I was uh-uh, am gonna pass on this one, but then I got an idea for something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while, and before I had a chance to reflect on whether I really had time for this, I was already busy coding.

Started a bit late though, and things are going sluggish, so I’m not confident it’ll be ready on time.

The idea I’m working with is Chess. Specifically, real time chess. I wanted a chess experience that is close to speed chess, but without any turns whatsoever. To limit myself, it’ll be a one player game, with you playing white and the computer playing black.

Wednesday: Grabbed chess pieces and background from opengameart. Initialized the matrix, set up the board and pieces and started working on pawn movement. After just a few hours, everything seemed to be working quite alright.

Progress video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSdbK8RWtwU&feature=youtu.be

Thursday:
Rook movement. Rats! Who knew rooks could be so tricky? Sometimes I get them hiding behind pawns. Sometimes capturing white pieces without actually taking them off the board. Sometimes just jumping over pawns. Spent hours on this now, and they’re still not ready!

Friday:
Ok. So the rooks are finally behaving. Plugged in Rook behavior to the queen, so she’s halfway there as well. It’s starting to look more like a game now. Of course, at max speed, a complete chess round seems to be over in a minute. That’s speedy… With  a little fine tuning at the end (and logic for player movement – currently, it’s on the honor system – ie. you’re permitted to do all kinds of illegal moves), I’m hoping a reasonable match can be played in 3-5 minutes. That’s the sweet spot I think.

Another progress video:

http://youtu.be/LZTIYEoqIHk

Rooks, bishops and the queen is now in the can. King and Knights remain, and then just the singleplayer logic. This should actually be doable, but family stuff will get in the way on saturday, so the rest of the work will have to be done on sunday.

Saturday:

Snuck in an hour of dev time in the morning. Fixed a few bugs regarding player select and movement. It’s really shaping up nicely. Very hectic gameplay. Still need movement patterns for Kings and Knights, and the whole player logic.

Screenshot saturday

Sunday:

Movement for Kings and Knights are done. While writing the logic for those, I came up with a much more efficient algorithm for deciding when and how to move those pieces. Doh! So now I really must rewrite the other pieces with that code. However, if I’m going to be able to put up something playable today, that has got to be moved to the backburner.

Another progress video, now with all pieces moving: http://youtu.be/V2h6xitUB6Q

First public beta:

First public beta is done… It’s playable, but there’s very little intelligence to the computers play, so winning is relatively easy. Bugs are likely. Refinement is necessary, but hey, I made it. Cheers. Hope you like it, and hope you have fun. If you find bugs or have suggestions for improvements, please tweet me at @svenardocom on Twitter.

Hi guys Faisal (Team Leader/Designer) from Team Tartan Paint hear again to show you our progress before the final changes that will be made for tomorrow

Character Art

Currently Jurgita is working on a polished Title screen for the game.

Sound

Currently the sound is providing a lot of challenges as need to change the volume seems to interfere and lag certain functions such as despawning units so it is likely that there will not be fighting sounds in the final version but the music still works and sound very good.

User Interface

Stewart has currently added some finishing touches to the User Interface with the addition of the mute and fast forward buttons as well as some readjustment of the current layout. And is currently working on auras to show when a character is boosted by the environment.

Code

Zacs has been progressing very well adding multilane combat as well as the death animations for characters. He has also managed to work out a basic enemy AI for spawning units though this is still being tweaked. He has also managed to program win and end conditions for the game.

Currently the game is almost finished just a few finishing touches before final submission.

Day 7 Prototype

Yes! has been a long week but finally we finished the game!. You can play it here.

The game is about defeat the base of the crocodiles, this looks easy but they will do everything possible for defend it. You must control the monkeys for get the victory and kick out the cocodriles of your place.

The time was our main enemy, but we will discuss this later in another post, where we will comment all the work we had in the game and our impressions about it.

We are waiting for your feedback!

Ah, and sorry for the bad english :/

My entry :

www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=14843

It is not like i want, but for my first game I am happy.

I will try to make a post-mortem version with lot of features.

EGGZ is a real-time strategy game with eggz in it – click on the EGGZ for a sweet 48-hour timelapse EGGlapse 😀

Click here for 48 hours of EGGy goodness :D

As mentioned in my last post Eggz was essentially finished in 48 hours, though they’ve been a couple of bug-fixes and enhancements since then. I’ve also been very lazy about building a version for distribution, but I’ve finally gotten around to it:

Cross-platform .love file

Windows .exe and .dll files

Unfortunately the game has no AI, so if you don’t have a friend to play with you’re not going to get much out of the game

I’ve drawn up a quick state-machine that should play the game adequately but it’s not going to be in the 7dRTS version I’m afraid. Check the game page for any post compo improvements

Looking forward to playing your games guys, I really love RTSs – let’s revive this genre 😀

Tags: #7DRTS, competitive, crossplatform, eggz, linux, Love, love2d, lua, mac, mini ludum dare, multiplayer, RTS, strategy, tower defense, Windows

Well, that was a disaster! But it taught me some things.

First of all, I should have used a framework or environment I was familiar with. It took some time to get used to Enchant.js, even though it was easy to understand and well documented. And it didn’t gave me the lower level tools which I needed to achieve the mechanic I was going for. I had to go into the code of the framework to change things. And that’s not what you want when you’re building a game. I still think Echant.js is a great framework to work with. But I think for the specific mechanic I had in mind, I was better of without a framework.

It’s not even a game yet, so I don’t think submitting it is good idea. Next time I’ll try to be better prepared and have a good plan of how I’m going to tackle specific problems.

Going to write a longer thing later, but for now, I am going to call the jam version of this game complete… There are some issues with it (MAJORLY), but I think it is playable? I hope it is at least.

Play IKON_COLONIZE on kongregate.

Tags: #7DRTS

Its been quite a week. Unfortunately, my game isn’t in a submittable state quite yet. But hopefully, by the end of tomorrow, I’ll have something which is completable. The project has come with its own lessons and plenty of surprises. I thought I might list a few:

• Networking is a nightmare to debug… with a debugger, but really easy with a bunch of well placed printf statements
• By writing algorithms down on paper, everything seems to work second attempt (I’ll give examples in a later post)
• A* is really easy to implement, but getting the characters to follow the path is the difficult part
• Two monitors makes things much nicer
• SFML is a really nice library to use
• Once networking is out of the way, programming the rest is much easier
• I get “in the groove’ when listening to music
• Keeping the games synchronized was almost too easy

What I’ve got left to do is:

1. Implement fighting and collisions between people’s minions. (yes, I haven’t done that yet)
2. Add a win condition
3. Make the settings dialog
4. Make the sound effects play

Hopefully I can get that all done by tomorrow… hopefully….

After waking up early in the Oregon wilderness (because I didn’t get any sleep! LOL) and having a fantastic breakfast, I return to the city, dropped my family off at the county fair, and returned home to lay on my couch.

How long do you think it was before I warmed up a tankard of coffee and got back to work?

NOT LONG AT ALL, MY FRIENDS

I’m putting the finishing touches on upgrades, economy, and in-game menus today. So you’ll be be able to invest resources into getting resources faster, building heroes, building defenses, and repairing damage. After that, I’d love into adding more guns to shooty-shoot with, but there is no opponent at the moment.

Well, there is: it’s a carbon mirror copy of your team, minus the player. Decisions, decisions. Clumsy AI, or giant, evolving boss monster? Or MONSTERS? HMM

So I finished it!!! I never really post anything during any Ludum Dare at least not until I finish the game. I think I like this kind of LD more than the normal one just ‘cuz I have lots more time to polish the game and add actual sounds to it. Game’s pretty much as I want it to be you can check it out here.

So, after a day and a bit, I’ve finished my second ever Ludum Dare game, game jam game, and game full stop, in one fell swoop.  BotWars is a real time, tactical local multiplayer tank battler where you hopelessly try and control four tanks at once, while fighting over the space key with your friend.  It was also my first time working in 3D, using Unity, and I must say, is it one sexy piece of kit.  My game works on Win/Linux/Apple, with absolutely not extra effort required from me.  Rather stellar, really.

So, what have I learnt?

Smaller is better.  Really.  I know I said so last time, but it really came in use this time around, working with software I wasn’t used to and with not as much time as I’d have liked.  Power-ups were cut, AI got cut, and I didn’t even try to make network multiplayer.  Am I disappointed?  A little.  Some semblance of AI, even if all it did was randomly wander through the map, would have been good, but hey, baby steps.

Polish is good.  And I don’t do any.  I really don’t.  After a day and a bit of coding, I was so damn knackered, I just wanted to publish and go home.  So take breaks, and figure out some time to do stuff like improve your sound and graphics.  Oh, and put in an actual end condition.  I don’ think I did

Take liberties with the theme.  I was never, ever going to finish an actual RTS in 2 or so days.  So I made an RTS-lite, and  you know what?  I think I probably learnt more.  This is the whole point of game jams!  Proper RTSes are silly anyways.

Play to your strengths.  I’m a terrible coder, a terrible artist, and a rather good writer.  So why aren’t I including any damn writing?  I really need to start thinking ahead, and use what I’m good at, even if it doesn’t feel like a conventional way to approach games.

So that’s it!  7DRTS, done.  I’ll see you for the next LD, or possibly for 7DFPS.

Tags: finished, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, RTS

Hopefully I can finish it after some sleep.
..and find a name for it.

“The left side is sending troops! Quick, build a defensive line! Oh wait, right side isn’t implemented yet.”

World’s Aftermath

A Sickening Dystopian Warzone Realtime Simulator

“If you like utopias and hate awesome, this game isn’t for you.” -Benjamin Franklin

We didn’t have time to post any updates outside of our regular 9-5, plus the time we spent working on this. It has been a very, very hectic week. We’re just happy we could finish a completed game by the end of it all, but we did have to cut some features.

See our full entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=24948

We’re going to work the rest into a proper release in the coming weeks and release the game for free on our website (online multiplayer anyone?).

-James and Nick

My fingertips are numb I’ve typed so much.

You folks like dynamic lights on your bullets? Visibility matrix debug output? Magenta collision boxes? Me too!

I’ve been desperately trying to solve inter-tile collision, rewriting it saved the day finally.

So I got my train of guys going, you can go into train mode or group (huddle) mode, formations don’t matter in tight spaces so I’m going to focus more on the AI side of things.

Was having a great time doing loops until they’d stop all of a sudden. Couldn’t tell why.

They now descend on the poor guy with zeal, but then forget to keep following me. I’m thinking of just leaving them there for the next victim.

Welp – the compo has come to an end.  We worked our butts off this week.  Unfortunately – we weren’t able to get everything in that we wanted to.  There are probably a fair amount of bugs to be worked out and there aren’t any victory conditions in place.  But the basic mechanics are there and Todd and Ryan’s art is awesome regardless.  We came up with a pretty ambitious plan and still managed to execute a large portion of it (curse you day job!).  Here is Attrition in its super raw state.  Please shoot us some feedback!  We had a lot of fun working on this and sharing our progress with everyone.  The support we got from this site was awesome so thanks a bunch!

Check out the Attrition entry here – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=24891

Please tweet at us and comment here to leave feedback.  We appreciate it and thanks for playing!

Finished writing my postmortem for Metal Galaxy. The link is http://blazinggames.blogspot.ca/2013/07/metal-galaxy-postmortem.html
For those who don’t want to read my blog post, here is a quick summary:

What Went Right – 1GAM theme of Metal

What Went Right and Wrong – Changing to a colonization theme

What Went Wrong – Fleet code not used

Ok, so I got soul consumption working. Meaning, summoning units now require souls. Each unit type has a soul cost and you are (for now) given 1,000 souls at the start.

As we discussed before in Internal Brainstorming 1, people don’t seem to like the traditional RTS type where you have base-building and resource-gathering, so I didn’t do that.

You have a fixed amount of souls at the start (like every other player in the map) and summon units to compose whatever army you want, as long as you can afford it. You also probably shouldn’t be allowed to attack enemies while everyone hasn’t finished summoning their initial army yet. But I haven’t added that in for now.

Be wary of rushing.

I probably can’t add anything that significant now; there’s not enough time (still fixing a few bugs here and there).

But I wanted to add mainly better movement (pathfinding, obstacle avoidance, lockstep marching, whatnot), and a few more units (bonewheel, pyromancer, guitarmancer, etc.).

Here’s the thing about the initial design:

“When you defeat an enemy, you gain souls equivalent to 50% of the unit type you killed (i.e. dwindling economy). You can use this to summon reinforcements in the middle of battle or upgrade your existing units.”

We got this idea from the multiplayer in Total War, as described to me by my friend (actually haven’t tried it myself so I don’t know how it works) my friend’s suggestion, he just happened to mention Total War as an aside, so I got confused.

Now, what strikes me as odd is, why would you reward the player who’s winning? If he’s winning already, he doesn’t need more help.

Understandably, I believe this comes from the basic idea that people should be rewarded for their hard efforts.

In the context of the game, it makes sense to reward the winning side if players are in a stalemate and we need tip the scales of battle quickly.

But once someone has the upper hand, you don’t need to bother watching what’ll happen next; the winning guy will just steamroll through everything for sure. Every character he kills means his army will grow bigger and the opponent will have his back to the wall.

So that was where I thought of the size growth idea. Whenever you lose a unit, all your remaining units gain size (someone suggested that only your units that are close enough to the killed one should be affected), until you are left with one unit who’s a giant boss kind of guy.

My proposition was, is it possible to give the losing side a second chance while still keeping it fair for the winning side?

Here’s also something I was thinking about: Factions. Something like this:

1. Undead (Lordran)
2. Phantoms (Boletaria)
3. Demons (Capra demon, Taurus demon, etc.)
4. Dragons (?)
5. Chaos Witches

Maybe each faction has a particular passive bonus to its units somehow. I’m also thinking of sub-factions, like the Covenants for Undead, or the White/Black Tendency for Phantoms.

Web Build WIP

Tags: progress, screenshot, Strat Souls, unity, unity3d

So here it is, then – Day 7 of the 44th Mini Ludum Dare.  As this is a 7 Day RTS compo, that makes this the final day – and about time, too, since I really need a break.  I am, therefore, done – here is my first LD submission.

My game, Jumpstarter, is nominally about taking the reigns of a rebellion against an Empire, using crowdfunding (tied to public approval rating) and trade route raiding as a main source of income.  In point of fact, the theme is rather thin; most of my work was concentrating on coding a working RTS, and in that respect, I think it’s a moderate success.

There are several issues remaining – not as many selection modes as I’d like; a bug that crashes the game if you exit to the main menu and try to start it again from there; homing missiles are a little wonky; and the balance of the enemy AI is iffy at best, swinging between hilariously incompetent and ruthlessly efficient.  I played against the AI’s current design and won a few times, but I am generally terrible at RTS games (despite them being a favorite genre), so I upped the difficulty a little bit above my level before uploading it, and I can’t consistently beat it as it currently stands.  Also, ship costs are mostly arbitrary, and are probably not properly balanced.

The game uses fairly standard RTS controls.  You drag-left-click to select all units within a box, or single-left-click to select one unit.  Mouse wheel zooms in and out, WASD pans the camera around..  Right-clicking issues orders, either to move, attack or invade.

There are three ship types and three station types in the game; the main difference is that ships are mobile and stations are locked to their parent planet.  The ships are (in the same order as the build menu)

• The Cruiser, a powerful but expensive ship;
• The Interceptor, a fast and cheaper ship;
• The Dropship, a weak ship that is capable of conquering planets;
• The Shipyard, which is required to build ships;
• The Repair station, which repairs nearby ships and stations fairly quickly; and
• The Turret, which fires homing missiles at nearby targets

To win the game, you must capture all the red Empire’s planets; to lose, you must lose all your planets and ships – that is, you can live on if all you have are ships (but you effectively cannot win if you have neither planets nor Dropships, since you can’t capture any planets).

Tomorrow, I will consider doing a more exhaustive post-mortem on how the development of Jumpstarter went, but for now I need some rest.  Good night everyone!

Cross-posted on my personal blog.

Tags: MiniLD #44, RTS

Finally release! Although it may be riddled with bugs, not even close to what I set out to make, probably not even fun I am extremely happy to have it done. I enjoyed making it so much I may even start over and make a full game out of it!

!Check it out here!

Thanks so much for all the nice comments I received as well.

Make sure you read how to play! and there will be bugs!

Wish you where here. I don’t feel the screenshots do the game justice!