Just playing with ideas, but I think I know where I’m going now. Here’s the inside of a cavern. Can’t get more literal than that. Now, about that gameplay…

In a cavern, in a canyon...

Tags: screenshot

Tags: motivation

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 1:52 pm and is filed under LD #15 - Caverns - 2009. 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.

Well.. Ladder collision took way too much time, I dont have anything “playable” yet, you can walk around, dig and build the ladders.

Now – make some quick artwork for some valuable stuff, implement perlin noise level generator and some score and I have something playable!

(Click for bigger version)

Since last post… I first worked on creating a player character, including movement and collisions etc. It’s a tiny ninja, because everyone loves tiny stuff and ninjas.

Then I worked a little on weapons.

Then I helped people move four almost four hours. This helped the LD progress a lot.

Then I worked a little more on weapons. And added making holes to the dirt.

Here’s a screenshot showing the tiny ninja charging his first weapon, the digger only weapon.

Tags: burrowing, chargin, digger, ninja, tiny

It’s raining terribly outside – I was going to go down to the local awesome coffee shop and get strawberry crepes..but I settled for cereal.

and I also have my first screenshot! …of a sprite floating in mid-air. I have to admit I’ve mostly been working on ideas about how to use a heightmap in a 2d game and what will actually make the game fun. Maybe I can manage…both?!

I forgot to grab my photos of my camera for dinner last night, so here it is:

Friday Dinner - Turkey breast, corn and french bread.

And here’s this morning’s simple breakfast:

Saturday Breakfast - Honey and Oat cereal

I think I’m going to get some toast too….  I’ll post my desk photo later on

Tags: foodphoto, ld48_15

6 hours of development so far and progress continues on my game…  thought I’d post a few early screenshots.  I’m working to get the first playable level done so I can continue messing with making the mechanics fun.  Doing bare minimum art as the lumpy bats will testify to:

Stalactites, Geysers, and Bats now spawn.  The bats have a funny animation right now which I think will make them enjoyable to watch flap around as you try to eliminate them.

Rough working main menu too.

Well, I’m stalling out on productivity right now because I am starving.  I have a chicken pot pie in the oven cooking but it won’t be ready for another 30 minutes so I’m powering on best I can.

I’m really trying to focus on getting the earlier playable and fun parts of this game coded.  Building out primitive menu systems and game framework logic so that I won’t have to mess with it later.  I have implemented the timing bar, level counters, and scoring widgets.  My hope is that once I get the basic ‘level format’ working I can do 5 rough levels with very basic art today.  Then tomorrow can be spent on improving the art and adding music and sound.

Tags: anger, angry, bats, caverns, geysers, progress, screenshots, stalactites

After having lunch (I didn’t take photos, but it was fish, cheese and a salad) I re-did the cavern image, since I had to drop the first version. This time I draw the cavern in two layers, texturized them with the previous cavern background and then drawing lines to achieve a ‘hand-drawn’ effect. You can see the full picture here.

About coding stuff, I did the game states transitions with fading, and also a parallax scrolling background. I like how it’s looking!

Parallax scrolling background

Tags: screenshot

aha, the char is moving around with the light folowing =)

Tags: draft, gameplay, glaucon, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, light, screen

Ah, I had a reasonable sleep, now to work again

I tried to come up with some very cave-like gameplay, but it all seemed rather dreary. It seems to me that caverns is goign to be mroe of a setting than a gameplay mechanic.

Anyways, 2D platformer. I have 2 superimposed such that the player is interacting with only the frontmost at any given time. Pressing spacebar will instantly reverse the order of the two caves, creating hopefully interesting gameplay.

Making it pretty is tomorrow’s work. Storyline is unneeded.

Oh, and check out the awesome realtime value sliders and the restart button that reloads all scripts and restarts the game, pretty convenient if you ask me.

Still not sure what the game will be, though…

I has FLOOD in my caves!

Trying to flood, dunno if it will be in the final game. Click to run!

Tags: cave, flash, flood

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 2:23 pm and is filed under LD #15 - Caverns - 2009. 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.

Well, I got my slime effect working.  I just need to get it fast enough that it won’t skip frames like mad  It’s hard to get the idea from the screenshot, but animated it’s pretty slimy!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 2:30 pm and is filed under LD #15 - Caverns - 2009. 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.

The collision detection’s pretty ropey, but you can now zoom your little robot about the place like a proper platformer.  Next step is to get the screen to scroll as you move about the level.  Then it’s onto the beams of light themselves…

My pot pie has finally finished cooking.  Luckily I had a few CheezIts so I didn’t collapse before it was ready:

After this hot meal on a dreary rainy day here south of Boston it’ll be back to work on the Angry Caverns.

Tags: chicken, foodphoto, potpie

Making some good progress at the moment. The main problem is the room and zone detection.

Once thats done I’ll move onto connections then I can slab the exploration and combat in.

Also planning to use marching squares style pass to clean things up. Though TBH I quite like the roughness.

Progress but room detection is broken

Some graphics included.

The problem is that some sharp angles stay, and if I want to remove them, the number of combinations gets big. And i’m a bit lazy to draw + code them all. Next, FOOD.

Next next, sprites for the digger and the bad guys and the gems and the rocks. And stuff.

I have the groundwork in place to start building off of. I am hoping to have a prototype of the game play within the next couple of hours. My plan is to get the basic mechanics up and working with placeholders for graphics and than get the game play polished up and add the graphics in once this is for the most part done.

Right now I am in need of some lunch and to catch up on what others are working on.

14 hours into the contest and only about 15 lines of code. No graphics, no audio, no nothing. The stress is kinda high right now, but I’m trying to remember it’s a fun contest, not too serious. I do have my concept… actually two… so I still need to decide between the two My goal is to decide between the two, and have the game running at least enough for a screenshot by 6 tonight, when the gf’s coming over for a while.

Breakfast was store-brand golden grahams, cranberry juice, and a bit of leftover blackberry cobbler.

Changed the dirt image a bit, gave it some friends: Walls and floors:

dirt.png

wall.png

floor.png

Now to get a level rendered and up on the screen!

Tags: art, foodphoto