Spaceman Jimmy has been stranded inside an asteroid! He is quickly discovering how inconvenient zero gravity is.
Shoot the aliens before they hug you to death! (Disclaimer: death may not actually occur.)
My cave is very square at the moment. I want to implement some cool per-pixel collision detection on the cave walls, but Box2D won’t let me do that and I’m not going to let myself reimplement a physics engine.
I spent the entire evening trying to get Physaxe to work like I want it to, but I give up! I´m sure it´s possible to make a good platform engine with Physaxe, but it´s not going to happen this weekend and not with the tiny bit of documentation I could find.
Time for plan B, I’ll stick with rectangular tiles and make a simple platform game without those beautiful slopes.
BTW, here is some food I ate:
Day 1 of my first LD is over and after almost 18 hours of work, I have some sort of a game.
I enjoyed doodling on a tablet after a really long time 
Unfortunatelly, I underestimated planning and created a system that is too complex to balance in order to produce fun. It’s just too random – sometimes too easy, sometimes too hard. I’ll try to tweak it tomorrow and see if I can get it a little bit more enjoyable.
Music would be nice and also adding multiple levels could make it more interesting (they’re procedurally generated, so no sweat).
The frogdog character that keeps popping up is probably a product of my fatigue 😉
Goodnight, fellow LDers (2:24am in Prague)
Well, it’s a tentative name. I couldn’t come up with anything better than that.
Anyway, I’ve made some progress, as shown below. There’s also a little webstart demo if anybody wants to try. It’s not quite what I’d like my game to be, but it’s better than nothing.
Tags: cavern, cavernous, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, shooter
There’s a movable player character, level loading, and the rudiments of player projectiles. There’s no collision detection though, and the terrain isn’t modifiable yet. Things are progressing, but I don’t have much time to participate this time around. I think I’ll at least get something done by the deadline.
http://z-machines.com/zacs_files/youmustfinishtherace.mp3
I think that people will be pleasantly surprised by the sound effects in Cavern Tycoon.
Tags: motivation, progress
Explore the depths of ancient caverns which hold secrets about gravity. Walking is not possible. The stones you have collected can be used to activate Graviblocks which can pull and push you around. Its a puzzle game where getting stuck means restarting the level. Find the exit into the next cavern to advance to.. possibly more doom.
Is this screenshot busy enough? I'm not sure yet.
Well, stuff is happening. I’m pleased with my first day’s progress — I’ve hit most of the points I designed, and in that regard this has been a smashing success. Trouble is, the game as-is is neither as polished nor as fun (even to me) as what I like to turn in as a final compo entry. Good thing we’ve got another day, I suppose. I’m out, folks — going to hit the bed and work on some music until I pass out. If you’re feeling bored and/or charitable, check out my first day’s (TEMPORARY, SLIGHTLY BUGGY, UNREFINED, etc.) playable: Fallout Cavern.
’tis appreciated!
Tags: screenshot
My game is coming along! It’s a game where you throw bikini babes into a pit that you have filled with traps. Also there are police. And umm guts everywhere? Core mechanics are in place, going to try and write some music now so I can spend all day tomorrow adding features and polish.
Tags: Bikini Babes
Here’s a video of my game so far.
I only need to implement enemy A.I. for the enemy squads to move around en mass and try and fight you. Once that’s done, it’s time for progression (skill tree, experience, levels), missions, graphics, sounds, and gameplay.
Er, ok! So I think I finally have an idea I like! Will start working from scratch tomorrow morning.
Some great looking entries here – can’t wait to play them all
I completally forgot to write anything today, and my cameras broken, so ill do a quick summary:
9AM: Got up. Ate sandwich. Thought about game ideas.
10AM: Got idea.
10:15AM: Started Coding
10:20AM: Remembered I hate Perlin Noise
NOON: Went to a party
3PM: Played halo
5PM: Got home
6PM: Got Cave Generator working
7PM: Ate dinner(steak+mac and cheese)
7:30PM: Got the mine cart working
8:15PM: Its my BIRTHDAY! YAY! I got a 1TB HD!(it was the only thing on my list(i was so surprised!))
8:45PM: Gameplay is done, now to add graphics and interface
9:15PM: I wish opengl had font support
Heres a screenshot:
Prototype mine cart rolling through a cave
Well, it’s the end of day one now… haven’t worked on this a whole lot ( about five, maybe six hours in total?), to be honest, but I’m reasonably pleased with what I have so far!
There’s a funky maze like cavernous system to the east of the player in that screen shot… the building is a research centre, of which there’s another one in the caverns that you’ve to find to rescue the peoples in there before the moon destabalises. Rescue them by landing on the pad ( the thing in the middle sticking up like a sore thumb. )
Those red things are nasties ( there’s a few different types of nasties, and there’s a number of different attack paths they take as well ) which can be shot cause if they smash into you, you take some damage and eventually explode ( same with careening into the walls, which seeing as the ship’s currently a nippy little bugger, you’ll be doing a lot ).. luckily, the research centres will repair you a bit.
There’s 28 ( count ’em! ) main cavernous screen types ( not all are in the demo just now! ), and plenty more derived from them – adding beastie spawn points, research stations, and all sorts.
Of the core gameplay, I’ve only really got the picking up of researchers to do, then it’s just implementing some fonts to track score, health, time and create some fiendish level designs and appropriate bleepy-bloops!
Current tech-demo is here: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/ld15/MoonsOfSubterrane.7z with cursor keys and “z” to fire. There’s GP2X-Wiz and Dingoo binaries, though they run a tad slow just now and I haven’t set the controls up properly yet. The linux binary is AMD64 compiled and the Win32 exe was compiled and tested on Windows 7.
Now for some sleep…
I am at the point where all the basic game play mechanics are implemented and the game is fully functional. I need to add sound and a start menu and probably create a few more graphics to make it a bit more polish. I haven’t quite got the increasing difficulty worked out yet, but that is just going to take a bit more playing. I was going to put what I have so far up, but I am going to hold off and wait until after I test it on my other computer and do a few release builds.
However, here is a current screenshot.
Here’s a screenshot of my game so far, our little explorer is getting ready to enter the evil cave for the first time … (click to enlarge)
Still LOTS left to do … sigh.
Also, I’m trying to think of an awesome name. I’ll come up with something.
This is my progress at the end of the first day – http://mattdev.com/cavernbat.zip.
Controls:
In the menu, up/down and enter.
In the game, press and hold ‘s’ to drop the bat down, and release it to make him hang from the ceiling again. ‘a’ and ‘d’ will alter his current angle. Escape to quit.
I’ve been working on this almost the entire day, and I’m reasonably pleased with where I’m up to. So far I’ve spent the majority of my time on the “art” – doing animations is tricky! The music took some time, too.
Screenshot:
Here’s my current to-do list, which is probably missing a load of things:
I haven’t quite figured out what the bat is going to be doing while moving from start to end points of caverns – picking up items (keys to unlock doors), maybe, or getting points for doing spins in the air, or something.
Anyway, I’ll deal with that tomorrow!
Ok, this is not a major update, I was asleep and then I had to fly to Illiamna and back, so I’m just picking things up again now.
Flash games on the web take the form of .swf files, which are streamed by their host. The flash player won’t normally play a frame of a flash movie until all the assets used by that frame have been loaded. Working in FlashDevelop/FlexSDK, you really don’t use frames much at all, everything is done from AS3 code, and the .swf which is created is a flash movie with 1 frame. Because you don’t want to show the player a white box until everything has been loaded, normally you add a pre-loader, which is small, and which allows the flash player to show something to the user while the rest of the assets are loaded.
Up till now, all of my projects have been wrapped either by the Mochi version control wrapper, or by Whirled’s wrapper. These include preloaders, so I’ve been able to totally ignore all aspects of preloading up unitl now. Unfortunately, as in my normal development flow I had set up my FD project as an ActionScript3 project. In order to get the FlexSDK to create a movie with more than 1 frame, so that that first frame can be implemented as a preloader, there are a few compiler options that need to be set. FD has a AS3+preloader template option, so I re-setup my project and away we went. (This really isn’t a big thing, but I lost 30 minutes because I didn’t know my tools).
Also in the line of I didn’t know my tools, if you hold shift while using the pencil, GiMP will draw a straight line!! Learning this alone made entering LD worth it to me.
Implemented a main menu and intro animation. Next up is building/support placement and a stress heat-map. That might take a little longer, so I figured I push what I have public.
Embedded flash versions here
-TF
Morning LDers, added board sounds, the begginings of a combo system, and I’m playing around with lighting so my lava pieces will look cool hopefully.
I've run out of onomatopoeia to type here, thats the real reason I added sound in this build =p
playable after the link:
[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.sophiehoulden.com/randomstuff/ludum/LD15_web06.unity3d" width="560" height="420"/]
I’m going to have some breakfast ow I think 
Tags: caverns, hoverboards, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, unity
My folks came over and I haven’t had much time in front of the computer since then. We went swimming for awhile and then grilled some burgers. The doofus I am, I forgot to take a picture of our picnic out in the back yard. Burgers with bean salad and pork and beans. Wow, did we have enough beans there? Anyway, my mom had a few cake mixes that were getting close to expiring so she brought down a cake.
Cake!
So where am I in development… I’ve got a hero that moves around the map and collision detection works great against the walls. I’m putting the finishing touches on the gem tile type and have begun the monsters. I still need to do more tiles, but I think I can wait until I get enemies done.
Screenshot showing gems and the updated tiles. Player is left of the gems stash.
Most of the work is all behind the scenes, which I hope means that the rest of it will start to fall into place at a faster pace later. Hopefully the next screen shot will show some monsters, even if their AI isn’t ready.
ok Ok.. so they are still rather stick figure like.. BUT they switch comically between running and walking and change directions too. You can watch a gameplay video of version 0.2 here.
At this point I’ve implemented 2 different enemies (bats & cavemen), 2 different weapons (stalactites & geysers), a combo system, tracking of stats like base level score, bonus score, and reporting back on a level over screen.
Many things still to do of course but my plan is still holding so far of trying to get the bulk of all implementation finished before generating levels and upgrading the graphics.
You can play version 2.0 here in your browser too.
Tags: angry, as3, bats, cavemen, combos, demo, flash, gameplay, screenshot, vid, video, youtube
I liked being hugged, but four arms doing it is a little weird.