Day 1 with 19 hours of coding (including some breaks in between) is coming to an end. As usual, I did not progress as far as I would have liked, but it is definitely better than in previous LDs; at least technology-wise. Even though I did not prepare anything, I was able to build a full raycasting-based software renderer on this day. I wanted to replicated the feel and art-style of a Wolfenstein 3D-like game. The idea was/is that this will allow even fairly limited pixel-art to look nice and retro. So, more time coding, less time spent in Paint.NET. And I like the idea of pushing each pixel on the screen myself and having full control. I have already discovered some nice visual effects by accident.

The software renderer was actually the main thing I was working on today and I had some occasion of thinking to drop out. The simple case of rendering one quadrant of the the map correctly was done after a few hours. The funny part started with the edge cases and making the code work for all four quadrants of the players facing direction.
I actually had looked up a tutorial about raycasting before the LD, but did not use it extensively. I wanted to judge my understanding of the problem and I am quiet happy with how it turned out. Especially, I am surprise how fast the implementation is running (>1200 frames per seconds) considering that I did not do any optimization and bit-shifting tricks. It is all floating-point operations which is slower in general, but helps the understanding of the code.

Even though the attached screenshot looks fine, I still have some glitch in the texture-mapping for the walls. This will be the first thing to get fixed tomorrow morning. As it is quiet late already I rather spent the time on some art and the bitmap font. I noticed hours ago that bug-free coding is not happening anymore today…

What else? I did not spent much time to think about the actual game mechanics and story, yet. I hope something will pop up over night; if not, it will become a standard shoot-em up.

What’s on the agenda for tomorrow? A lot:
– Soundtrack and game sounds
– Artwork: textures, sprites
– Speaking about sprites: The renderer still needs support for the character sprites. But it should be “easily” possible to reuse the wall-code for that purpose.
– Enemies and Game mechanics: Still not sure about the actual goal of the game, so not sure what the enemies/characters will do. A theme like “Evolution” actually dictates to build something heavily AI-focus. But, I haven’t been doing AI since university and I don’t want to open up another can of worms in the last hours I have left.
– Menu system and Highscore board; I like Highscore boards
– If i have lots and lots of time, I would like to extend the renderer to also support textured floors. Up to now, it just a color-filled rectangle at the bottom half of the screen, simulating the floor.

Oh yeah: As I was spending the last hours on art-work, the logo for the game is done. You see it on the screenshot. I don’t have time to waste on redoing the logo, so
“Shit! It’s Evolving” it is. No idea yet “what” is evolving, though…

Good night!

Some random walls and a textured block. Doesn’t look that fancy for 19 hours of work…