I’ve just been putting in sokoban-like boulders in (although it might not be obvious yet I do have a plan here!) It was pretty irritating to do, and it was something I’d picked as “oh, that’ll be easy”, so also somewhat annoying.

The difficulty came from having sokoban-like elements in a game that has smooth-ish player movement, complicated further by wanting the boulders to be affected by the ice and springs in the same way as the player is. In other words, “Now entering Special Case City, population YOU!”

I expect there’s a few odd cases I’ve not caught yet, but I think (hope) the worst of it is over now. Check them out in this build.

This game has some basic combat going now.

First you have to cross along the line of fire of the pirates(who, at least in this incarnation, just shoot in cardinal directions) to get to the ammo.

Then you have the option of picking them off like a sharpshooter, weaving in and out of their fire line, or blowing up the bombs, which will conveniently chain their explosions. It’s awesome, albeit a bit hard to read with the colored blocks. I think I will go to bed in another hour or two, add a few additional forms of AI to vary things, and then do the level design and polish.

Genesis 1:9. An Ceiling Cat gotted all teh waterz in ur base, An Ceiling Cat hadz dry placez cuz kittehs DO NOT WANT get wet. An Ceiling Cat called no waterz urth and waters oshun. Iz good.
(slight god complex here…)

Now with fully rotative camera, gamepad controlled

Still no precise gameplay in mind, but it will imply raising water level, probably something RTS-y.

Also, I added some Perlin noise to the heightmap. Now it’s almost always nice.

Tags: screenshot

So, I’m entering, but I’m not using Java as I had expected. I do not have too much time this weekend, so I decided to go for a simple web game and focus on making some content instead. We’ll see how that goes – didn’t make too much today, and I’ve got to leave for the evening.

Anyway, here’s a sneak peak of the title screen graphics. The game’s tentatively called “Islands: Through the Sweep of Stars”, which is a perhaps a bit more pretentious than I’d like. Any suggestions?

See you all again tomorrow!

Tags: islands, LD17, stars, Sweep

Just added the gameplay system that enables the player to convert clouds into floating islands for a short period of time:

It works great, but I’m not seeing this game turning fun anytime soon… I’ll persevere in the hopes that I have a moment of inspiration and I find a way for the game to work as a game (challenging and fun)…

Already thought a lot about scrapping this, but I like taking things until it’s bitter conclusion…

There is now a score counter, a rescued people counter, and well, people! They’re stranded on islands, so you have to rescue them and bring them to land. Still need to work on the getting people to land thing, and change how the islands work so the people disappear when you rescue them other than the whole island disappearing. Maybe a max capacity of people on your boat too.

Still no clouds. It’s disappointing, I know.

I slept in longer than I meant to. Anyways, I’ve started on some of the happening stuff. As you can see, the boat circles that were created at the dock squares are sailing around the sea by following paths and making ripples as they do so.

I’m not sure if I have to declare this or not, but I will be using Game Maker for my project with an external library called “supersound”, for playing OGG music. I’m pretty sure this is OK but I just wanted to make sure!!!

Still no gameplay, though. Next up, procedural map generation.

Argh, I just don’t have the motivation to finish this time. I just haven’t found the gameplay idea that I would want (and could) to do in this timeframe. This is the first time I’ve not finished. (3 out of 3 entries finished before this so I guess I don’t have to feel that bad)

I have decided to try something different. I have always wanted to do interactive fiction. So this comp, I’ve decided to try to make a text adventure.

I am using inform 7, which is about the coolest language I’ve ever seen. I’ve played around with it a little before. But this the first full game I’ve tried to build with it.

Writing the text is going fine, but is a steep learning process trying to learn how to do cool stuff.

It is kind of a meta game that I think everyone entering this contest will identify with.

Hopefully I can finish it. It is definitely fun and nice not to have to worry about graphics for once.

got some stuff done since last time, not much, nothing visible, so no screenshot I’m afraid!

so now you can’t build blocks in the middle of the air, they need to be adjacent to other blocks (makes sense). I also fixed the bug i’ve been talking about. I have all the item sprites and i’m going to implement them right now!

currently my todo-list is:

• add items
• add a way to make items with your resources
• a point to the game (a way to win?)
• day+night
• enemies of some sort

so yeah!

Lost a lot of time, but no excuses. Will probably have to cut back on what I intended to make, but I’ll be damned if I dont have something playable by the deadline.

Finally some progress.. My experience with F# has been relatively smooth and I’ve been making good progress. What I have up now is a fluid simulator and on top of the fluid I can drop “boats” (those dots in the image) and they will float with the fluid. The fluid simulation is a fast implementation of the Lattice Boltzmann Methods (LBM) and it seems to work relatively well here.

The goal of the game will be that there are 2 colors of boats, red and blue. The boats start from the left and the fluid will push them to the right. There will be 2 goal areas, one for red, one for blue. Any crashed boat or boat that enters the wrong goal area will substract one “life”. Lose too many and it’s game over. What the player does, is that the player can grow and shrink islands (so the obstacles in this image are only for testing the fluid dynamics). By growing the islands correctly, the player can the steer the boats to their destination.

This is the best idea I could come up with (spent hours in thinking) and I’m sure there will be tens of games like this in this LD17. Oh well, can’t win ’em all in originality..

Tags: LD17

Currently still experimenting with SDL on my Mac, but in the meantime I got 2 ideas for my games, one would be more like a stratety tile-based board game and the second one is more like an adventure.  Will see how this afternoon goes.

And if you are interested in seeing what I am doing you can check my live stream here :

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/quebarium—ludum-dare-17/v3

So, here’s the dough having risen (and then fallen a bit when I removed the bowl’s cover:

And after the cut, you can see it stretched out, and the sauce bubbling away on the hob.

Here’s the sauce:

That’s half a red onion, half a tin of tomatoes, a pinch of sugar, a pinch of mixed herbs, and (the secret ingredient) a touch of white wine vinegar.  Pizzas cook so quickly the next post will probably be after I’ve eaten it (and watched Dr. Who), but there will be more pictures.

Well, now we can Jump and Die if we fall to no island. I added clouds to make the idea we are really high 😛

Here is a video of the current status.

I added some simple diffusion for a vaguely watery appearance. I intended the player’s dot to be a boat, but with this palette it looks more like an island in the making.

I figured my other AI could be a pathfinding one. Surely I could just reuse some pathfinding code for haXe? No, of course not. The library I found showed several signs of poor manufacture(particularly, using the extremely slow Enum construct to identify whether nodes are start/end/clear/blocked instead of, say, an integer value) and threw an exception in use.

Now I’m left torn between writing my own pathfinding code(done it several times before) and integrating it into the Roguelike collision system, or to go with dummy run-at-player AI. The latter would be a much safer bet, but I think that having a pathfinder mob, besides being useful library code, would add more dynamism to the game – with the water and bombs, there’s plenty of opportunities for the player to snipe at them or send them into traps, rather than it always being a head-on combat situation.

This is probably one I should sleep on, really. I’m at the end of my day.

I got the basic gameplay features done. It’s probably quite clear from the image that I’m making a tower defense game. Not very original, but it was the only decent idea I could come up with
There doesn’t seem to be many other tower defense games from what I can see, so at least there’s that. The camera can rotate and travel freely in the world, but there’s probably not much point in it other than if one wants to take a screenshot from a cool position or something.

Now I’ll just have to decide whether to improve the visuals or make the gameplay better… At least I’ll be needing a money indicator or something. Then maybe upgrades to the towers.