I hate doing my own pixel art.

Art asset update.

First meal of the jam was tacos. Sadly, no pictures were taken. Sorry I was hungy.

First official snack though was this:

To make:

Scrambled eggs.

Ham.

Shredded bacon.

Shredded cheese.

Mix.

Heat in microwave.

 

First meal of “today”:

 

Game plans for today:

Tilemap.

Characters.

Character stats.

NPC movement.

Switching player character.

Maybe more.

Hello there! Been doing a lot of art. A LOT of art. I think I have most of it. Maybe one or two more things. But I THINK I have steady progress. I have done ZERO programming so far though. Mostly cause the programming is stuff I’ve already done and open repositories.

In my “I’m in” post I didn’t state what I was using cause I was feeling down. I also thought that the number of times I’ve participated and haven’t changed what I’m using I figured it’d be fine to skip it since it’d be pretty well known OR you can just check out my history on here to see what I use.

I WILL be using one new thing though. A lighting system for enemy line of sight. Hopefully I can pull it off, heh. Any way.

The game itself is about a gang attempting to rob a whole town by poisoning them all to death. It has an old time radio show twist ending to it so not everything and everyone is as it seems! So any way, picture time!

Dinner:

Old art:

Misc art:

Mokup:

I achieved the art’s look by looking at what another tile set did and sort of doing that. Hopefully that’s not cheating.

Hopefully I’ll have a build soonish.

Good luck everyone!

This has been unnecessarily completely infuriating. It was just supposed to be a simple copy paste job. I did copy paste. Changed all the necessary names. Or at least I thought I did. And of course. There was little bug, after little bug, after infuriating little bug. I should NOT have gone past the deadline. But I did.

I wouldn’t be so upset if this wasn’t my last planned ludum dare. I just wanted one last feather in the cap you know? Now it’s just a smaller feather that I’ll keep in the back somewhere.

Looks like I may make it for the jam.

Sigh.

Screenshot Update:

Looks like I’m probably in.

In all honesty I’d thought I’d have a job by now. No job. Not even a call.

So yes, I THINK I’m in.

And done.

You can play as a comic snatching Sasquatch here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=1960

I’ll write up one of those post mortem things in a bit. Even though I hate them to death, this one is just perfect for one of ’em.

Sorry about not making blog posts. I get depressed just looking at the home page so I try to avoid it as much as possible.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot for you:

Just off the bat, I want you to know that I hate doing these. So I’ve never done one. I get nothing from reading them either. So I don’t read them. HOWEVER. THIS ludum dare I have a little story to tell. So, I figured what better way to tell it than modifying this format eh? Anyways, let’s begin.

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Theme:

I’m one of those people. The theme folks. Not those “OH GOD I HATE THE THEME I QUIT!” But the other kind. I GENERALLY try to like the theme or come up with SOMETHING to fit it. Even if it’s an old mechanic with a theme paste and I come up with nothing new, I still try to do something.  Whether or not I like it, I generally come up with something usually something right away. Luckily, that happened this time.

I love comics. And I took one of those personality quizzes and I came up with the monster Sasquatch. So I figured okay, what can a Sasquatch, other than being strong, do? They are generally recluses and only come out once in a while and don’t like their privacy being disturbed. Kinda sounds like a geek. So my thought process was, well, if your a comic geek that doesn’t get out very often and are full of anxiety and don’t want to bother with people BUT there’s a place where you can get free comics and not disturb much people OR yourself, where would it be? Well, I thought, the waning hours of a local comic con, of course, where there MAY be free comics littering the floor and left loose by themselves. So that’s how the idea tumbled.

So I wrote down this premise: The local comic con is over! Which means almost back to normal near ghost like streets and abandoned comics EVERYWHERE! Unlucky you, your a Sasquatch. Though lucky you most everyone leaves you alone sic[thinking your just another wandering cosplayer]. The Knights of Harmony, monster killers, do not. They are our in force tonight. Lucky you then, you’re good at vanishing and seeing in the dark. You just have to be very, very careful. Now get out there and bag those comics!

So I new this was Ludum Dare going in and I had to think small or the project wouldn’t get done. So I had my Core Idea already from the premise:

-Wander map in darkness collecting comics, avoiding guards.

So. I had the theme down, I thought, now to build the darn thing.

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Engines Go:

I had the technology. Or at least, I THOUGHT I did. I’ll get to that later. But  after announcement and idea, it was time to do dishes, and watch some TV. But I never stopped working on the game though. I knew it was ludum dare going in, so I KNEW the initial concept was going to be blown up, and needed trimming down. I knew I could do somewhat of a decent map from my last game ‘The Halfburn Incident’:

So I wanted to do something similar, but stopped myself thinking that was much too big, ESPECIALLY for the darkness mechanic I was going to add in. There would be way to many segments to find and from another project I knew that took a long time. So I kept pairing down the map. And cutting, and cutting, and cutting. The original map was having the Sasquatch start in his home in the woods, make it through the park to the city streets, and wander the streets collecting comics. I did some inner visualization, and instantly realized that was too big.  So I cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut some more.

I didn’t want to do a single screen, because I thought then that I would want to add levels, I didn’t want to do that because of time. I thought that a 2 screen width would be acceptable, but I knew that a 480 pixel screen height was not very adventurous. So, I calculated twice that, than cut that in half. My final game screen being 1280 pixels wide by 790 pixels tall. Or 80 tiles wide and 45 tiles tall with each tile being 16 wide and 16 tall. That felt acceptable and doable to me.

Core Idea:

Now. Knowing it was ludum dare, I decided to come up with the minimum amount of game that I would be happy with should I not finish in time. For that purpose, I began on the map. I decided that since I was not able to get the full “world” that I wanted, I figured I could still get part of it. So I came up with the monster as having broken into the convention hotel and was wandering about there. I needed to depict rooms, doors, windows, and walls, and flooring. Simple. That came out to about 16 tiles.

I didn’t want to do any floors, water fountains, water coolers, vending machines, tables, or other bits and pieces because of time. I could have because of the premise, a convention in clean up mode, but I knew I didn’t have enough time. I wanted a bit of variety, just a tad, in the floor tiles though so I came up with 2 floor tiles. Then I thought about windows. I first thought of doing just a pane of glass. But then I tried it and it didn’t seem to work so I just went with full windows and darkened the panes, since of course, it was going to be at night.

The full tile set:

So the tile set was done. I also had to make the characters then. The human guards were easy. I used a public domain character as a shading guide. But it was not a recolor and I did it myself. Trust me you can tell. If it was a recolor it’d look much, much, MUCH better:

I try to add diversity where I can in people in my games. It’s just better overall. While I could have made the Knights of Harmony a racist cult, I figured best not. Their goal is to keep the world pure for humanity, so I figured that’d include all humans. Although there IS a lack of female representation, again, I would have, but there was time to think about as well. Apologies for that.

Then we have our lovely player character who wears a green cap for some reason:

 

Okay, he wears a cap to stand out in the tile map. Since the tile map has a green floor and the brown wasn’t standing out at that size. The comics were a bit of a bugger to make cause they were so small, but I got them done and plugged into the game. So, art was done, and then I made the first screen. With no scrolling. I did this to test a few things.  This is where things started going bad.

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Engine Blowout:

I had used the feature that I wanted to use in a previous game. It was this one:

The lighting system I had found on the forums was very cool and I wanted to abuse it for this game. So I thought easy. Copy and paste the code and your done.

THAT is when things began to fall apart.

I had gotten used to the idea that the lighting just worked that I had forgotten about all the TROUBLE I had to do to get it to work. I basically followed the resource that I had in code. I just copy and pasted the block, because both games were similar enough that I figured that’s all I’d need to do. I even prepared beforehand by figuring out lighting segments the night before and blocking them out on pencil and paper to make it easier for me when I started working on it:

So I got that done, plugged in the system, made minor corrections, hit build, got a clean compile, then I hit play, which starts a live version and…

Black screen.

I was stunned. When that kind of black screen happens, that means I have no idea what that means. But generally, even with clean compiles and bug less runs, I’ve put it in the wrong section of code. So that means I can do one of three things:

• Experiment with placing the code different spots.
• Copy and paste over the entire working source.
• Fiddle with working with the system by hand, going line by line.

By this time, I didn’t want to work with it any more. AND I was running out of time. I tried placing the code in different spots first, which for some reason, proved fruitless. The mechanic works by: make the screen dark, then add lights to the dark. I could get the screen dark to run perfect no problem. But I could never get any lights to work. No matter where I put them. I had been working on this problem for a number of hours. Was getting upset and down, and was considering not finishing.

This was the worst part of the ludum dare for me.

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Operation:

So I walked away.

Only for a bit though. And considered what I had, and what I wanted. I was running out of time and options. And there was still lots of gamey bits and gui to add in. Which fortunately, doesn’t take me very long. That wasn’t what I thought about though. I thought about what I could do to make the kind of game I could be happy with if I couldn’t get the lighting to work. Still though, the idea seriously got me down for a couple of hours while I thought. And I finally came up with the current version that it is:

The point of the lighting, I thought, was to give atmosphere and to have the player ‘get caught’. I knew I couldn’t get atmosphere any more. So I had to get the player caught. One of my old stand byes for this enemy zones that followed the enemy units. Then if the player gets withing range the enemy shoots them. I finally got the shooting to work. Then I ran into another problem. The player was supposed to be able to use the environment to hide. But I realized that the system I was using was going to take longer than the time I had left.

So I cut that as well. And I had the player instant death and particle spray as they entered the enemy sight zone. The game was supposed to be light. So I added the scary guards, but placed them so they [SPOILER: never bother the player from getting the goods at all]. But if the player isn’t observant, they might not watch where they’re going the first time and fall into the deadly red squares.

I was able to plug everything else in and submit with under an hour to go.

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Aftermath:

I’m still not happy with the finished game. Even with the part of the core idea completed, I wanted to do more. I still want to do more, but I have little motivation to do so. Still, though, if I’ve learned one thing, I’ll simply copy and paste the working source and simply change the aesthetics to match the theme. I’m not going to give myself a headache next time over something that can be solved simply.

I’ll know better next time.

You can play my game, Comic Scavenging Sasquatch here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=1960

 

 

 

 

The almost completed tile set atlas.Calling it Patches of Adventure for now. ^^

Tags: gameboy

To do: Witch. Warp traps. Sign. Other states.

Progress:

I dunno how I feel about this.

I might make something. I might not. It’s been hell of a busy start of the week. I’m exhausted. People are coming over this weekend. I had hospital visits yesterday I’m tired from. I just don’t know.

I might make something. If I do it’ll be with the standard tools I use. Check my previous posts to see what they are. I’m not repeating myself. I didn’t even vote in one round. I’m tired.

So if I’m in, I’ll make something. Depending on the theme.

Stay tuned.

Or not.

 

It’s not the best or most exciting. But it’s something. The idea is that you are a worker in a food truck. The food truck has converted all of it’s menus to easy identifiable shapes, reducing hassle. Customers will come with an order in mind. And if you are on the right order spot, you get cash. If you miss them, you don’t. Customers orders will change in complexity, or customers will go faster. Or a crowd will form and you won’t get them all.

The correlation is that your food items are shapes. And to suit the customers needs, you are shifting which one you are serving by shifting your position in the food truck.

That’s all I have for now.

Tags: food, food truck

Things can get quite busy. Definitely going for an arcade style game here. Hopefully I’ll have something to submit tomorrow within time.

Tags: arcade game, food, food truck

And The Purple Banana is ready to roll! I might do a little polish here or there and add flash effects and maybe a sound or two. But otherwise, this is done. I have a lot of work to do elsewhere and this was supposed to be very short. I’ll submit it in a bit.

Tags: arcade, banana, food truck, purple