Hey LDers!

For those of you who have slept, I hope you all have slept well! And for those of you who havent, don’t forget to rest those creative minds!
Got about 5 and a half hours of sleep last night. Pretty good. Today we’ll really start hammering out some stuff for our game. Be sure to keep an eye on us!

For breakfast, we went and got McDonalds. Yataa!

THEY DIDN’T GIVE ME ICE FOR MY ICED MOCHA. WHAT?

Cheers!
~ScreamRawr & Jif

Our jam entry is going well… We are making a universe evolution game.

Once the map loader is finished we will upload a beta for you to play…

Screenshot 1:

Screenshot 2:

Tags: java, screenshots, space

Ok so ill be live streaming the develepmont progress with some slick music

http://www.twitch.tv/vurbgames

streaming will start at 9:00 A.M.  Mountain time

Well, everybody here seem liking to post food or desk pictures… So I’ll do it too :

In order : What I would have liked to eat tonight, What I really ate tonight (and you can’t see the rain near the table…), My operating center, and two screenshot of the two first levels of my game.

It’s starting to look like what I want it to look like (the game, uh) even if i’m quite not satisfied by the third and last level. And I also have to make the music… not yet finished. Voilà, Have fun

The idea came to me really quick this time, and I was able to spend the first couple hours of the combo brainstorming mechanics and visuals. Before going to bed, I was able to get a yellow rectangle moving around on the screen with a nice little charge jumping mechanic. I spent way too much time tweaking a pixelated gradient for the background, and re-acquainting myself with flixel/as3, but I think I’m in a good position for making progress today.

You can check out my repo here: http://github.com/dgbrown/ld48-24

So, keeping yesterdays mistakes in mind, I’m going to completely ignore artwork today. If I can manage to stay focused and avoid clashing with flixel too much, my feature set should look like this:

• simple blocky tile-map levels
• dangerous coral and under-sea heat-vents
• tasty coral, and mineral deposits to collect
• locations and npcs to deliver collected resources to
• bubble gun to defend yourself
• encounters with enemy faction of mutated fish-people

And… with any luck, tomorrow is for artwork, polish, and packaging!

Maybe I’m being too ambitious, but I guess we will see. This is my first ld48, and I want to make a splash.

Touch/mouse controls are in… following Sid’s rule of making most everything global; messy organization but easy access.  This is not how you want to write enterprise systems… 😉

P.S.: Is it just me or is it not possible to change your profile image here?  There are no options for my account in the Ludum Dare WordPress “Edit My Profile” screen.  Sadness.

I haven’t managed to start yet but a will at least have a few screenshots in a couple of hours. Damn friends, do not destroy my LD weekend. PS. I think that I at least will finish something for the jam.

So, I’ll have to release my code? DONE!

It’s on google-code. Once I learned to work with mercurial I can hardly work without it, so I just settet that up and uploaded to a repo I’ll be using (I hope) in forecoming editions.

http://code.google.com/p/atridas-ludum-dare/

I guess I’m not the only one making kittens…

I heard twa thousand corbies making a game.

I began this compo with several hours of sleeping and thinking. But now I’ve reached my first milestone! There is not much to see here – I’m using placeholder graphics for today – but I pretty much got the player-character’s movement working.
In this game, mankind has screwed up their own evolution. The player controls a raven, feasting on the dying humans.

Oh, and by the way: I’m in too.

flap flap flap

Tags: processing, progress, screenshot

I

I’m using CraftyJs and Box2d for this prototype. I added several rooms without much content. The red box is supposed to be the chamber to refill the juice of the evolution gun.

Next step will be to add the HUD with a mini-map and the inventory.

Tags: snapshot

After 5 hours of coding, i finally got my engine done.

My idea is to make a spaceship shooter, where the enemies AI is evolving every round. I’m planning on making some kind of neural network to control the enemies and an algorithm  to choose the best fighters and mutate them.

Here’s a little playable demo.(You need Java to play)

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/61784249/LD24/Appletsite.html

Im using JBox2D for the physics btw.

So after 13hrs I’ve now got a nice and abstract space-shooter framework set up. I’ve got a pretty solid idea of how evolution is going to tie in but a lot of coding awaits.

Side note: anyone else out there using Qt/QML or have tried it?

I have made movements and collisions working pretty well, next up is better terrain rendering, guns and stuff like that.
Maybe even start making some 3D models and new textures to make it look better

4 hours in;
2 – Tweening and particles
1 – Bloom and blending modes
1 – Actual content

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2012 at 12:02 pm and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I have to say I’m not very happy with the theme… I feel like many games are going to be alike. Whatever, I’m doing some kind of infiltration game where you have to absorb people weaker than you to get new abilities and grow.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2012 at 12:05 pm and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Finally, gameplay! I finished the gene-expression system.

I tweaked the code to randomize the basic genome for the above screenshot, so you can see what it looks like with an enemy that isn’t the default, un-evolved grunt.

Currently it seems to me that there are a lot of evolutionary dead-ends which kind of make the enemies a bit gimped, like if they get all the defensive genes and none of the offensive ones. But that’s kind of a gameplay feature, seeing as the player is well served to try and cull the more dangerous enemies, thus forcing them down an undesirable path and prolonging the game.

That, and if one of those nigh-indestructible enemies suddenly develops a dangerous mutation like “attack cooldown decreased by 30%” or “attack type changed to shotgun” (both real), the player is in a bit of a pickle…

Next up: do the wave/level system.

Tags: flash, Flixel, ld24, shmup

Hi!

We’re Team 111 and as we said before we wanted to make a stop-motion game and…we’re making it!

Here’s Felix working hard

It’s a game about games…a meta-game! Almost everything will be stop-motion animations. It won’t be very “gamish” but we hope it will still be fun to play/watch. As usual in my (Pierrec) games, there will be a lot of dialogs and ramifications…but no pixel ^^

Problem is…The game is goind to be heavy. The picture we use are only 640×400 but there will be like THOUSANDS of them.

So expect a 150, 200MB file…Would you be patient enough to download it ? Do you have a favorite file transfer service ? Would it help with a torrent file ? Any suggestions are welcome.

I tried to make some gifs to show you the animations, but failed. So here are some screenshots :

Where is the “Evolution” Theme ?

Well, this game is about the evolution of a game, of a game night, and will probably use some evolutive musics (Like with the gool old iMuse)

Well…I have to go back to work. See ya!

Squandered like 4 hours last night on a bug. I woke up and INSTANTLY solved it once I thought about it with a fresh perspective. SERIOUSLY I need to learn to just go to sleep when the going gets tricky!

Here’s a picture of where I’m at so far!

I admit, that background is a little lacking… but I’m pretty happy with my tiles so far

Here’s our lunch and desert! Now we’re back to work.

well, um, I had a very long night of sleep, so I don’t have much work done (yet)

but!

I have a very fancy wave system in place that makes the water almost alive:

As I wake up this morning I realize something terrible.  There is nothing to eat, at least not for me.  Normally it is my job to cook for the family.  Customary societal dictates may indicate that I am, therefore, a mother.  As I fail part of that test, being a woman, quite explicitly one might go on to assume that I am a father. This is also false.  I currently live with my family, and part of the arrangement is that I cook.  However, because I need all the time I can get, my mother has agreed to do something about dinner.  I believe she’s going to order pizza at least one of these nights, and I would certainly not be opposed to this course of action for both nights.  So dinner is covered.

Yet we lack breakfast.  There is no cereal, no bread, and I haven’t the time to prepare something more complex.  Further, the family also has no time to do so, as they will be working this weekend.  One of them is already gone as I wake up, the other will be soon.  For dinner, they will be here.  For breakfast I am up a creek without a paddle.

Well I shall just have to go hungry for a few hours.  Trust me, I have gone much longer without food, but I don’t relish the distraction.  Speaking of distraction, let’s get into the meat of what I am here for.  Let’s talk shop.

I must admit, I never expected to make as much progress as I did last night.  I have constructed and thoroughly tested the ability to display Sprites to the screen already.  I have a basic guard, though I will need more enemy types than this in the end, and I have a player.  The player can move around the screen with the arrow keys, though I use a Key Listener (really a Key Adapter) for this, and I’ve been told Key Bindings may be better (and I agree this will allow me to better implement customized controls), so I will almost certainly be tinkering with this functionality further.  Most importantly, my guard can see the player, but only within their field of view.  I haven’t gotten to the point where I have any data about my levels in the game, so I haven’t given the guards the inability to see through opaque barriers yet, but what I have I am quite proud of.

How it works is simple.  My guard can draw an invisible line between himself and the player, and a second (very short) line in the direction he is facing.  I then calculate the angle between these lines (using a method that involves no division, no dividing by zero here!) and if the result is within the guard’s predefined FOV (and nothing else prevents him seeing, though again these remain unimplemented) the method responsible for handling his vision returns false.

I would stress that I have tested these things.  Everything I have described so far works.   Believe me when I say that while learning the language I exclaimed excitedly whenever I seemed to have solved a problem, only to shrink in disappointment when testing showed this to be premature.  I learned quickly to only be excited by results, and let me tell you I am very excited.

That being said, here’s what I have that is untested.  I have a Level Class implemented that should be able to read input from a text file, and use that to construct a level out of tiles.  There’s a very good reason why this has gone on untested, I have no levels to read.  I don’t even have tiles to create levels from.

So time for the big one.  Today I will be working on my in-game level editor.  First I will be coding the ability to flag where tiles should be placed by clicking on the screen, and then I will be making some very simplistic tiles to place on the screen.  I won’t lie, under the outline I proposed yesterday these simplistic tiles will probably be making it into the final product.  Finally I will formulate a way to save files from the level editor, to any arbitrary folder in the directory.  Once these steps are done, I can test my Level class and its ability to open and read files, as well as implement guard movement (which is very dependent upon factors presented in the levels themselves and so cannot be done until the levels themselves are done).

Busy day.  I’ll get back to you with my progress on this later.

I just caught two hours sleep, and I am feeling more like a functional human. Whether or not I can be a functional programmer remains to be seen. Breakfast is egg sushi.

Title screen so far

Game screen so far

livestream availible on: www.livestream.com/random_and_shit

Lately I have been having trouble with HaXe.

I have been needing to make my own interfaces in JS, because they are missing everything new from HTML5

Welp, I am actually pretty far, considering I only have 3 hours of code so far.

Well, it’s my first Ludum Dare. Hoping that I could make it.

It’s just a basic platformer where you have to evolve to make it through the puzzle.

At the moment I have to design stuff. I just woke up and ready to go~

Getting GM8 ready. Setting up some stuff. Hopefully I can get some content sometime soon.

You can test it here: https://c3a2348c-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/stranger087host/ludumdare/First_Demo.swf

next: limited fuel, enemies, car-food, land-selecting

So I scrapped the first idea, that one is done with. It ended up looking something like this:

And while it was cool, I didn’t feel it was going anywhere. It used a system that caused your colors to change depending on your play style, but I didn’t get much past that point.

Instead I’ve fallen back on a slightly more story driven interpretation of the theme, using “evolving” to refer to a mutant virus locked away deep down in a facility that you’ve been tasked with wiping out.

It looks a little something like this:

Let’s hope this one makes it! Back to work I go.

Join the G+ Ludum Dare Hangout! We can discuss strategies, games, people, food… Whatever you’d like! A nice little distraction, or a place to come for help.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/%23LD48 should take you to a search in which you can find it, or just go to your G+ profile and search. Look forward to seeing you there!

Use this link: https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/0827f3f82b02513b5ac9840cf9c43f7aa330773d

It is looking ugly (even for programmer art :P), but I’m proud of the level management system that I coded this time.

I’m losing it…

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21495867/LD24/Saturday3pm/WebPlayer/WebPlayer.html

My game is based on genetics and the theory of evolution.

There are much randomness in this game. No exp. and level-up. You must propagate and die over and over again to become stronger.

I don’t even know what will happened after all.

So I desperately needed to get sleep this morning. I didn’t realize that my day job had put me at such a disadvantage energy-wise until I tried to do a catnap that ended up lasting 7 hours. Anyways my first entry is taking shape. I have helpers that player will be able to buy and upgrade, and enemies that randomly look at the helper’s attributes at random and increase their own if the helper’s is higher. Here’s a quick screen shot, with sphere helpers and cube enemies (game on left, scene on right).

Still making progress.

Switching to GameMaker from Java seems to have aided in allowing us to build more functionality easier.

We’ve got a really good base down to start adding sprints, game play elements, music, and story.

No screen shots ready yet, so please enjoy pictures of our lunch/dinner 😉

Starting to feel tired. I haven’t made a lot of progress, but I made some important changes to the way the plant thing generates. I’m finding that I’m wanting to move away from it actually being a plant, and just having a plantlike structure and growth system. I’m thinking more abstract now. I’ll probably sleep soon, but I need to make a little more progress first. I’d like to be able to program some of the enemies and defense placement system when I wake up, then begin graphics.

http://content.wuala.com/contents/pansapiens/Public/ld24/index.html (Unity Webplayer)

So here is my progress after a day … a little sandbox with a swimming squid thing (Controls are WASD, Q/E to twist, Space to go forward, move the mouse to rotate the camera).

No goals yet, but swimming is kinda fun once you get the hang of it, so hopefully I can flesh this out with into a game tomorrow.

Tags: screenshot, unity3d

Boom, early screen shot of the basic AI running.

Just finished the core AI of units. Started on the evolving Ai that changes depending of the skill of the player.

I plan on adding some artillery later and hopefully some better graphics.

Once again, it appears as if the enemy in this game is going to be cubes:

Tags: cubes

So finally Evolution managed to be the theme. Mine will be about the player trying to survive in an world evolving around him.

Try a first release here (Unity HTML Webplayer).

Not much gameplay yet, but I like the procedural creep art

Tags: progress, screenshot, unity3d

I’m using unity for the game.

It doesn’t have a name for now and i’m still working on it.
Hope i will finish the game at time.

I now have a tank capable of moving up and down and firing bullets.

That footage is based on the random movement I programmed in. It’s not player-controlled yet, but at least I can leave it up to take a break and be sure that the timelapse is a lot more interesting.

My current plan:
- get the player’s character in the game
- make it controllable
- add obstacles (most likely boulders)
- make collisions between the player and obstacles deadly
- add an enemy
- create a wave of enemies
- create a way to modify the wave of enemies so each enemy evolves in some way

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2012 at 12:31 pm and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Something’s happening.  I’m not sure where I’m going with this yet, but I do have a “tree” generator & particles.

Also, some food.  Tofu burgers with some basic salad, Karelian pies & chorizo!  Almost veggie!  Made a bunch of these tofu burgers in preparation, nice and spicy, herby flavour.

Next up some coffee and on we go.

13.5 Hours in and I’m only just starting, oh dear. At least I’m somewhat happy with my chosen idea.

Tags: lildood_ld24

Here is another character of the story… It reminds me someone… maybe in a game? I d’on’t remember. Seems very friendly anyway.

Good morning, good night, jamers!

The Schrödinger team is glad to announce a great new: we have an idea! Since few hours, all the team is drawing, coding, designing and drinking coffee to make a very first prototype of the game. On the right, you can see two C++ coders and on the left, two graphic artists. Behind the camera, one game designer.

We have unfortunately nothing to show you but something very important can be revealed: there will be kittens. Yes, kittens! You’ll even be able to make them pretty and cute. Or kill them al. You’ve got the choice.

But, for the moment, it’s time to eat good food. Take also a look on the wonderful poster from my little sister.

See you soon, jamers!

I am using Twine to write out the flowchart of this story but the final thing will probably be in flash with some music. This is going to maybe be a sociopolitically reprehensible Choose Your Own Adventure and I am completely paranoid that this will be viewed in the wrong light. Oh well.

Some updates on my progress

Here’s the first playable version:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4761626/LD24/LD24Evolution.swf

There’s only two types of critter for now, more to come
I added power ups too, it definitely needs more weapon types too…

Tags: brainstorming, foodphoto, sleep

Alright so I’m more than a few hours into development now and I have completed a basic Main Menu, Game Map and Game State.  As you can tell, my non-existent art background has come in useful.  Hopefully I’ll have time to find something better than coloured squares before the end of the competition!

Really well! I woke up this morning and spent about half an hour getting ideas. I eventually chose an idea, and I’ve stuck with it since! Right now I’ve done absolutely no art whatsoever (so every asset is a delicious placeholder), but the code is almost 100% complete. My game is fully playable, including a win state, upgrades, enemies and other funky stuff.

I <3 squares

There’s quite a lot going on here. Basically you’re a creature that decided to attack a random planet. The planet defends itself, while you evolve (upgrade ;D) to become stronger, until you’re completely maxed out – at this point, you can destroy the planet. It gets pretty hectic! I’m also quite proud of myself, since this is the first game where I’ve used a lot of maths for the core mechanics. All of the orbiting and shooting is great fun! 😀

One of my goals… achieved!!

Hey guys, I just woke up a few hours earlier than I thought, so I am going to start programming and start the livestream a bit early today. I have a lot of work to do and a good chunk of time to do it. Lets get started!

Check me out at: http://twitch.tv/bigbass1997 

R-Evolution. Lol. You get the point.

R-Evolution! Got the map, the UI, the basic idea, the renderer and many graphics done. Well… programming the game itself comes next ^^

/edit: Here is food!

Very tasty!

Tags: foodphoto

I have my idea: a space shooter that lets you evolve your ship to add on shields, more guns, more body segments, etc. Each ship is based on simple pieces that fit together. As you defeat enemies you get evolution points that you can spend to add onto your ship. But watch out because the enemies you fight also evolve using a Genetic Algorithm. Survive enough generations and out-evolve the enemy to win!

My list of chores:

• Basic ship pieces fitting together
• Ship flying, shooting, & collision behavior
• Ship generation based on GA string
• GA generation & cross-breeding
• Put it all together into a game!

I’ve started to draw a couple of the pieces. The main bodies will be hexes so it all fits together nicely.

project codename is Darwin Defenders: https://github.com/trflagg/DarwinDefenders

I have to go out now to an aunts birthday and then see a friend off to their new house so I won’t be able to program for the rest of the day, hopefully I will be able to have something small and finished by the end of the Jam however!

In the mean time here’s another screenshot, so far I have some collisions and death, it needs the AI and evolution part to come but for now it’s shaping up.

Tags: 2D, jam, ld24, opengl, screenshot

Here is a video of the algorithm in action with random seeds at the end. Enjoy!

Tags: algorithm, generation, land, showoff, video

Hi all. This is my first LD! I’m going to be using Unity and Photoshop. I’ll be also be using these frameworks:

• ex2D for sprite animations
• iTween
• Some home-brewed libraries for GUI, Audio and other stuff.

Was kind of hoping for chain reaction, but I guess the whole point of LD is to think on your feet. After seeing 1000 kittens I just couldn’t help but base my game on kittens as it also kind of fits the theme of ‘Evolution’ (evolution tends to work over a large number of independent entities).

So I’ve done my first asset, a little animation of a kitty running – I plan to tint it so I can have all the kitties in the rainbow!

Next up, some sort of kitty breeding simulation to make evolution possible.

So we’ve been working on and off for about 12 hours now on our entry. Our team is very organic, people join and leave all the time but I think there are around 5 people who made most of what we currently have.

Here’s a screenshot of our main menu and check out this little gameplay video.

Click to see a gameplay video

The link with the “Evolution” theme might not be very apparent yet, but we’re getting there! Stay tuned

After I dropped my first idea, I started with a Osmos-style game. Going pretty well so far, bigger mobs can absorb smaller mobs, the player can move around, zooming is implemented and automatic scrolling as well.

Next up:

• Power-Ups (Mobs with other colors, increasing your speed etc.)
• First sound effects
• Automatic zooming when player gets bigger
• Boundaries, mobs should knock back
• “Unabsorbable” mobs (other mobs than the player should not be able to absorb power ups)
• And food! Oh god, I’m hungry.

Well I’ve absolutely no idea how I’m supposed to attach a picture to this oddball wordpress blog thingy, so you’ll just have to trust me that my current progress is best described as CryEngine 5.

Any tips on how to add an image to a post would be appreciated of course.

Wait, I think I’ve got it…Tada!

I’ve done lots of work but cannot think, so I’m going for a walk around the block to clear my head.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve done so far:

It doesn’t look very interesting, and it isn’t, yet.
If you collide with the bigger circle, then you get absorbed into it and game over.

more is coming soon.

Yep, should not have picked Java at the last minute. Or at least, I should’ve spent the days before the compo converting all my C++ classes to Java and declaring them at the start. Only just got the StateMachine and rudimentary Steering working. But at this point there’s no way I’m going to have a functioning game by the deadline.

What I DO have, however, is a crab chasing some shrimps… before spinning round and round (not intentional). Yay!

(Flash Movie ~ 10mb)

Ok so the live stream is now going check it out here

http://www.twitch.tv/vurbgames

this morning ill be doing alot of the graphics for the game.

I’ve just managed to finish the very basic spawning method for mined cubes in my Cube Miner game! currently you just have several invisible miners throwing there cubes into the machine and you see them all come out! take a look:

Follow me doing this crazy stuff on my stream! http://www.twitch.tv/draxov

Attending a party, taking antibiotics and I have not really slept for a day. The perfect time to sneak into a back room to work on my ludum dare…

Core mechnics nearly finished, so I’m going to touch up the UI and then give the player some AI to play against. A screeny of my attempt at art.

Just a glimpse of everyone’s jamming environment.

Sempai’s

Meririm’s

Ephy’s

Jonas’

Joan’s

Grungi Ankhfire’s

Hi everybody !

I’m in for my second Ludum dare and I’m going to develop some kind of strategy game using Flash Punk.

I’m now 3 hours into the project and I’ve just realized you don’t have a right click with flash…  Back to the drawing board ^^

A Minecraft adventure (whilst cool) also seems to be out of the scope of what I want to achieve in the time. because I want to submit something, I’m going with a backup idea for the Jam.

This’ll be written in Java with AWT. Time to sprite.

Hi there!

We are InfiniteDog and this is our first Ludum Dare as a formal team. On the previous edition we developed Mothly’s World and we decided to create a team.

We have finished the brainstorming about “Evolution” and we are beginning with the mechanics. We will develop a game where the player is the Zombie 0 and you will bring the civilization to the next evolution: the zombies!

It will be a funny game and these are some mechanics:

• Control the Zombie 0 and bite humans to convert them.
• Use your dead brain to approach your enemies carefully like Solid Snake
• Make friends (biting humans) and use them for your personal benefit.
• Just eat brains for fun!

See you soon!

I’ve added growth nodes that the player clicks when they have enough collected energy, these will grow the evolving network of energy in various directions, adding hardpoints along the way. Hardpoints are where you can place defense objects.

The Network

Hey all. Slow but steady, we are getting our initial game framework in place. Here is the current progress on the planet:

that is all.

I’ve been working slowly, procrastinating a lot and talking to my friend even more, but I’ve finally gotten up to the point where I can start doing stuff.

So far I have a main character thing(just a ball for now), some small enemies(which are fast but weak, and drop bad drops like +1 health) and I’ve given them a little “AI”.
The “AI” they have is just tiny, they chase you, and then once they hit you, they run away, since you(and everything) have a damage cooldown, so you could finish them off in the time of that cooldown. I might keep the same “AI” for the bigger enemies, not sure yet.

Screenie:

Little guys chasing me. I’m red because I’ve just been hit.

Now, I’m going to start adding some evolution to it. It’s going to be half-decent, hopefully!

I am an incompetent artist. This has been obvious to me for many years. My aquisition of a graphics tablet has in no way helped.

However, using a whole bunch of sneaky tricks, I seem to have been able to bypass needing to be good at art.

Anyway, as the placeholders start to disappear, the game is starting to look pretty nice, methinks.

Well, by my standards, that is. Stll got a long way to go before I can compete with proper artists…

We’ve been working since this morning. It’s been a strange weekend so far. After many hours of discussion, waiting for a theme(it was 4 am in our timezone) we were not in a good position. Without a consensus, we started making our game. This is where we’re at now.

I’ve added one more mechanic to the game. Before you can’t do anything aside from stay safe the whole time. Now, picked up coins restore nearby tiles as shown by the blue tiles below.

This will give players a chance to survive longer. This also gives the pickup coin a better purpose other than just for score.

Been working on this game the whole day. Might take a rest soon.

50% of eaten instant soup…

Hello all! I haven’t written a post before start programming, but it doesn’t matter – I still have 0% progress in game.

The real progress is nearly zero, because I’m still struggling with many ideas in my head.  But all I know about my game is the leitmotif – ‘evolution’. First thing that come up to my mind was a neurotic network or the program, which writes itself.

I’m using C# and XNA from Microsoft, but I don’t know if I’m going in the right way.

I think my game will be about computer system, which evolves into something better, bigger, more complicated.

Wish me the best!

<— This soup was so yummy <3

So the theme is evolution and the curse is broken! The problem is that I was stuck for ideas.

I combined a couple of the ideas I had previously and flipped them around until they seemed to work together right, and I ended up with a decent plan for a simplistic upgrade-oriented RTS.

I’m working with Processing, which is an open-source library/IDE for Java which makes graphics convenient and faster than J2D.

I’ve implemented pathfinding, which you can see here. 100 paths per frame drop the FPS to only 50, so it’s efficient enough that I’m going to stick with it.

Here the evolution list. And now I’m going to sleep. 14 hours is a laaaarge time.

Fourteen hours is, still haven’t gone to sleep. It’s 11AM local time, and I think I’m going to go to take a nap soon.

I need my beauty sleep, you see.

Here’s what’s done so far:

– All the enemy programming! (Excluding the boss AI)

– Main menu graphics. (New Game button, Info button, etc…)

– Opening ‘cutscene.’ (Not much of a cutscene, really. Just text on a box. A textbox, if you will.)

– Beginning to code the first boss. (This is going to either turn out really neato or really crappy.)

It’s really astounding how much I’ve gotten done so far. Here’s a to-do list!

– Create the actual levels themselves. I have a feeling this might take me a whole day to do. (The screenshots in my previous post were of test rooms… Now that I think of it I might keep them though.)

– Finish the boss fight coding. (This’ll probably take a while too.)

…

That’s actually about it. That doesn’t seem like a lot in type. In my brain it’s a colossal amount of work to be done, though. I don’t think I’ll have a problem actually finishing it, though.

Until next time…

~Kortuga

After another 5-6 hours I got the basic prototype working.

So I’ve already got the level layout done, enemy ai/movement/etc. (still missing 2 more enemy types though), player movement and interaction, score and life system and some other minor stuff.
But I’m still missing the evolvement mechanic for the player which is going to be a lot of work. Also I still have to do the menu and sound/music. I think I’ll do that tomorrow.

Seeing all the other blog entries is kind of intimidating. There are lots of cool ideas out there and other devs are making great progress.
I also fear that I interpreted the “evolvement” a bit too loose. Right now it’s more like leveling up than evolving, but this was the best idea that I could come up with.

Ok, Evolution did not really inspire me to do a plattformer, so I decided to do a (tower) defence game instead, where you evolve your weapons and the creeps evolve themselves, getting closer to the goal means this creep is going to produce the next generation.

Up till now, I have only a pathfinding demo and a labyrinth editor, but it works as a charm. You can try it here, if you like. (Tested with Chrome and Firefox, Safari does not work, yet. No idea of Opera or anything else)

I was slowed down by Chrome, because it does not fire any SVG-animation events. If anyone working on webkit reads this: please fix this soon. Next thing to do is making towers attack creeps and creeps die.

TODO:

• Creep Health
• Attacking towers
• spawn and goal
• player health
• money
• usable UI
• creep evolution
• tower evolution
• nicer graphics
• sound

Nice to have

• graphics displaying traits of creeps/towers
• traps/attacking floor tiles

So after a couple of hours we got an idea about what we want to make. We are making a small 3rd person shooter game. Most of our assets will be unity provided stuff which means that we will focus a lot on the story and the level design of the game. Here are some shots from the editor. I have checked and found out that we can use unity’s assets for this competition, but if we are not and i am wrong please let us know.

It seems like everyone’s game involves the player itself evolving. Mine does not do this- I included the theme in having my enemies evolve to try and defeat the player…

Eh, worst case scenario I get a little bit of a deduction in the Theme category.

I hope not, though…

~Kortuga

I don’t know what meal this is meant to be, but it’s a nice break from eating junk food.

Here is proof that I have actually done something:

There’s a bit of a game there, but it is probably the least fun game you have ever played. I doubt the cubes will ever be anything other than cubes, because art is *hard*.

Representing in my favourite LD48 hoodie from my horrible basement. Not my mum’s basement, mind. I’m moving up in the world.

Yes, it’s 17:17 here in italy and we are 14 hours late for ludum dare but we did it, we have a idea and we are starting the Jam!

I don’t want to tell you too much (yes, this is an excuse because we still don’t have a clear idea), but hey we have a concept.

So far I’ve got this going:

The bars on the right are supposed to be an enemy count bar and a “tower material left” bar. This is going to be a tower defense game (duh). As you might guess, I’ve been doing these simple things and avoiding the things that matter in this game (enemies, towers shooting). I NEED TO WORK

What do you think? This is… well, it is something.

I just have a faint idea of what this is actually is though. I guess that’s the point!

Edit: “Survival of the Tastiest”? Brillante!

Toying with the idea of a gun that evolves as you use it. Perhaps a visual shift in the type of damage. Though, I’m not sure that’s enough evolution. After all, there are only so many types of damage I can do. If I have time, perhaps I’ll add more evolving features to the weapon.

The actual physics is still perfectible, but the essential is present. If I got some extra-time tomorrow (Sweet dreams…) I will try to improve it.
Now it’s time to create all the “evolution” part of the game. I aim to a playable prototype this evening, allowing me then to concentrate on graphics and sounds tomorrow.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/49521293/LD48/LD24/LD24-02.html

I slept on my other idea, then promptly got to work making it after waking up.

About 45 minutes in, I was already sick of working on it. The game itself might have been an okay idea, but I figured I would need to do a lot of work just to get it playable, and that scared me.

There will be future LDs (where I will perhaps have a better plan going in), so I’m going to try to keep it a bit simpler. I’m going to make a platform/puzzle hybrid. Basically, it’s pretty simple platformer. You play the level, although finishing it is optional. Then you get to choose from one or more “positive” rule changes. Something like “your character jumps higher”. You need to be able to finish the level with this rule. Once you do, you will now need to choose from a list of “negative” rule change (like “you can only jump three times”). All the rules you have picked in the past affect the levels in the future.

First things first: get the platformer going. This should be pretty simple. Then I can build up some more rules and start implementing them one by one.

Ok so just over 14 hours in to the compo, 4 hours of actual work done for me and ive made reasonable progress, firstly I struggled for an hour to come up with an idea I would be happy with. Then laying down tracks I got to work like a mad man, soon realising I was making a ton of mistakes I decided to resort to my trusty pen and paper and old faithful, list making

Heres a screenie of current progress:

So Ive got 2 bullet points from my list complete, 6 more to go but their much bigger than the first two so better lay some more tracks 😀

Sneak Peak from my game about the evolution of stars

SciBerC and SciYaps Ugg’s Travels

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/52325119/Games/LudumDare/Ugg.zip

There is an enemy that does stuff…!! And’reacts’ to getting shot…

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21495867/LD24/Saturday4pm/WebPlayer/WebPlayer.html

Since I love those pics where you can partly see the game and you see a bit of the code… >_>

Space Ham name is a parody on Space Jam 😉

I have finished one of two parts of the game, namely the part in which you play the fish. To be implemented tomorrow is the part in which you play the dinosaur on the ground.

Download the demo here: http://www.hugi.scene.org/adok/miscellaneous/evolution.zip

Well I’m starting to get the “wiring” mechanic in place in addition to basic enemy evolution, and it’s becoming close to a playable game. Maybe next up is the “currency” using killed enemies’ genes – towers can hold a limited amount of genes, and not every tower can use every gene, so you have to do some swapping micromanagement while defending. I’d like to think I’m on schedule at this point, but the incomprehensible last day bugs have proven me wrong in earlier LDs. If I do have spare time, I’ll definitely spend it on tweaking the mechanics and adding polish in the presentation.

But even though it’s a bit derpy, I just swear I won’t write another pathfinding algorithm for this game. No. I refuse. I even crossed my arms.

Whew, I managed to finish all the things I wanted to do today!

Even the genetic system.

Hurrah for biodiversity!

Only thing is, dynamics-wise I’m not quite feeling it right now. Around stage 10 or 11 it gets frantic and enjoyable, but the more tactical aspects of (mis)guiding the aliens’ evolution aren’t really coming through.

For tomorrow, I’ll be mulling over some possible gameplay changes:

(1) Adjust the mutation rate. Currently each new alien will always be based on a genome from the survivors of the previous generation, with one of its 34 genes “flipped” (mutated). I might want to introduce the possibility of a double mutation, or no mutation (to counterbalance).

(2) Adjust the spawn pattern. The aliens currently have a tendency to spawn in vertical columns. This makes them sitting ducks for the player’s straight-firing vulcan. To make matters worse, the last alien in the column often gets to escape regardless of the merits or demerits of its genome, simply because its siblings happened to go first and act as bullet absorbers.

(3) Implement recombinant DNA. I really don’t want to do this because it’s a pain in the behind, but it might help. In particular, if the most successful alien in each generation became the “king” or “queen” and bred with all the other aliens, it might yield interesting results. Currently all survivors have an equal chance to pass their DNA on, resulting in a very diverse but somewhat characterless environment.

(4) Possibly in combination with (3), give advantages to specific aliens in passing their DNA on. I’m thinking along these lines:

– Aliens who manage to shoot the player down get a chance to pass their DNA on, regardless of whether they end up dying. (This will be horribly tough to track. Currently the bullets don’t have their shooter’s name on them.)

– When an alien survives, its chance to reproduce is directly tied to the number of bullets it managed to shoot (okay, that sounds REALLY wrong) during the level.

Well, time to go sleep (it’s 11:30 here). Will continue tomorrow.

Tags: flash, Flixel, ld24, shmup