Progress is going well, the animation system is fully setup, the renderer is fully setup, I know that the sound system will take no time at all because of the preparation I did (see my initial post to a link to the framework I started with).

Right now I have zero assets, I do have placeholders for my animations, but they look like this:
Imageshack Gallery of some dodgy artwork

This is enough for testing the basics of the animation stack; I can confirm that when a creature is hit it plays its orange “pain” animation and then continues with the white “idle” or green “walk” animation, and that when it dies it plays the red “death” animation and then freezes on the last frame.

I’ll do some screenshots when ive done the HUD. I need a readout of the stats of what you currently have selected, and a row of buttons, one for each ability of the selected character, as well as a readout of mission objectives.

My second meal of the day is not as elaborate; boiled brown rice, chilli con carne out of a can, and my typical addition of grated cheese.

I added a ton of chilli powder though, because the stuff out of a tin is never spicy enough for my liking. Actually, this meal was so good, I ate it while still writing this post.

Coded non-stop, lots of work done. I also worked some on artwork (they have eyes now). And I learned a lot about chipmunk. This is the first time I’m using a physics library of any kind but I’m very positively surprised. Chipmunk does everything right. C API. Simple, does just what it needs to. API makes sense and is easy to use. Good documentation and examples. Probably the first time I don’t find anything to criticize about a library I used. So, despite learning the API and spending time watching the examples, I probably saved a bit of time compared to if I had used my own line-line collision function as I did in the past. However I lost all that time because I decided to write my own XML parser instead of downloading expat or something. The problem is I need level data and just drawing them in Inkscape and reading in the .svg files seemed like the easiest approach.

What I have left for tomorrow is: Different kinds of monsters. Then using the weak monsters (the only ones you can really fight on your own) as weapons against the stronger monsters, beat the final boss.

If I had the time I could also add actual graphics and sound effects and music. And more gameplay effects like more varied monsters and more varied attacks. Alas, I have to work all Monday, so have to get up right around when LD ends – so I lose the last 6 hours or so. I also stupidly slept for the first 6 hours of the compo because I stayed up right until the theme was announced. And I’ll sleep another 6 hours now since I’m too tired to go on.

You can knock your enemies over now!

You knock them over by.. touching them! Then the knocked over enemy can knock over other enemies.They release particles when they are defeated, and you also release a bit when you touch them. yay

Tags: gameplay, particles, screenshot

Alien Super Mega Blaster - WIP 1

Only managed a couple hours of coding so far this weekend.  At present have all the game state up and working.  I’m using XNA and have a tried and tested pattern for it.  So even though I’m not using a library other than XNA, its quick initial step and I can get this up and running withing 30 mins.  All the coding from now will be components, so for example if I run out of time and have not implemented a “display screen in game play component” then it will not break anything else.

You can see from the attached link that I’ve made some progression on the game play aspects.

Ludum Dare 18 – AlienSuperMegaBlaster 2010-08-22 01-20

Fair bit today and lots of family stuff for tomorrow.  So touch and go for the compo, but should be able to submit for the Jam.

PS Watched Tron earlier today and if nothing else been mildly influenced by the colour scheme.

PS: Keep forgetting to add titles to posts.  Sorry if this pops back to the top of the list.

I’ve been working on a bit of AI, and this is how it’s turned out.

A & D to move Left / Right. you cannot jump.

click to place portals. blue sucks, red blows (thankyou Douglas Adams). placing a red underground will make the terrain higher, if you are standing on it, you move up too. dropping ground on an enemy kills it, turning it into what is basically a ground tile (which you can use as a “weapon”, along with the rest of the ground)

DLlink

I have a video of the New England LD Meetup, but I’m having uploading problems.  For now, I’ll just post a couple of images of my game’s progress.

While hanging out waiting for HybridMind to arrive for the meetup, I was chillin’ with billknye.  He was working and I was trying to think of a concept.  I joked about finding inspiration in the local newspaper, so I picked it up and mentioned the front page headline.  It was about a fair-sized fire nearby and billknye made some remark about the gamability of it.  It stuck, I guess.  It turns out to be a creative take on the theme.  Enemy?  Fire.  Weapon?  Fire.  There you have it, a game about fighting forest fires.

I first got the player moving around and then some fires drawing onto a grass buffer:

Then I worked the rest of the meetup time on getting the fire to spread in a good way:

The implementation is surprisingly simple, so I’ll be able to polish this baby up…  Like all babies should be?

Two delicious chicken burgers and a couple of slices of watermelon, washed down by a glass of coke.

I started way too late, but I finally (after 10 hours) got something working that I’m almost okay with.  You can try out the current build at: http://garbos.itu.dk/ludumdare/ (Windows or Mac)

It’s made in Unity and is still a bit buggy. Also you can’t die yet.

Boom

Kaboom

Now that the Red Bull is wearing off and I’m losing my gift of sight, it’s time to call it a night and finally admit I’m halfway through the weekend (UK time here). Progress has inevitably not been as good as hoped, partly due to having several hours of my day stolen by my call into work (damn you day job!). But at least I have the idea, a foundation with a player character and a level, and all of Sunday still to come.

The idea will involve turning hostile robots against each-other using nothing more than your awesome hacking skillz. Not that I even have the enemies just yet…

Tomorrow will be a busy day...

Ok so I didn’t manage to find the time to work on both LD and the other game jam that was organised by friends, but I wanted to combine the two together so at the very least I can show my work over here as part of the Jam.

Its been a slightly bizzare setup as I am in Copenhagen and the sound guy and artist are over in Norway….

Because of that I’ve been posting regular updates of my progress over to them in the form of video screen captures

So here is a link to my videos… should you wish to see the evolution of our Whale game.

Linkage!

Our theme was code within code, whale and light..           and we decided to scrap the code within code bit and go with whales and light.

Hi all!

It’s gone 2am, which is not ideal considering that I intend to join the other Cambridge guys in CB2 again in 8 hours. I shall be off to bed soon, but here’s a quick progress report.

I’m collaborating with my buddy George, so we’ll be entering the Jam, not the compo. Here’s a screenshot of our progress so far:

It’s a bit like Asteroids, except enclosed within a circular play area, and you can’t destroy the ‘asteroids’ directly. Instead, you can push them around by firing lasers at them. To destroy the ‘asteroids’ and score, you must collide them with each other.

I’m pretty pleased with our progress. The game is basically playable, there are sound effects in most places where you’d expect sound effects, there’s a scoring system that even I’m happy with, and I even wrote a little bit of ‘music’, but I’m not sure if I’ll put it in since it’s painfully repetitive (like all my music). The only major remaining gameplay issue is that sometimes an ‘asteroid’ will spawn on top of your ship and destroy it without warning, but that’s easy to fix. Once we’ve fixed that, we intend to introduce some new mechanics to make the game more interesting – and more challenging as it progresses.

Frustratingly I spent about three hours today trying to make the ship and ‘asteroids’ bounce off the arena wall in a convincingly elastic fashion. The eventual code to implement that was about four lines long. One and a bit lines of code per hour is not particularly good going when you’re working to a deadline. I owe a debt of gratitude to Alan who gave me a hand with my dodgy vector math code, which got the bouncing working as expected. (I think I’ve got the right Alan there, but hopefully someone can correct me otherwise.) Other than that, everything has gone surprisingly swimmingly.

You can follow our progress on GitHub. If you want to build the code, you need Flex and a little bit of nous. There’re no build instructions because, until the contest finishes, we have better things to do!

I have to say that a lot of the other entries are looking absolutely amazing, given that they’ve only seen a day’s work. I’m eagerly anticipating the finished products!

(Semi-crossposted to my personal blog).

It’s 2:15am and I am sleepy, so off to bed I go!

The game’s starting to take shape, but it’s still not “fun” so to speak!

The game as it is now…

… and me coding on the train back from Cambridge!

Staying at home in Wiltshire tomorrow. Had an awesome time with the CB2 Indies, and looking forward to seeing them again!

The title has a double meaning.

A) This is what the game looks like after 2 hours:

B) It’s past 2am so i’m going to bed!

Later guys.

I had a few delays today — slowing progress down a bit, but I feel like I’m getting back on track.  Here is a screenshot of how my game currently looks.  It has almost no gameplay — just a tilemap and basic character controls.

Hero standing near some water.

My game has all of the really important elements, and I’m pleased with my progress thus far.  Though it’s designed for iPad / iPhone, it should work on all Webkit and Mozilla browsers as well.

Todo list for tomorrow (in no particular order):

• Splash screen
• Better player movement
• Score
• Difficulty progression
• General funness
• Sound
• Detecting end of game
• High-score list
• More enemy types
• Some way to dispatch with the last enemy
• Background image
• Graphics for player
• Explosions on bullet impact

If any of you find any bugs, please let me know.  Any thoughts you have about what might make it better would also be appreciated.

Well, I figured I’d give it a go this year. I got off to a bit of a late start, but still 24hrs to go

Not much gameplay at all so far.
Just messing with tech right now. Hopefully it’ll all come together in the last hour or so…

Smores attack is finally in progress after a day of mostly life delays, and with coding almost entirely wrapped up in cobbling together a simple way to handle my graphics in a java applet. That part is finally working, leaving only the game guts, which i should be able to do pretty quick. I can see why so many people use a code library, a framework, or “not java” haha.

Well, it doesn’t feel like I’ve gotten a lot accomplished, but when I look at my todo list it seems to be getting checked off pretty well. I guess it’s just perception.

I’ve implemented 3 out of the 5 weapon types, and partially implemented all 5 aliens that serve as various types of ammo. The levels transition, but there’s nothing to indicate you cleared the level and are proceeding to the next. No menu or game over screens either. I may drop one of the weapons to save time. Implementing the upgrades should be faster than weapons, so I’ll definitely try to squeeze that in. The graphics are crap, but I’m not an artist so I don’t really mind. Music and sound goes at the end, as usual, and may get cut if I run out of time.

With a little cleanup I could submit it now, the gameplay is functional, it’s just not as polished and featureful as I’d prefer. Here’s hoping the next 24 hours will be productive!

Home stretch! Lets finish this together!

Ok,…let’s end day one.

Actually I’m a jMonkeyEngine-User but this time I want to create an android-app for my new phone. I use gdx that should help me a bit with that. Still I don’t feel too comfortable with that….until now I have build a TileMap-Reader that read my txt-based tilemaps with additional meta-data (postions of player and enemies). Actually there is no game play, yet!  But that will change tomorrow.

Here a screenshot:

This is more or less one to one to the android-version! As soon as there is some interaction I will publish an apk-file.

I’m not sure if I’ll go with that game title, since it’s kinda taken, but here’s another screen: