Hi, so this is my first time participating in LD and I’m looking forward to the whole weekend.  Gotta say I was a bit stumped when the theme was finally released, but now I think I got some ideas to toy around with.  Of course, I may well be sabotaged by my own carelessness by the time it’s all said and done.  First of quite possibly many blunders just occurred after the spending the last two and half hours of coding.  Basically instead of:

$ rm *.pyc

I did something more like:

$ rm *.py

on accident (damn you keyboard and your missing of crucial keystrokes!).  All I gotta say is thank you Subversion.  By the way, for you non-python programmers, I essentially blew away all the source files (about six or so files at this point) instead of the auto-generated bytecode.  Talk about no bueno.  Fortunately I have a revision not too far back from the state I was currently in, so it’s not too much of a setback, but definitely not cool either way.

In the meantime, I think I’ll quickly re-alias rm so it does something with a little less finality, say, just move things to a .trash folder.  Yeah…  Then it’ll be back to putting back in the new features I so indiscriminately smote out of existence.

Oh, and just to throw this out, as far as development goes I’m (currently) using Python on Mac OS X with the Pyglet game programming library, which is a simple library that’s got a lot of nice features.  Definitely worth checking out as a possible alternative to other libraries like PyGame.  I’m hoping that by using Python I can easily bring my game over on a Windows box and run something like py2exe to make for a nice easy install, though I guess we’ll see in a day or so’s time how well that works. 

After a grueling 24 hours, I can confidentally say I’ve gotten most of the mechanics done and can now focus almost entirely on content.  I have a couple of small tasks that I need to finish up (extend the collision system to have a trigger collision type and fix the order in which things are drawn), but the bulk of the hard work has been finished.

The gist of my project is that you’re a freelance construction worker, namely you own a bulldozer and you pick up odd jobs bulldozing anything and anyone who gets in your way on the inner-city streets of a soon-to-be-named urban town!  It’ll mainly be puzzle-oriented, as you have to move debris and other items over the roadways to either clear a path or get to a certain location, but we’ll see what else I can do with it.  I don’t have any screen shots now since everything is placeholder art, but hopefully with the next update I’ll be able to showcase some pretty pictures.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of this weekend is that I am absolutely horrible at doing effective collision detection and response.  That part of the code is enough to make anyone cringe I am sure, and I’m dead certain that there has to be better ways of doing it than how I’ve done it.  That said, what I got up in running works (well, there’s some minor quirks that occur, but nothing too distracting, and actually makes the game more interesting), so I won’t plan on monkeying around with it any longer unless I have no other choice (ie, turns out to be a bottleneck or something).

Well, I’ve had this for a while, but I’ve jsut been working on tweaking various things.  The more I think about it, the more I might not have a game per se, but more of a sandbox to play with.  In the next three and half hours I’ll play around with getting some simple levels with some defined objectives.  Basically this has evolved into very a much a puzzle-centric type of game similar to that of games like Rush Hour (shift items around to find paths to some objective).  I kind of wish I had more time to glue the various gameplay components into a more cohesive unit, but all in all I’m quite pleased with what I have so far.

But without further ado, I present to you a couple of screens from Dozer, the game that’ll make you wish you had, too, had your own personal bulldozer to drive around and cause general mayhem.  The first shot is just a main menu pic (I’m rather fond of my artwork on this one, given that I’m not a great artist at all), and the other one is my test sandbox level where all the various gameplay components can be tried out.

By hook or by crook, I will be making an appearance for this weekend’s LD15.  I need to definitely wrap some things up before this coming weekend, not least of all getting together my collection of Python code I hope to use for this coming competition.  I still need to clean a bunch of it up and make sure it’s good to go, but sometime Wednesday I’m hoping to have it up for public download so that I’m all in compliance with the rules.  Beyond that, totally looking forward to yet another weekend of insanity and insomnia in an attempt to crank out something worthy of being called a game.

Okay, so like I said in my previosu post, I wanted to post a link to the “framework” that I’ll be using this weekend.  So without further ado, I present: the Ghetto Game Engine. This has just been my attempt to get a general purpose “engine” together, but since I haven’t exactly been winning to the fight in search of free time, this hasn’t progressed too terribly far.  That said, I plan on using it this weekend, and I’ve posted the source for all who want to see and possibly attempt to use it this weekend.  Warning: it’s very terse right now.

Speaking of what I’ll be using this weekend, I figured while everyone else is doing it, I’ll post my own list of tools and tech!  Everybody loves lists, right?

TECH SIDE

Language: Python (version 2.6)
Libraries: Right now just pyglet 1.1.3, might look into pulling Rabbyt in as well
Platform: I’m working on my Macbook, but since it’s Python, I’m hoping to easily put it on Windows as well.  I just need to figure out how to use py2exe and py2app
Version Control: Subversion.

ARTSY SIDE

Graphic Software: Photoshop CS4 w/ Wacom Intuos tablet (there is no WAY I’m going to try to draw things with a track pad or mouse)
Sound Software: I’ve got VMWare loaded on my Macbook for the sole purpose of running Sound Forge for mashing up sound effects.  If need be, I can go out with my field recorder and take some samples, then contort the crap out of them in Sound Forge.  That said, I might be wanting to check out this sfxr program people keep talking about.
Music Software: If I’m actually lucky to get to a point where I can try and make some music, I think I’m just going to hook up a Casio keyboard the recorder and mash something cheesy out.  I have a copy of Cubase from when I took digital music classes back in college that I can use for sequencing, but I want to make sure I have some gameplay done before worrying about the music (and sound for that matter).

Yeah, aside from all that, I really got nothing.  Looking forward to the competition, and best of luck to all that do participate!

Normally I rack my brains for hours on end trying to come up with an idea for game based on some central theme.  But lo, not this time!  I’ve actually got what I think will be a doable and fun game.  Basis for inspiration is the old original Metal Gear games for NES.  Essentially you will try to progress through a series of caves, either attacking enemies with some form of weaponry, evading them by slipping into cracks and crevices, or creating obstacles between you and them by blowing holes in the cave floor with dynamite (this last one is actually a stretch.  would love to add it in, but we’ll see how it goes).  For reference, here’s an image from the old school game itself:

Image from old game Metal Gear for NES

To add some more depth to it, I want to add in some adventure game aspects as well so it’s not straight arcade.  Simple things like talk to NPCs, gather a few items and solve some inventory puzzles in order to advance through the game.  My pipe dream would be to also add in a mini game or two to act as some of the puzzles, but really, I don’t this will happen in 48 hours.  But hey, who knows?  Things seem to be going smoothly right now, so we’ll see.

I’d add some images of concept sketches and what not, but currently my camera battery is dead, so I’m charging that now.  Once that’s charged, I’ll be able to take part more in the photo blogging aspect of this competition too.

And by breakfast of champs, I mean my turkey and cheddar egg sandwich, courtesy of Eistein’s Bagels:

Breakfast, half consumed

Now it’s off to mad coding.  In the next hours hope to have everything in place so that I can crank out simple scenes/levels.  By mid afternoon I should have some preliminary screen shots, and towards the end of the day, have a fair amount of gameplay (for suitable definitions of “end of the day”).

So I had the unfortunate happening of passing out an hour after the constraints were announced, and I didn’t wake up until about 30 minutes ago.  In any case, I think that was a good thing because as soon as I woke up, my mind was fresh with ideas given the constraints of this MiniLD (yay!).

My biggest hurdle so far was coming up with a fun game idea that could use the input constraints well.  I thought it’d be fun to use the number keys at the top of the keyboard and situate your hands with one finger on each key (as if you had your hands on home row, just shifted up two rows).  Then each finger pretty much is a single trigger or button, and so the challenge then became what can I do with 8 push buttons? And that’s when ideas started coming.

I should note here that I also wanted to avoid mapping four of the keys to the directional motions left/down/up/right (which I’m sure you vi/vim users out there would’ve loved ;)).  So with that in mind, I started discarding a lot of ideas and typical gameplay mechanics.  And then as I was staring at my VCR, it kind of hit me: it would be cool to make a game the used some sort of tape transport control scheme would be cool, you know, have a rewind, fast forward, play/pause, and a “record” button.

So from there, this idea formed: you’re a runner.  I don’t know what kind of runner, maybe the world’s fastest runner, who knows?  But you’re a runner who runs at a constant speed but can also affect the time and space of things around you.  Your main time controls are:

• Slow down – Everything around you moves at a reduced speed.
• Play/Pause – Actually stop everything around you from moving.
• Record snapshot – Remember the player’s current location and other physics state (velocity, direction, etc).
• Speed up – Everything around you moves at a faster speed.

Of course, manipulating the time-space continuum is a tiring feat!  So for that reason you have kind of a “time stamina” you have to manage, and if you don’t have enough energy, mashing your transport controls aren’t going to do a thing.

As for your other hand, it’ll be used to activate various “abilities” your player learns in the form of pickups/powerups.  I have four slots to play with, and I’m thinking of reserving one to always be jump.  I might continue running (no pun intended) with the track runner theme and have other pickups be like a pole from a pole vault (so you can make it over higher obstacles) or a shot put (use as a projectile weapon).

Enough rambling. I need breakfast.