I’m still working out the kinks in Box2D for Flash. But the concept is down I guess… I think tonight might be a long night.
I did some cover art as a break.
Inkscape is awesome.
After collision got working (last post) I implimented digging, and it works great animations and all. After I got digging as done as it’ll get, I tried tackling cavern generation…and ended up with laggy strait tunnel generation. This was another bummer because I spent so much time working on it trying to figure out a good algorythm, but it failed in the end. I got a tiny bit a spriting done, and now I’ve turned off the screen recorder for the night and am not going to work on it anymore at the moment. I’m going to sleep on the algorythm, and hope tomorrow will bring better luck with my not waisting my time with failedattempts.
Wrote a couple of song loops for the levels, and made some eyecandy for the surface area.
Also added a magnet item that can help maneuver the pellets. I’m in a good place for one day of work, but am going to need work out some sort of win/lose mechanics and more engaging gameplay tomorrow morning.
space bar to switch which swarm you’re controlling, click to tell them where to move, wasd to pan camera
swarms automatically try and take cover behind cover that is touching the rectangle
75 percent chance that cover stops a bullet, unless swarm member is touching said cover
I was thinking in doing something rogue-like but now the game is shaping into a puzzle-game and it looks interesting (at least for me :P). I got almost all mechanics written down and all it’s left is level design.
Here’s a screen of 3 enemies and their field of vision (in red). Since I’m no artist I think these tiles will be final ones.
Progress going good, just optimized the speed of my game around tenfold, and decreased the levels filesize by a similar number.
lovely screenshot.
As you can see, 2 layers of cave (foreground and background) that can be switched ingame for awesome platforming.
Also, a neat motion blur, a stylish edge tracing, and a halfdecent overall look
Other not so obvious features include my very quick and very convenient mapeditor that I created to generate the maps, the fact that there are many screens such that as soon as the player goes off one edge, he starts on the other edge of the next screen.
Similarly, you don’t see how cool it is to go around stuff in a 2D platformer. I assure you, it is quite cool.
Just an ugly progress shot before I get dragged off to lunch with some old lady that I think we’re only friends with because she got so excited over design of our business card.
This one is coming along a lot better than the last attempt besides one frustrating problem where Construct tried to help me by auto-hiding a canvas that had an X ordinate below a certain negative value–despite the fact that I was zooming in on that layer so it should still have been on-screen and therefore fucking VISIBLE.
It probably won’t be playable until fairly late, so I hope the gimmick turns out interesting enough to make up for the horrible graphics.
Woke up again. This keeps happening.
Anyway, I don’t have much to show for yesterday. My code can draw animated tiles and tilemaps (scrolled) into a rectangle, but that’s about it. Oh, and maintain correct aspect ratio no matter what size it’s rendering at. Originally I wanted to support fullscreen, but apparently flash disables keyboard in fullscreen mode for some reason, so it’s not very useful unless I do a mouse-controlled game, which I probably won’t. You can still just plop the swf directly in the browser to fill the browser window though.
Also, I think I got an idea now. Don’t know if it’ll be good yet, but at least it’s something. Time to draw some gfx.
And so I’m heading for the bed.
New in this build is improved ai for the little cretins known as monsters.
There is a lifebar as well. it recharges if you stay out of trouble.
You get points for killing monsters.
When you die you are returned to a screen which shows some score info.
If you press the middle mouse button, you push enemies backwards. nice for crowd control, but really overpowerd. I should add a cool-down to that “weapon”.
I want to add grenades and improve level design + spawn points, and also do some difficulty curve work, so that it gets harder and harder. Hope I get time for some of that tomorrow.
Darn, I have fallen way behind in my schedule. Haven’t done half of the things I set out to do the first day. Oh well, at least I got to my first screen shot. Allthough it is techically just one picture blited to the screen, all the logic to blit all the objects I want is allready there. At least I got something.
Next up are ligh emiting objects and some kind of resource object.
Tags: behind, first screen
Just got up after 5 hours of sleep. I’m feeling like a zombie…
I hope I’ll finish this…
Hi!
So, this has been going pretty well, I think. I’ve pieced together something reasonably interesting and playable – while not really constituting much of a game yet, I think I have time to remedy this.
I’m uploading an exe here if you would like to check it out, please let me know what you think 
Given that I have almost a full day left, I’m intending to add gameplay of some sort, integrate my audio lib, and revisit the cavern graphics, hopefully make them more cavern-like.
Download: ld15_CavernGhost_1.zip (Win32 Binary)
Screenshot:
Early in a project, things like this are funny. Later on, I find the time lost incredibly frustrating. I don’t think windows is going to find the error before I do…
-TF
Dinner tonight was a roast, with a baked potato, a roll, and a bottle of Martinelli’s, prepared for my by my sweetheart of a girlfriend. Afterwards, we played some Animal Crossing, and now, back to work for a few hours before bed.
She's such a sweetie ❤
Well finally! I have a demo that everyone can try out. I haven’t really spent any time on balancing the game play so don’t expect much in that respect. The idea of the game is simple. You control the little guy at the bottom of the screen with the left and right arrow keys. Your job is to collect the coffee beans that fall from the top of the cavern without being hit by one of the falling rocks.
Ongoing
I have not incorporated a state system yet. When you run the game it will immediately start playing. Once you get hit by a rock the game is over, you will have to close the window and restart it.
Known Issues
For some reason pressing the Esc key is not exiting. I am going to fix this, just haven’t had a chance to yet.
Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions.
Well, i now have a J that moves around like The Flash and an @ sign that you move around. I’m implementing PoV’s timer code, too, but I haven’t yet. There’s also a little bit of dialouge at the beginning of the game. No screenshot yet, though.
I have a ton of code to write, and i have no graphics at this point. Things are looking pretty hopeless. But I just stocked my energy drinks, water and candies, rewatched the keynote speech and am totally motivated.
It is gonna be a long night…
…They’re all still spheres along with everything but my mock level. Making good progress so far, have most of the game logic done and my goal is concentrate only on art after midnight or so and all of tomorrow. Also plan on making the game take place on one huge level.
My game involves a dragon looking for her lost babies in a cave (duh). She can roar to get the closest one to answer and indicate the direction it’s at, use fire to take down enemies, and fly around. So far I have giant moths and acid dripping stalagmites as obstacles. Once she finds a baby she has to fly it back to the roost and look for the next one. Early prototype was ok fun so I decided to stick with it given the short amount of time available. Gameplay is 2D with 3D levels (Shadow Complex is a recent example). I’d post a screenshot but just have spheres to show off.
Note: Like I said on IRC, recording a timelapse increases productivity and makes me feel guilty about slacking off on the Internet. Give it a shot haha.
Chris
