I’ve been wasting much time during the first 24 hours, mostly sleeping… stupid uni project getting out of hand in the last minute…

Nevertheless, I am determined to get something done, so by now I’m just about done with the initial part of my game… I’m getting increasingly concerned about gameplay, as I’m kinda just going on a hunch I got just after the theme was revealed… the idea never really included any real gameplay, so I’m hoping the Muses will grace me with their presence soon! 😛

As you may be able to tell, I’m trying to mainly play with effects since I’m quite a crappy graphician… I’m hoping to be able to create some gameplay based on visual effects!

Tags: screenshot

This is what I managed to do last night. Its amazing what mistakes a sleep deprived brain can make. I had a lot of issues baking AO maps because I had one silly button selected the whole time, which was the first thing I saw when I woke up this morning. Oh well.

But here is Discovery so far:

Far from finished.

-I dont like the ET texture much atm,

-The shuttle doesnt have markings yet, only an AO map

-I dont have much time to work on it anymore

-Need to get into some python to making it fly and get some environments done today! (But I have so many other things to do today as well… Gonna be a late night)

-ADEdge

Tags: 19, ADEdge, blender, ld, progress, Shuttle, space

And yet another post !
There are so many details to complete before releasing… I plan to spent the next few hours between :

– level design,
– add looot’s of other stupid “new concept discoveries” to unlock,
– sound design,
– intro + outro.

The main engine is working and quite stable. Pretty happy with the way it looks now

One day in and no progress on game design. But I did get Rosegarden + Fluidsynth set up and recorded a few little tunes which will probably not have a game to contain them:
Peppy title
Goings On
Theme?
Obligatory Game Over

I slept from about 6amish-10amish, and i’ve had tea and custard tart and meringue (which didn’t work properly — just not dry enough, but sticky and chewy and yum nonetheless), but I’ve just spent about an hour fixing little bugs; 45 minutes of that ended up being because I’d forgotten to return a value from a function.

Yep, runnin on not-enough-sleep.

But my game has music now!

So ‘Discovering Direction’ as it’s currently called is really coming along. A pleasant mixture of puzzle, profundity and punnage. I imagine players will come up with some creative ways of speedrunning the later levels, given the range of keys made available later in the game (teleport through walls!  reverse velocity!) – looking forward to seeing how this is received.

The 'P' box is the player. Arrows push him around. Here, it's obvious which directions are required.

Profound. Or maybe just going too far with a pun.

I’ve been busy painting HIB promo art and Yule shopping, so I missed this LD by a day. But I want to at least throw an idea down. An idea fueled by pepparkaksdeg (it’s a crime to bake it really) and a movie that I just watched: “They Live” by John Carpenter.

So, you play as a person in a city full of other pedestrians. The walls have company logos, ads and other things. In a trashcan you find a pair of goggles which allow you to see (or should I say discover) the evil aliens who have infiltrated mankind. However, wearing the goggles lowers your health. Taking them off replenishes it.

The aliens consider you a threat, so they’re trying to discover you, and then attack you with health draining beams. They can only do this if they get within a certain distance. So the trick is to only use the goggles in crowds, or to read the motions of people and move in the gaps. You might also have to remember who is nasty after you’ve taken the goggles off (like a game of memory) . The goggles might have a warmup/cooldown to prevent the player from flicking the effect on and off. Perhaps aliens spot you at a larger distance with the goggles on, making it more important to remember who’s who and then sneak by whistling with the goggles off.

The goal of the game is to gather up stuff around the city and head for a building where the aliens have hidden the device which is cloaking their appearance to the human population. The ads and stuff would of course substitute for OBEY/CONSUME/WATCH TV while the goggles are used.

I’d like to say that I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, but I’m all out of… well, time.

Tags: concept

Well I sat on the theme for a total of 22 hours, not 18 as I’d originally tweeted (I hope my math improves as I go along), but mostly my problem stemmed from not wanting to do the obvious exploration/dungeon crawling that I typically flock towards. I’ve written random dungeon generators for other projects and love RPG’s to death, but I figured for my first outing I’d have to do something a little more unique.

Well nuts to that. I’m not creative or experienced enough to do something unique and meaningful. I wanted to go the whole self-discovery approach but I have no idea how to stick as complex a concept as that into a video game, let alone something fun. For my first LD I better bite off something I can actually chew, and it took 22 hours of beating myself up to get there. It seems that the theme of “discovery” is having a whole meta-meaning as I come to grips with the fact that I’m an incubator and not an overtly creative “build it out of thin air” type.

I amaze myself sometimes. No I am not cheating.

So I took an hour from my marathon session of “Sunny In Philadelphia” (who knew a recommended show would actually be good?) to take a classic and code it from scratch. And now that I have a base of a working game maybe I can incubate up a storm to make it a bit more challenging/interesting. Because I’m already getting good at it (read: fluking out) and I’m running out of episodes!

Have a play for yourself before I ramp up the difficulty or god help me try adding more graphics: http://bmcgames.com/discovery

So, after hearing about this “Ludum Dare” in the past months through Twitter, I looked it up to find out that it was A) Awesome and B) Already in progress. So I joined in. I quickly prototyped part of an idea, and set to work:

Ping to Reveal your surroundings!

And the (admittedly somewhat lame) Title Screen:

Eww, mouse handwriting.

What are these mysterious red drawings?

What IS that stuff?

So, yeah. I’ve got 3 levels so far, and I’m hoping it’ll turn out well.  It’s being developed in Game Maker 8 (if you couldn’t tell). Lemme know what you think!

A bit over halfway! Here’s the screenshot of the current state: be warned, it’s ugly. But it’s 2/3 of the way to having gameplay ready, then I can spend the waning minutes of the compo working on polish.

Ugly, but a RTS/Puzzle hybrid based upon finding friends and avoiding foes.

The game is based upon the idea of discovering friends, and not being discovered by enemies. There’s a pseudo-plot to add if I have time, but that’s looking like a post-compo thing. The repeating shape is your beacon, cast out into space.

good news, I ported my entry from iPhone to OSX .. which still limits the amount of people who can try the game out .. but by far less

You can download the latest released build here.

After fixing the tile type set issues, it finally looks like it could actually be a game. What needs to be done now (after making graphics, of course) is getting the player, then some other entities working.

Dump here.

Also an earlier, definitely buggy dump behaves quite differently in Kega Fusion compared with Meka, and it’s here. How does this act on a real SMS?

My game in it’s current state. I’m not very good at coding and/or drawing so I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got so far! Still plenty to do!

Controls: Arrow Keys & Spacebar.  Press R to restart the 1 level!

GO PLAY!

In the last hours I have been struggling to implement the map and gameplay system. Turns out it took a lot longer than expected, partly because sprite.js is not as mature/complete as I thought it would be and because of my own lack of practice.

However I think I have done something worth showing/talking. First I did a python script that would parse a txt file and output a PNG containing a wire frame to design the level from. The same text file is used as input by the game to generate the collision platforms. I also needed to implement basic physics, which still have some rough edges but it will have to suffice for now.

The current prototype is accessible through here.

I think I will leave the gameplay engine for now and move on to game rules and visual stuff. What do you think?

Just for the end of day 1 I made some sample assets. So here is my version of Discovery and a planet and first time ever: I made background-music 😀

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 50%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Ok, that’s it for day1. As summary it started as usual! 8h works -> restart -> …and then more concentrated works. Now let’s see how far I come. Mabye takeing the jam-option!? Cu tomorrow

Ludum Dare Official Unofficial Mumble!

Currently having an amazing party over 72.249.10.144:64738 #ludumdare! Come swing by!

You can get Mumble over here.

Shoutout to Furyhunter for hosting the Mumble server.

Over halfway, and I’ll finally take some time to sleep.

I’m finally at a point where I won’t change anything any more in the game play.

I still need to improve the UI and mini-map, and create some graphics and sound.

I think I’ll go for a black-and-white approach, just as in the original Scarab of Ra game, but with more detail (rather like Mad World).

If I find enough time I may make some stencil-graffiti-like images. I’m no artist though, but if I keep it stylized it could work out.

Example of a stencil graffiti:

Stencil Graffiti

[/pun]

So yeah, water works more-or-less the way I envisioned it, it does in fact make lakes instead of rivers, but it just makes it that much more dangerous, which is good. The next thing to do is make ore float and do something about water’s dangerousness.

and after that it’s enemy time, I’m thinking a mole and the ever-mandatory ball of slime.

Should I just call it “Chain of Discoveries”?

http://2bam.com/proto/ACOD

Mechanics are buggy (I’M HATING POLYGONS, DAMMIT)

Has only 2 levels for now. Trying to figure out some core bugs.

😛