It’s now time for bed, again, and all I’ve achieved since last night’s bedtime is adding a player object with the ability to jump from “island” to “island” (just pretend the white circles are islands, ‘kay?), and thus create rigid connections between the islands.

Which isn’t nothing. But it’s a lot less than I needed to get done if I wanted this to turn out like a proper game. The cause? I simply haven’t put enough time in today.

Here is a screenshot of me (the bluish streaky comety thing) jumping towards the final unconnected island, having knitted four of the islands into a nice solid triangle + one that’s just kind of hanging there. Reaching the unconnected island without hitting any of the red circles is the win condition. Or at least it will be, once I’ve added code to check for that.

It looks a little better in motion… but not a lot better.

Things I don’t have, and should:

• Game-y elements: Win condition, lose condition, lives counter, level progression
• Proper physics balancing. Notice how many of the circles are pressed up against the edge? That can make gameplay really annoying sometimes. I need to increase the force that pulls them back into the centre (or solve the issue in another way). But make the centre-pulling force too strong and everything bunches up, making the game impossible to play. And it needs to be able to cope with arbitrary numbers of circles, as that’s the level progression mechanic that I have in mind. Hmm, maybe I should remove the collision between circles, then it wouldn’t matter so much. Would make it look uglier though, especially if I make the graphics less abstract.
• Graphics that don’t suck rotten eggs.
• Sound. ANY sound.
• A public build. Need to remember to statically link the VC++ runtime so more people can run it.

None of this is terribly complicated, but I need sleep now and when I wake up I’ll probably only have about 3 hours to the deadline. 4 at a pinch. Sigh.

The worst part is that I don’t even care that much. So unmotivated. LD was supposed to solve that problem.