Yeah, that’s it for me tonight. The compo’s running, the wiki has been revised somewhat, groovy.

I haven’t even started thinking of what to do yet. Compo site calling and all.

Whatever I do, it should probably be something small. Towlr like scope (i.e. only a couple hours to get up and running). I think I want to do something with audio though. Exactly what, I have no idea.

Until then.

Hello LudumDare. First time I’m in. ‘might now have the full 48h available, but trying anyway.

Been outside to walk the dog, have a coffee & find ideas.

… and idea was found.

Nowadays Caverns are completely poluted. It will be down to the player to clean them. Should use puzzle logic & a bit of gravity as well. We’ll see.

YAYE !

Just thought I’d check in before I hit the pillow to rest up for tomorrow. The theme, Caverns, kind of stumped me for a little while. Fortunately, after much idea bouncing, I think I’ve settled on an idea that will be somewhat unique, and pretty fun to play. As expected, I’m going with C++, SDL, OpenGL, SDL_mixer, GIMP, framework code, etc. I’ve made a little progress on the code, but so far the most progress has been in concept, and I have lots of ideas for features – we’ll see how many of them I get to add before time is up. More updates on this later on, but for now, it’s definitely sleepy time.

Nothing too fancy yet, most time I’ve been working since the last log entry was spent on writing some pretty bad water simulation stuff. Just now added the rock layer as well. Still not sure what the game will be, but it’s getting closer and closer to involve burrowing. From caves.

Also got the news that my sisters are moving this day, so will have to spend some of the afternoon and evening carrying stuff.

Tags: burrowing, cave, rock, water

So I spent about an hour and a half on the game design and about two hours on the sw design. after about 5 pages of scribbling, below are the two important design documents 😛 game design concept tree on the left and uml class diagram on the right. Looks like there is going to be around 40 – 50 classes in this thing. Oh by the way I’ll try to do a platform / rpg game called “Kara Toprak“. It means “Black Earth” in Turkish :).

Our guy is a warrior sent to the caverns of hell by the Sultan to fight the evil iblis’es and djinns and various servents of Seytan himself. By force, and by magic…

Here is a snapshot of my log:

8.28.2009:
———–
8.20 PM
Just learned the theme. posting the workspace photo

8.36 PM
Joined IRC

9.35 PM
Initial game design ideas %50

10.01 PM
Game Design 1.0 completed. I am doing a platform/rpg game

11.39 PM
Sw Class Design %80 except IVisual tree. That means classes responsible for the game mechanics are now designed and seem quite flexible. Let’s see how coding turns out.

Tags: deskphoto

Just finished my breakfast and I’m ready for some action.

Here is what I had:

Food: Flatbread with crème fraîche, green onions, cheese
Drink: Lemonade-Cola mix (as long as it has coffein, I’ll stay awake 😉 )

Tags: foodphoto

Also it is late at night, and I am tired.

Adventures in CAVErnS continues in the morning! Probably I will have some idea of what I am even doing then.

Yay I have a window with a blank screen. I’ll spare you the pointless screenshot. But in reality I’m not that far behind because I spent some time working on asset munging scripts.

Also, a reminder that I’m updating my code in google code as I go. You can watch my changelog or browse the code .  Right now “beneath” is the working title for my entry but that might change. I’ll check in far more frequently than I’ll will post.

Good morning everyone, and good luck to those who are in this competition!

I was planning to get to sleep early, but I was awake until 3am, only 2 hours before the start of the competition. 😛

And after only 3 hours of sleep I was up again, Christer Fuglesang, Swedens very own astronaut, was about to be blasted into space, for the second time, and I couldn’t miss that. Went to bed shortly afterwards but couldn’t get back to sleep. So I started to code on my little entry.

It’s been two hours of coding and drawing now. I decided I wanted to code my entry in Ruby, my favourite language. I’m usign the Gosu module for graphics and sound. I haven’t used it in the past, except for quickly trying it out, so I’m a bit slow since I have to look everything up. But I finally have a scrolling background and a guy riding a bike wearing a tophat and a monocle!

My entry is called Mr Monocle And His Marvelous Madcap Underground Race

In it, you are Mr Monocle and you are riding a bike in an underground cavern. I’m planning to throw in some rubies for the player to collect and some bats and mining carts and whatnot.

And for breakfast I had two sandwitches, an energy drink and a cup of tea. A timelapse movie is recording this while we speak.

Now to figure out how to attach images to these journals…

Tags: food

Ok, that should be the concept :

http://astrofra.com/posts/ld15/poluted_caverns_00.jpg

It’s not *that* original, but hey. Lot’s of code to make it work properly. Gotta hurry

I have nice ideas for the visuals, but that’s the second part of it, gameplay first ! Gosh !

Things to simplify and deliver a working project within schedule :

• only convex shapes, even round ones, no chairs, for example…
• make the shape of the cavern simpler, more easier to predict how the physics will behave

Really not too much to show here… the ground and caven backgrounds are just solid fills with some about 5 colors airbrushed over each at random. The grid is generated with two for loops, and there are two instances of each… I’ll be storing stress information in the cell objects that comprise the grid. Next up is to draw some houses and supports which will be placed by mouse click. In anycase, here’s the game so far:

(oops, WP doesn’t like me embedding a swf from my domain.. oh well, here’s screenshots instead) (And here’s a link where I’ll keep an index of the in-progress .swfs)

-TF

Hi all,

I got basic SDL stuff up and running now. See screenshot on screen.Also breakfast time. Going well so far.

Claire's workspace and breakfase

Tags: desk, food

I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and now a bit of time coding – I came up with several ideas but ultimately thought the most doable and flexible one is the idea of exploring caverns.
To that end, I’ve started putting together an engine to procedurally generate a cavern. Once I get a bit further I need to answer some additional questions like “Will I tack on a collecting minigame or RPG elements to this to give it more depth?”, but for now I have a pretty clear idea of the rendering/generation tech I want to develop, and will just work on that.
I’m not much of a graphics sort, so I’m sticking to graphical elements that will be completely procedurally generated or simply hardcoded in a geometric way.
As such, my entry will be called “Cavern Ghost”

…and not particularly happy with the theme.  I think I’ve got an idea, but it’s a bit complicated and it might be a pain to implement.  We’ll see…

My very untidy desk:

Work-in-progress showcase.

The game should actually deal with a bit different theme, this is just a funny test of a simple AI to avoid obstacles

http://www.jarnik.info/pub/ld15/index_01.html (click to see a flash embed)

Ive been on a bit of a randomly generated level binge lately and got inspired by numpy, and Cellular Automata. Basically, I spent way too long trying to get numpy to do all the work for me

If anyone knows numpy – is it possible to iterate over the array and compare elements vs where you are in the array currently?

Lucky me the neighbors are having a rockin party so I cant go to bed just yet!

Tags: cellular automata, numpy, python

Caverns isn’t a bad theme to have, though I hadn’t thought much about what to do if it was selected.

One of the first things that comes to my mind is the old Apogee game series Kroz, of which one game was titled Caverns of Kroz.  It’s sort of rogue-like, but more action oriented.  Probably best described as a single-player Gauntlet-like game.

Here’s a screenshot of a level in a Kroz game:

Level from Caverns of Kroz

The ohm signs are the monsters in this particular level and they will do their best to march toward the character, represented by the red and yellow smiley.  Monsters disappear when they collide with the player, but they also take gems, which are the measure of health the player has.  The only way to destroy monsters is to get them to run into destructable walls, or use a precious whip.

I decided that for my LD entry I would try to remake a basic version of this game, only using better graphics.  We’ll see how much I can get done.  At the very least, I hope to have a movable hero, monsters with rudimentary AI and a couple types of terrain.

I spent some time early into the compo sketching some creatures with inspiration from the original Kroz games.  So far in the code I’ve been working on my tile map data structures.  It’s kind of a pain in the ass, but it should make things easier tomorrow.

I will likely be going to bed soon, even without a game screen shot to post, but sleep will do me good.

Tags: caverns of kroz, gauntlet, kroz, ld48_15

Tags: foodphoto

Pushing ahead with my caverns idea. Haven’t figured out the gameplay yet, but I’m starting to get a feel for where this is going. It’s not yet 9am so I think I’m in decent shape.