I’m in the same boat as everyone here…
4 hours of sleep a night for 2 weeks straight…
I’m so tired I feel drunk…
My coding skills are starting to deteriorate…
My family and friends are all saying,
“you really don’t need to push yourself so hard. I’m worried about you”

But we all soldier on!!  

I thought I’d share my app icon evolution – its close – not perfect, but it’ll have to do for the moment. I’ll probably go with one of the last 2. I’ve blogged/rant my 5 rules for icon design at ZombieTales.net for those interested?

and I’ve been STILL heavily working on the level editor here are some screen grabs of some fancy doors in game.
    

Thats all for now.

Good luck everyone, and be comforted in the knowledge that there are people all over the world feeling the same dev pain you’re feeling now!!

It seems that I am falling out of the challenge. I’m in 11th grade, and lately, our teachers have been buriing us in projects. English, French, History, Ethics(lol) not counting all the exams.

Since my game is a Halloween theme game, I wouldn’t probably have time to finish it, challenge or no challenge.:(

And then, as to add, I have been arguing pretty severally with the JavaScript garbage collector, I don’t even know what is the reason. And yeah, I am making an html5 game, that should be ported to mobile, so performance is key. And anyway who makes such a stupid language where the garbage collector causes more problems than solutions? Why do garbage collectors even exist? Aarghghg!!1!!!!1!11!!RAGE QUIT!!!!

Hi All! So I’ve been hustling everyday. (Cue Rick Ross) But it’s not looking like I will finish by the end of october. I am getting some great progress. My goal is at least an alpha by the end of this month. I’m still laying down a lot of foundation. This contest is still providing me with that fire under my butt that i I desperately needed.

So for context: Sky Hawks is an arcade shooter. The game is a fixed scrolling game that is reminiscent of 1942. The funny thing is, I started this project as a way to finish something with a more manageable scope. (This was 2009.)  A lot of this project has been solving problems that I assumed would be easy. The first large one was dealing with off screen enemies. Having enemies in the game world was one thing, but they would be long gone by the time the player arrived. The solution was to place the enemies inside of a trigger. When the player was close enough, the enemies would appear in the world.  My coder is a rockstar, he got a level tiling system to work. This will allow us to swap out different art titles. This will also make it easy for us to have a level that lasts forever.

I’m rambling, this weekend is all about incorporating  more gameplay stuff: Turrets, Getting the bomb working better, and maybe sounds. Overall, it IS starting to come  together, but we haven’t even touched the boss routines yet. I’ll also post some of the art that the art guys have been working on. For now, here’s a link of an older build. I’d love some feedback. Thanks!

http://marvinhawkins.com/SkyHawksv10.html

So after stripping out some extra abilities and monsters, I have six monsters and six abilities. Now I need some levels! I have the randomly generated “sandbox” levels but I figure some tutorial levels would be good since the mechanics are non-trivial.

Each tutorial only has a few monsters and/or abilities to avoid user overload. I’m going with the “explain everything as if you were talking to a 5-year-old” method. Players can always just skip the tutorial levels and each level only takes about 30 seconds anyways so even if some players find it too easy they can quickly go on to harder levels.

One problem I had was with transparency of the icons; this wasn’t obvious when monster icons were placed on the bright buttons, but viewed over the dark help window they showed some obvious fringing…

Can’t see it? Let me zoom that in for you

Yeah, that’s not good. It turns out my original drawing in Inkscape had the background set to transparent white instead of transparent black. Switching to transparent black helps a lot here:

The real fix to this problem is to use  premultiplied alpha but I wasn’t about to start fiddling with that right now. In any case the background should be transparent black anyways since it is easier to work with in other contexts.

k, I’m out of October Challenge. Change of interests and a still broken GPU diverted my plans. I did some experiments with Web Audio though and started working on a library which I will probably use in future projects. I’m also going to continue creating new Web Audio experiments which I will post on this site:

http://www.cappel-nord.de/webaudio/

By the way: My Adsense earnings on this site is > 1€, so in the end I achieved the October Challenge goal without even a finished product 😉

For this year’s “October Challenge” I am proud to present Mars Orbital, a 3d platformer game with “skateboarding-in-space” physics. I had so much fun making this game, and I’m really happy with the result.

BUY IT HERE! PAY WHAT YOU WANT!

It should run great on any Windows machine, old or new. The game uses the openGL fixed-function rendering pipeline, which means that it should run fine even on laptops or older PCs that can’t handle today’s advanced shaders. Playtesters have reported framerates as high as 300 FPS when running on a modern gaming rig at full HD (1920×1080) resolution!

It uses PhysX for realistic rigid-body physics simulation. It even supports non-convex solids, which was essential for proper handling of snowboarding or skateboarding-style “half-pipes” and level geometry with rounded corners.

The game consists of 12 levels, including a hidden “bonus level” (hint – do a blind jump to the left on the first level), a “speed round” (where you try to collect as many powerups as possible in a limited time), even even a simple “boss battle” (where a ball of electricity tries to push you off the ledge).

Trailer video:

Use the arrow keys to move. Collect as many powerups as you can and avoid falling into space. Find the teleporter to warp to the next level.

With the right amount of momentum, you can pull off insanely big jumps between platforms!

Gameplay footage:

Screenshots:
                   

Tags: McFunkypants

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2012 at 8:09 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. 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 think I’ve completed the october challenge as I’ve earned the first dollars on iTunes and Google Play.

I’ve also created a flash version and submitted it to Kongregate. I hope this will drive some traffic to the app stores via cross promotion. You can play it here.

I just updated Another Castle to 0.03. This version adds in a sword, pellet gun, falling spikes, slimes, and some nicer backgrounds. All of the basic weapon types are done, so next on the list are some basic magic and clothing items.

You can play the prototype at http://www.AnotherCastleTheGame.com

I am entering the October Challenge. Better late then never. One week of vacation should give me enough focus to complete something that is publishable, I hope. I am planing to port my LD24 entry to the android platform as I have been getting my first company smartphone lately and would like to tinker with it anyway.

As my LD24 entry was using only plane Java JDK APIs and pushing every pixel to the screen manually (a raycasting-based software renderer) there was suprisingly no big effort to get the code running on my Galaxy S3. Only the speed was really bad due to not leveraging the GPU in any way. 5 fps made it clear that even some optimization would not get me to a smooth 60 fps easily. So, I am planning to reuse the general game-idea and architecture to build a simple 3D game using OpenGL ES 2.0. I am not sure if the theme will keep the same, but I am planing on mainly tinkering with some lighting, shadowing and physics. Whatever theme will make good use of the technical things I come up with will be fine. Learning something new is still the focus; earning money is only secondary for now.

Main tools will be as usual eclipse, Java. MS.Paint and Bfxr. Additonally, I will put libGDX for rapid development on the desktop and iNudge for some music into the mix for the first time.

Well, things have been going well. I problem solved and retextured the spaceship. Here’s a screenshot to show some progress. 

I posted a larger update here: But as to yesterday’s word, here’s some media on my project. Again, my focus now is build the foundation. We’re close to getting close to a playable demo. This week’s update is more art heavy. We are getting some good contributions from the art team. My challenge this weekend is to start to get that in the game. The biggest indicator of progress is the main player ship (above) is close to ready. It’s an exciting moment!

In the mean time, here’s  some photos. By the end of the month, I want to have an alpha done. I might try to get preorders (thus fulfiling the challenge) But I want to make sure I’m doing it right. My thought is, I’m making a  single player game, what can you give a player in that case? its not a game like mine-craft or some other sandbox experience. I welcome any insights. Either way, Sky Hawks will be released soonsih. If not by November, then by December. If anyone has any insights on how Alpha Funding works for non multiplayer games, I’m all ears.

Here’s some pics:

I’m often too lazy to do anything, but yesterday and today i worked on SquareShot. I’ve made a few additions, but none of them are big ones. Anyway, here’s the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hypK53iSvNI

So, more progress is being made on my space shooter game.  Thanks to a very funny bug that resulted in a ship being spawned every time an enemy hits the player ship while the player ship is invincible, I now have a really fun idea for a powerup:

This powerup will cause maybe 20 ghost ships to appear out of your one ship and collectively allow you to destroy every enemy on screen with a powerful barrage of thousands of bullets!

And yes, there are less than 0 lives remaining in the screenshot.

I can’t make good graphics, sound effects, or music. The code is good, the ideas are interesting (to me at least) but it’s time to cut my losses and get back to the giant piles of laundry, dishes, and junk mail that I’ve been neglecting the last few weeks.

Retrospective and thoughts about next time on my dev blog.

Here’s some pictures of procedurally generated plants I was working on. Each row is a bunch of individuals from the same species.

im sorry to say i wont be able to participate in this months ludum dare due to family issues. the drama is getting to extreme levels and is hindering my performance. again, i apologize. see yall next time! good luck to all!!!

It’s week 3 already? Wow.

I’ve done a lot of progress over the past week. Most of my days were spent working on my very own 2D Tile-Based level editor in Unity.

This has sped up the level creation as the editing and the testing can now be done simultaneously. No more pausing the game just to change stuff and then playing again.

Here’s a full list of stuff I’ve made this week:

• Level editor
• Map saving and loading
• Sprite animation manager (not seen in screenshot but def working)
• 25 basic (easy) levels

• More levels
• Basic menus and GUI
• Sprites and Art assets

• Playtesting system
• Optimizations
• Release of level editor

I’ve thought of putting up the game on Steam Greenlight. Will read up on the steps needed to make it happen.

Ciao!

Hey folks!

There are quite a lot of updates about my game.

First and foremost, I had to rethink the storyline, streamline it to make it fit in with the visuals and gameplay. Therefore I also had to change it’s name again… “Closer to You” was definitely chosen way too hastily. I’m learning valuable lessons here!

Anyway, the game is now called Memory Inc. and here’s what it’s about:

Memory Inc. is a 2D platformer with a mixture of quick jump n’ run action, a metroidvania progression and memento-like storytelling.

You’re an agent being sent into a guys subconscious by Memory Inc. – a company hired to help people remember. On your journey through the mind you set free the supressed memories about a long lost love, causing your host unbearable agony and leaving you to deal with a more and more hostile environment. The only way to heal your clients pain is to get to the bottom of it, whether he wants it or not.

It’d be real awesome if you could tell me what you think about that story setup.

Here’s some more stuff that I worked on:

I’ve made some more visual updates, added new sprites.

The slightly updated menu screen.

Updated the agents (players) sprite to fit in with the slightly altered scenario.

Made a little Illustration for the title screen (probably).

Also, I’ve started working on my homepage and naively hope to finish it today.

Remember to hit me up on Twitter for pizza and snacks!

So, I’m 14 and I don’t really have a lot of time, I’m not sure if I’ll even get the game finished by the end of October, however, the development is going pretty well, the multi-player doesn’t work yet, but I might scrap that, I have saving and loading, an inventory and some crafting!

Here’s a link to anyone who wants to play the current version: Download

Also, to anyone interested here’s my development Twitter

I am open to any suggestions for items and mobs, also the character sprites are not mine and just place holder, the rest are done by me.

Fighting the Skeletons

The bouncing Pumpkins

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2012 at 9:29 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. 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.

Firstly here is a video of the current state of my game – warts and all. (Sorry about the music it’s a lot louder and cheesier than I realised at 2am when I uploaded the vid)

After 3 weeks of hardcore developing I’ve come to the conclusion that a full release version is not possible to submit by the end of the month. I hate it when reality slaps you in the face.

But I have deceied to soldier on and still try to do a staggered release

Here is the plan:

$0.99 – Public Alpha for Oct challenge includes
killZ wave mode – You start with 1 bullet. Kill a wave of Zombies then choose to either return to the safehouse and bank everything you have earned or continue to the next wave. If you die you loose everything you earned.
Stories – 2 pre-made levels to play through and earn Zombie dollars from.
Create – (testing mode) build 1 level that you can walk around and shoot. 9 Skyboxes
Practice – A level with unlimited ammo but you don’t earn any Zombie dollars

$1.99 – Public Beta (TBA) includes
killZ wave mode
stories – 4 pre-made levels
share stories – download user vreated levels, upload and share your levels. Detailed search engine to focus on levels you’d like to play. Earn Zombie dollars for uploading and downloading.
create – 4 spare level slots to save WIP levels. More game asset sets to choose from.
practice
your loot – manage what you take with you into a level you play through.

$2.99 – Full release (TBA)
All of the above without the bugs and more level packs.

$2.99 – future releases (TBA)
I’ll be working on this game probably for the rest of my life because I’ve made it in such a way that when I feel like making specific style of FPS I can just make new game assets and release a new pack with some pre made levels. That could be a Dead Space style game, Western Zombies or even a Slender Man pack. And then the player can make those levels too.

I guess what I’d really like to know is are people willing to get in early, save a couple of bucks, play and contribute feedback to a paid public alpha?

Mechanics and monsters are done, so I’m finalizing the level design. There are three tutorial levels, three “standard” levels, and two special levels. I may have time to add more levels but this is the amount that I think I can actually finish. The special islands include a randomly-generated island layout and a “time attack” level.

Of course, zombies are mandatory so I added a zombie summoner “boss”. The zombies need a bit of fiddling, but they basically function correctly.

The final “standard” level features two zombie summoners, so use of AOE is key to conquering that island. I usually clone the dragon for the extra AOE damage, but some other approaches should work as well.