Alright, I’m declaring that I intend to participate… this will be my first LD…

I will be using a work-in-progress custom engine/library, at the moment it’s pretty incomplete, and right now I’m hacking a copy of it into a simple physics wrapper, with some audio and stuff, so it’s more of a framework, so that I don’t have to write all the lower level stuff during the 48 hours…

My engine/library is made with C++ and uses Ogre3d, Nvidia PhysX, OpenAL, and if I have time to make it do something, perhaps some simple lua scripting as well.

Given another couple hours I could’ve finished it up, but at the moment it’s not ready… I slept late this morning, and I also missed the first 6 hours because of a party… It was my first LD though, and I intend to do it again. So, lesson learned.

My game was going to be called “Electromigration”, it procedurally creates the level as you go, it’s an fps and the goal is/was going to be to keep exploring and finding randomly placed upgrades while fighting off enemies. I had the level generation working perfectly, and enemies and shooting are all there. But I still need to make the game generate enemies and upgrades in the level (at the moment all you can do is walk around the endless level and spawn enemies via the console).

It looks sorta VR-y, with colorful grids (as the player explores, the areas that have been walked through fade from red to green, so you can see where you’ve already been).

I probably should have prepared better, I used a custom engine, but all I had finished in the engine (which was meant for another project, and had been started a week before LD started) was part of the lua scripting setup and the basics of the graphics engine (I used Ogre) setup, so I wound up writing a lot of needless low-level stuff… on the positive, I really did a lot in a short time (that was a couple thousand lines of C++…) and an ingame lua-based scripting console was amazing for debugging/testing.

Here’s a couple screenshots; I might keep working for a few hours just to get it done…

So I tried LD last time and didn’t quite finish my project in time (my failure post), and I’m going to have another go at it this time…

As before I’ll be making something 3D and using C++. I’ll be using Ogre for rendering, irrKlang for audio, OIS for input, Bullet for collision detection/physics and maybe Chaiscript for some scripting goodness.

Last time I used the beginnings of an engine I was writing, but it became sort of a hassle to work with something meant for a much larger project, so I’m starting from scratch this time; though I will probably hack up a quick bit of base code tonight.

Also, I just cleaned up my workspace, so here’s a ‘before’ pic:

(Note the sexy desk (made of 2×4’s and particle board) and 15 year old keyboard…)

Good luck everyone!

Tags: C++, deskphoto

A little over an hour now…

I finally got all my homework for the weekend done (digging through civil war letters to quote was ever so much fun…). I’ve also got my base code about as far as I can get it.

I really doubt anyone would want to use it (I threw it together in about 4hrs total, ugly code, probably all kinds of buggy…), but to comply with the rules I’m posting it now.

It’s basically a simple state machine plus physics, graphics, audio, and input.

The dependencies are:

• Ogre3D (1.7.0 RC1)
• Bullet 2.76
• irrKlang 1.3.0
• The newest version of OIS (comes with Ogre)
• Chaiscript’s newest version (never got around to adding this, so comment out an include or two and it’s gone)
• Boost 1.4.1 (threading and date/time, these are because of Chaiscript, so again, not 100% necessary)
• Windows and Visual C++ (though it would probably compile under Linux if the ‘#pragma once’-s were replaced with proper header guards…)

Download: here

Once again, good luck to everyone!

I actually just took a (very rainy) walk, and I have an idea… since I failed to finish last time and I thought that one turned out fun (Tron-style FPS with colorful grids and whatnot), I’ll probably reuse that concept, but re-imagined with islands (obviously..). I’m not terribly happy with something so similar to what I did last time, but it beats anything else I can think of right now… and I know it’s fairly unique, even if I’ve personally done it before…

Yay, I actually finished something this time!

My Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1503

I made a sort of 3d platformer, you jump from island to island at high speeds. It’s simple but (hopefully) a little addicting.

It looks better in motion...

Alright, so this was my first experiment with timelapsing (I used chronolapse). I used 120 seconds per picture, so it’s sorta choppy, and I missed a couple hours when I forgot to turn chrono back on, but it’s definitely a cool way of seeing how you work.

LD17 Timelapse \”Island Hopping\”

Alright, I think it’s time for some post-compo thoughts.

First off,  I must say there are a lot of really amazing games this LD and I’m hoping to work my way through all the ’em if I can 😀 (I’ve rated or commented on ~70 so far).

I’ll write up a full postmortem sometime in the next while, but overall I’m very happy with how it went. Everything really just fit together and I managed to do a whole lot in the 48 hours, and so far I’m getting some pretty positive feedback (and the bytejacker article just made my week 😀 ).

This whole experience has really gotten me thinking, in the past I’ve focused on really large, long-term projects projects; and while they may have nice clean code and cool technical buzzwords under the hood, this 48hr game is quite a bit more enjoyable than my previous ~1yr effort. I’m thinking I’ll stop/slow working on my current long-term project and keep making little projects like this every couple weeks or so, the instant feedback (a couple days of coding and you know if it’s a good/bad concept rather than a couple months….) and the variety is really great.

I am still working on Island Hopping, I just now got an online high score thing working (the game doesn’t read the data back yet, but my current build uploads the data correctly) and I’m playing with some PHP/SQL stuff to make the scores/stats display nicely online.

I should have another build with high scores and such up in a few days.

Also on the todo are: better difficulty curve-age, allowing you to turn off the music (also, perhaps some better music…), some gameplay tweaks (maybe combos for the red islands, or more types of powerups, etc), lots of UI tweaks, a tutorial, etc. And after all else is working, I might whip up a fancy water shader as a high quality option…

And I have some comment responses:

fun concept, and really quite addicting. nice work!

Thanks!

Fun concept indeed! The only problem I have with this game is interpreting the platforms as islands, but it works with some abstract thinking :3 Good stuff!

Haha, yeah it’s a bit of a stretch, but my art skills don’t include palm trees and such…

Very nice graphically, very clear what you’re meant to do, just incredibly buggering hard to do so! Good fun but too hard due to the controls.

Thanks! and yeah I really need to tweak the controls/difficulty… (the updated version is a bit better, but I’m gonna be tweaking  it for a while…)

Very nice 3d graphics, very fun, a bit too hard. Good work for a 48 hours short time

Thanks! and yep seeing a pattern here with the difficulty…

Way too hard to get into. The learning curve is a cliff.

Ouch, but it does seem to be true… I’m workin’ on it 😉

You *really* gimped the jumping, and that’s what killed the game for me. Not so much the aiming or timing, but the falling miserably short on every single platform I attempted… sad. My highest combo was a measly 4 islands.

I’m hoping the update with double jumping helps at least a bit, but yeah the jumping and handling still have a ways to go…

Very nice looking albeit simple. Pretty hard, though, and the first straight line is maybe a bit long, since we die and start over every 3 islands
Music is clean but a bit repetitive. Overall quite well polished.

Thanks! I might trim the start platform down a bit then. And yeah, I made the music in LMMS in about 20 mins (haha, and the fact that I’ve never played an instrument probably doesn’t help in my music generation skills…)

Fun and addictive, but needed a smoother difficulty curve

I’m trying to smooth it now

Madly addicting. If you continue this, I would consider allowing players to use their own music

Yeah, I’m definitely adding a toggle to the music for the next version…

Best game I tried so far. Really adictive!!!

Thanks! 😀

Very fun game, reminded me a bit of Counter-Strike bunny hopping. Music got repetitive very quickly though. If you ever keep on working on this, I’d love a online high score.

Thanks! the music will be toggleable in the next version and I’m working on online high score right now.

TONS of fun!!!!!!

The music really got me in the mood, but it got old quick.

Great idea, having the different difficulty settings. I was able to master “Easy” before moving on.

Excellent work.

Thanks! Definitely seeing a pattern with the music, I might search for something nicer online now that the compo is over, in addition to letting the player toggle it.

I played the original version, and while it was difficult, it was also a ton of fun. One of my favorite entries so far. The graphics are very simple, but they do their job very well. The music is repetitive but not annoying. What the game does sorely miss though is a high score table. Preferrably online high score table. I haven’t played the double jump version yet, so maybe it’s not that big of a deal there, but what I thought could had helped with the difficulty is if you had a minimap that you could refer to, especially for long jumps where you’re staring at the sky. Frankly though, I think maybe you should limit the player’s vision or just make looking up not do anything, because that’s a bit of an annoying thing to have to do. My best score was 49700. I got close to that on other runs, but on that run I got a 4x multiplier followed by a decent combo, so I got lucky a bit.
Oh, I guess the game also really needs a tutorial. It’s not obvious that you have to tilt your view to affect your jump height.
I hope you keep working on this. I’m going to download the double jump version now and play some more.

Thanks for the in-depth feedback! The high score table is on the way, and I’m working on tweaking all the controls and things, and good point on having a tutorial, I’ll add that to the list

Yay #7 in Fun and Overall! Congrats and thanks to everyone who participated and voted! I only got to rate about 66% of the games thanks to a hectic couple of weeks, but I’ll definitely still have a look at some of the ones I missed.

Update: More final version released, (includes fix to the double jumping issue mentioned in the comments), here’s the mod db page for it http://www.moddb.com/games/island-hopping/

Thanks to homework and all sorts of unexpected junk these last couple weeks I wasn’t able to get this ready until now, I still have yet to make a web interface for viewing the high scores or a tutorial, but whatever…

Here’s what I’m calling the version 1.2 beta, it’s probably fairly buggy and missing things, but I think/hope it is significantly better than the compo version.

Tutorial is listed as an option, but I never got around to it, so just ignore it for now. Also, keep in mind that this is my first attempt at online leaderboard stuff, so I might disable it at any point (or it might break) due to unforeseen events.

[Download Link]

Released a more final version on Mod DB: http://www.moddb.com/games/island-hopping/

Changes:

• Improved double jumping (also double jumping is removed for hard and insane modes)
• Online high scores
• Local high scores
• More options (toggle music, allow internet access, field of view, etc)
• OGRE dialogue thing removed in favor of ingame options
• Jumping is now mapped to all letter keys, up arrow, ctrl/alt/shift/enter/space and mouse clicking
• All of those above keys also restart the game now (there is a 1/2 second delay to keep you from clicking right through it though)
• Misc bugfixes
• And probably more but I’m drawing a blank now…

Anyways, I’d appreciate any feedback, and I hope you enjoy it! I’ll probably keep working with it for a week or two, so suggestions are welcome.

So I’ll keep this brief (it’s 2 am…), but I released an update to Island Hopping with online leaderboards and a few more features a bit under a week ago with the help of some friends. So we put it up on Mod DB (here’s the page) and got a surprisingly large reaction… I was just looking at the leaderboard stats:

• 135,000 Runs recorded (!!!)
• 13,629,036,774 total points earned
• 796 Hours worth of runs (that’s 33 DAYS, and I released it 6 days ago….)
• 1112 unique usernames (and there are about 31,000 runs by “Anonymous”…)

For 48 hours of work, plus a couple weeks’ on and off tinkering, I’m absolutely amazed…

C’mon, I want to see 200 games based on this!

Tags: motivation

I will be participating in this weekend’s Ludum Dare (yay!). It’s my third LD48 and I’m looking forward to making something!

I’ll be using a custom-made engine (written in C++), the engine is rather incomplete and filled with ugly code (atm it’s mostly just an Ogre/Bullet/OpenAL wrapper with a disorganized state machine and simple event system) so I don’t recommend that anyone use it, but as per the compo rules here is the GPL-ed source.

Also: I’ll be posting a workspace pic or two once I get all cleaned up and prepared, I’ll be using chronolapse for a timelapse, and I should be hanging around IRC on and off.

My workspace hasn’t changed all that much since last time, but here’s a pic:

The CRT on the left is to my old PC (usually a headless server, but I’m setting it up to run IRC all compo).

Software I’ll be using this time:

• Visual Studio 2008 Pro (C++)
• My custom engine (“QEngine”, uses Ogre, Bullet, OpenAL and a few other bits and bobs; source was released in my earlier post)
• GIMP
• Paint
• Blender
• Notepad++
• sfxr
• Either LMMS or Musagi
• Spotify!
• svn

I’m leaning towards making a shmup of some sort, as I’ve never made one and my last few projects have been first-person.

I might also make a quick warm up game to make sure everything is in order…

Tags: deskphoto

Okay, inspired by the 2hr warm up game idea from IRC, I made a 2hr game based on the best (but sadly downvoted into oblivion) theme “Isaiah Mustafa – The man your game could smell like”.

It was made in a little over 2 hours since I was a bit distracted and getting it all to package up took some finagling (good test of my pipeline though), but here it is:

Windows (Linux may come later)

The goal is very simple (and not terribly fun); avoid the green “Double Rainbow Body Wash” boxes, and collect the red Old Spice ones to reach 100%.

Tags: C++, compo, journal, progress, Windows

These seem to be all the rage, so here are my two (!!!1!!@!!) previous entries (the first of which didn’t even get finished on time..)

In other news my engine and test game both compiled and ran in Linux (Arch x64) with minimal tweaking, so a late/post-compo port is likely (and should only take a few minutes).

Also, my theme picks are Isolation, Bugs and Darkness (oh and double zombie rainbows of course!), I voted all others down.

Tags: montage

Okay, 9 hours in, gonna sleep now…

I’m making a shmup, it’s 3d (though until I get some nice textures and particle effects going, it doesn’t really look interesting…), and the premise is that you control a cargo ship of some sort with powerful magnet/tractor beam-ish tech, so you can “force push” enemies into each other (I’m using bullet for some fancy physics), or pull an enemy in to use them as a shield and use their weapon to destroy other enemies.

Here’s an early shot:

It’s all coming along pretty well, I’ll have some screenshots to show in a little while, but all the physics are finally cooperating… using a full 3d physics engine for a shmup might have been a bit much, but I think it’ll allow for some cool effects when I get to the polishing stage.

Muffins!

And since everyone seems to be posting pics of their cats:

Tags: cat, food

Okay, 26 hours and 30 mins in, mostly feature complete, though I’ll have to tweak the controls a lot to get em just right (gonna have mouse, arrows/ZX, WASD/something, etc to allow for peoples’ preferences). I also need to get the enemy generation running better and add more enemy ship types, but other than those, gameplay is all there. After that it’s just gonna be a mad dash to texture it all up pretty (almost every texture in the shot is placeholder) and add particle effects everywhere.

At the moment I have the enemies’ colors set to their health for debug purposes:

9.5 hours left!

Still got a long-ish list of stuff to do, but I think I’ll finish with something reasonably game-like.

Got textures and some simple particle explosions going:

Breakfast

Diet Pepsi (that’s less than half the cans I’ve drank this LD…):

Tags: foodphoto, progress

Alright, finished up my shmup. My attempts at making music for it failed miserably, so I’ve left it music-less… but the gameplay seems to work well enough, and while still shots look sorta iffy, it looks nice enough in motion.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=1503

Turns out that using full 3d physics and graphics engines for a game with entirely 2d gameplay isn’t worth the added effort… ah well lesson learned.

Good luck to everyone still scrambling for the deadline!