1:30 AM for me, perhaps I should take a nap… but I’m scared of the dark…

The world is now generating fairly random, and I can easily expand it with more if I have time left. Patches of trees and areas of houses are randomly distributed over the screen within certain borders of my algorithm. I call create_areas(…), and give some information about how to distribute the areas over the screen, about how many, what spread, about how many objects per area, and which tile base to use (to show houses, or trees, or mountains, or tall grass…). It’s a nice function to work with.

Here’s a TODO list (with MoSCoW):

1. Create roads between houses within their area [W]
2. Draw the player [M] animate him [S] and make him able to move[M]
3. Draw art for the innocent surface dwellers [M] with animation [S]
4. Draw our evil minions [M] with animation [S]
5. Player can infest a creature/human to create a minion [M]
6. Battle system [M]
7. Battle behaviour for Minions [S], Humans[M] and Creatures [W]
8. Player can conquer an area (forest, village, …) to get bonus creatures [W]
9. Particlezzz! [W]

Phew… I don’t know… 22 hours left…

So I sat down. Had dinner as I expected. The sub sandwiches were better than I was expecting. I decided to get with the picture and take a photograph:

I talked with people. Not about much, but hearing another’s voice was just nice, really. I then sat down and implemented a pathfinder. Currently the core works, it finds paths properly, I just need to start setting moves so that entities follow their paths. At the moment, entities just look like this:

It works, and I can assign colors to visualize direction. I think, once the pathfinding’s done, and there’s basic AI so that the soldiers fight the demons, I’ll start making test imagess and actually put some graphics in the environment. I’ll probably paint them out at 128×128 resolution with my tablet and bundled Photoshop Elements 9. Someone had asked in my previous post why I’m feeling a bit weird about the whole pixel art thing, and it’s kind of silly. It just feels a bit weird that I want to go against the established “norm”, but there really isn’t a norm at all and I shouldn’t have any reason to feel this way. Ultimately, though, I just don’t like creating pixel art. It’s pretty cool, and it really defines the look of things like VVVVVV, but it’s not what I want to do. I like painting more, even if I’m not very good at it.

And then, I’ll add particles. Particle effects are all I need.

Playable at http://centipede2013.herokuapp.com/

• I’ve managed to get it so that it’s not too easy from the very beginning, and you can actually die if you’re not careful (hurrah).
• I’ve also added animations and drawn a load of stuff in SpriteSomething on my iPad
• I’ve made sure it’s obvious that you get hurt when you’re hit by a bullet
• I made a decision to only give one flower at a time as it keeps it difficult

I’ve actually probably spent about 6 hours putting together the game, and another 6 hours tweaking, tweaking, tweaking – it turns out it’s really hard to make a game ‘fun’ and ‘difficult’ etc.

I’m not quite there yet, tomorrow I’m going to

• Add an on-going score counter
• Add code for ‘game over’
• Add touch controls for mobile devices
• Add instructions on start so you know what you’re doing
• Add sounds

That is all pretty trivial and then I’ll get onto adding more things to make the game more “interesting” and “fun”

• There is a tendency for the ‘cover’ to erode by the 10th level or so, might consider a way to keep it coming back
• Power-ups would be cool. but not really sure what sort of power-ups to use

I think watching The Hobbit movie inspired me too much XD. In my game you are an evil dragon that has to protect his treasure from the heroes that come to steal it from you!! My precious!! XD

Here it is my day 1 work.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/13291868/index.html

you can use your claws, throw fire and kill them all. Still no end state or even puntuation. Tomorrow more.

Tags: ld25

The fact that I got 4.5 hours of sleep last night, coupled with just the right amount of coffee, has left me pleasantly refreshed, even after a day of work. I had salmon and creme cheese on a bagel for breakfast, grilled cheese for lunch and I am going to have some chili for dinner (this my friend, is the recepie for combating canadian winters, even though I have not actually been outside in the last day)

game updates: I tweaked the world gen engine, now it generates original shapes, instead of placing pre made chunks (shapes are still based on chunks, but the engine modifies them to the point that they are unrecognizable!)

I also modified the player metrics. You can now jump over an extra block!

Oh, and enemies now spawn, I currently only have 2 types though (with at least 2 more planned)

I want to finish up the game in the next 3 hours, giving me a whole day to polish the snot out of the thing 😀

to do: make graphical UI, make 2 new enemies, make spikes, actually make a game over screen (atm you just get negative health), tweak metrics, make presents spawn, make health (candy canes) spawn, write online high scores (likely ill will do this at the end, because its not crucial, make graphics, make particle effects

(most likely im forgetting something, but whatever)

btw, the most recent public build is here

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/12/15/demo-of-my-game/

(this does not have most of the aspects that I mentioned here XD)

It’s halfway done and I have basically zero progress…

MY CHARACTER CAN’T EVEN JUMP YET.

Okay.

*Mantra*

I can do this I can do this…

*Puts on some christmas music*

This is the Second room of the spaceship, might have some familiar faces in here ; )

The gameplay is pretty much complete I just need to finish up the introduction and ending of the game, as well as music.

Horrible result after first 24 hours.

I spent half of a day resolving problems with animation and frameworks (my and Starling), but in the evening during remaining 20% of today’s time I made 80% of work. :/

I forgot my graphic tablet in another city, so project, probably, will consist of pixel art. Tomorrow I should wake up with clear mind, trying to look at this problem from another corner.

Okay. I thought that I would write a summary on the blog, too, for those who are not following Twitter. (Btw: http://twitter.com/robee00)

I successfully implemented a wave-system, now I have to fine tune the difficulty, as now it’s so hard, that even I can’t play it throught ^^. There is so much to do, and I think I just have to polish things, and make new graphics. As I felt, I learned a lot of things, even from Day #1, and I’ll write a postmortem after LD, so be sure to check that out too

Came back from partying ~7pm and got back to work.  Now the buildings all spawn at random locations on the map BUT NOT ON WATER OR SAND!!

In fact, next step is to stop you from building graveyards and caves on either water or sand.  That, and making it actually cost something.

Then GUI…then your spells…then upgrading spawners…then the hero spawn…then the difficulty ramping up…THEN PLAYTEST.  All in all, I think I’m making good time.

Oh, and you also start with far less corruption, that way you have to spawn some and can’t just immediately start bombarding the enemy towers with units.  I’m also doing scaling difficulty from easy to hard, (2 towers, 3 towers, 4 towers).  If it doesn’t ramp up well enough I can mess with the values.

You want to be a Goat? Maybe to play tennis or volley with a naked human?

It’s for you, enjoy.

Day one of three

Pretty good progress on the first day

I got the map loader working and some basic (but dumb) AI running too! Almost all graphics (not the placeholder character sprites)  are made by the talented artist Sara Mena (https://twitter.com/sara_coisa), go check her website out 😀

What is the game about? Well about goats and other less important stuff… (you will have to wait and see!)

LUMBERJACK!!

Me and my brother Joseph are back for our third Ludum Dare (and third consecutive!)

Here’s the character for our game about chopping down trees with a big, nasty chainsaw! before all those pesky environmentalists show up!

Little turnaround..

– Rob

A short point about the game : It’s both a maze and a minesweeper. You have to reach the target by scanning nearby areas. Once discovered, you’ll be able to claim (or to lose !) new areas.

The gameplay is nearly finished. That’s the good point. Incoming things are a scoring system, particles effects and musics.A long night is incoming !

You say into your phone : “Agent 2, head to the sewer”

You hear from your phone : the sounds of a sewer when the Agent moves there

No screenshot obviously. :p

I’ve worked primarely on the presentation since I last posted. I trouble shooted several HUD ideas, worked on my information communication, even added an orbiting moon around earth. I settled on a simplistic style and offset framing for my game.

I’m currently working on gathering sfxs for the game and eventually a track. I also need to work on a final Background and endgame states such as winning or losing. After that its the home stretch with a front end and bam!

Have a screenshot

More monsters!

Demo: Web! | Standalone! (Java – Platform Independent)

This is it so far.

http://killkong.weebly.com/

I’m tired.

So, Saturday daytime…
Got 2D Toolkit, spent an hour investigating (running through all demo scenes) to get the basics. Decided to try building a playable prototype using their graphics (Stone Block, some bubbles and sheep) first.

<time passes>

Here’s how it looks so far (including confusing clouds — pretend they’re passing icebergs and that’s a reflection of the sun 😉 ):

Got a basic modular Arctic icemass (using stone block graphics supplied with tk2d demo). Got it responding to clicks/touch and incrementing a basic score which is displayed. Intro instructions begun. Started work on dropping chunks of ice and decided to do bobbing in the water using same mechanism – bit inefficient = later! Next finish dropping ice to create end case. Then we’ll need a closing screen / overlay.

Built and deployed to Web player — seems to work fine. Will consider this basic packaging and look to do an upload before I finish for the night.

Right now, am concerned about balancing the (unfinished) game since there might be an easy optimal strategy (if external tiles are removed first, just mine those first!). Thinking about how Real Life ™ mining works, people prospect before mining.
So will switch the initial click to being a prospect. From that you get an estimate on the richness of the seam. (which you have to remember?)
You then choose where to site a mine (which might take a while to build later).
Perhaps you then only score by clicking the mine (forcing you to choose between this and more prospecting). Not sure about this part since RL mines just get on with it — expect the miners need paying. hmm
Perhaps you sacrifice score to build a mine? and only a little to prospect? So the player should start with some initial capital. Let’s rename score to money!

Right, onwards to sleepiness!

Tags: oil

Here’s a preliminary picture of my game. I think I will name it “Split em Up”:

The progress is going very slowly, and the game is still far from playable… I will probably not be able to include stuff like a decent title screen or sound. But well, who knows.

So the game that I’m working on (Along with partner in crime Ian Snyder) is a reverse-platformer, you design the level and then the game’s hero has to navigate it. Hopefully dying in the process. So that means making all the art for a platformer, along with other things.

Man I feel like I should have more, but I did end up sleeping until…11…

But there’s also walk cycles that I ended up making, plus attack animations. I figure I’m about half way there. There’s about 40 art assets in total. and this is probably less than half of them.

ART IS HARD

I’m done! I’m actually done! Here soon, once my game is converted to html5, I shall post it!

Here’s some of the new art….now time for some food

Things to do:

-clean up hitboxes

-add mario anims

-add lose condition

I hope you will enjoy this musical work of Mathhal.

–>CLICK HERE<–

We are really proud of our musician!

You can also Listen the first track here

Previous posts Introducing Mad Princess! and Enemies of Mad Princess here.

It’s 3 am in my country, so I better catch some sleep and continue working after sleeping for 5-6 or so hours. Tomorrow is going to be busy day! I just finished the the trap buttons in the GUI, tomorrow I start making the actual traps you use to kill the enemies. Before I sleep though, here is a screenshot of the current alpha build, click it to enlarge:

The game is a sideways tower defence. You need to stop the advancing enemies from reaching the Princess. To do that, you use collected blood to buy and set different traps like spike carpets. Killing enemies gets you more blood to buy more traps. Info about the enemies in my previous post Enemies of Mad Princess. Some stages will be wider and will scroll following your mouse. Please note that this is early footage so some graphics can still change.

Follow the development and my other ramblings in my Twitter @AdventIslands

Philz Coffee, the coffee of the gods:

Sandwich from Plutos. Incredibly delicious. Also, so large that I only ate half. Saving the rest for dinner 😀

What? What’s that you ask? How far along on the game am I you ask? Given that it’s already been a full day  you say?

…

…

…

UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

My game is basically ready. I even added a bonus stage, something that wasn’t in the original project. Everything seems to be working nicely, and the game is pretty fun to play IMO.

I think I’ll reward myself with some resting now, I’ll watch a movie while I eat some ice-cream (It’s horribly hot here in Rio de Janeiro right now). I still have about 25 hours to work. Tomorrow I’ll see if I can make some nice music for the game, I’ll work a little bit more in the sound effects (I am not completely satisfied with some of them, and I think I could use a few more in certain spots… BFXR makes everything sound like an Atari 2600 😀 ), and add some icing in the cake, like an instructions screen and some other nice stuff 😀

But yay, the game is done, and longer before the deadline 😀

At the moment, our villain is little more than a capsule.

Not so much a space capsule. More like an aspirin—not exactly what a villain of such magnitude aspires to.

However, the master villains (that would be Adam and myself), are much pleased with the progress of our plan.

Though he already has designs on destroying the entire world and wiping out all of humanity, our capsule villain has just taken his first baby steps. Players will navigate the map by clicking open ground with the left mouse button.

Adam has mocked up a test level for us to roam around in, and we’re getting a lot of good data in terms of how to proceed in terms of camera movement, camera angle, speed of character movement and NPCs, NPC detection radius, and line of sight. All of these factors are going to have to be balanced out, but even just running around a mostly empty room is amusing.

And isn’t that what developing games is all about? Making some fun?

We’ve also started to do some tests in terms of art for the final environments.

Here’s a mock up, just for a sense of mood.

At the moment, we are planning three levels: the tutorial takes place in a corn field in Kentucky. The first really full-speed play level (in terms of the player’s point of view) will be Area 51. And the final level will be in a well-guarded palace.

Tags: ReturnDearLeader

I know it doesn’t look like much, but this is the culmination of a lot of work, and it will make a lot more sense tomorrow.  Anyways, the grey dot is a wolf, the red dot is a dead lamb, and the brown dot is a fence.  You have to kill the sheep and you have to go around fences.  In reality I can do however many animals and obstacles I want, but I’m going to keep it simple.  If time allows I might drop in a goat.  I still need to add in some scoring components.  Its a puzzle game and the sheep move in a pattern, the idea is to minimize the number of turns it takes to kill all the sheep. At this point I just have to create some simple ui stuff to make the game reasonable to play and design some levels.  Tomorrow I’ll tackle graphics and sound.

16 hours in and I though I’d make a post.

To be honest, I really though that the “end of the world” theme was going to win. I had plenty of ideas for that one, but when “You are the villain” won, I was stumped. I had a few ideas, but none of them stood out for me. I eventually decided on a top-down town, called “Joyville” or something similar, and a small-time villain who is trying to cause chaos.
I decided to go with a pixelated style, as I’m no artist. I am afraid that this approach may affect readability. See if you can work out what is supposed to be a car in this picture:

Spot the car

Here’s a photo of my workspace. I would have taken a photo of my lunch, but it didn’t last long enough on the plate

I really like what I see here, and I can’t wait to start playing them

First screenshot

and I managed to put some goat into it

go go goats

I didn’t want to enter at first. I didn’t feel very motivated to begin with and with my back injured i cannot work effectively and without pain anyways. That said I rather like the theme for once and eventually i got an idea and realized how i could implement it.. Heck, 20hours are good enough anyways 😀

So here’s a little heads-up:

EATEN

You’re a hungry cannibal running wild, eating people. NOMNOMNOM

I’ll be doing things with Flashpunk, Aseprite, LevelUp and Renoise.

Not feeling super motivated this LD. But I am hacking on some stuff on principal

Here is a work-in-progress shot:

“Memex” update!!! It’s going pretty well. The game is actually playable, except for the fact there’s only one level and no exit yet. It’s going to be a puzzle game if you can’t tell yet. There’s a lot to do left, sigh. Cake (me!) has a ton of UI assets and game assets to keep working on. And with a full and busy schedule tomorrow, it’s not going to be great for both of us. Let’s hope for the best!

Jamming to: Animal Collective – My Girls

The 1st day comes to an end and I’m quite satisfied with the result so far. The game Make It Black features you, a dark creature who just wants to go to whatever oblique dimension he calls home but he’s trapped in some sort of cheerful place with smiling creatures. Help him get out of there by darkening the place up a little.

Gamewise this version is still quite in alpha mode, to-dos are: actual levels, disgust level, sprite interactions, more enemies with better AI and an intro and ending sequence. Enough to do for tomorrow but this is a nice waypoint for now.

Pic shows world as it darkens because of your awfully tarnishing bile. (test level)

start, sort of halfway and delicious darkness

Latest version playable at http://logic-dream.com/ld25

While this screenshot (intentionally) doesn’t show much, I CAN tell you that the game is coming along well.

You play as an evil supervillian who’s been locked in his own dungeon by a (completely moronic) superhero who just happened to acquire some ridiculous superpowers. He’s locked your gadgets in the adjacent dungeon cells and you must break out and reclaim your tools of villainy to destroy him.

I totally redid the graphics (when I should be working on the gameplay mechanics!) and I’m much happier with the way they look.  I halved the resolution of the sprites, it seems you can create satisfactory looking graphics in less time and more easily with a lower resolution.  I also got the key mechanism for dying coded.  As I mentioned previously you’re a ghost in a haunted mansion and if a tourist manages to take a picture of you then it’s game over.  You can avoid this by “hiding” and turning into background scenery (currently a clock, a pot plant or a coat stand) or by jumping over them.

TODO:

Allow the ghost to turn the tables and chase the tourists out!

Create different levels

Sound

Music?

More sprites?

BUT FIRST: Sleep, it’s nearly 2am!

…unless you unlock the fly power.

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…

etc.

…HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!…

Joey did a great job with the art this afternoon and I’ve added that into the game. Now onward to the AI system!

Now them sats be pointing at targets the poor villages, thanks to the magical atan function, kindly provided by Ananace

Progress so far: http://jenkins.cyberstalker.dk/job/LudumDare25/ for linux and windows.

Well, core mechanics are finished and im leaving a lot to do tomorrow. I hope you can come by the submissions page and give me a little feedback to get more stuff done tomorrow!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/?p=205337

Hahaha, this is fucking awesome! Click and hold the left mouse button to start charging up a power ball thing, and release to shoot!

I drew some resources over dinner and tv and cobbled together a dragon out of them.. Now I’m putting some colour into it.. Bit of a waste of time, but if I dont finish the game, I can make a koi pond style app with dragons in it!

My process for this has been a bit time consuming:

• Draw on paper.
• Photograph paper.
• Seperate in gimp and theshold.
• Stick together to make resources.
• Copy layers individually to different file.
• Save as transparent.
• Alter the sizes and offsets in a file.
• Add a bit of difference clouds beneath the sketch, add some darken for detail.

Tomorrow is going to focus on hit detection.. It will probably involve a lot of circle boundaries.

\o/

The same plan…

Hey everyone.

I hope you are all having fun.

Just an update from my game. I didnt put any time on graphics yet, so the screenshot won’t tell/show much.
I’ve finished the npc AI and the combat system along with some mechanics.

The main goal of the game is to attack and consume npc’s that walk around and gain evilness by doing so. The more friendly they are, the more evilness you get. (It is easy to attack people that are rude to you, but harder to harm friendly people). Also being near to friendly people will hurt you.

I will get some sleep and then start with graphics tomorrow.

good night 😉

Tags: compo, screenshot, update

… piggy said

My effort so far.

Ive gone for a lot of particles, not sure if ill regret that :/

The aim to is to go around killing as many people in 5 mins as you can. You can buy throwing stars, firebombs, swords and a bow. Will probably add more exploding stuff. Just got to make it so you can actually buy stuff, villagers contstatly spawn, 5 min timer, and a soldier mob that fights back, and goats, of course.

You shouldn’t be reading this. You should either be sleeping or working on your game. Unless you gave up.

No pictures of my food, for I sustain myself on the tears of the competitors who couldn’t make it. Every “I’m out” is like a fine morsel of filet mignon.

Here’s a screenshot:

Hell yeah it’s dark. Dark like the Acre.

My ambition is becoming a reality. This has been the best attempt so far, and this is the seventh attempt in a row. Will he finish? Will it suck? All questions shall be answered in due time.

Detailed updates live here. There’s a link to a “playable” build on that page.

Follow me on Twitter, Friend me on Facebook, Subscribe to me on YouTube. The usual crap.

Dark Acre Jack, signing off for the night.

Tags: Dark Acre, effluvia, indie marketing

This was a great first day for my first LD! 😀 I made to Pixel art animations for the first time!!

Hmm i’m using Stencyl to try to take away the programing of the way but i’m having huge problems to try get the distance from 2 actors … bah that’s for tomorrow 😀

\o g’night everybody

Tags: pixel arte, stencyl

So, I’ve got the basic level generation and platforming controls done, let’s turn this into a game now!

Alright !
We are behind on timing with server comunication, but things are going well with the designing parts.

At least you can choose a login and connect now… but cannot play …

Developping a game right

I ended up spending the last hour making the maps look pretty instead.

Dem priorities.

Because 789. Don’t know if I’ll be able to work on this much more. Have a ton to do this weekend.

Submitted and ready to play here.

Tags: compo

I’ve made some great progress in my game. I’ll list some the major things I’d done.

1. There are 3 sectors to play in, I have all 3 working some what.
2. this goes with the above, warp gates are working.
3. going to a starbase allows you to steal credits or fuel
4. if you get caught the space police show up
5. you have the option to attack or try to flee from the police
6. if you succeed in your attempt in escaping you get a message that its safe to move

I still need to add combat, which is the last major element left.

Here are 3 screenshots showing the warp gates functioning

Once I get combat in I’ll post some pics

-KunoNoOni

Holy cow! I think I’m actually going to finish something for LD this time.

So the idea for my game is that you control a satellite / ship that orbits the planet, and your goal is to be all evil and use your laser to destroy targets on the planet. Some targets are simply important buildings/installations, but some other targets will launch attacks at you, like homing missiles or defense fighters, so you have to balance blowing up high point value targets, and destroying potential threats. I’m also hoping to work in some more mechanics like some upgrades or alternate weapons… who knows.

The red things are going to be missiles, and the white blocks are targets

So far, we’ve got a planet (yay), with randomly placed buildings. Currently, every single building fires homing missiles at you and there’s no real scoring setup yet either. Obviously graphics are placeholders. Today has been about MATH. OH GOD THE MATH.

I came across something interesting that I hadn’t considered today. Zoetrope is built on Löve2D, and uses a horizontally flipped plane for drawing – that is, the top of the screen is y = 0, the bottom of the screen is y = 600 (or whatever the height of the window is). Zoetrope rotations are also flipped like this. This means that a rotation of 45 degrees in Zoetrope is actually -45 degrees on the normal coordinate plane and that for calculating things involving angles (which I clearly have a lot of…) there are some issues with  cos/sin and negating numbers to correct for things being backwards.

I also think I’ve done more math today than I did throughout most of college.

Also!Here’s the most recent build. Left & Right arrows orbit the planet, and space fires ze laser:

So i already submited my game, i think its almost complete.

There is some things i need to do yet:

• Make player, goats and farmers rotate.
• Fix some collision issues.
• Add some “Winning” to the game.
• Maybe get some better art. 😛

You can check it out here.

Hope you like it.

Thanks, MAT4DOR.

Yay.

So next I need to finish up the game over session, and then more polish (and maybe add a feature…?).

View progress here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf8cFt5LGhI

What we have so far:

• Complete game design
• Multiplayer “arena” – up to 20 people can play at the same time.
• Collision detection
• Sound/Music (although the video did not record it…)
• First level designed (assets coming soon)
• Client prediction (stop other players from lagging all over the screen)
• Simple enemy spawners

We now have 4 people working on this!

• Myself – Developer
• Callum – Art
• Brendan – Sounds/Music
• Michael – Level Design

48 hours to go! Time to prettify things!

I couldn’t think of another game idea and rather than quit I decided to remove the Hitler references and rename the game Bad Puppy.

I now have a Person animation in the game.  If you get too close to the person, it will pet you, causing you to lose meanness.  When your meanness drops to 0, you cease to be a bad puppy and start wagging your tail.

Not much of a game, yet, but the animation is pretty cute.

Tags: Bad Puppy, csanyk

Slow progress. :/ Struggeld a lot with getting guards working. But finally got them to recognize the player. Get Progess here.

Screenshot of guard getting hold of player.

3 AM around here, its time for some sleep.

I have some more features in mind. Lets see if i will have enough time left to add some of them. But first thing tomorrow is to do some proper assets and a more complex level.

Well, I am pleasantry surprised how well the first 24 hours of ludum dare went. I managed to do few things and do them well:

• Rendering complete
• AI complete
• Controls 50% done
• Graphics about 25% done
• Play testing 5% done
• Windows compatibility ??%

Screenshot of th current state:

Result of the first 24 hours of the Ludum Dare

And for the fans of video action, here is the latest build of the game on video: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1501162/ld-14.ogv

Now, I must catch some sleep and finish this beast tomorrow!

So, I think I kind of know where to go next with my game. I have a few things to change:

• Have fewer, but stronger enemies.
• Make the enemies slower.
• Add drops from enemies. Which makes sense ’cause you’re supposed to be stealing your stuff from them.
• Maybe add some variety to the levels somehow, like a landscape-ish.

Hopefully I get all that done in the next two or three hours (or learn to sleep-code. Anyone got a tutorial for that?)

It’s 7am, I can’t see my screen without leaning towards it, I’m too tired to put on my contact lenses and my glasses are broken… Time for some emergency repairs. *Pulls out sellotape*

I’m actually not doing too bad!

Here you can see a new monster that the wizard can summon: the skeleton. I want at least three more, and maybe healing spells. I’ve finished sound effects, and now I’m working on music.

I hope everyone else is doing well! Good luck!

Tags: halfway

Summary of the first day:
Got an idea.
Chose technology.
Made some food.
Took a nap.
Run some errands.
Sleepy again.
Took another nap.
One day passed, yay!

Tomorrow we’ll see if I’m too tired to get anything done.

After getting a christmas tree with the rents, as well as a trip to Chriskindlmart (a german christmas festival in a town near my home), I return to the game!

I figured out my problem with my countdown timer, got it to stop at 0 as well as turn to an end screen at 0. Displays end credits as well as a title based on the number of kills you got. So far I have separated the titles between 8 different point ranges (8 different titles, think you can name them all?).

I also added two new characters to the game: the sheep dog and the shepherd! Running into these guys will reduce your kill count by 1 and 5 respectively. Of course once you do they will move places in the same fashion that the sheep moves after eating one, so I guess you could consider the encounter a rough tussle between the monster and the hero characters.

So the phases go as followed. I have the hours til hibernation set at 360 for the moment. I feel like balancing would be very time consuming so I’ll just leave it to my first instinct.

Little less than a day left! Let’s see what else I can jam into this! XD Keep it up everyone!

got some sheeps with a sheepish AI…

Going steady.

Loadingscreen, loadingbar, and silly backdrop and loadingtune done. (most important first)

and of course some super awesome models for  the game.

Leaving the actual gameplay for tomorrow, and of course an awesome tune to loop in the background 😀

/D

Team Tibble Productions has reached their 24 hour mark in the 72 hour JAM! Here’s how our game is looking so far!

You can check out the applet here: http://redsoxfan.cz.cc/Games/ConfediCats/

So far we have the basic physics of the character down, with some needed tweaking with collision detection, and we have started on the enemies now!

Ok so I’ve got basic worker AI in place and I’m trying to calculate/balance the happiness factor next. I also realized that I may have to scratch my one-choice-at-a-time idea of forcing the player to choose what his citizens should do each day. I realized that this is annoying as I’ve to decide/click in a regular interval. I think a continues simulation will be more fun and probably easier to balance. I’ll sleep about this and decide tomorrow morning.

Here’s another good night screenshot

As always I’ll continue live streaming (http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose) tomorrow.

Tags: journal, screenshot, you_are_the_king

My idea is slowly taking shape: it’s something like a 2D sneak-’em-up.  You can’t really tell what’s going on from the screen shot, but the idea is that the player is supposed to be stealing the treasure from the houses, ideally without alerting the guards.  The guards move around on patrol, and chase the player when they come in range, and the player can throw daggers back at them.

There’s much more to come, but as always, it’s a matter of figuring out what gives the best cost/benefit ratio.  At least I’ve got collisions working reasonably well, which is a relief (:  There’s a ticking time bomb in the code with switchings of tops and bottoms of rectangles, due to pyglet doing things up the opposite way to what I’m used to, and me writing it the wrong way around and kind of getting the behaviour buried in.  Fingers crossed it all just works… hah!

I’m off for a bit of shut-eye.  Pleasant dreams, all – hope you dream of fun things and not crash bugs!

Ok, so I am making a (simplistic) 3D Third-Person Shooter thingie. Up till now, everything went quite smoothly. Let’s hope the second half goes as well as the first.

Done:

• Engine (movement, collission, shooting, damage)
• 2 Enemy Types and possibility for more
• Loot is dropped and collected

ToDo:

• Buyable updgrades
• Story
• Content (Map(s), more Enemy types)
• Sound/Musik (?)
• Better Graphics (?)

Check out our original mock-up compared to the actual lighting. We still have a lot of work to do, but the groundwork is all laid out. Now off the see The Hobbit in 3D IMAX, then back to work!

This is the first ludum dare that I have gotten far in, and I am so confident right now.

changes since last update:

pause screen added

more enemies

gui added

resources added

ability to collect scrap added

resource bar added

controls improved

(zoom in on screenshot, it’s a little small)

So now I have EVERYTHING in place, and all I need to do is program a better enemy spawning system and add more enemy types!  The graphics are really nice for my standards, because I suck at art.  I’m going to do sound now, with sfxr.

-zzForrest

I think I’m in a bit over my head here. But it’s getting somewhere now. Tonight I’ll check how I can scale down my concept a bit…

Anyway, here’s a little screenshot of my progress.

Not much there, but I still have 24 hours right?

By the end of day one (beginning of day two) I’m now sure that I won’t be participating this time. Got some really important stuff to do this weekend and even though I tried as hard as I could to make it work, that wasn’t enough.

All the luck to everyone who’s still on board. =D

I have officially created the cheesiest looking game on the planet.

And I love it.

(And yes, the sky does pan. That’s the most important part!)

After almost 12 hours, of which ~7 hours were around algorithms and data structure (yep, it kinda tells me our project is somewhat ambitious), we were able to determine how our classes would work together, and how NPC’s would avoid obstacles when “hunting” our villain. We had to read old (but gold) codes we wrote some time ago implementing steering behaviors, so that we make sure NPC’s won’t stay behind a rock, trying to unsucessfully move towards our villain. We were also able to implement some game basic data structures, like bullets, guns, and a point-n-click structure for the camera. Still, there’s a good amount of stuff to be implemented, but that’s fine – as this is our very first jam, it’s a good way to measure what we could’ve done different or less, and what we could’ve spent more time on tuning.

Our artists spent quite some time doing lots of drawing, and they’re also kinda far from finishing all the assets we foresaw in the beginning of the project. Not sure if we will be able to complete our game on time considering the game design and mechanics we planned – maybe we might consider updating it a bit so that it gets less complex and smaller, or not. We’re still unsure.

Anyway, this is just a report.    Here’s some of the conceptual art and assets our artists have been working on.

Regards,

Vico

The game is finally starting to look nicer !

I couldn’t really get any sleep but at least having a break got me back in the mood.

Also I already tried some stuff about the other assets *teasing*

Playable:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ifn50ylj7q21425/bombit_001.swf

You can navigate with the arrow keys, and toggle the music/game over sound by clicking. Note that if you let the music run long enough it will destroy your CPU. I think I can make a solution for the final game, though, that won’t affect people with a low spec(other than the framerate being shit and the sound clipping).

Next things for tonight:

It’s been a big day – lot’s of progress on my end. Though there is still a ridiculous amount of work that needs to be done.

However, it’s time for a little screenshot:

The game will be a turn-based strategy game a la “Advance Wars” with a twist Some of the details are still a bit vague, but ultimately it’s meant to portrait how humanity is “Nature’s Villain”. So, YOU are the villain!

Anyway, need some sleep.

Cheers,
Bach

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2012 at 12:47 am and is filed under LD #25. 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 broke something when I added the pause code…

That kinda makes me want to make the trail stay like that though. Maybe I’ll add an option for it afterwards.

In the end I decided give a try to the Blender Game Engine instead of Unity3D and sadly, I regret a little.

I’m learning a lot, but I miss a lot programing in unity than use blender logic bricks, they are usable, but still are very primitive.

But Blender have nice things, like, everything seens so smooth and make shaders with it is wonderful.

Tags: 3D, BGE, blender, first day, LD # 25

Now I just have to make it more of a game…

Tags: Ghost, progress update

I’ve implemented the first of the games items. They are spread randomly through the level and have randomly generated stats.

Still no enemies…

No idea if I’ll finish this, but here’s what a few hours work has got me. First, before:

And the aftermath:

If I have the time tomorrow hopefully you’ll be able to see what happened in between.

Another screenshot:

Not much progress, but that’s OK.

This Jam is going worse than the last one if I’m honest. Countless struggles with Visual Studio bugs, the general slow, demotivating process of writing a tile system in a framework I knocked together in the late hours of the previous week, and frustration with other roadblocks I’ve encountered. It’s not been a pleasant ride.

What you see below is barely interactive. You can move the camera, and the tile your mouse is over is highlighted by a red outline. The likelihood of doing my original idea justice seems slim and I’ve spent the last two hours or so just trying to think of another way to continue from where I am. I’ve drawn a blank, so I’m going to sleep on it. Whatever I do I will be disappointed, but I said I was going to finish something this time, and I fully intead to do so.

Things I’ve learned so far (and in my previous jam attempt):
1. Don’t roll a tile system out during the jam.
2. Singleton managers are best for fast development. None of this constantly accessing parents’ parents’ managers lark.
3. Pick a SIMPLE idea. Do not forget this when looking at the list of uninspiring ideas in front of you and deciding to try the only interesting one. Pick a SIMPLE one.
4. Don’t use C++. Not unless you’re really confident with the code-base at hand, and have a stable installation of an IDE to use.
5. Don’t start the Jam burnt out. Staring at code at the office all week and my messy framework afterwards didn’t put me in great shape at the start.

Hello everyone

That’s been a day, and we’re getting on the right way so far.

Here’s a demo of our game : http://kingsavate.fr/ld25/branches/m2/
There is only the first part of the gameplay, more is coming tomorrow.

For now, my eyes can’t see anymore, and i’m making loads of mistake I could avoid with some more rest. I was about to integrate the sprites for the characters nut i’ll do it tomorrow.

Anyway good night all, see you !

Highly productive day, even with taking a few breaks and making food.

Speaking of food, dinner was a delectable sardine and rice concoction with a cookie made by my amazing sister:

I’ve finalized my idea in my head, now I just have to finish it!  The biggest hole right now is the player movement.  It is very buggy.  I’m currently trying to refactor my state transition code and hopefully I’ll find the problems.

Since my game is more or less in the NES style, I tried my hand at making some box art.  I may change the name, but for now it’s called Super Agent Run:

We’ve got a countdown timer signaling when the enemy army will arrive, a full level built, and a death sequence.  In this game, you die if you fall too hard or fast, but can tap spacebar to encourage your player to get back up.

I even managed to fit goats easily into my game in the plains level:

Party!  I really really want to finish this game, and I think it is in the realm of possibility.  Good luck to all at the halfway point!

When we last left our villain, he was little more than an aspirin capsule, moving around quite rapidly through a level of NPCs with no weapons and little more than the ability to explore.

He was fun to move around, which, considering he’s just a white oval who appears to have three dimensions, is a pretty good start. But now he needs something to do.

At this stage, it’s going to be key for us to define how we intend to use the camera.

Though there are elements of violence and disintegration-ray mayhem planned for the game, the core mechanic here is really stealth. So, knowing where the enemy NPCs are, which direction they are moving, and being able to spot locations where line of sight can be blocked are going to be very important.

At the moment, we have top down camera, that’s fairly close in. Out capsule villain, again, just at this phase, moves quite quickly. So, given the limited amount of visibility and the speed of movement, it’s quite easy to accidentally move too close to an enemy NPC without having any chance to really respond to the environment.

Part of me actually likes this vibe. If the key to success is in movement management, and snap decisions, it could be very fun. To my mind it would give the game a more tongue-in-cheek feel, since obviously if you are running around Area 51 and damn near step on a guard’s toes but manage to escape by ducking behind a barrel, we’re not going for serious.

If we go this direction, then we wouldn’t need to really muck with the camera angle, or distance, nor would we need to adjust the speed of movement (though all of these are super easy to adjust). However, we might need to think about some sort of a mini-map, since involved level-designed puzzles will be impossible for a player to fully comprehend at that speed and camera distance. And though I don’t know that we want to get too deep into complex level design for this, since that could seriously eat up our time up, I do think we want players to have some sense of the bigger picture. So it’s something for us to think about.

Other options, of course, would be for us to pull the camera back, move it to a more ¾ view (similar to what you saw in our UI art style mock up), and /or adjust the character movement speed. A mini-map might be a good thing for us if we take these other directions as well, but it’s hard to tell without some testing. (There’s no sense in adding a feature unless you really need it.)

We’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, here’s a revised shot of our loading screen.

Tags: ReturnDearLeader

A few important updates. Humanity now grows its various sectors of civilization each turn: military, science and industry. If any of these sectors reaches a pre-determined upper limit, the game is over. Also (and critically), the ‘friend’ of Tokyo now destroys buildings.

As usual, you can try it out online at http://friendoftokyo.scriptolo.gy:8080/. As for me, though, it is time to sleep. Good night!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2012 at 1:03 am and is filed under LD #25. 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 go to sleep

continue to sleep

ok, 4am !

Time for a bit of sleep for me.
Still 2 people up and running around with their AS3 codes and Photoshop !

The game is getting along better now and we now have a map generator, the spaceship is not working very well for the moment, buts thats the flash developper problem, i dont care !

The designer is doing some nice work on tiles and interface design.

I keep telling : soon you will have real pictires… but ot just yet.

For the moment, its just us

!

Finished massive quantities of coding! Nearly everything is set up, all that’s left is polish really.

This has been an unusually productive LD (hopefully I’m not jinxing it by saying it), normally I don’t have this much done by now

Then again, it might be my beatifully simple idea and Python.

Sir Cat (still doing name-mogrifiying- I just made up both that word and our villains name) is very hungry, and he flies coach (with wings, outside the aircraft, because that’s what evil cats with wings do. Duh.). So, he needs to eat *something!* Luckily a few innocent mice happen to swing by… and I think you all know what Sir Cat does to them…

He greets them and keeps on flying to deliver an evil bomb to blow up the world. Well, not really, but IDK what Sir Cat will do- eat the mice or avoid the mice for a more evil goal.

I’m working on things such as angular velocity for them- it works (but not amazingly- I think it’s probably because of the fact that pygame sprites have positions based on the top left corner

I’d upload a screenshot but I’m on Ubuntu and don’t wanna figure it out tonight (tomorrow, I promise!) Therefore I’ll simply upload the images for the bg, cat, and mouse. (not actual size- these have been scaled differently)

What’s left on the todo list?

• Figure out a story
• Add menu
• Add (maybe) cutscenes
• Add (maybe) music
• Fix mice
• Optimize mice (currently crashes on my comp after ~3-5 (is it three or is it five? </pythonicmontypythonreference>)
• Add scoring

Overall I’m very impressed with myself here- though the new tools I’m using this time around might have something to do with it (Krita is amazing! GIMP, I’m leaving you.)

-JoeCool17

Ugh, it’s going slowly…need to figure out how to prevent you from clumping too much.

Spells should be easy damage/healing/SPAWN NOW buttons.  Going to make spawning like.. hit 1 “Click to place Graveyard” hit 1 again to cancel.

Lots of tuning.

Exploding trees!  Thanks Madjack!

Scoring.

GUI.

Updated 8-bit art!

Play it here.

Left click – make fire, Right click – make water.  Don’t run out of trees.

So just passing half time, here’s the status update. The AI is just about done, things shoot at you now, and the level is almost completely done. Now for the super powers allowing to annihilate all the good guys!

Screenshot!