Got up at 2:15 to see what the theme was, then went back to sleep to get some ideas.  And the idea is:  ‘For Queen and Country’, a turn-based multiplayer strategy game.

There are 4 players, and an unexplored island divided into tiles.  The player to visit all those tiles (and thus explore the whole island) gets to claim the island for their country, and wins the game.  There are three obstacles in their way:

• Players cannot move into a space another player is already occupying.
• Players can only move if they have enough food rations.  Otherwise they will have to spend a turn foraging.  Each space will have a different number of food units, so some spaces will be more useful in this regard than others.
• Players may erect a garrison on a space which will prevent other players from moving there even if the original player has moved on.  Garrisons last 3 turns.

That’s it.  It’s probably more like a boardgame than a videogame, but I’m trying to keep it as simple as possible to make things easier on myself.  There will be the option of CPU players to make up the numbers, but I can’t guarantee they’ll be particularly smart (not being particularly smart myself).

First step: draw the island map.

yup, I fixed my triangles problem, and I even coded all the streaming PCG stuff, so already you can wander endlessly across the surface of mars. click ‘more’ to play the embedded version

[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.sophiehoulden.com/randomstuff/ludum/mars01.unity3d" width="560" height="420"/]

Tags: mars, PCG, unity

yeah .. it’s a bit better .. still no idea what game will come from this!

I started a little Flixel project about a floating blob that’s looking for a girl.

Just mockups and some messy test code for now…

I coded most of the engine and I added shooting and a jetpack. I’m going to get the rest of the programming done today, then I’ll finish the levels and menu tomorrow.

Tags: ludum dare entry gravity sphere

Whew, after fighting some weird bugs and getting used to Flash Develop a little more I’ve made this:

http://www.ericmcquiggan.com/Gameuploads/ludumdare/LudumDare48.swf

The plan is you are a prospector on an island trying to find things of value to sell back to the local colony.  There is a still a bunch more to add,  my tiles are easily extend-able to different land types .

But for now, sleep.

And this is what I have:

OK, I have just little time, but I can move the objects around now, and they indicate when I can’t place them or pick them out, because they are behind another item in the fridge.

Where Is the Cheese? - Move test

I spent my first 3 hours designing the main character and coming up with an art style. I then coded the basic character movement and added a particle effect during the following 4 hours. Add in some playtesting, IRC, and blog reading and you’re looking at my entire Friday night.

I’m super tired, so I think it’s time to hit the sack. I can only hope that I remain this productive tomorrow.

Tags: first screenshot

This is my first LD, so the goal is clear — finish ANY game. I woke up in the middle of the night to see the theme, had some weird dreams about explorations in complexity theory and then woke up again an hour ago, without any idea what kind of game to do. But now i think i have at least a rough idea, what to do — some kind of mind exploring game.

Now i see, that lot’s of people have already got some content to show, where i still have just a fuzzy idea, but i’m listening to Gangpol und mit – Exploration raisonnée du verger and ‘m going to do my own rational exploration of flixel.

I think i will use Flixel for programming, maybe as3ds for datastructures, Flan for tilemaps, Allegro sprite editor and paint.net for sprites and Sfxr + musagi for music and sounds. Besides paint.net, I haven’t heard about any of this programms until a week ago, I never learned actionscript or programmed in flash, so it will be pretty funny frustexploration weekend for me… 😉

Fixed some bugs in slug so that mouse/fullscreen actually works now, and also fixed up my build system so that I could build a portable Linux executable (new build/src is here, if anyone’s interested). Assuming slug is “done” for now (haha), this means i don’t have to compile anything again for the rest of the compo, just writing Lua scripts and automatically have everything work on both Linux and Windows. Mac support would be nice too, but I don’t have a mac, so.

Now, time to get started on the actual game! I wish I had any good ideas. Guess I’ll just start making a platform engine and see where it goes from there…

Tags: slug

The compass is kind of skewiff but otherwise I’m pretty happy with this.  Now I’m going to do the old ‘soak a piece of paper in tea’ trick to create a vintage-looking paper background.  Not started coding yet…

Breakfast was delicious! 😀

I’m still getting started with this, struggling for inspiration somewhat. I’m probably going to make a third person exploration game. Hmm.

Witness particle effects with lines and rects.  11 particle systems with 100 particles in each.

Renders ok with pygame software rendering on my system.  Now to work on the game part… hrmm.  Or maybe time for some music?  Or perhaps some drawings… um, ar… or more particle systems?

Ok, preliminary prototype is already working… the “speech” system is also going ok.

Really crappy graphics for now.

taking a break for food! Unfortunately I bought noodles with octopus, and I hate those. Getting out, buy something else, losing time? hahaha no way

Left computer is only for entertainment (a megaman vid), and on the right one you see a first draft. only gonna get better 😀

have fun, everyone!

I’ve decided on my concept. (For real this time!)

The game is about a little fox cub trying to find his way home. He must explore the forest to find his family. There will be rough clues to the path, but they will take the player all over the forest. The clues will take the form of cookies placed in a rough approximation of the path.

There won’t be any dogs or other predators, the player can take their time going through the game.

There will be a nice ending, too.

I’ve got an idea for Exploration that I’ve had for awhile and wanted to do as a project.  The theme gives me a great opportunity to do it.

The idea is that you are an explorer sent to sail the world and to bring back riches and claim land in the name of the mother country.

I don’t have much at all yet.  I struggled with how I wanted to represent the world data and scrapped a few ideas before settling on a bitmap and accompanying data file.  As of now, I have it able to load up the bitmap and extra info into a class, but nothing is done with them yet.   I’m falling asleep at my desk, so I think I should get some sleep and continue fresh in the morning.

Tags: exploration, ld48_16