After a while of banging my head against the desk I found a neatly hidden bug, so the legs don’t get stuck in islands anymore. Island inhabitants appear:

Also, snack time!

Tags: flash, foodphoto, progress, screenshot

I made some progress on my submission last night, but it’s looking like I’m going to scrap that idea. I did get some reusable code out of it like a level loading function, though, so all is not lost. Here’s a little shot of what I had working:

Now I just got to get myself an idea that fits and is reasonable for me to get done in time… I’m leaning toward something grid or tile based. We’ll see.

Tags: journal

My terrain generation is really le big suck.

Tags: screenshot

And once more I’ve done the most horrible collision detection system ever, a tangled web of ifs and elses, special cases and other horrible things… it works well, though, so I’ll probably just touch it the least I can…

Player can jump and fall, move left and right and that is all animated… of sorts…

Going to add a nice gradient background (that blue is getting on my nerves), have lunch and then get to make our own clouds appear…

This is a “non-report” that I’m doing just because it’s becoming a habit to blog what I’m doing constantly. I took the last half hour or so to fix up some tutorialization issues in Deep Sea Descent pointed out by the kind people at Flash Game License – I just happened to catch the message minutes after it was sent. Nice, simple changes, and I think they made a big difference. So – if nothing else comes up on their end – they’ll have it approved for bids in a few hours, by the time I go to sleep. That would be nice

As far as Pincer goes, I guess I’ll try for limited ammo, a HUD, walls, and explosives by the time I go to bed. Still have more features I want to get to though – pirate AI and player death, gold, maybe some crates to push around….I’m approaching this game as “throw features at the wall and see which ones stick.” I can only do a few more before starting the polishing process though.

Well after waking up at 8am to find out the theme is Islands, I’ve set about to work!

And here is the first pic!

Run red square! Run from the blue wave of death!

Just place holder tiles in at the moment, the green tiles will be the “islands” with you attempting to place tiles of land in order to save the people (red square) from the water (light blue). Not many mechanics as such yet, the water spreads out, the red man runs away, he gets squished.

So we will see how it goes!

I am making another game with islands in the sky :S (I saw the other posts).

The idea of the game (for now) is to jump from one island to another using forces like worms2 for example, activating a jetpack of a jumper guy. There would be another challenges like moving islands or things like that.

Here are pics (low def) from my working desktop, from the whiteboard with the first idea and at last one starting shots of the game template (using gimp).

What not to do in LD:

1. Don’t put off thinking about your LD game till the weekend is 25% over.
2. Don’t decide to learn Flixel over LD weekend.
3. Don’t decide to also learn Musagi over LD weekend.

Doing what not to do is often a worthwhile experience, as you never know quite what will happen.

I do not know quite what will happen this weekend.

Hamburger 20:10

Well, I missed the last 2 LDs because there was way too much work to think of joining. And what do you know – the same is true this time. However, I’m trying to reserve some time this weekend for LD anyway (or rather, just forget about all the other stuff and see what will happen :P). So, well, what did I do so far. First I put the the Monkey Island 1 music on endless loop to inspire me for the islands theme, then watched a video of a goat pulling a cart with… the typical LD entrant in it. Then spent several hours to get my code to export and import a Blender model and display it in OpenGL working again.

Behold, I can display my island now:

Right now I’m getting at the right direction, I just need some more enemies and all that crap. My game is a platform shooter where you have to defend your island and also make sure you don’t hurt yourself. I’m also copying the concept for the graphics off of a game that I tried to make earlier (but failed). Here’s a pic:

Apple, 3 scrambled eggs, 3 thick strips of bacon and club soda with a lime.

Tags: foodphoto

Another build, this one came almost an hour and a half after the last one. This one now shows the controls so I don’t have to go and write that here every time 😛 It also has limited ammo – you get one shot from the pickup.

Something cool I used for this is a bit of code I had lying there, not sure that it would come to use: Layout.

This is Layout:

package fireball.gfx.util;

import flash.display.DisplayObject;

class Layout
{

public static inline function sTopbTop(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(px);
}

public static inline function sTopbCenter(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(px-ti.height*0.5);
}

public static inline function sTopbBottom(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(px-ti.height);
}

public static inline function sCenterbTop(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.YRES*0.5+px);
}

public static inline function sCenterbCenterY(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.YRES*0.5+px-ti.height*0.5);
}

public static inline function sCenterbBottom(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.YRES*0.5+px-ti.height);
}

public static inline function sBottombTop(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.YRES-px);
}

public static inline function sBottombCenter(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.YRES-px-ti.height*0.5);
}

public static inline function sBottombBottom(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.YRES-px-ti.height);
}

public static inline function sLeftbLeft(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(px);
}

public static inline function sLeftbCenter(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(px-ti.width*0.5);
}

public static inline function sLeftbRight(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(px-ti.width);
}

public static inline function sCenterbLeft(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.XRES*0.5+px);
}

public static inline function sCenterbCenterX(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.XRES*0.5+px-ti.width*0.5);
}

public static inline function sCenterbRight(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.XRES*0.5+px-ti.width);
}

public static inline function sRightbLeft(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.XRES-px);
}

public static inline function sRightbCenter(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.XRES-px-ti.width*0.5);
}

public static inline function sRightbRight(ti : DisplayObject, px : Float) : Int
{
return Std.int(Game.XRES-px-ti.width);
}

}

Very simple, but highly useful. On all the functions that take an x and y coordinate, I can pass in Layout functions to transform them.

However, I have a flaw in how I’m doing font rendering that is going to limit the utility of Layout for this game. The flaw is – Flash does not autosize TextFields at the moment of instantiation, as far as I can tell. Not only that, but I don’t use TextFields directly; I render them to bitmaps, because I want to cache that data. Hence to get around these flaws I’m oversizing the surfaces I draw the text to with a bad heuristic(32px height and width per character).

I think that in the future I may switch to a solution based on the Polygonal library’s font rendering solution. Although it’s a little bit cumbersome(compilation process vs. drop in a ttf), a little bit less Flash-friendly, this will give me good data to work from, and the basic render speed is faster too.

Normally, I’m against quitting this early, but after spending some time thinking about the theme, and trying to come up with an idea that could work, I decided to try for a trading game.  Then I started to realize how much time I’d have to spend on graphics to make something that looked even half good, and then decided that the scope of a trading game is bigger than I can manage in less than 48 hours.  I might have been able to make something that sort of resembles a game, but I’d rather spend the weekend on my main project (a Sim Tower remake) instead of something that I wouldn’t be all that proud of.

I’m looking forward to playing the games that people come up with, and it looks like there’s a few trading sims being worked on, so good luck to everyone.

The current final level, complete with random bridges.

I also added music, a mute button, a main menu, and 10 levels total. The level displayed is the (current) final level.

Tags: flash, progress, screenshot

Is this progress?

Last night I did some planning and some programming, but it’s not a complete plan, just a start. And the programming part wasn’t super far along…

So let’s see where we are in a few hours!

Well here’s what I have after 7-ish hours work:

Those things on the rock platforms are placeholder cannon graphics.

Hopefully my game is going to magically transform itself into a sort of turn-based strategy game where you have to fire cannons at the enemy (a la Worms), from islands in the sky.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get Fiona’s timelapse program working this time round and I didn’t want to waste any more time setting up a capture program. In retrospect I really should have had that prepared before the competition started. So no timelapse from me I’m afraid

So my first bit of progress includes looking at character controller scripts, learning how to write a script that will allow me to use a flying island as a ‘vehicle’, initial tweakage of character attributes and thinking about what i’m going to do for NPCs that attack.

I’ve been using tutorial scripts from the Unity website as references. Not copying and pasting, instead completely re-writing them out and trying to understand each line of script and what it does. Also looked at the Unity forums for some starting points on the ‘using the island as a vehicle’ ala ‘Press e to enter’. I hope this isn’t against against any rules as I don’t yet know how to just sit there and have code flow out of my hands! But I’m trying!

After realizing I had no time to make a deep strategy game, I finally decided on making a small, adventure/exploration platformer.

So, I’ve got a few things up and running. The graphics on walls change with the background, so my job is much easier.

Since I don’t have time to make a platformer deep, interesting gameplay, I will just try to add stuff to make things interesting.

Phew! Making your own skybox, water, and wood from scratch is time consuming but fun. Rules is rules! No pre-made textures for me.

Play with it here http://richard.brooksby.org/2010/04/24/ludum-dare-17-islands/