BATTLE STATIONS

Some trivia:

• I’ve been programming for a month. This will be God-awful.
• C++ and SDL shall be used.
• Sleep is for pussies/winners.
• I smell really bad.

Ed and I have been tearing our hair out for about an hour trying to think of a non-trivial game idea. The result:

Gimpy the Bird.

Gimpy The Bird

I’m starting to think sleep would be a good idea.

Well, it’s been a productive six hours. So far, this is a screenshot of everything we have:

Not Shown: Image loading, Movement, Text Display, Gameplay, 3D Graphics Engine, Multiplayer LAN, Innovative Features, Skill

Well, time for a break!

We have overcome our greatest challenge yet: opening the Lucozade.

In other news, we now have images, movement, and almost text! GAME FINISHED 😀

Hit a massive snag with sprite-loading. We’re using transparent PNG spritesheets. For, say, the font, the SDL_Surface* _font is loaded, and displays as transparent with no problems.

When blitting parts of _font onto an empty SDL surface, there is no transparency:
SDL_Surface *surface = SDL_CreateRGBSurface(SDL_SWSURFACE | SDL_SRCALPHA, width, height, 32,0xff000000,0x00ff0000,0x0000ff00,0);

SDL_BlitSurface(_font, &srcRect, surface, &destRect);
results in:

I’ve tried every combination of masks imaginable, including _font->format->Rmask, etc., to no effect.

If anyone has any idea what I’m doing wrong, I’d love to know, even though we’re very unlikely to make the jam deadline at this point.

A bit late, I know. I’ve actually been making stuff since Monday, but my internet and I fell out. Last time I did this with some friends, but as this is the mini, I’m going to go it alone.
Unfortunately, I’m neither an artist nor a musician, and some might even question my programming ability (while I’m not in the room). However, I’ve already finished all the graphics I think I’ll need, and, if I do say so myself, my clouds are pretty damn swanky:

(Hmm… check the dither on that)

I’ve started on some totally unsuitable music and sound effects, but I haven’t written a single line of code yet, so I may yet fail 😛

OBJECTS = $(SOURCES:.ccp=.o)

Who wants to guess what happened when I ran make clean?

(The c++ file format I was using was .cpp)

We’re In! Right now, I don’t know who We are, but We are definitely In excluding those of us that are Out.
(There could be as many of five of us or as few as two).

Programming in C++ with the SDL/OpenGL libraries.
Graphics in GIMP and maybe Photoshop
Sound and music in either Cubase and some other stuff or an Ardour/ZynAddSubFX/Midi-Keyboard/Hydrogen cocktail.

More on this story as it develops.

Basically because I have one lying around, we’ve hooked up my internet camera to my dyndns account for the more perverted among you.

You can connect to it here:
http://gazserve.dyndns.org:8150
user: guest
pass: pass

I dunno how long I’ll keep it up. The whole thing really is a bit creepy.

Well, spent about three hours battling against my stupid framework, (which I wrote), just to allow rotation about any point.

Here’s what we’ve got so far:

Wooo!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Lanaguage: C++ && (Maybe) Lua
Code: VIM
Music: Midi-keyboard && zynaddsubfx && Ardour && Hydrogen
Graphics: Photoshop || The GIMP
Map Editor: Tiled
Livestream: http://www.twitch.tv/gazok (Maybe)

So, after going to a meetup, only to forget my laptop charger, I’ve decided to use what little juice I have today to start a 2 day Jam entry. Once my laptop dies, I’ll go back home and continue.

Fun fun fun.

Do it last and do it fast.

I’ve finished my game. At least, I’ve finished the writing and the programming.

Unfortunately, it looks a little bit like this:

So I have an hour and a half to do all of the graphics and design the entire map.

FUN FUN FUN.

My game was The Banker: An Atrocity in Three Parts

It was made in slightly less than two days from scratch with C++, and entered in the Jam.
Libraries used: SFML and Boost Property Tree
Tools used: VIM (IDE), GIMP, Tiled Map Editor.

What went right:

• I finished! This was the first game I’ve actually managed to do in time.
• The idea. While I didn’t get to work on it for a day, I had the idea the moment the theme was announced and it didn’t really change at all after that. This is the first LD that I can say that for – although it’s the only one where I would have benefitted more the other way around.
• I got most of the dialogue I wanted in
• By compromising on features, managed to make all three parts of the game
• It was almost funny?
• SFML wasn’t as God-awfully obstrucvtive as I usually find it

What went wrong:

• Programming took around twice as long as I expected
• As a result, all graphics had to be made in ~1 hour
• As a result, the graphics were terrible
• Movement was too slow, but this only became apparent once I made the map larger than 10×10 tiles in the last ten minutes of the competition
• Some of the dialogue was done in the last couple of minutes before I uploaded, so it’s a little badly written in places, and feels inconsistent
• While it would never have been a “gameplay” type of game, it lacks even an attempt at gameplay features

What didn’t go at all:

• Didn’t have time to do any music. Not even sFXR
• Had to cut a few interactions, and jokes suffered as a result
• Didn’t have time to add the minigame I had planned
• Didn’t get in any social commentary or obscure economics jokes

Overall, though, I’m just glad I finished – it was a very close thing.
I spent so long on loading the maps that the benefits I reaped in terms of entity loading were rendered useless given the lack of art assets, which was a shame. Just having better art or any music would improve the game so massively that I think I ought to just brush it up a little next weekend.

We’re in for the Jam for the nth time.

Our base code, the Tank Engine, can be found on github. Of course, anyone is free to use Tank if they like, but unfortunately it still lacks complete documentation or any form of input handling, so I wouldn’t advise it.

Other tools may include GIMP, Photoshop, vim, zynaddsubfx, ardour, twitter, a barbeque, giving up.

Firstly, it’s late and I’ve been kept up by all kinds of cross-platform build shenanigans, so I haven’t been able to play anyone’s games yet, but I really hope everyone had a great jam and had a lot of fun.

Now, however, it’s time to talk Smack.

Who wants to bring the Smack?

I don’t like to toot my own horn, but Card Smack was a rousing success. From flawless cross-platform support to AI that can outplay the sharpest of tools, Card Smack has it all.

Who uses Windows, anyway?

In all seriousness, though, I am quite pleased with CS. While all of its advertised merits are entire falsehoods (it *does* in fact work on Windows – just not all at once), the game and its graphical representation work fairly well, in my opinion, and I think it looks pretty cool too.

Someone’s about to deliver the smack.

However, I prefer to focus on the negatives:

• The AI is horrendously broken. It wasn’t even intended to be good, just to look like it was playing, and it couldn’t manage that. It just sits there in a corner worrying its cards.
• Abilities are purely decorative
• Our soundtrack sounds deafeningly like silence
• The user-interface isn’t at all informative enough – how much damage did I do?
• And more!

With that glittering review, who could restrain themselves from trying Card Smack?

Oh, everyone? Oh.

But I already made the best game ever*. Like years ago. So, everyone can stop now, right?

The best game you’ll ever ploy

http://gazokblog.co.uk/HelloWorld/

I wish I’d got here sooner. I could’ve saved you all so much trouble <:'o (.

Song: Space Battle

Tags: house, ld48, music, soundcloud, space