Day one is in the bag!  I’ve put five good hours of work into this, and sleep is very important.

But first, an update!

A nearly empty game map

A busier game map.

My game is called Monster Machine!, an incremental game in the style of Reactor Incremental, a favorite game of mine.  In Monster Machine you

place Monster generators to create monsters, Nightmare Portals to send monsters out to scare the kids, and Mad Scientist Labs to generate science goo for upgrades.  Get as many monsters, tears of sadness, and science goo as you can!

I made incredible progress for my first day, a fantastic sign considering my recent failures in Ludum Dare.  I am coding this game for your browser, using the HTML5 canvas, so anyone (almost) can play it!  Running the show is ImpactJS, a game engine I bought for $99 almost 5 years ago now…wow.  That may have been one of the best purchases of my life.  Its been an incredible help, making game development easy to code, and fast to prototype.

I’ve really upped my graphics game too, making use of Photoshop – that I actually legally bought!  That’s how you know you’ve grown up – when its

This is totally legal and legit. I’ve come a long way mom!

easier to just buy a license than deal with the keygens and installers for cracked software.  Going with Photoshop is a new Wacom drawing tablet that’s really made the graphics a breeze – relative to my skill.  I’m no artists, but this has really made my more comfortable in creating assets, and made the whole process faster.  That way I can code sooner!  This extra time has been spent adding more variations into the game – each structure has three variations that are randomly placed, so your map isn’t uniform and boring.  Each one is also animated!

I currently have monsters and tears generating, and their structures able to be placed on the board.  Getting science labs next follows the same pattern, so getting them there is easy!  Once I am able to place all structures its time to tackle the upgrade system.  That will be an interesting process, and will probably take up the majority of my Saturday.  Then its on to music and sounds, but that’s the home stretch.

The assets – and their variations.

Good luck to everyone involved – looking forward to your progress.