Well I thought I had a simple idea but I neglected to consider how long it would take to throw together a “quick and dirty” level editor. So instead of getting anywhere with gameplay, I spent all day on the editor.

A small level in the "editor"

Anyways.. a least that’s working pretty well now. Now to try and add some actual gameplay to this thing.

Okay, so I’m wide awake (thanks, seagulls…) and ready to get back to work.  The plan for today is:

• First, do all the little things the game still needs:

1. Light boxes which send the light beams up to the sky.
2. Light pipes to send the light from light boxes deep in the level up to the sky (and to act as extra obstacles for the player).
3. UI, showing: number of lives; number of light boxes lit up; number of reflectors available.
4. Pickup-able reflector crates.
5. Ability to die, from:
6. Lava.
7. Spikes.
8. Moving spiky ball things (yay originality!).
9. Fix the stupid collision detection!

• 10.30: Do the music and sound fx.
• 11.30: Off to the shops.
• 12-12.30: Back home for lunch and the grand prix.
• The afternoon: Finish putting the level together.
• Late afternoon: Add story screen, build final Windows version.
• 6.00: Dinner.
• 7.00: Build Linux version.  Release.  OSX can wait for another time.

Here it is so far…  I hope I can turn it into something solid, but the knight looks like a pansy.  I might have to redraw that.

Oh my goodness there’s no way I can keep up with the amount of posts and comments this site is getting! It’s awesome that so much awesome is awesoming here so awesomely.

Awesome.

So my update.

Looks way better in motion. Click it!

Turns out that Flash doesn’t really likethe way I am doing 2.5D, but eventually I got the framerate to be a consistent 30.

Postmortem of Saturday:
I’m doing it wrong:

• Too much Mtn Dew.
• Not sleeping when my body is telling me I need it.
• Maybe concentrating too much on the visuals. I always spend a lot of time tweaking things like colors and animation speeds.
• Normally I’d say AS3/Flex is great for LD, but I think that for this game concept I’d have been better off dusting off Code::Blocks and using some SDL/OpenGL.  A lot of time was lost to getting Flash to cooperate and the quality of the game is definitely suffering.

I’m doing it right:

• Never seen a Flash game that looks anything like this!
• Nap!  I seem to be like 10x more productive now.
• Excited about the game concept!
• It’s kind of fun!

Basically I am ripping off the Wario Ware Inc. microgame Ninja Pipe Cleaner. Which you can see a video of here.

You can see my last upload here.   I’ll be uploading updates there occasionally.

Yay for food!

The game is nearing completion, by the way. All I have to do right now is to add all perks (there will be 10), story, concept art, music, sound effects, and help. It’ll be easy.

Same instructions as last time:

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 per…cent chance that cover stops a bullet, unless swarm member is touching said cover

http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1251614687

Combos are working, though there is still only the 1 ‘trick’, you can add to your combo by doing air jumps, and getting *really* close to lava (best to try when in slowmo).

Lava in games is always cool right?

playable after the link:

[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.sophiehoulden.com/randomstuff/ludum/LD15_web07.unity3d" width="560" height="420"/]

• Left/Right = steer
• Hold Space = Crouch (speeds up a little)
• Release Space = Jump (hold longer to jump higher)
• up/Down = Kickflip
• Tab = toggle cameras
• 1,2 & 3 = change board sound effect
• 4 = mute sound

Tags: caverns, hoverboarding, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, unity

Right, I haven’t gotten the building placement yet (nor drawn the buildings, so that’s the major stumbling block) but my little game is correctly placing the supports and displaying the stresses on a heat map. Playable version history here. The halo effect in the screenshot below is caused by setting every border cell, actually, every cell 1 step outside the border of the playing field to be a support. I’m not sure if that’s going to work or not in the long run (however long of that run is left). Ideally, 1 support will nullify 1 building. I’m not sure if it’s a better idea to drop the supports around the edges entirely, or to thin them out a little so their effect isn’t as large…

-TF

Hop.

Nicely coming along. Made the selection system, and the game is detecting that the proper number of items where selected.
It still need to be able to check when the items are stuck together, or not.

Here’s a binary, working but you can’t do anything except selecting the items

http://astrofra.com/posts/ld15/binary/

I’ve added lightboxes and a UI (left to right: num lives, num lightboxes lit up, num reflectors available).  I’ve decided the aim of the game is to light up all the light boxes in the level, which will entail connecting lamps to boxes via reflectors, finding extra crates of reflectors, and avoiding any hazards along the way.  Eventually the sky will get lighter as you light up more lightboxes.

Not nearly as far along as I should be, but getting there. I’m definitely not going to have time for art tomorrow. I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping I’ll be able to get the gameplay done. In its current form:

Biggest wastes of time today: trying to figure out how to do inversed masking in Flash (to draw a black rectangle everywhere except where there is light), and tracking down a slight error in my matrix math that was throwing off all the scaling. Doh.

Tags: progress, screenshot

Ok, end of the day for me. I’m going to sleep. If I wake up around 8 or 9, I’ll have 11-12 hours left to work.

I’m probably not going to finish what I originally intended, but I’m having fun anyways. I’ll definitely continue this project after the compo is over.

As for the game, I’ve got movement down and am nearly finished with digging. Plus, I’ve got a terrible menu system. I’ve never done a mouse-based interface in a game before, and I’m not very good at it. Anyway, after digging, I think I need to start adding more units, so that I can add attacking. That, plus bughunting and packaging, may be all I can get done, though if I have time I’d love a random/procedural level generator. The enemy AI, assuming I even get that far, is going to be *very* primitive.

Goodnight!

Tags: journal, progress

Breakfast is muesli with greek yogurt and honey, and a cup of tea.

Last night I went to bed concerned about the lack of progress I had made, however this morning I found I’m advancing quite quickly, so I guess I did make a lot of progress on the ‘scaffolding’ code after all. Or maybe I’m just less tired. 😛

Also I made a (-n awful) piece of music for my game. It really sucks though so I might not leave it in.

Tags: foodphoto

I just woke up and now it’s back to work. I’m going to rush to inject some damn gameplay into this thing today so that it can at least be described as a game and not just a pile of shoddy cavern wall graphics =/

The other entries are looking amazing this time round! Ludum Dare never fails to surprise me. Every time, people go far beyond what I thought possible in 48 hours – whether it be graphically, technologically or even in terms of the gameplay or story itself. Once again, I can’t wait to get my hands on some of these entries!

I forgot to post foodphotos of some snack and a pizza, but here’s something more interesting. My wife made a kalakukko, which is “fishcock” (edit: umm, cock as in rooster) in English as a direct translation. Kalakukko is a traditional Finnish food made by baking fish and pork inside rye dough and cooked in oven, and then left to poach with low heat for roughly 8 hours or so to make it softer.

Tags: foodphoto

OK, the game detects when a row is selected and close enough to be removed.
Yet, it’s a damn bunch of bugs. I guess my setup is to complex, and 3D physics is not really suitable for this

Anyway, here’s an updated binary :

http://astrofra.com/posts/ld15/binary/

Okay, last post before I switch computers and go and make some music.  Here I’ve added spikes and lava, and collectable reflector crates.  It’s possible to die now too, although there’s no fancy animation – it just decrements your life and puts you back to the start of the level.  I don’t know if I’ll have to time do anything more polished in that regard.

Still to do:

• Moving spiky balls.
• Fix the collision detection.
• The sky should get lighter as you light up more light boxes, plus it should be smooth, not stepped as it is right now.
• Make a proper level for it.
• Story screen.

There’s other things I’d like to do, but only if I have the time.

I finally finished my entry. If I get enough time, I may update it; but it’s polished and in a playable state right now. It’s also quite fun to see yourself die in horrible ways; even if you have the best weapon in the game (called “The Reaper +15”). You can find it in the submissions menu; http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/

Edit: There was a bug in the game in the Altar sequence. It’s fixed now.

edit: after I was asked “why” —– yes, there’s some more fish food coming.

Tags: foodphoto

Well, its coming up on 4am and I have almost nothing to show for this LD. I spent far too much competition time on other things (soccer games, movies, drinking) and the time I DID spend so far I’ve wasted messing around with blender and ogre, tools I have almost zero familiarity with. I really wanted to make a 3D cave shmup, but it is simply outside my abilities to finish within the small amount of time left. I struggled for hours trying to get all sorts of other tools to work to get my cave from blender into ogre in a useful way, but ended up with nothing feasible.

I guess this just isn’t my LD. I neglected to start a time lapse, I’ve taken no food photos, and at this point there is about 15 hours to go and I have zero, count em, zero lines of code. Here is everything I have so far – a simple render of my cave system from the top down. It’s fairly dark (on purpose), so the image isn’t worth much by itself.

Map of the cave system

Not too bad, but not great either — still, I learned some things and had fun playing with nurbs, so even if I drop out it isn’t a total loss.