http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtRYRdmdWg0
So here’s a video I made today. It’s actually a bit outdated by now, but there’s still no real gameplay. Enjoy the video. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get you guys a better video with actual gameplay. Now, I need some sleep.
I was going to do a video blog about this, but I’ll do that… later.
Here’s my idea: Guy the Sword Guy was out on an adventure (He likes to have adventures, which is why he became a Sword Guy), and his ship wrecked on a Great Big Rock.
Guy came to on the shores of a tiny island that wasn’t on any map. In fact, when he looked around, Guy saw that the island was in mid-air. Now, being a Sword Guy, Guy gets pretty hungry. Doubly so because of the harrowing experience that had brought him to this strange place.
Guy pulled himself together, got up, and explored a bit. It really was a tiny island. However, he found food growing on the trees. In fact, he found cheese, ham, and donuts growing on the trees!
Guy greedily devoured a great deal of food before stopping to think about how to get home. He missed his girlfriend Matilda, his brother Patrick, and his dog Grendel.
Guy explored a bit more and found what looked like a magic gate. However, it wasn’t turned on. A bit more exploring yielded a key, which Guy insterted into the side of the gate. The gate then turned on, and Guy stepped through, figuring that the trees on the island would run out of goodies eventually anyway.
Thus, our hero’s adventure begins!
Again, the video blog will wait for when I’m not so groggy, and possibly even then only once I’ve got something worth vlogging about.
first draft !
map edited with TileStudio, loading of the map based on Flashpunk tutorial,
click here to see working
http://www.athanazio.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/ld17/draft1/index.html
Tags: draft1, fight the flood, islands
Yes, it’s slowly coming together! Next I should start thinking what I want to do with this engine… 
I spent another hour or so pluggin away at things (collision/player control always seems to need endless tweaking to get right). Then stopped for a bit to cook a worryingly healthy spicy vegetable soupy thing for lunch.
The weather was so good I couldn’t just bolt it down and get straight back to work, so I spent a quarter of an hour dozing in the sun and listening to music. Waste of time? Possibly. Worth it? Definitely.
After that got back to work and started putting some gameplay building blocks in:
Check out the latest build to check out what’s actually going on. Still looooooads to do, so time to fetch yet another cup of tea and get back to the grindstone.
As I’m participating for the first time I began to wonder if it’s ok to use the default cursor and buttons in CEGUI.
Here’s what my game looks like at the moment. The debug overlay will be taken away in the final version but I would like to at least keep the cursor. Though if it’s against the rules then I’ll take it away.
Here’s my first timelapse video, for the stuff I worked on this morning. I am still where I was here visually, but I’ve written some code since then. Nothing to show yet, but stay tuned…
EDIT: Due to the fact that this wordpress here keeps removing my embedded video, I re-posted it to my blog here.
Okay … After spending age to creates better tiles than this and the player caracter , I came up with this : The fish will need water to breath and to explore land to get bonuses.
#gallery-1 {
margin: auto;
}
#gallery-1 .gallery-item {
float: left;
margin-top: 10px;
text-align: center;
width: 33%;
}
#gallery-1 img {
border: 2px solid #cfcfcf;
}
#gallery-1 .gallery-caption {
margin-left: 0;
}
/* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */
The concept is that you play an isle, with certain properties, over time you shift and change in different ways. As you change you become more magnificent, depending on your view of what is a magnificent island (rich in natural treasures, home for an intelligent civilization of living creatures, pristine beaches, world-shattering volcano, or whatever else is on your mind).
As time goes by isles shift and change; continents (alliances of isles) are formed and broken among diplomatic works; populations of living creatures are born, migrate, and form civilizations; isle properties change; isles become more magnificent, while others wither to remnants of former glory. This is Island Fun, it is fun with islands.That’s the general concept of the game I’m planning, since I have lots of homework it won’t be much but I intend for it to be something at all. So far I have only the general idea of how things will be handled. I was very surprised at the chosen theme, seems kinda boring. Considering how so many posts are either about pirates or isles-in-the-sky, I’d say it’s not very inspiring either.
Oh, and it’s mostly multiplayer.
thoughts and ideas are welcome
New build showing projectiles that move faster than you. This is done by having the main loop call as a function pointer; when projectiles exist it temporarily changes to the code that forces you to watch a frame of the projectiles mid-flight. Somehow, I made this build exactly 30 minutes after the last one. As before, arrows, WASD, space, and /.
A cool (I think) interpretation of the “islands” theme just struck me: Islands of human waste! It’s a real life phenomenon: http://www.falloutearth.com/documentary/garbage-island/
Also about every 50 times or so restarting my game I notice that my compiz window manager (default on ubuntu) bails out and I have to restart because metacity causes nasty tearing in my game! If you have this problem, drop to a virtual terminal and execute:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart
Or I guess do it from xterm with “nohup”
So I dicked around with crossing the theme with Pretentious Art Game and doing something about “people as islands” and making connections between them (d’awww), but I wasn’t able to come up with mechanics which reflected the idea I was trying to get across while also sounding like fun.
So I tweaked the mechanics a bit and ended up with this concept: Island Repair Man! Your floaty island in the sky has been broken apart by an attack of Giant Flying Island Rodents, or something like that, and it’s your job to rope it back together.
So far I have a glorified molecular dynamics system / particle simulation. Now with added verlet. Woo.
The white bits are the island pieces which you’ll have to jump between and thus rope together, and the spiky red bits are Generic Bad Guys to avoid. They repulse each other with inverse-square forces so everything floats around and makes a nice dynamic playfield. Now that I’ve changed themes I should probably swap out the art; but gameplay comes first!
The roped-together islands will be constrained to stay at the same distance they were at when first roped together, so you’ll gradually put together a neat-looking structure as you hop from island to island. Hopefully that won’t make anything explode. Verlet integration is supposed to be able to take constraints in its stride, so it should be okay.
More importantly, I have no idea if this will be fun at all; I guess I’ll find out tomorrow. Or rather, later today, as it’s past midnight. How the heck did that happen. Sleepytime, pronto.
Tags: screenshot
Posting this a bit late, but here is my breakfast from local coffee shop favorite, Coffee By Design.
Double shot Cafe Mocha with a fresh locally made blueberry scone.
I just spent 5 working hours brainstorming and doing research. I now have a set of ships (with various tonnages, cannon, speeds, and costs) that I *think* will be fairly realistic and balanced in terms of gameplay.
I haven’t written a single line of code, which is… atypical for me at this point in an LD. But I did want to have more of this game designed up-front before I started, and it is almost completely designed at this point.
Tags: journal
ok, I don’t know how, but I’m participating and this is my first LD =)
Here is a first screenshot of my work in progress:
Micro Silent Hunter v001
I called it: Micro Silent Hunter
I almost forgot, I’m using ActionScript3 with FlashDevelop
So far its a bit of a poor physic simulator with a few gameplay mechanics strewn about, so far the only interaction is being able to control your ship/ufo/character/home-island and move other islands. This results in a elastic-y madness until you let them go. I’d like to say it looks much better live but …. yeah.
The actual premise I set for myself is far from achieved, but I’ll start putting that in soon.
GREEN FUZZY CIRCLES!
ANSI colors are pretty limited, and I’m having trouble getting the ‘bright’ variations to display, but perhaps I’ll get some pity votes in the graphics category 😉
I’ve done some thinking with the gameplay. Islands will be traditional room based areas, where you can explore, fight things, find and bury treasure, get peppers.
Players will be able to buy boats that let them sail throughout the world by setting directions.
Hopefully I will have time to implement some sort of nautical combat and piracy.
Lemon Sole
If I’d remembered to take the picture before I ate my lunch then you’d have seen a rather delicious Lemon Sole, but I was so keen to eat that I forgot. That was a great way to start a Ludum Dare weekend.
I’ve been out and about, including taking my family to lunch to celebrate a birthday, so I haven’t got down to the serious business of coding yet. But we don’t get to see the sun around here very often so it was wonderful to sit at an outside table at the restaurant, to eat some fantastic food and drink a beer and to think about what I’m going to do for this theme.
I’ve been chewing over ideas including: a side-scrolling Choplifter-style game; a capture the flag game; a few variations on a theme of turn based strategy; an evacuation game; something involving a volcano (thanks Iceland); something with lots of boats, and even a shmup because I’m old and I like them.
My ability at programming far exceeds my ability at art, so whatever I do is going to feature somewhat retro programmer art. But in some respects I’m counting my chickens – I still haven’t selected a theme.
Good luck to all entrants. I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with.
Tags: foodphoto
A young stranger, lost in a world where land floats lightly in the sky and no one lives on the ocean-covered surface, becomes an enterprising skyship captain looking for a way home, or just to make a few bucks on the high winds of adventure.
Tags: progress