YOOOOOOOO LUDUM DARE FANS!

Today I’m bringing you an update on my latest creation for LD19, a currently unnamed game!

It’s damn difficult to get a screenshot of the game in action, as most of the action takes place in the darkness:

I’m very pleased with my progress so far, as I have been extremely ill all day today and will probably be ill tomorrow as well, but I was ill last LD so damn it this time I’m finishing a game!

Benn

The ghosts are now animated!

I quite like the looks of the new thing, so I guess that’s ok.

Though it feels kind of awkward to join the roguelike-ish bandwagon!

The compo is almost half over, and there are some awesome projects out there. It gets really difficult not to keep checking for other people’s status every 5 minutes, but it’s something great to do when taking breaks.

Anyway, here’s what I accomplished today: (You can test the current version in your browser – though chrome doesn’t seem to work. It’s a cheating version where you have a ton of resources for testing, though 😛 )

• Had about 3 people visit my live stream. Hoping for more tomorrow.
• Downed about 2 liters of orange juice and 1.5 liters of apple juice, along with some cappuchino, water, and of course food. Wow!
• Made a space-game with theoretically infinite maps (currently limited for fast testing and loops around)
• You can fly around, absorb resources (Matter, Energy and “Life”) and explore space in all its colorful glory
• Upgrade your little planet’s facilities (peaceful stuff done, offensive and defensive upgrades coming tomorrow)

Nicely working after day 1. A few simple bugs in it which will be fixed tomorrow.

I’m feeling pretty good about it so far, except maybe for the placeholder graphics. But they’re just that, placeholders.

Plans for tomorrow:

• Weapons!
• Enemies!
• Story!
• second half of the day, make the interface nicer
• Better graphics!
• Sound!
• Release!

But first, a nice 8 hours of sleep would do me good. See you then!

As of yet, I have still not discovered what my game is about. If anyone else has any insights, please let me know.

It’s 22:30 here in France, and it was really time to eat ! Here’s what I’m having:

Dinner

Sorry, I could resist eating before taking the photo…

Yea anyways im stuck at work till 8pm, so I cant get to work before 9.,  Dang another late night by the looks of it.  Last night I spent the night making sprites for a 15th century game, that is all the details I am going to give out until tonight.  Keep an eye on twitter for my screenshot post coming tonight (After I get something to make a screen shot of.

Things are not going very well… Real life gets in the way :>)

My first test.

In a tiny new world, a humble ship is setting sail.  Tomorrow, we’ll see what it may discover.

You get to kill it now.

I’m added collisions now, so you can take down the big ship of doom! It won’t shoot back at you yet but I want that to be added by the end of today. The tomorrow I can added more battles. I need to make some music/sound but I’l do that last minute. You have to ‘discover’ where to hit the big ships.

-bear

I heard you like caves, so I put caves inside your caves so you can dig while you dig.

The “Level” is how deep you are. Play it, the controls are on the page. Next thing i need to add before going to sleep: Enemies. 😀

In the future, the human race has grown to a size that the Earth can no longer sustain.  They have built space based farms and started working towards livestock raising in space.  At present they have run into a critical shortage of certain organics, notably phosphorus.  Farious factions from Earth have begun sending bot explorers to planets and astroids trying to discover new sources of phosphorus.

Your task is to write the code that powers the distant discovery bots.  There is competition everywhere you go so you’ll not only have to worry about finding phosphorus, you’ll also have to defend yourself against other bots.

Code window:

Now with stars and "LatchMobs"!

Alright! Now that I am confident that my framework will be usable to create a full-fledged game, I’m down to content creation. There’s one last step to the game that I need to implement and that’s changing between screens. That means, it’s almost time to start making mobs, obstacles, pickups and The Artifacts™!

Because I was having trouble reading image data from graphics contexts in Slick, I decided to go with an even more hacky map format: a text file of sequential numbers representing entities. A separate entity that lives for the duration of a single frame builds the level up from a text file with exactly 300 integers (placed however desired). The darker dots in the background are actually a scenic space thing that scrolls as you change between screens… or, will eventually do that but doesn’t quite do so yet. I’m not going to worry about entity priorities unless it seriously needs to be done, and it could be easily set up anyway.

I was too lazy to program the collision between bullet and player, and I forgot to set up the HUD object that displays how much life your character has… whatever that thing is supposed to be. Now it’s lunch time, and on to these tasks:

• Screen switching
• Pickups
• A nice-looking HUD
• More mobs
• More gimmicky obstacles
• Possibly a better sprite for the player.

You can play this demo at the usual URL.

A bit more than 30 hours left and nothing to show exept the image above. Idea: finished. What I want as intro/tutorial: finished. What else do I have? Crappy psd-files and about 15% of the code. No music and no sounds yet.

Gotta pull an all-nighter!

Didn’t have a cable to post my workspace before. Here it is.

Not working at home is less fun.

Back to work and I have a checklist (minus putting in a whole other half of the game but oh well…):

1. Pause Button

2. Money

3. Hub Menu

4. Upgrades

5. Mining

6. Planet Properties

7. Turrets for Hub

8. Quest

9. Main Menu

10. Instruction Menu

11. Music

12. Sound Effects

13. Prettier Graphics

//If I have time

14. Different Types of Enemies

15. Better Controls

Place your bets now!!! How many I’ll get done and in which order!!!

Ores now randomly generate on walls! This will make doing the level generation much easier.

Hmm, I’m not going as fast as I would like to go.

Oh, and the to-be-found object is going to be a hat (all these hat simulator games nowadays…)

Things are starting to come along alright and I’m catching up on my schedule. I have started to flesh the story out a bit more but will leave most of that for tonight while I’m trying to fall asleep but the basic jist of it is that you’re a caveman attempting to “discover” fire. this happens earlier on as the levels (hopefully) start to get more difficult. Thats when the goal shifts to telling over cavemen about your discovery.

Completed so far:

Sprite sheet/animation system.
Terrain collisions (Could use some tweeking).
Input.
Player movement.
Gravity.
Loading new levels on the fly.

I still have my work cut out for me if I want to finish on time.

As a side note, I’m finding this competition incredibly enjoyable and a great learning experience. I will deffinatly enter future LD’s too!

I have this much finished. See if you can find the fan pack to jump higher!

http://megaswf.com/simple_serve/87754/

Tags: dark, Flixel, ocean, pixel, playable