Woke up, read the theme and started working on my sucky pixel art.
The game will be about the importance of dive knife. As a diver stuck in an underwater cave you will find yourself in an extreme need of one.
I still haven’t decided, if I want to write my own 2D engine or if I want to experiment in Löve. Will decide later when I have more sprites :).
After I found out concept, I paniced a lot, then left and bought more food.
BULK FOOD! Turkish Delight, Asian Crackers, Trail Mix, Candied Ginger
1 hour 20 minutes in, figured a concept out.
“life is guano
and then you die”
Ate food while watching BBC series “planet earth” — the one on caves of course!
Hot dog
gameplay will consist of flying a bat around, eating fruit, pooping on miners, and well… dying.
spent huge hunk of time trying to do some pixel art, have a miner and 4 frames of bat animation.
4 hours in I have a bat flying around the screen with gamepad input and a flap sound.
Now that I took this break, time to code up a world, and some POOP.
Here are a couple screenshots… so much to do tomorrow… can’t think any longer.
Here’s the intro:
first level, no caverns generated yet (don’t those Grags look nasty!)
It took some thinking, but I’ve come up with an idea. 
It’ll be a platform game where you play as a pair of cavers who need to get out of a cavern. Unfortunately, neither of them can see all the platforms (although both of them can stand on them). The idea is to move both of the cavers upwards so that you can use the vision of one to ‘fill in the blanks’ of the other. As I’m using the DS I’ll use each screen to display the vision of one of the cavers.
Not sure how well this’ll turn out, but here goes…
Got up, had a couple of mugs of steaming hot Colombian coffee (thanks Mr Cappuccino), then remembered that I hadn’t seen the theme yet. Logged in and there it was, Caverns. Looked around for inspiration. Didn’t find any.
So, in traditional manner, I’m going to let the idea incubate in the back of my mind while I get on with all those things I have to do, then I’ll return later armed with a fresh idea and put it into practice.
That’s the theory anyway.
Finally I can start up. I was expecting the cavern theme, though.
Tech Demo
It isn’t much to look at yet, but it has alpha blending and event listeners. So far so good!
First of, this theme is awesome and I hope for justas awesome entries. 😀
Game Design
For my entry, I’m going for a (RT)Strategy game. Here is some concept art:
In the game you will control a subterranian civilization, which evolved eyes, that can only see a single color on the spectrum. You will have the basic RTS objects: towers to expand your teritory ( emmit the light you can see), units, which will emmit a dim light, when out of the towers range, building that will function only inside the range of the towers, some for traning troops, some for housing, some for gaining monochrome energy. Every object you see distincly in your color.
You will battle other civilization such as yourself, who are able to detect a different color. All of your enemies will appear black or very dim and will not be distingushable from one another. So if you are a yellow civilization, and have green and red opponents, you can tell them appart.
The basic goal will be to destoy your enemies/neighbours by destroing their main tower. I was also thinking of doing something with the entrance of the cavern, maybe a goal or bonus for the team that has control of it. One idea was to have the you gain the color of the opponent you conquer, till you eventually see all the colors and can go outside in the light world.
The game seem to be carying some racial message with it or at least it has potential for it.
Technical stuff
platform: Linux for development, Windows build after the compo, this time maybe even OSX
programming language: c++
libraries: SDL for graphics, input and sound. Do i need anything else? O_o
drawing: GIMP
recording sounds: Audacity
sound and music: Hohner BBassV with Digitech BP50 multi affect and 60watt Vision AMP . I hope my music skills don’t let me down.
TODO list for first day:
So how much can I actually get done in the first day? I think this should be a realistic goal:
* resource manager: sound, graphics,…
* tile engine for the map
* create the cave
* implement ligh sources
*create the towers
* mouse input and HUD
*some background music
I think that would be about half. I hope I am not underestimating any part I left for day two (AI or troop control maybe?). If my goal are realistic, I think I can actually make a good game this time round. 😀
Well good luck to you all.
Tags: game design, libraries, technical, TODO list
Nothing is worse than having to work at away from your own setup(more on this later). grrrr
Bovril toast and orange juice breakfast
So! Woke up at half 7 this morning, took a peek at the theme, and then went back to bed for a while to think about it. Caverns, eh?
Eventually got up properly and made bovril toast and 200ml of orange juice for breakfast! Yum! Liquified cow.
Been doing some brainstorming on the pad you can see to the left there – I’ve got an idea I rather like:
Alternative Club Tycoon: The Cavern Club
You own and run “The Cavern Club” – a struggling nightclub for the goth/metal/rock community of your town/city. It’s up to you to choose the tracks, price the drinks, and get everyone happy (well, keep the goths poetic, at least).
Plus Points:
Worries:
Oh, and I discovered that I can’t use the ‘play and charge’ cable to make an XBOX 360 pad work on the PC. Doh! I’ll be getting a wired controller some time today – but if it’s a sim game, mouse control seems best anyway!
Tags: brainstorming, breakfast, caverns, desk, food, journal, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009
Mum made cookies with a juice that has so many fruity tastes in it i am suprised that i like it. Ok, now i can start!
Tags: foodphoto
Collision detectioncode against the cavern walls is awful, but it will have to do for now.
It’s now possible to collect gold nuggets. Now to change the cavern generation code to spawn them dynamically. Score is awarded when the players collects them.
Now to get a snack and wake up my wife. I think the cats are hungry too.
Random level generation success!
I think I have managed to get further than I was expecting for the comp already… now only the game remains 😛
Tomorrow I will work on gameplay – im still undecided roguelike or side scroller? or both? or something else.
Tags: first screenshot, screenshot
Just woke up, 7 hours into the compo…
Caverns… now that’s an easy theme… There’s so much stuff I can do:
– Cave-based RTS
– Squad-based top down shooter
– First person explorer
– Dungeon Keeper-like simulator
– RPG taken place underground
Etc, etc, etc…
Only thing is trying to find something original, with fresh gameplay, that I can actually pull off in the 48-hours, with my crap graphic skills…
Anyway, time to search the net for Caverns pictures and stuff like that to get in the mood…
A better one than before, anyway. It’s going to be a puzzle platformer type thing, called Caverns of Light. The story is that for some reason, there’s no light anymore on the surface of the planet, but there is below it, in the aforementioned caverns. So you have to go down and bring the light back up from these caverns, by setting up a series of right-angled prism thingies. Hopefully it won’t be too complicated to implement. I’ll aim to get the basic mechanics up and running by the end of today, and if that works out, I can set about adding enemies and level editing tomorrow.
First step I think is to create a level editor though – I’ll see if I can get that done by lunch.
Here’s an initial mockup of the tile graphics:
Taking it easy this time. My last few projects have been too ambitious and I’ve had to rush to finish them off. This time I’m just making something that’s fun to play. Meet Bean Kid.
Just got up; have a vague idea.
Tentative title: “Space Caves”
Going to use Flash, probably with a Box2D library.
Tags: first screenshot, screenshot
