I read a few posts about people needing a location to upload for submission. I’ve setup a public FTP server, e-mail me at howard@blacktriangles.com and I will send you instructions, if you need it.

And to test that server I shall link a screenshot. It’s not that different from the last one you saw, but it’s progress!

Almost halfway in time.

The initially planned version is nearly finished (a version without proper graphics and sound, I mean), but I noticed some issues with the gameplay that I’ll resolve first:

• To make it easier, I had to allow moving the tile you’re standing on, rather only dragging walls in front of you to the left or right – which was far too limited.
• Now it’s too easy, so you actually don’t need to explore a lot (you can just stay on your tile and navigate it nearly everywhere).
• The solution:
  • Addition of  a health meter. If you move a tile, it costs more health than just moving your body to an other tile. By exploring you can find health packs to restore your health.
  • Addition of treasures. These are used to create a score. Also, the percentage the map was explored is added to the score at the end of each map. If you have explored the map for 100%, you get an extra bonus.

This shouldn’t be too much work to implement. I hope to do this now, before going to bed. Tomorrow I’ll still have at least 16 hours to create a pretty layout and some nice graphics.

No screenshot this time.

And still having just proto-visuals.

You can now collect money from enemies among other small tweaks.

Controls:

Mouse to Move, Click to Fire.

Press P to Pause/Unpause.

Press Space to Enter Hub/Exit Hub.

http://sarah.draknek.org/Games/CompactDiscovery/

Things are going moderately well, I’ve still not got much art and the engine isn’t totally finished. But I’m optimistic about finishing on time. I was pretty ambitious with this project, switching from AS2 to AS3 which I’ve not used for games before and also trying alot of new things programming wise, so I won’t feel too upset if I can’t finish.

The game I’m trying to make is a cross between Digdug, Worms and  Go To Hell. Basically you’re an archeologist digging for bones, but being too impatient to dig them out the traditional way, you instead opt to blast your way through the ground with explosives. Getting deeper under ground and collecting bones scores points, but if you blast yourself or something falls on you, you lose a life. 3 lives then you’re dead. If I have time I’d like to add living dinosaurs that you can blow up for more bones too.

As you can see from the screenshot there’s not a whole lot going  on artwise, tried to get something going this evening but my brain  was stuck in programming mode, so I’m going to sleep that off. The  basic engine is all there though, the blue square can move around,  mouse click throws a rectangle which explodes in one second,  clearing a hole in the earth that the player can move into, move far enough down the screen and a new block of destructible ground is created, so you never reach the bottom. Distance from the mouse cursor to the player decides the force the explosive is thrown with, should be easy enough to add in an arc so people can see the trajectory of an explosive before it’s thrown.

Next part of programming is adding in natural holes that contain bones and other objects, which need to be affected by gravity and probably the impulse of the explosives exploding.

Now I’ll sleep and hopefully have another productive day tomorrow.

I’m quickly falling into the trap of designing assets and not gameplay, but hey, I’m having fun.

Planet textures drawn in Gimp and displayed in Unity. Here’s a little video with a first shot at some background music (using Ableton Live):

Earth Flyby

It’s 3. Februar 2011 the discovery starts its last mission STS-133 . Commander Steven Lindsey see earth vanishing with discovery heading for its last ride in the universe…..

blablablabla Something happens => Wormhole => Millions of Light Years away, didn’t think too much about that (as I won’T have time for a story). You need to search all planets of the current solar system in order to get enough resources to jump to the next one. You can do following in order to control discovery’s path.

1) Starting direction (with an aiming utility (can’t be seen on the screenshot))

2) Start Speed

(actually that were the basic ones, followed by more advanced techniques in upcoming levels)

3) In(de)crease sphere of influence (the closer you are to the center of the planet the higher is the influence)

4) In(de)crease the size of the planet (a very new technique of relative scaling makes this possible :D)

Now, I make a break with coding and start with some asset-stuff before I go to bed.

Ok here’s a screen shot.

Eureka! Vaults of Knowledge

It may not look like there’s a game here, but it is progressing.

The idea is that in a post apocalyptic world, the player has to unlock forgotten discoveries from the vaults of an ancient race known only as humankind. This can only happen by researching those discoveries whilst holding off strange mutated creatures.

Strangely enough, I think the theme of Discovery is going to work quite well if I have time to do it properly. If not, then we’ll end up with an unholy mashup of “Centipede” and “Typing of the Dead”.

Wow. This is my first LD and I’m finding myself running out of steam already! On the positive side, I’m figuring out some techniques that I haven’t played with before. And I’ll have something finished by hour 48, but now I’m not sure it’s going to be anything fun. Still, it’s cool to see everyone’s progress over time.

EDIT: Whoops, found a typo, it’S ELSE, not EKSE :p

Here’s my progress over the last 24 hours.

Chronolapse is also still chugging along, at 16,000 frames XD

Here is what i have so far:

I still have ALOT of work to do.

(Please ignore the super dodgy resize. Click here for fullsize.)

Can anyone guess the reference to the theme?

Either way I’ve just done my first pass on my first piece of art for the game, and after having most of the game itself finished bar art, I’m now focusing on getting everything looking nice

I wanted to join this compo, but real life got in the way.

Well I think I’m going to make a game anyway and take the time.

See ya guys at LD20 xD

I know have walls, diamonds* and bodies. But only walls shown.

Hopefully if I get time towards the end I can make the walls look a bit more wall-y, but the engine is the important thing for tonight.

*This game contains no mining what-so-ever**

**no crafting either

Fricking walls!

I got about as far as you see below before I got sidetracked trying to fix things about Flash and Actionscript that were driving me crazy. Eventually I had to just give up altogether. I’m trying to start over and rebuild the whole thing using Ruby and Gosu, but it looks like I have a lot to learn.

Not even close to being a game

I’ve got some basic playability in Disco?Very! now.  You’re the guy on the right.  Use left/right arrow keys, combined with shift, to do moves, and follow the other three dudes.

Click the picture to try it out.  It’s Flash, so click inside the window once it loads (or keypresses won’t register).

Still have a lot to do (more music, more moves, levels, scoring, etc.), but the basic gameplay function is there.

Tags: Disco

Going to sleep. I’ll have plenty of work to do tomorrow, but I’m really happy with what I have currently. Next up shall be some proper effects like a better sword-swinging animation and then quite much everything else; dying, item handling, winning and so on. I probably can’t finish a version I’d be happy with in time, but I’m quite sure I’ll release whatever I have in the end anyway.

Time to get some sleep and think about where I’m going to take the game from here.

See you in the morning.

Current version (not much you can do except jump around and admire the awsum lighting effectz and music):

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4785344/ludumdare/LD19%20WIP/index.html

Haven’t quite got anything on screen yet… scary thing is, I have been coding all day and have quite a fair bit of code to show for it too!

Turns out taking the engine and stuffing a prototyping layer on top of it ended up being a bit more work than I expected… so while my initial idea was to abstract pretty much everything, the past few hours have had me refocus specifically on what I’ll need to get a game done over the next couple of days. And a few words of wisdom… Lua and heavily templated and inherited code can cause some major headaches! Be careful where you abstract from, or you’ll be going in circles and creating some rather spectacular dependency diamonds 😉

So, with one day down.. I have to re-plan a few things. Originally it was: Day One – core code, Day Two – gameplay code, Day Three – asset fix up and tidying loose ends/porting fun. So it looks like I’ll be cutting into the asset time to get something done.. but once I have the core code done though, it should be fairly plain sailing so I’m still quite confident at this point.

No doubt that’ll change around lunch time tomorrow, should I still not have anything on screen!
But for now, some sleep is in order…