to see other people’s creation process, so I’ll try and keep this well updated with what I’m up to and why. I’m actually really rather excited.

Tags: basecode, deskphoto, introduction

Woke up earlier than intended this morning (5:30am rather than 7:00am), probably due to excitement x). This might mean things are going to be a bit harder later on today, but, hey, it also means I’ve got an hour and a half headstart.

The theme is Islands, this makes me happy, I had an idea what I wanted to do for islands.

I’m a good couple of hours into development now. The first hour was mostly spent getting getting a rough visual look sorted out, and then splitting it up into useful sprites.

Then I got myself some breakfast (leftover sausage sandwhich and a mug of green tea).

Since then I’ve been getting cracking on the actual source code, putting in some tile based functionality, and code to make those tiles render prettily. It currently looks like this:

In my into post I mentioned I’d be trying to post lots of builds along the way to really show the evolution of the game, so in that spirit, here’s build no 1 (you need flash) http://jwhiting.nfshost.com/ld/17/build01.swf

You can click around to toggle between land and sea. This isn’t how the gameplay will work, it’s just my game’s going to be a bit level design centric, and as such I’m going to be putting in in-engine level design tools as I go.

So yeah, feels like a lot of time burnt already, but on the other hand, I guess I’ve done quite a bit too

Okay, I’ve been plugging away for a few more hours, putting player movement + collision in, adding stuff so I can load and save levels in some way.

Annoyingly I wasted about half an hour on a completely silly bug that I really should have spotted sooner. If you’re relying on a variable to be different in each instance of a class, make sure you haven’t made it “static”.. Grarghh..

Liberal application of tea and ginger biscuits got me through it though.

Feeling rediculously hungry already, but it’s only 11am here (UK), so I’m going to try and hold off on lunch for a bit longer.. In the meantime, more tea and biscuits!

Build Two

You can walk around, between screens, and can’t walk of the islands.. There’s a few glitches still, but nothing horrific.. Next step is probably to add some actual gameplay mechanics, might need to do some design work first though, my ideas are still a little vague.