Cuzco the Goat (from LD17 Keynote Address) is such an awesome creature, I couldn’t leave him out. Also the Obelisk from 2001 plus multiple steps of human evolution, mutated sheep and Godzilla (Cuzco is off-screen, only his wagon can be seen):
Tags: flash, progress, screenshot
Falling behind slightly due to having to do a bit more tweaking and more work around code than I expected for things to behave themselves. Methinks this may be the last time I’ll be using SGZEngine in it’s current form.
Anyway, progress!
I’ve fixed the camera and added it’s “smarts” in again, so it only draws what it sees, not everything it can find.
I’ve added movement and attacking for men and ships! YARRRR
There’s wind – depicted by the crap clouds. It’ll randomly change direction and strength, and will affect your ships trajectory. Quite amusing to watch them perform wide arcs to get to where you told it to go as the wind’s throwing them about a bit.
The whole map is finished.. minus the randomising of where forts and treasure start.
All the graphics are done apart from the hud, though that wont take long ( nice big block of solid colour will do, if need be )
Screenshot:
What’s next…
Looting and Pillaging!
Capturing Mines and Forts ( and placing them, of course )
Some context sensitive clicking ( at the moment, left click to select/deselect a unit, right click to move, left control and right click to attack )
Hud stuff. This is probably of prime importance, actually.. as there is a lot going on, and I don’t want another derelict disaster *cough*
Polish ( sound, music, perhaps fix some of the tiles which look a bit crap )
I’m pretty happy with how things have been going. There are some bugs in the engine (for instance, I can’t seem to get the monkeys to stand flat on the trees all the time) but overall the project has gone pretty smoothly. Barring any huge issues when porting to Windows, I should be able to finish with time to spare!
My first and last post for this LD48 happens to be about my game’s completion! Go on over here to see the submission page and play it.
Before the weekend, I didn’t think I’d have the time for it. But I suddenly had an idea, and after a friendly reminder from Phil Hassey on IRC that it’s never to late to enter, I decided I’d do what I could. So, after a few struggles with mouse picking and getting the y position on a terrain grid, I gave up on both and moved on to make a game that, while using a semi-awkward control scheme and an inaccurate terrain-tracking pointer, is complete now.
It was originally going to be themed on the Iceland guy, with his face on top, responding to how fast you’re clearing the levels. What are now forks were originally supposed to be fists, but I couldn’t figure out how to texture them that way. So now it’s themed on exquisite dining rather than a Iceland-pounding rage.
I had fun, no matter the result, and that’s what counts, right?
New build here
I now have a title screen, win/lose screens, and the game can reset itself nicely. Made a number of small changes for aesthetics (aligning text, cleaning up the intermediate zoom sand tiles, etc).
I’ve had enough play testing now, to decide that I needed to change the walls so they block both the glompers and the kiwis. So that’s done. I don’t want to make traps life-limited, so that means I’m getting close to done.
Quite a bit of CPU usage on my computer, but it seems stable and I don’t seem to be leaking memory (for once :))
I just need to figure out what sound effects I need/can generate… Thumps and such when the player adds objects are easy enough, but if I add a sound when things get eaten, it will be getting played more or less continuously in midgame.
-TF
I realize this looks like my only journal entry for the whole compo, so click here to see the actual deal. I really did do some! Not a lot, just some screenies yesterday, and I’m about to do one more today, which shouldn’t be too tough with 4 hours left to go. LDs are exciting, but draining. I am ready for rest and WoW now.
So i 100% finished the items now, you keep them from map to map and i actually fixed the torch (only works if you buy it) the spring (actually makes you jump higher) and the sword exists and kills pirates! I’ve also updated the HUD, you have 3 lives, and a health bar. that’s almost done, i just need to health bar to refill when you lose a life 😛
screenshot:
After finishing up the health stuff it’ll be time for pirate spawning!
Here’s a timelapse of my unfinished entry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3V3YbBh1RY
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2355556/brave%20island%20diver.exe
about 3 hours of work <3
My idea may be sunk. I need to find the centre of buoyancy of objects to make it work, and I’m just finding out how difficult that’s going to be. Time for a break and a visit to the LDers over at CB2. Mealwhine, if you want to have a go, look at http://richard.brooksby.org/2010/04/24/ludum-dare-17-islands/ and for a laugh, walk forwards onto the second tile.
Technical details
The overall game was just going to be “get from A to B” by jumping from precarious floating object to other precarious floating object, such as ice blocks, lilos, rubber rings, etc.
If I can solve the buoyancy problem in the next hour or so I might get at least a prototype up.
I got up about an hour ago. I think i have a good idea what my game will be now that I have slept on it.
I made some pizza for breakfast 😛
Tags: foodphoto
Well I have reached a point where I know that I will do more damage than good if I add anything else.
I have added all of the features I wanted and have packaged up all of the media(despite it turning into a massive pain)
Overall I was really pleased with Allegro, I will definitely use it in the future, allthough one bug that i couldnt seem to iron out, was that the level would simply not be there sometimes, no idea how to fix it, so the submission will have it in.
Stan, lost and angry alone in the middle of the sea with only his gold and the rising tide for company
The water is much better now.
I also added a speech bubble, which introduces the game quite nicely, as well as start and ending screens:
Stan Casually Explains the severity of the current situation
I improved the day->night transition, still not perfect, the stars stay too long, but the blend is nice
also changed the display to use a better bigger and bolder font, and moved them out of the centre of the screen.
Finished adding sounds.
Thanks And good luck to everyone who hasnt finished yet, good work to everyone who has.
Now to get some beer, and play some LD 17 games ( :
Imagine a similar top-down island+water view as in my previous sketch. I’m too lazy to make another.
This game is more of a resource management affair, with few action elements. All the islands are fairly small and circular in shape. You start out on one of them with a small land vehicle which you can move around. From this vehicle, you can send a probing ray aimed at the mouse cursor, used to measure range. The intended purpose is for you to drive near the edge of the island and measure how far away the next coastline is, and if it would be viable to build a bridge over there. You have a supply of resources for this purpose, like fuel, metal, and wood. There could be different kinds of bridges to suit different situations of resource supply, like wood/metal/concrete bridges.
Anyhoo, if the range checks out, you would start bridge building, which would be automatic and animated in some fashion. When the bridge is complete, you can cross it to visit the other island and harvest its native resources. One alternative system for resource handling would be that you had a swarm of builder agents that would scurry between the bridge being built, and back to connected islands with resource supplies. They would gather material and bring it back to the build site. This way there would be no global material reserve, but it seems like it could turn out kind of complex and tedious to have build time and efficiency depend on the network of bridges, possibly having the drones move all across the map to get things done.
For deciding where you want to build the next bridge, you could detach a helicopter module from the main vehicle and fly over to other islands to survey their contents. Small icons and proportional numbers (like “5 Oil” and “3 Rock”) would pop up when you get near them, or when you land. The helicopter would consume fuel, and have a limited tank capacity. That could mean you end up stranded on an island, and you would have to build bridges to reach and salvage it before it can be used again.
I’m not really sure what the overall goal would be, and if the game should either be win/lose or just sandboxy. Sandbox would probably be the best option, with some tweaking to make it apparent that you’re doing well or not, depending on how you play. One idea that could shake things up (pun!) is to have islands randomly rumble and crash into the sea, taking connected bridges with them. This would mean that you’d have to build new and longer bridges to reach some areas in case a key island was lost.
It might be possible to layer a different and primary mechanic on top of all this, where you perhaps shuttle creatures or other artifacts between islands in some way, so there’s something to aim for and always something to do (they want to go from one island to another, then back again or move on somewhere else). In that case, bridge building would become secondary but still the main important task you perform while playing.
That’s all there is, and you can’t play it. I would probably have started prorotyping one or both of these if I hadn’t made the questionable decision to spend my weekend doing really boring Sculptris code. I didn’t feel like I could relax and start on something else before that was done though, and in hindsight I’m glad that I have the boring stuff taken care of so I won’t have to do it tomorrow.
As always, good luck to those of you making games, and I look forward to browsing the entry masses later. One perk of not participating is that there’s no pressure to vote, for once 
Tags: foodphoto
Well, it’s not as fun/finished as I’d hoped (no title screen, only one type of enemy)… It’s just a very basic FPS where you fight off waves of smokey snake like creatures (all islands have smoke monsters, right?). I’m about out of energy, just got to squeeze out a few sound effects, then I’ll call it done…
Things where going great on my second game. This was started after lunchtime in the final day and I made some pretty good technical progress.
Some real life issue’s stopped me in my tracks though. Guess ludumdare just wasnt meant to happen for me this weekend. For those of you still working away, goodluck.
See you all next time.
Just about done.. I think I’ll skip making any sounds/music this time (so the game should work well in office setting as well).. I added “bubbles” that flow with the stream (the little dots). They help to visualize the fluid behavior a lot. I added lives and scoring and also a startup menu screen (not shown here). The hiscore is saved to the registry. So I’m pretty much there, or really close.
I think I might spent a few moments seeing if I can optimize some of the rendering code. For example, the fluid bitmap is updated every frame. With Bitmap.SetPixel for every pixel. So things like that may be a bit of a performance overhead.. Not sure if I’ll bother but we’ll see. Then there’s the packaging and uploading to do.
This feature took way too long to implement. I had to write a description of every single thing in the game. There are quite a few. The only thing it doesn’t do (and probably won’t for sake of time developing the find-the-exact-location algorithms) is give you infromation on structures already built onto an island. Excuse me — skyland. Yeah. That’s right. Ain’t no islands to see here.
2am, it is time for sleep.
here is the screenshot of where i got up to.
you can click around the procedurally generated world to have hovergirl teleport there. unfortunately no other gameplay was implemented. if you have firefox, go here to test it yourself. if i get time tommorrow morning i’ll make sure it works under webkit browsers (safari, chrome) and then add whatever features i can before the competition end. probably not many!
overall i’m quite happy with this as a technology demo of what is possible with just plain old javascript + images in the browser.
