My game, now titled “Broken Cave Robot”, is nearing completion. 2 hours left! Still need to do one more track of music, one or two more levels, and some testing. Getting tired, but must go on.

So, only two hours left? Hmm. Have a bit of a dilemma. I actually haven’t gotten far enough to implement the core mechanic that makes my game work! I think that’ll take a good hour, which doesn’t leave much time for anything else.

All I have to show at the end of my 24 hours is a basic platform engine and a few basic game elements. I don’t have time now to develop the idea I wanted to do properly, so instead I’m just going to try and muck up something with what I have – which isn’t much. It’s better than nothing, though. Here goes!

Ok, so this is my first LD and it was fun, the game isn’t complete yet, but it is playable (if you don’t mind getting no score hehehe) #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

I am still continuing the work in good spirit but I am pretty sure, that i won’t make the deadline. Below is a screen shot.

still no enemy ai and less than 2 hrs left.

Well, more or less…

I only got the first seven levels done – the entire Moon of Chronos, and the first two sectors of Kala. Rest are repeats of Chronos with slightly different gravity pulls, and textures.

But wow, I felt it was complete enough to actually submit!
Here’s some screenshots of the past few hours:

But it’s all submitted now so, hope you have fun playing it as I have had making it this weekend
Even if I did only spend about a day all in on it due to feeling a bit bleh…
Good Luck to everyone that entered!

Well the blue army is ready to deploy...

Only due to cutbacks and time management issues the landing craft will not be available in time, just as well as the red army are on holiday…

So no war today, still there is always tomorrow!

I’m done for today! Get ready to race your way down the caverns as fast as possible. The game also includes a level editor if you want to create your own tracks! You move the wagon with the arrow keys (more introductions can be found in the readme-file)

The game was developed using Python+pygame.

Screenshots (game view on the left, level editor on the right):

and the game can be downloaded from here

It was a super hard day to find the motivation for some reason. I got very far yesterday and it’s kind of a shame I didn’t use it as well as I could have, but my biggest goal for this weekend was to make a game that would be interesting enough to keep developing and I think i somewhat managed to do that. I will try to update the game with more tiletypes etc. in the near future. I think a postmortem of this weekend is needed for my part as well

Uploaded my entry just a bit ago.

http://www.esnips.com/r/hmfl/doc/2cc943fe-3236-4740-b288-0aac64fb7550/scavern

http://rapidshare.com/files/273654558/scavern.exe

http://rapidshare.com/files/273654962/scavern.gmd

Find the key and open the treasure chest to win!  Avoid the Red Dragon and Bat.  Arrow keys to move.

Used Jave and Irfanview for graphics.  SFXR and MS Sound Recorder for sound.  Yes, this sad excuse for a game was made in Game Maker 5.  Blame it on me not Mark Overmars.

11:58am Sat.  Power reset before I saved the last log.  Didn’t save what I’d developed as of yet either.  Decided to sleep over coding last night.  Still a little shakey on theme.

Currently drinking:  Instant coffee + rice protien + stevia + strawberry extract.  Really bad instant coffee too.

12:43pm Sat.  Gettings caffeined up.  Frustrated with thinking about game ideas.  Has to be simple.  Has to be doo-able.  has to be fun and unique..  Arrrgh!!!!  Shooter RPG Cavern style?  Hmmmn..

4:38pm Sat.  Decided on an art style.  Took awhile to figure out the image processing.  Thinking of standardizing on a Venture/Adventure motif.

5:11pm Sat.  Still working on the game font.  What a pain!!!!  Only doing symbols, numbers and caps though..

5:40pm sat.  Did I mention custom fonts are a pain?  Almost to the letters though..

6:26pm Sat.  Font is done!  Moving on to player sprites and objects.

7:17pm Sat.  player is moving with basic collision.  Added dummy treasure object.

8:24pm Sat.  Ate Steak & Cheese Hose ole and tried to take a nap to no avail.

12:41pm Sun. Started work again after abandoning the project for the rest of Sat.  Got title screen mostly done.

3:01pm Sun.  Got room exiting and enterning done.

4:01pm Sun.  Red Dragon Sprite “good enough” done.  Adjusted game for Full Med and low hero health.

6:15pm Sun.  Got some sound in.  More animation for dragon.  Player health dealt with.

9:12pm Sun.  Went to work to finish the rest.  It’s feature complete.  You can die and you can win.

I’m “done”

“Done” as in, some stuff left to do, but I give up. The game is playable and submitted. People can play it. I will release a Windows version tomorrow-ish. (The XP laptop is asleep and I don’t want to wake it up and start downloading files)

So… I went to sleep on a friday after a long evening of Call of Cthulhu RPG playing with my wife and brother in law. Got to bed about 3am. Up again a few hours later and started to code on my entry around 7am, 2 hours after start. (local time, but you all knew that)

After some quick thinking with a tired brain, I decided my entry shold contain a monocle wearing gentleman on a penny-farthing. The penny-farthing should fly and the player should press and hold space to make it fly higher, and release the button to fly lower. Kind of like all those flash games nobody plays.

But when the first version of the map code was up and running I decided that he should ride the penny-farthing on the ground instead, so the game was transformed to some sort of top-down racing game. And the rest is pretty much history. I didn’t really have a big todo list from the start. I had a few ideas and everything else was thought up, and included, on the fly.

It was an interesting experience for me. I have never done a game in Ruby before. And I have never used Gosu, the game programming library that powers my entry. It turned out pretty well, I think. I really like Ruby because it makes most things pretty easy to do. Gosu was also very easy to use, and I will continue to use it in the future.

What Went Right:

The game runs smooth, even on this macbook with a intel graphics card. I knew before that Ruby isn’t the fastest language around, and I have heard bad stuff about its garbage collection, and how it can make games stutter and lag. I’m not sure I noticed it. At times things was behaving a bit bad, but I had a timelapse movie in the making at the same time and I believe it caused most of the poor performance. I also had a bucket full of apps open at the same time, so I’m not ready to blame Ruby and its GC just yet.

Not sure what else to write. It got done. That is something that went right.

What Went Wrong:

Well, where do I start? Entities and their controllers? I used a new approach for me when it comes to game programming. I followed a short tutorial on how to use Gosu and Ruby. And it used a Model View Controller layout for the game. “Fine”, I though. I already use that when I code in Ruby on Rails, so I’m not a stranger to that. But I made a poor implemention of it. An entity in my game has a model. The model describes what it is and what stats it has. (position on screen, image to show, velocity, etc). Every model needs a controller. The controller tells the model what to do. But I keep these in separate lists. Luckily, no bugs turned up making this fall appart. But instead of having two lists I should have only had one with models in it. And each model should be responsible to know where its controller is. Instead of updating the controllers I should update the models, which in turn updates their controllers. Or vice versa. Not both. That made a mess out of things.

I’m not happy with the map! For some strange reason I though it would be a good idea to store the map as a long list of strings. Each string could look something like this: “3;9;3” which means, 3 solid tiles, 9 empty ones, then three solid again. This would save a lot of space and be a nice thing. Making a pillar in the moddle of the column would look like this: “3;4;1;4;3” (3 solids, 4 empty, 1 solid, 4 empty, 3 solids)
But… WHY? What was I affraid of? Why do I need to save space? It only made things much more complex during rendering and collision detection. And when I realised that, half the compo was over! Too late to change now, just keep going! This of course makes things a bit more complex when it comes to detect what’s to the left and right of a tile. Notice in the game that the stalagmites, or whatever they are called, only shows below and above a column of tiles, and never on the sides? I didn’t even try to write code to allow me to check the sides, thinking it would slow down the game a lot. Next time, don’t diss the good old tilemaps!

Music! I’m not good at making it, and it turns out neither is the computer. The result you hear is at least a lot better than my first attempt! cfxr is a nice tool to make sound effects with (I love 8-bit sounds).  However, my attempts of making musical instruments in it failed in an epic way! So maybe it doesn’t sounds good, but be glad I rewrote it and switched to some samples I found online.

Difficulty; have you played the game yet? Enough said!

Collision detection — I’m doing it wrong! It got better during the second day of the compo. It was a rewrite I had to do! It’s far from perfect and I don’t like the code, but it works. Kind off. Please ignore that you sometimes goes through a piece of the wall before you die. Use it to your advantage instead. Sometimes your should be dead, but isn’t.

And finally, how things usually turns out in my code. I have heard that globals are Bad(tm). Avoid them like the plague, they say. And I do. Stuff is passed from and to the classes and stuff. But sometimes class A doesn’t know about B, and it would be silly if it did, but it must, otherwise I can’t do C. So I hack it in. Now A know B and C is done. But then C needs to know about A, so I have to make a short cut here. And then one there. And before I know it, it’s a mess! And today I found out that I had 3 methods that pretty much did the same thing. Did a quick code refactoring, but I felt silly. The rest of the code is ugly too. But it was written in under 48 hours so I shouldn’t complain.

Closing Words:

I had a lot of fun! I will do it again! I have done similar things in the past (game-in-a-day, and my own Im-bored-will-code-game-in-12-hours private compos), and really enjoys it. I hope you like my entry. Thank you for reading my rant.

Link to entry: here

Tags: LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, Mr Monocle, post-mortem

Wow, what a weekend.

That there was a ld15 this weekend caught me by surprise. I was not sure I would enter until it all began. I figured it was time to complete a complete entry. First up, I started with the music.

I wanted to have some voice, so I wrote stuff into a text-file and got mac speech to speak it out loud. At first I had no idea how to record it to a sound file, but somone on the ld-irc helped me out by showing me that “say -o sound.aiff” would record to file.

The lyrics in the text were inspired by that song “I’m on a boat.. ” , and I wanted to do something similar only in cave setting.

”

I’m in a cave.
in a cave mother fucker.
never thought I’d be in a cave.
dark void and sunshine miles away.
baby let’s cave-in tonight, fuck the light today.

”

Then I figured, since the mac speech sounds like a robot, that there would be a robot speaking. And I wrote some stuff about the robot needing a rope. I still had no gameplay ideas. I dribbled down some stuff on a paper about a rope and a cave, but didn’t find anything. In the lyrics there is also some hints to the robot being evil and wanting to kill you for the rope.

Then the idea came to me, to make a cave setting with stone monsters spawning to attack you, to get the rope that the robot claims you have.

Oh, and a fun part of my experience was after creating the song, I went outside with my camera to take stone/cave textures. They turned out quite decent I think, allthough I’ve probably tiled them to death on my very flat box-like geometry. Wish I had a 3d program available in the pipeline to make some cool geometry, but maybe for next time.

Also thanks to the people at the irc channel for company throughout the weekend.

Here is the link to the game entry

And for people who really wants it, here’s the complete lyrics.

”

I’m in a cave.
in a cave mother fucker.
never thought I’d be in a cave.
dark void and sunshine miles away.
baby let’s cave-in tonight, fuck the light today.

The cave is so dark and loomy,
caveat I forgot we can’t see shit,
the monsters, the horrors.
shoot them, with your colt, revolt,
light baby, light. hold me tight.

Feelings are for pussies,
now I want you to fight.
Shoot your terror,
bring me a rope.
I’m the cave monster,
mostly your mother,
t-bone was busy, so mac-speech got busy,
in the mix slicks, rock steady, the cave is full of them.
the rocks everywhere, cool bystanders drip from the ceiling.
cave is ready, let’s go rave in the cave.

For what it’s worth, which amounts to nothing,
there is less here than four-fourtyeight hours
could bring to this thing.
I am instructing you. A rope, a rope.
I want your rope. My monsters want your rope.
Survive them, survive me.
In a cave. what the fuck are you doing in a cave?

Disco shit, bring light shows in the mix.
Cave, cave, rope rope, ain’t it all dope dope?
stones are cold and wet, will you slide away?
please, I’m the robot in the cave, save.
save me in the cave, save me in the cave,
your rope is the only way to save me in the cave

Never thought I’d see the day,
when a cave came tumbling my way,
believe me when I say,
I fucked a golem

“

Download Cavern Pellet Eater Creatures!

Whew, what a marathon! I am totally brain dead.  It’s amazing how much work goes in a small game project.

The amount of entries is mind boggling, I’m looking forward to playing as many as possible in the next week.

Good night all!

Deskphoto before and after:

This is going to be short and sweet. because my Model M makes a racket and it’s nearly 3AM.

About the game :

Well it’s the second ‘game’ i’ve made this year, it’s simple and has that one-more-go factor to it(at least in my opinion).

Things that went right :

Oh, So much went right and I was overjoyed when they did and it was finished and it actually ended up being pretty righteous. sound was nice and easy to do, graphics took the longest(the playersprite mostly – I was pretty lazy when it came to the floor tiles. Coding was fairly easy, the generation of the floor was a bit tricky but I got it in the end and was amazed when it all worked without a hitch! Scoring and highscores were easy to do, you get 1 point per step(~60pts/sec) and at 100,000pts(add : it’s actually about half an hour) something the world changes.

Things that went wrong :

Oh god the collision was a nightmare. The way i’d written it was everything except the score was moving at 2px a frame left, and Game Maker doesn’t like to do collision very well with moving objects because they are notorious for making the object stop without warning. This of course, led to problems with making gaps in the platforms. I think I completely squashed it though, but I think it might come back in a very very rare case.

ADD: People have commented about the logs that materialise out of nowhere, and they were a hacky bugfix that allowed me to get away with just randomising the floor/fire generation and letting it run wild(there’s a 25% chance of getting a fire tile) as anything more than a 2-tile jump is impossible(note : all two tile jumps are possible, anyone saying otherwise just got unlucky.).

Final Words :

I had a lot of fun coding this. Small games are easy to make, can sometimes be horribly addictive, and a big rush when people like them

My personal highscore is 20,171 – try to beat it!

I’ll definately be doing this again.

Tags: LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, postmortem

And… I’m done! Four LDs in a row, imagine that

Cavernous Shooter! is a top-down shooter set in a cave environment. Try to fight your way through the entire cave system, using the links below:

Windows / OSX / Linux / Source

Java Webstart

Controls:
[WASD] or [Arrows] to move
[Left mouse] to shoot
[Right mouse] to fire shotgun (if you have ammo for it)
[R] to reload
[Q] to toggle particle quality settings

The linked zip file contains .bat and .exe files for Windows, or .sh for Linux and OSX. It also contains the game source code.

There is also a web (Java Webstart) link – just run the .jnlp through your java/bin/javaws.exe (most browsers will default to this behaviour).

Tags: cavern, cavernous, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, shooter

I went out for a walk and hit the grocery store not to long ago.  It was around 8:30 PM when I got got there, and I was pleased to discover they had reduced the price of the stuff in the hot food section.  Sooooo… Blam!

Delicious 50% off pack of fried chicken.

Yummay!

This should get me through the super busy end of compo submission phase, and provide some delicious leftovers for tomorrow.

Tags: foodphoto

I finished! I’m so happies! (And tired. It’s 3am here!)

My game has the dreadful pun title of ‘Miner Distraction’, being a minor distraction from the games I should be making. Hmm. Download is here: http://bentosmile.com/games/minerdistraction/ There’s no sound or anything I’m afraid, as I ran out of time. (My bad for trying to learn while doing this!)

YAH LADIES! This is my first LD48 and I’ve got to say, even though time was quite limited, I’m happy with the result.  Needless to say, I learned a lot and had a lot of fun, especially with the nice IRC folks who so happily helped me procrastinate on stuff that I didn’t want to do (collision “system” comes to mind!)

Anyhow, without further crap I present to you: The Narwhal Bacons At Midnight

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

A game of love, romance, bacon, lots of funky characters and one little narwhal who wants to find his destiny. All in all, a heartbreaking 3-minute piece of art that everybody should have played.

Download here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview&uid=1097

NEEDS URGENT PORTING TO WINDOWS USING PY2EXE!

I got my entry far enough “done” to submit, and have kicked it off – not to be touched again

So this competition has been rather entertaining this time around – I didn’t have any real solid ideas for what sort of game to make so wound up with something not really very game-like; I’m pretty happy with it though – the tech is good; the game could have been better, but ran out of time and motivation.

I’ll probably post a proper postmortem within another day or 2, but need to do something other than the computer for a while now :>
See you all later

Duplicating combo submission stuff:
Download: Win32 Binary | Source

With only a day to make it, and given the fact that I’m no speed programmer, this is all I could manage. Play the thing over here (Flash). I’ll upload a timelapse in a while.

Tags: final, tigs

Finally, a submission-worthy version, complete with menus, music, and online high scores:

Shelter From the Rain

And, of course, a gameplay screenshot:

Nuclear War. Truly, the end has come. Wait, is that a cereal box?

You dig a fallout shelter, then hoard supplies in it. The ultimate goal is to extend your shelter all the way to the cavern below, and re-unite with the rest of humanity. If you make it there you even get to submit your score (a composite of how much stuff you’ve gathered) to the leaderboards!

Download Shelter From the Rain for Windows, or get the Python+PyGame sources (for Linux).

Tags: final, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, pygame, python, screenshot

My first LD and I actually completed a game… well… it could use a lot more polish, but it is playable with a score system, sound effects, etc.  I was a little worried after last night as I had some things come up yesterday that took about 4 hours or so out of my design time, but it all worked out okay.

StoryLine:

You are a cave shaft jumper seeking thrills and treasure.  Score points by picking up treasure and deploying your parachute at the last possible moment to achieve maximum points. The faster your velocity, the more points you score, but watch out because if you’re going too fast when you hit the ground, it is all over!  Avoid the bats when your chute is deployed as they might get tangled in it!  Complete the game by reaching the bottom of the shaft and picking up the entry key to the main cave system.

Get the Windows version of the game here.

Mac version of the game here.

Get the source here.

This game was made using Novashell