Good Morning #LDJAM!

Here are some of our previous day work visuals.

Tags: LD36, ldjam

Alright, I expected the sloppy code, but won’t someone please think of the source control!

On the upside, it looks like I’m actually going to finish (a less-than-great and kinda buggy) game for my first Ludum Dare! Compo no less! Well, provided I can drag my aching fingers across these keys for another dozen hours or so…

The game viewer layout is beginning to take shape. The map is on the left, the control panel is on the right. It has potential.

Originally, I thought that ship health status could be displayed directly on each ship on the map. But looking at it now, that might not be a great idea. With icons of this size, the user would either have to zoom in to each ship (which I’m not coding), or view a selected ship in the control panel (much easier).

The ship is of approximate scale (7m wide, 30m long). However, the indicators are getting cluttered. The rowers are represented by the outer circles, the archers by the top mid-bar, marines, by the bottom mid-bar, and the rudders by the two trailing bars.

This could be simplified, or just better organized. One improvement will remove the rower dots and instead represent the number of useful rowers by their oars (which need to be added anyhow). A loss of rowers is reflected in a loss of oars. It won’t matter if the rower died from an arrow, or lost his oar in a crash. Either way, that rower is ineffectual. This of course, brings up another problem of reorganizing the port and starboard rowers for equilibrium.

I just learned/remembered that Glut for OSX has been deprecated in favor of native windows (retina display, and all that). So my plan to quickly render 2D textures in OpenGL has been scrapped. This game will be done in HTML/CSS/JS.

Now I need my beauty sleep. Just a nap, really. Later.

I decided to check when the next Ludum Dare was, only to find that it’s already over halfway done. I’ll try to make a game in the limited time frame. We’ll see how it goes 😉

Okay so something weird happened.

We actually didn’t have time for this Ludum Dare so we made a small game (according to us a very crappy one) just to say we participated in this Ludum Dare. What we didn;t know is that our crappy game is actually very well received so far. So thank you so much for the people that already left some comments and gave their input. So we have decided to improve a bit on the game.

Go and check it out and remember to come back later for the votes.

PLAY HERE

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I’m so glad I finally finished it!
Although its not the size I was aiming for, 35 rooms is still a fair amount for such a small amount of time.

Here’s a few random rooms i picked.

All it needs now is a win condition, music, and a menu!

I’m on a roll.  All the bugs are fixed, the map importer is ready to go, graphics are coming along nicely.  I’m in content creation mode.  I may actually finish for the compo this time.

Finished some of the ancient technology powerups that Thog is going to be able to use.

Standard Metroidvania Double Jump Boots

Mask of Moving Freely Underwater while seeing hidden passages

Off to bed!  It’s 4 AM!

I wasn’t sure what i could feasibly do all on my own, but now that i have *Blocks I’m starting to like whats coming putting together …

I am now in that part of progress, where i can just copy and paste, and add a lot more stuff. Of course there is little things that I still have to do, but those are just easy to do.

Аля, художник
Стили народов в нашей игре сильно отличаются друг от друга, поэтому для большей гармонии я обобщила их легким намеком на средневековые записи, будто все эти истории в свою книгу собирал седоватый монах-ученый. Для референсов я использую околоэтнические материалы, ещё помогает книга “Signs & Symbols”, в которой рассматриваются значения и происхождения символов и рисунков народов мира.

Женя, композитор
Конечно, за основу саундтрека я беру отсылки к тем культурам, к которым эта музыка будет относиться, хотя не скажу, что я черпаю в них вдохновение. Я не оглядывалась на что-то конкретное, не могу назвать конкретные треки или исполнителей. Музыка для игры просто появилась. Она нарисовалась из ниоткуда. Из моего восприятия этого мира, того как, я его вижу.

Илья, гейм-дизайнер
Да на миллион всего ориентируюсь: Banner Saga показывает как сделать совершенно минималистичный геймплей стильным и захватывающим, Stellaris – крутая штука про космос и “первый контакт”, Age of Decadance – та самая “древняя технология”, да ещё и переворачивающая восприятие игрока, игры от Telltale просто безумно цепляют… Беру идеи отовсюду. И боюсь теперь, что проект выйдет вторичным.

Паша, разработчик
Обнуляю переменные, делаю игру. Чего и вам желаю.

Андрей, раб-переводчик.
i never asked for this. Вместо того, чтобы играть в новый Deus Ex я перевожу вот эту претенциозную херню, что эти разработчики про себя удосужились изрыгнуть. Надеюсь, они будут гореть в аду за это.

High Res

Good morning, everyone! (well, it’s morning at my timezone, i don’t know that time is at you, but whatever)

Almost finished my game, i just need to polish it!

Kingdom Brunel is regarded as one of the most prolific figures in engineering. And rightly so, considering in 1859 he built a coal powered spaceship to take him to the stars.

Still lots to do (probably too much), but having fun!

I’m almost done with the first level. Though I’m not sure if I can finish this game on time!

Here’s the Ludum Dare 36 entry I am working on.  I took the theme of Ancient Technology and thought about the story of how Solomon was said to have built the first aqueduct system in the middle east.  Whether this is true or not is up for debate, apparently, but I thought a game about building up an aqueduct system in ancient lands would be an interesting strategic theme.

So I spent yesterday evening doing a paper prototype of a game I’m calling Aqueducts of Solomon.  In it, you begin with a village at the end of a trade route, and you try to build up your empire by bringing down water from the high mountain springs, irrigate the lands, build up your cities, and eventually erect great temples.

It went really well.  After a few false starts, I hit upon some mechanics that offered a lot of strategic depth with very simple rules that really brought the idea of connecting places with aqueducts and roads to the forefront of the theme.

With the mechanics largely settled – there are a few things that still need tweaking, but the core gameplay is solid – I sat down and started doing some artwork and laying out the board.  Here’s a screenshot:

Here, you can see the game board which represents mountain highlands (on the left, elevation 3), steppes (elevation 2), and the desert lowlands (elevation one).  Two hexes have been developed – a village and a trade route.  The village lets you develop more hexes by playing cards (and paying their costs), and the trade route gives you one resource each round of your choice, which is super helpful when you’re first getting started.

Below that is your hand of cards, with the mouse hovering over the Aqueduct card.  The card shows the hex that you will build (an aqueduct) and the price (one stone).  On the left is a description of what the aqueduct will do for you when you build it.

This is all being rendered to an HTML5 canvas, so the game will be playable in the browser.  I’ve got the layout working pretty well, so now all that’s left to do is to hook everything up and start writing the controllers to handle the game flow.

The game works as a solitaire score-chaser.  You cannot lose the game, but you can do poorly.  You’re given a certain number of turns, and at the end of those turns, the game ends.  It will then count up the number of victory points you’ve gotten.  Your goal is to get a score worthy of Solomon himself.

Just want to share some progress !

Got to sketch the data structures, which would let a train navigate a track with switches. Seems simple enough that I might be able to pull it off, though no level parsing etc – most likely data will be hardcoded. I also don’t yet have a tilemap/sprite decoding routine, so likely I’ll transcribe them by hand into numbers (single byte per 8 bit rows).

Day and a half almost gone.

I’m not much of a coder, so I’ve spent the time fooling around in Unreal Engine’s editor, building the environment. On second thought, trying to use the engine for Ludum Dare while I’m still learning it might have been a mistake.

Hopefully, I’ll get to add some gameplay before the jam ends.

Here’s some pictures:

well my game so far… Sucks… I haven’t even done any of the game mechanics yet. And all my veins are popping… from being Sleep deprived?