So this weekend is somewhat busy for me, I have other work I have to finish but in between when I have free time, I’m attempting to work on my jam entry. Not even sure if I’ll finish, but I’ll most likely submit what I have at the end of it. I only began an hour ago, 9 hours after the jam began.

I did some pixel art (I use that loosely), since it’s my first attempt at art, completely going in blind, I haven’t even read on any pixel art techniques, just attempting from an image in my head to pixels. The approach I’m taking to the game however, is that of a JRPG, mostly including the turn-based order of actions in the vein of Final Fantasy IV for example, with a simple Active Time Battle-esque approach common in the series. The simple premise is that you’re in a nuclear shelter beneath the surface, which I am going to expand upon and saving the details as a surprise for when people can hopefully play it and how the gameplay relates to being under the “surface”.

Here’s a basic character and punch animation, first pass.

Here’s the character placed in a quick concept of a wall/corridor, testing the palettes.

And here’s a piece of the wall in-engine using dynamic lighting for the pixel art, I haven’t created the normal/light maps for the rest of it, so it only shows the wall canvas as a test. First pass and still requires a lot of tweaking.

Action menu for a battle sequence, still using an old palette I haven’t changed yet. An in-engine concept, supports both keyboard and mouse control.

Tags: bunker, jrpg, nuclear, pixel art, turn-based

I am going to use Crafy (http://craftyjs.com/). Just playing around at the start i found a nice “beneath the surface” property of combining a floor and the “fourway” input controls.

My entry will be massaged into readiness here:

http://www.nikolajbaer.us/ld29/

Now to ponder how to make a game from this..

Just a quick notice for the people that don’t follow me (@ThatCoderGuy) or the #LD48 hashtag on twitter.

I threw together a quick design doc for my game. If you fancy taking a look, here’s the link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sUT_fwg0ny5iarbvLfVuQKPO5mBtSxPu7NukPjxAkCg/edit?usp=sharing

As always, any feedback is more than welcome. And now another coffee and I can finally start coding.

Alex Out

After a late start I can now render pixels on the screen.

Now I can get into the actual game.

The very basics of my game is in place such as:
– Screen flows
– Main Menu
– Buttons/Options
– Level and Player classes
– Physics

Here is a screenshot of the main menu so far.
My idea and planning of the game is also becoming more and more clear.

My Idea is a space sim, similar to FTL but more like a 4X. The game will see you colonise and discover what is ‘beneath the surface’ of the solar systems. What I have now is a randomly generated universe which gives you one solar system at a time with a max of 5 planets. I am going to tell the story like through an event system. Here is the obligatory screenshot:

I can’t wait to do the music for this!

Oh what a mistake. I woke up at 05.00 when my girlfriend woke up, she’s working early today, and went to the bathroom. After I was done, still pretty tired, I made a big mistake. I checked the current theme for Ludum Dare 29: Beneath the Surface and guess what? Now I wasn’t tired anymore.

So I got out of bed, at 5!, and wrote down some ideas. Now, almost 2 hours later, I’ve had a battle with my makefile and I’ve written a lazy resource management system and a simple state transition scheme. A bit annoying as my previous fast prototyping framework already had all those ready, but in the end I got a bunch of coding done and it’s not that big of a deal anyways.

My idea for the theme is far too big of course. Hopefully I’ll have something to show off in the end. But now I need to eat some breakfast and maybe go sleep an hour or two…

Mushrooms. Mushrooms.

Made some great progress, got a solid idea down and first playable bits and pieces. Worked out a reveal mechanic and considering the implementation of it all.

Not sure whether to go with an 8-directional character who fires circular blobs OR… an analogue “mouse facing” character who moves to a click and fires a “cone” of scanning…

I am going to take a break now, watch the end of Rockets VS trailblazers and then sleep for an hour after that

working doors, working with Haxe Flixel

Im thinking of a game inspired in the movie Sphere http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120184/

I’ve started work on my game, with scientists!  They have good aspect ratios, you know.

I’ll be streaming all the dev. of this game on my TwitchTV channel http://www.twitch.tv/technocf/.  Tune in to see the scientists.  I am also using the game engine that I created yesterday, it’s public for all of the peoples here: https://github.com/technocf/Ultraviolent.

Just so that I know what I have to do (not necessarily in this order and subject to change). Feel free to copy.

[X] Have a checklist (4:20 hours into the compo)
[X] Come up with an idea (3:30 hours into the compo)
[X] Sketch the idea on a piece of paper (6:00 hours into the compo)
[X] Implement the game (starting 6 hours into the compo, finished 1:30 hours before the end)
[X] Create a winning/losing screen (43:30 hours into the compo)
[X] Create a menu (43:30 hours into the compo)
[X] Have a name – Castle Engineer (4:00 hours into the compo)
[X] Write a description
[X] Post the game
[X] Advertise the game
[X] Write a progress report before going to sleep
[X] Write a Post Mortem
[X] Play and rate at least 100 games

I woke up 20 minutes ago, learned about the theme, and sighed. It was one of the few themes in the list I didn’t quite like.

Well, anyway, after some thinking, I may have an idea based on another idea I had for another jam. Maybe I’m being a little claustrophobic, but all I can think for when I read “beneath the surface” is: “deep waters”, “darkness”, “lack of oxygen”. I kinda know what to do with that, but I’m afraid it will be long to develop. No time to waste; let’s get to work!

So here’s my dev plan for now:

1. Build Level

2. Player controls and collision handling

3. Pathfinding

4. Victim and win condition

5. Vigilantes and lose condition

6. Citizens

That should keep me busy for quite a while. I’ve got a good couple of additional features in the design doc that I’ll prioritize and implement dependent on how much time I’ve got left and what feedback I get from my testers (yes, that means you guys). And now I can finally get started with coding.

I’ll try and leave music and art for tomorrow so I have a whole day to focus on that while the core mechanics are already nailed down. Let’s see how that works.

Again, the link to the design doc is
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sUT_fwg0ny5iarbvLfVuQKPO5mBtSxPu7NukPjxAkCg/edit?usp=sharing
so feel free to take a look and give me some feedback.

Alex Out

Basically I have a shark, and it blinks green when it eats fish.

I honestly spent at least 1 hour on the rotation of the shark, and it still doesn’t feel right.

No fucking clue what I’m doing next, I’ll figure that out tomorrow/today.

… for the first time.

I’ll use the following tools:

• Godot Engine (a nice open source game engine http://www.godotengine.org/wp/)
• Pinta/Blender/Gimp/MyPaint (depending on what kind of graphics I will want to create)
• lmms/sfxr

Now all I need is some good ideas …

“Beneath the surface” means a lot of things to me:

• Beneath the thin veneer of sanity
• Beneath a system of rooms
• Something living beneath your skin

My whiteboard is filling with flowcharts already…

After think a lot, I already have an idea for my game, but I’m not sure how to do. I hope to get finished in time..

Language – AS3

IDE – Flash

Graphics – Photoshop

Audio – i don’t know yet

And cropping