i’m working and then…

this happened see left side of picture

Coming along quickly. So far, you can learn a bit of backstory and find a key to a locked room. Oh, and get yelled at by the King, too.

So, after spending a good 4 hours trying to make Game maker work (It has worked before, but all the exe’s it compiles…don’t run on Windows 7), I decided to quit.  But soon, I couldn’t stand doing nothing, so instead of doing a graphical game…mine is all text based.  It was very late by then, so I decided that some sleep would be good for me.  While laying in bed, I decided how the game would work.

First of all, every character (even yours) has a different personality that is randomly decided by the game.  (If I need to, I can manually add a personality), and every character in the game responds differently according to his major personality traits, and how well he knows you.  Yep…giant project right there.

Secondly, you have no control over what your character/party does besides how he levels up/what he does when.  For example, lets say you wake him up at 9, and then you pick one activity.  You could have him eat/get ready.  That takes us to 10.  At 10, you send him off to go exploring.  Now you can watch him explore, see what he finds (everything he finds adds exploration points), watch him fight (you can’t tell him how to fight), and at some point along the way, you can tell him to head back to camp.  Lets say he gets back at 5.   I tried to make the game…as strategical as possible while being minimalistic.  I decided to be minimalistic because: it is easier for me AND you don’t have to type “go east” over and over.

Now about leveling up.  Every character has a list of abilities, and he actually levels up those abilities by using them…not by you pressing the + button.  However, you can take items away (preventing him from using certain abilities), and at every level, teach him a new ability.  That’s it.

Now what I have done:  (I have 9ish more hours to code/debug)

Creation and development of my idea/flowchart

Character personalities/creation.  (A giant project)  I still need to do the NPC text/tests to see if they join/give missions

Coding of the reader (grabs names and stats of areas/locations/items/monsters)

Now what I have to do:

Name every area/location within that area/items within that location/monsters within that location, and each of them stats.  (all will be stored in text files)

Code the general engine for time/telling what the character to do (shouldn’t be too hard)

Code the engine for what the character/party decides to do.

Debug

Release it to the website

…Like I said.  I’m going to die 😛

I was a little let down when unwanted powers didn’t sweep the votes. So I slept on the broad theme of exploration.

Exploration left it pretty wide open for me, concept wise. I’ve been drooling over stuff like Passage, The Marriage, and Braid again after seeing Chris Hecker’s talk at MIGS a couple of months ago. I figure this is as good a forum as any for making a game filled with allegorical subtext. Not that this is exactly the target demographic, but at least some of you will be tossing me feedback.

I’m thinking a more accessible less artsy Passage. The exploration of time, and decisions in life, couched in a gauntlet style game.

I’ll toss a rough concept document once I’ve got a rough proof of concept done.

Pretension a go go!

I wasn’t going to have characters in “Explorers”, but I just couldn’t resist this. Viking helm and monocle? Yus.

More information at Waddlefarm.

Spent a lot of the morning fixing my cobbled together code from last night. Things are looking ok from the tech-side though I’ve spent more time than I wanted.

Build 004 is available here: http://www.refrag.com/gamedev/ld-16/ It includes character movement with the arrow keys and sonar blasting by clicking any of the black area. My game concept will revolve around the player only being able to see through tiny sonar blasts. They need to navigate the terrain with very little visibility.

My goal today is to get the bulk of the game done so I have all of tomorrow for polish.

Time for my shower!!!

Here we are! What I’ve done so far:

– Thought about what I want to do (at hockey game last night)
– Created a design document (after I got home)
– Slept (too long but not long enough)
– Made love to flixel (today)
– Got a Screenshot!

Unlike previous competitions, this time I know exactly what I’m doing from the start; I’ve put together a design document which is something I haven’t done before. I’m excited to see how this turns out.

Yes, I'm making a sailing-ship adventure.

Things are going very slowly but I’m tired. I only got to spend about 6 hours on my game today and most of that time was spent figuring out how Unity works so I haven’t made that much progress. I’ve got some basic gameplay but I’m not so sure that my awesome gameplay idea is that awesome. At least it looks like it would need a lot of experimenting and tweaking to make it right so maybe I’ll switch to plan B tomorrow and make something quick with pygame.

Anyway here’s a little screenshot (everything is placeholder as I haven’t worked on the graphics yet):

first screenshot

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 4:13 pm and is filed under LD #16 - Exploration - 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.

This game may be text based, but it’s got it where it counts. It has a cool story, and awesomesauce NPCs. Not to mention loads of typos. 😀

I skipped the picture from phase 2 just to let you explore yourself what there will be 😀 Now I have a scout on a map, so I only need a gameplay, only …

Tags: screenshot

Somehow this reminds me of Fallout… Whatever, things are going mighty fine! I’ve got the map going and the engine mostly ready, now just to add rest of the engine. I guess I can spend tomorrow entirely on adding content.

Yarrrr !

no screen to update just code code and code hehehehe, finished the desktop implementation, so now I can move to the game itself

• fix the keyboard input
• fix the mouse input
• make char movement, with animation
• add map and screen scrolling
• define map in a txt file
• draw tiles
• draw trees
• draw rocks
• draw coin
• draw 10 different vegetables
• draw 3 different quest givers
• draw 3 enemies
• add to the quest giver to code to show the quest
• all the char to gather stuff
• add random code to add vegetables to places in the map
• add coin counter
• add bomb key and bomb damage
• make enemies move and attack
• buy bombs
• add life control and die event
• create bomb machine
• create main menu

Although I am a bit late with it, I have a good feeling about this one. Most of my game mechanic is finished. On the picture you can see the graph of paths drawn out, red paths are active, blue are passive, and are activated, when you reach certain action nodes in the graph. You can see an action node, under the mouse, indicated by a spinning red circle. The filled red circle is you player, who travels over active paths. You can send him to an action node, by clicking on it. He will find the shortest way and follow it, until he reaches that node.

Now I need to replace the black background with scenery, red circle with a sprite, create animations for action nodes and some sounds all wrapped up as a neat puzzle. Right now I hope I can get one level together, after that the menu, and then maybe another level (my head is in the clouds).

Tags: black, graph, java, pathfinding, screenshot

For the power of caffeine summoned by Yerba Mate…

I’ve already half of the speeches. The gameplay is simple but solid: You must find a girl and in your quest you end up knowing a little bit of the raw truth about society.

I think I’ll use tonight to add music and better graphics to the game.

Regards!

And what a nice one it was too B(

Anyway…time for a new one!

Progress and stuff. Aliens are all red for some reason.

Tags: alien, screenshot

Well, it’s raining all weekend, so they kinda blew my idea of going outside and taking some pictures for the game.

But instead, I came up with a great idea for this theme, a fun one, that uses all of the christmas stuff my wife collects around the house.

The name of the game is Massacre at Misfit Toy Island. You are Santa and your objective is to explore Misfit Toy Island, finding all the Misfit Toys and exterminating them (don’t worry, misfit toys will be able to defend themselves). I am kinda aiming it sort of after the classic PS2 game, Shadow of the Colossus. You sort of explore around misfit island, until you find a toy and destroy it. You have to destroy all 12 toys (12 is a good biblical number).  You should feel sort of sad after killing a misfit toy.

I have finished taking all the pictures for my graphics. Almost 7 Gigabytes of raw shots on my new Canon 7D (amazing camera btw).

Now I have a TON of processing to do to remove the backgrounds of the objects and to assemble the graphics for the backgrounds.

Let’s see how that goes. Remember, the actual game will be super simple. I’m just focusing on “Eye-Candy” for this game!

I found this article on Roguebasin, that I thought might be of interest to folks creating indoor environments procedurally.

The method described works by dividing the map into grid “cells” containing an area of map tiles, and how to use that to create a procedural world efficiently and simply. Worth a read, I’d say.

Boo yah! I like the look of this.

Just got back from work and scanned in the tea-stained paper.  It’s not as dark as I was hoping for – maybe I didn’t leave it long enough?  Or maybe I should have used coffee?  Anyway, I reckon it still looks pretty good:

If I have time I might try and stain the edges using computery magic.