So, yeah, I haven’t done anything at all today. Mainly because I completely lost motivation on day-one where I just didn’t get any bursts of inspiration.

It was my plan to use Unity3D and create awesomely sweet looking 3d graphics with lots of cool gameplay, but lacking that one *good* idea, it just never happened. Also, I really suck at modelling AND drawing graphics/textures!

Late day-one, however, I did decide to just whip up a heli-flyer game using the iso tech I had sort-of implemented earlier that day, but after fiddling around for a while creating some temporary art I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. So here’s a shot of the few (crappy) things I made:

Isometric graphics textures projected onto 3D cubes

Should you not have realized it yet, this is an “I give up”-post

Tags: Failure

This is a bowl of popcorn.

LOOK AT IT!

I prefer my popcorn plain. It is much easier to grab a bite and continue working if I don’t feel the need to wipe the butter off of my hands every time.

Progress report:

The driver can exit the vehicle, pick up some mineral, return it, and go back out for more. He can’t pick up more than one mineral at a time.

Oh, he also can’t leave the level without the tank.

Next: adding monsters to their lairs. For lack of time, the AI will have to be very simple. It will cheat and chase the driver through walls. Hopefully they’ll look more like monsters than spheres of a different color. B-)

Tags: foodphoto

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 30th, 2009 at 3:39 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.

Yay, digging through works now

I haven’t really done anything LD wise other then tweak a few constants in the last 12 or more hours. Tons to do so trying to kick myself awake with an assault of food and sugar.

The last meal before I fell asleep and stopped producing:

Steak of Unproductiveness

Now with only about 9 hours left. Eeek!

Breakfast of inspiration

Caverns need to look cavernous (brown rectangles won’t do)

Game needs some scoring system so it has a point!

Game needs some sort of menu!

Top priorities for now.

Yeah, curry and cuppa!

Well currently code is broken but prior to the syntax bomb of new elements being added I had red and blue soldiers on the map admittedly appearing in the middle of the sea but in the game!

Now have coffee and going on a bug hunt 9:07.51 to go!

Tags: curry, food, update

I’m making some progress, although not quite as much as I would have liked.

The helicopter can now collide with the walls of the cavern. The player has a score, and the helicopter is far more controllable than it was at the end of day one.

Here’s a screenshot that shows the helicopter in a canyon in a cavern.

The helicopter flies through a cavern.

Still lots to do, such as…

• when the player reaches the end of the level they are congratulated and shown their score
• when the water reaches the helicopter it’s game over
• the helicopter should respond when it collides with the walls of the cavern (haven’t decided yet if it’ll crash or just deduct some points and continue)
• scientists
• sensible scoring
• sound effects

But it’s getting there.

Tags: screenshot

I totally overslept today. Nearly all gameplay features are implemented, but the game is still not fully finished and I still have some severe bugs to fix.

So, here is the latest screenshot:

Click on more to see what I had for lunch/dinner.

And here is what I need for lunch/dinner:

Corncob

Tiramisu

Tags: cavern defense, foodphoto

GoblinHome is about a tribe of goblins that are trying to make a new home in a cavern, but they need to make the cavern safe to live in by killing all the cave denizens(currently just blue trolls) and also ward off attacks from adventurers.

It looks like I won’t get the adventurers or the home building in on time but I should be able to get the goblins and trolls to battle which can result in either winning or losing and will therefore constitute a game.

The clock is ticking.  I added some dump trucks, and monsters that eat the pellets.  The monsters get hurt by the wrong colored pelets, if 3 monsters die, your game is over.  They also get bonus points for consecutive pellets eaten.

There are a lot of items/features that I wanted to add in today, but with the deadline looming I’m going to settle for adding high scores and spend the rest of the time adding levels.

Tags: foodphoto

Well, it’s more colorful anyways… Fixed a bug which caused the stress grid to recalculate itself up to 800 times per frame o.O Score and cash displays in progress and coming up next…

-TF

Well, this is getting odd:

Beyond the edge of the world, there are... odd floating blocks that shouldn't exist.

I’m currently sorting-out level scrolling. But due to something odd and inexplicable, when you go beyond the level you get odd floating blocks. And invisible ones like the one I’m standing on. No idea why at all, but hopefully it should soon be sorted – I’m going to try changing the level format to a vector of arrays rather than a 2D array, and add new columns to the end of the level as needed.

Ah, just looked it up and apparently vectors of arrays shouldn’t work, so there goes that. Actually, I could use a struct… Yeah, sorted I think.

I’ve added dinosaurs, finally! Well, a dinosaur.

DINOSAUR!!!!

The dinosaur sits there until a rock drops on its head, then it dies – flipping and sliding down the screen. Stylish. Unfortunately, that’s all it does.

While I’m mentioning flipping images, I might as well also mention the terrible memory leak I had. I was flipping the images dynamically, which created countless identical images that were never deleted. Ew. Sorted now though, phew!

I really, really should have set-up a framework before the weekend, it would have made all this much easier…

Currently have 16 hours, 20 minutes left of my 48 hours. Though a lot of that will be sleeping. Better get up early tomorrow then!

Tags: dinosaur, screenshot

Available here.

Pretty happy with it, even though it is a bit shit. At least I got it finished.

Tags: final collapse flash

They chase you, and they look better at doing so than I would have thought. Now I have to implement player death.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 30th, 2009 at 4:50 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.

I added a dummy main character to get the movements working and it can now walk and jump, now I still need to draw the actual character.

Here is a pic I forgot in my last post:

And I just cooked (and ate) supper:

Gah. Massively overslept. Need to add progression, levels, and a score system. Those are most important.

I’ve uploaded an entry. I’m not linking here yet, because I’m planning on making it better, but it’s uploaded. Right now, I’m totally stuck – I’ve got code to switch to a new level, but it doesn’t work. I can’t figure out why it won’t, either. I’ve been asking on IRC, but haven’t gotten a response, so unless I find out what’s wrong, I don’t get a better entry.

That’s right, LD15 is over for me It’s been the most exciting event for me in a really long time.

Check my submission here – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview&uid=1163

Features downloadable flash (.exe), on-line playable version and full sources (graphics included).

Tools:
– FlashDevelop (+Flex3), coded in ActionScript 3
– sfxr
– musagi
– Inkscape
– Gimp
– OpenCanvas + Wacom tablet

Libraries:
– Flixel v1.25
– TweenLite v6.21

Thanks to LD (and TIGS), I’ve discovered some really amazing tools.

Sfxr is a final SFX solution for me (at least as long as I stick with platformers) – lets you create wide variety of chiptune sound effects with a few simple tweaks (or a single “Randomize” click).

Musagi proved to be quite a handy tool. Although I have some musical background, I’ve never composed anything and was always a bit hestant about make music tracks on my own. Thanks to Musagi, I can set up a simple tune in a few minutes – nothing original, but just enough to break the silence barrier during the gameplay.

Flixel is also my new friend. It’s an AS3 library for Flash platformers and even though its quite specifically focused, you can tweak it your way, if you are a bit serious with Actionscript.

GIMP is an old acquaintance for me, so I used it to create pixel graphics for the game. For static things it’s quite OK, because sticking with it quite some time. But I feel it’s not the best solution for animations and tiles.

Got some good sleep last night, woke up and started working again.  I figured out why the monsters were having issues walking more than one space (missing else before an if), but they keep walking through walls and sometimes the player.  I’ll have to insert some more debug code to figure it out.  I also had a Concurrency exception last night that I seemed to have fixed by placing a syncronized block around the code that loops through a LinkedList.  So far it hasn’t come back.  I also added the status area to the right.

Here’s a screen shot with the monsters:

Monsters! Green are slowest, pink are faster, and blue are fastest. Damage also escalates.

For breakfast, I just had a bowl of granola cereal:

Sunday breakfast, Granola cereal.

After I can figure out this monster collision stuff, I’ll work on whips.

Tags: foodphoto, ld48_15, screenshot

Bad news! Yesterday I had to help my aunt move, which took up most of the day. But I’m still slaving away, desperately trying to make this thing fun to play. I started off with just a random assortment of ideas and no real direction, so the final game will likely reflect that. Oh well, some of those random ideas are actually pretty cool! I’m excited to see what people think of them.

Anyways: new screenshot + music to show off!

Broken Cave Robot

So the title sums it all up. I just can’t motivate myself today. I’m hoping I’ll get back into it in time to py2exe it (as HybridMind suggested) so Windows users won’t have any problems running it. Though at this point there’s really not much to play. I suppose my error in this contest began at the beginning: I wasn’t prepared at all, and really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I am, however, quite proud that I at least got something running, something playable, for my very first LD.