Ok, overslept a little but thats ok as I woke up with an idea, I’m going to procedurally generate mars, and put a psychologically disturbed astronaut on it.

ok, so I need to work on the procedural generation bit, I always forget how to set up my triangles right when I do this, but it will come to me sooner or later. and unity does it fast enough it should be able to generate the landscape in realtime, allowing for endless trips to wherever. and because its seeded it will be consistent too.

my plan is to have a story of course, but this will give me a huge expanse to explore with (hopefully) relatively little work. though the compromise is of course mars would be cooler if I made it myself, but the theme is exploration, you need something big to do that right IMO

Tags: mars, PCG

The ones above the gameplay plane, unfortunately, break alpha blending with the planet indicators. C’est la vie. If I have time I will split the stars into 2 particle systems to avoid this.

I’m going to sustain myself exclusively on these things during the compo:

So, exploration. Not sure what I’m going to do yet, but it’s probably going to be a platformer of some sort. Kinda want to do something ala Monty on the Run or Dizzy, but we’ll see.

Right now though I’ll go fix some bugs in slug: Mode switching corrupts the graphics, and mouse coordinates aren’t scaled right. Might add some new features too, though I suppose I should wait until I actually need them now that the compo has started and all. In fact, I’m not even sure I’m going to use slug at all, might try to go for a Flash game again instead. Time to  make up my mind =]

Oh, and here’s some eggs I had for breakfast:

Tags: breakfast, foodphoto, slug

I’ve choosen an idea and did a hands-on prototype.  I’m happy with it and moving to Phase 2 – Develop Gameplay.  I’m keep the idea under wraps for now, but you might be able to devine it from this evidence:

MrPhil's LD16 Prototype

And, I also learned a hard lesson about playing with prototypes on the floor:

O Hia ur prototype wuz tasty

Tags: cats

So .. I’ve got a screenshot. This is a magical pirate island.

I had to do some hacking on tinypyC++ to get nested lists working as well as to fix a bit of error handling. But, well, short of that, things are going pretty well. At least, well, I’m not sure that the screenshot is going so well, but hey, the night is young. Or the weekend is young.

I still don’t have a clear idea what my game will be, but I’m pretty sure I want islands to explore.

-Phil

i spent a little while making a fish shop (as in the selling of tropical fish not the kind where you get chips) and put it into my game (using paint and game maker btw) and it all looked grand until i realised something wasn’t quite right…. the road was fine perfect for a character to wander around the shop however would only have been suitable for a flea

in short scale makes me sad

I was able to think of a very rough game idea on the walk home so I started sketching some ideas on paper. I knew that I’d need to get Alpha Masking working in Flash to make my idea work. I’d never done Alpha masking in Flash so I started to prove out this tech.

Build 001 took a couple of hours to get working. Note to everyone wanting to do Alpha Masking in Flash… .cacheToBitmap is the trick. Do this on the target Bitmap you want to mask, as well as on the Sprite you are using as the mask object.

For Build 002 I decided to try and hack together some of my old tile engine code. This again took longer than anticipated mostly because I was copy and pasting from wrong directories. Doh. Anyway, an hour or so later and I had this working. You are seeing a tile layer being masked by a sprite that has alpha blobs moving through it. The hero object is not affected by the masking because she exists in a separate object.

I’ll muck around for another hour or so tonight before I rest up for tomorrow.

Well you can move around the grid-like maze in a grid-like manner, no enemies yet, but I’m working on that right now.

The idea is that you go up the tower, as high as you can, collecting coins and treasure. At certain points you will be able to exit back to the main floor with all your loot. Dying however will send you back to the main floor without anything. at the shop you’ll be able to buy upgrades to help you out, but i’m still unsure of how that will work yet. At the moment i’m just making levels and adding new features when it’s necessary. It’s hard to add timing, dodging, enemy, etc. elements because of your character’s grid based movement:

for example: pressing right will jump your character 96 pixels to the right into the room to the right.

i guess i’ll just go with the flow and see what comes up!

the first floor

Tags: ld16, quest, tower

Well, for my Ludum Dare, I decided to make a sort of Sim Ants type game. Basically you press a button to start the day, and stuff happens! This game is based off a joke from www.Hamumu.com which is a typo of an old game he made featuring a knight called Boboli, which got typo’d as Boboil at some point. I don’t know how it got so popular, and why it’s so funny, but it is.

You will be able to go adventure by clicking on a button to make your day start, giving you random things that happen that day such as:

ex: -You dug but found nothing

-You dug and found 1 Silver

-You trip and drop your wallet, you drop all you got on your trip so far!

With the material you got, you will be able to purchase items to make you day easier. I still have no clue how you will win this game, or if I should even make that you can, but I’ll figure that out later.

I was also thinking of adding fights, kind of like random encounters. If I do so, I might as well make good encounters. So far so good, I will presumably finish this game in time.

Also, in case anybody reading this is wondering, it will be made with Flash CS4 using Actionscript 2.0

Just woke up. Exploration eh? Mind drawing blank. It seems like the lowest common denominators popped up to the top. Hmm, how about changing the voting system so that people get as many +/- voting points as they have finished LD entries? Just a thought.

Anyway… exploration. When you hear that word, everyone probably have a picture in their head about what that game is. Now I just have to think how to have a unique spin on it. I guess I’ll start setting up the dev env and maybe something will come up.

Yes.  This did actually take me 5 hours.  No, I’m not very proud of it.   But man, I debugged the HELL out of some HLSL.

Tags: screenshot

Got a fairly nice base code set up now.   “bzr clone lp:exploratio” to check it out.  So now I can do:   make build, make clean, make commit, make push, make upload, create .exe .dmg .tar.gz source, and linux also x86 binaries.

No actual game yet though

Ideas wise, I’ve explored the theme a lot and think I have an idea(*drum noises*).  The exploration part will be done in the story… like a choose your own adventure.  With game elements coming in between parts.

In order to win the competition I will include some particles.  PFTW!!!

Well, maybe I’ll just get some particles flying around first and worry about the other stuff later.  Not even a window showing up yet… but At least I have a cool Makefile,

That’s right! Stuff is happening and there’s nothing you can do about it! Anyway, here’s what I have of my game, In The Field, so far:

It’s mysterious, and not all that great looking! But it’s a good start, and it’s fairly Explorationesque. Speaking of which, “explorationesque” is my awesome new word for today. Between the mysterious and awesome nature of my screenshot, and the wonder of my new word, I’m sure you’ll all be flabbergasted. It’s not a big reason for undue concern… yet.

Go Ludum Dare!

Tags: journal

Already a bunch of screenshots, meanwhile I can even get Java up and running (should have looked that up before the compo). Kinda ridiculous. 😛

Right now I’m looking into using Slick as a game lib. I have the most problems with input right now. Once I get that sorted, I should be able to get something together. :S

But first: breakfast.

Tags: falling behind, java input, Slick

Good morning everyone.. Just woke up and the theme of the day.. Exploration. Damn. That was one of the ones that I didn’t have any clear idea what it would be. A bit too abstract to my tastes and it will probably show up other entries as well (as games that are hard to judge upon another). Oh well, will have to take my customary 45 minute shower some time soon to think of an idea =) .

Title screen

Walking around the town of Asplorheim

Following the road to the claimed hill.

So exploration it is. I have an idea for the game which is still yet untitled, but rest assured that starting bright and early tomorrow morning I will get cracking on it. Until then, here is my still relatively untarnished work space ready to go!

Damn it, jlnr 😀

I guess I’m in this time as well. Actually didn’t plan to, because I had stuff to do, and tomorrow there’ll be a party, but jlnr managed to hypnotoad me or something, and now I’m too pumped up for programming that I won’t be able to stop. Party with darkened eyes, woohoo!

First pics and first foodstuffs. Japan is quite convenient with its bentou, though the boxes themselves are a waste of resources. I also wanted to make a timelapse, but the camera of the MacBookPro isn’t working. Hmm. What now…

Jlnr! When I meet you the next time, I’ll get a giant hammer and smash you into 2D! ^^

Have fun, everyone!

Here’s how it looks now:

I can now select planets (see the Earthlike planet on the right). No UI yet.

It is looking like there may end up being a lot more Expand, Exploit and Exterminate than Explore in this game. 😛

This is my first LD, its almost 6 am, I got home like 30 mins ago and I need some sleep.

Exploration gave me a decent idea, I just decided my protagonist would be a grandmother after something goes incredibly wrong and she loses her grandson . Now it will be extremely hard to manage the production of this game given I won’t have all 48 hours to work on it, I don’t like delivering half-assed things but that’s as far as my drawing skills go,  so behold Granny v1: XD

Other than that, I will be using Flixel, which I’ve been using in my latest project.

Goodnight / morning and good luck to all of you!