There be strange red towers on that there island…

I wonder if there is any link to the red lightning that destroyed our ship lad…

It be Dangerous to go Alone! …

Dangerous Tower Island

What be that thing on the rock…

Hmm could just be just the thing to get our own back me thinks! ;0)

Working on the intro cutscene. The player is the little guy on the left.

So here’s another screen shot to show off…..well….it doesn’t look much different than the last but I have made good progress! So far I have finished:

• Humorous intro
• Graphics (for now)
• 5 of the boss attacks
• Particle effects and funny comments the planets blurt out when you hit them
• Squashed some bugs

What’s left is to add more depth to the game and more parts to the boss sequence.  I also need to add sound effects and create a UI and score. I hope you guys are doing well!

Cheers!

I was really ill for a while today. I haven’t done even close to enough. Oh well. I added some weapons, here’s one-

I’ll see what I can salvage here tomorrow.

I’m going to go sleep in an hour and a half, and I’m thinking I’ll probably call it quits for development tonight. Starting with not a single clue on what to do and getting to this point gives me hope I’ll actually finish by the end of the competition. Still using the programmer art and all but art is slated for tomorrow anyway.

You can't tell, but the rectangles are meant to be robots.

For now I’ll be hosting the prototype on my site at http://cirr.info/ld20/LD20.swf so you guys can prod it and poke it while I’m asleep. I’m aware there’s a ton of niggling little bugs and not much to do yet, but have faith! Greater things are in store! Oh, such greater things. Probably. Hopefully. I think. Erp.

EDIT: So apparently my site is down. Here’s an alternate link until it comes back up: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7124203/LD20.swf

Just finished a custom platform-oriented physics engine for JME after trying to get JBullet to work properly.  I’m seeing better framerates too (in the hundreds, versus in the tens with JBullet), at least with a reasonable amount of moving objects. When the movable objects and fixed platforms start reaching into hundreds the framerate drops, as I’m using a brute force search at the moment (O(n^2)).  Could be improved with some simple optimizations (don’t check collisions for stationary objects or objects that have fallen out of the map).  Probably I could have gotten JBullet to work too, but I’d rather spend the time implementing a simple solution I can understand and tweak, than reading manuals and debugging external frameworks.

Visually the game hasn’t changed much, except I added in lighting.  The spheres look positively yummy with a bit of shininess and lights from two directions.   I’m dedicating tomorrow to content creation and gameplay implementation.  The goal of the game will be simple, move from a spawnpoint to a goal-portal on each level, by jumping between floating platforms, and avoiding/fighting some kind of enemies.  If I have time I’ll add some companion for the player to protect / escort.

On the tuning side the my scalaprops library is turning out to be very practical, it allows tuning of game parameters interactively which will be a real timesaver when digging into the content creation.  It will need a bit of additional work to comfortably display all the settings though.

So after a night of sleep, and some annoying interruptions, I’ve been back to work. I thought I’d update with some screens of the progress I’ve been making. I guess it’s a bit late to turn back now, so the likelihood of me scrapping this and starting over again is very low.

It started with no tiles, then simply creating the same set of tiles over and over, then creating from a set of 2 types, then a few more, then I added in an epilepsy background and alpha to test, and that was all last night. Then this morning I started by updating the graphics, and then by adding in slimes and diamonds.

Making great progress, but there is still so much more to do! Good thing there’s still another 30 hours or so left.

Well I’m calling it a day for day 1. Here’s a screenshot so far:

I’m going for some kind of vertical shooter involving a tank. But there’s not much in the way of gameplay in there yet. My hopes for getting a fully-playable game in place in half a day were maybe unrealistic.

I think if I’m going to fulfil my intention of having lots of tweaking and polishing time, I’m going to have to scale down my idea a bit. I’ll sleep on it and I should have a revised plan in the morning.

Tags: end of day 1, moblin, screenshot, tank

This little bugger is “Sam”. He’ll be the little guy used as the main character for my game.

Hope ya’ll like him!

they won’t stop chasing at me

Things have not being going that well for me. I had to rewrite my engine two times. The first time I tried synchronized grid-based movement for the characters. They would use a global variable to slide from cell to cell… but I couldn’t figure out a way to make queues and priorities work. Who would get first dibs on an empty cell? What if there was a really complex queue? Would they figure out a way to move out of the way? It also looked a bit strange with characters not being able to move into seemingly empty cells because someone had called dibs on them.

So I tried something a bit more analog, but made a mess of the code and there were big problems with getting stuck against tiles and not sliding against them properly. The maze is really tight so you need to be able to easily slip around corners.

Finally, I managed to write a huge chunk of code which slides the player around edges, e.g. if pressing against a wall the game will look for a gap nearby and walk the character towards it. I also added buckets which helps me with depth sorting (overlapping) and it will also make collisions easier to detect later. Some characters will be vulnerable from the back. Slimes are sort of omnidirectional though.

Early array fun. Druaga colors.
Mac screencaps being incredibly slow.
Rewrite. Buckets. Pause function for screencaps.

There’s a lot of work left, but perhaps I shouldn’t underestimate what I have finished so far. Regardless, it will be a busy day tomorrow.

http://www.livestream.com/m2tmgaming

Watch me program/draw/get this done in real time.

last thing ii can remember is that i made a sprite shit bricks. literally. damn, i’m tired, and my body didn’t really like me drinking too much coke. hands are shaking 😀

Sloped terrain technology unleashed

When I laid my head down to rest last night, and shortly after my prayers for others to potentially choke on their baked goods — not die or anything, but maybe just a 48 hour coma with no long lasting debilitating effects — I pondered sloped or a tile based level. I have chosen sloped as I think it’ll be more visually appealing to see these little fleas attacking things trying to climb up a hill. So I spent some dev time creating a way to move along a sloped terrain. Works pretty good and I’m happy with it. I’m going to imagine I might have to do a little more work for a wider object to angle it right on the slope. Like a collapsed corpse for example.

You can check out the demo as it stands here :
flea_bitten_demo

sloped magic, and you are safe from the fleas for now...

You still can click to add fleas, and for the moment you are safe from the fleas as I have not taught them to traverse slopes just yet. So you are safe for now.

I’ve decided to take a slightly different approach in development to ensure i have SOMETHING by the end of the contest. Rather than design out 10 levels, I’m going to develop this as a single screen game for the moment. Focus on all the core gameplay elements/concepts within that range. Then if there is time at the end.. i can churn out more content and scrolling capabilities.

Next up is objects in flight — such as a bird maybe? What might happen if a bird flew low enough that a few fleas could jump on him ? what would happen if he took off and while in flight that bird was bitten and zombified as well ? How quickly could zombification spread under such circumstances? would a helicopter be safe ?

It still looks quite unassuming, but when you go see a magic show — does the magician just show you all the tricks right off the bat ?? hell no, that magic man has some shit up his sleeves. He gets you to look one way and next thing you know he’s sawing you in two and everyone is laughing.

Ok.. back to work. I think i need to go learn some magic tricks too!

Even though the last few hours haven’t been effective, it has been a good day all over. I am quite confident that I will finish in time. I’ve cut out half of the content I wanted in the game but there is still quite an amount of graphics to draw, but I think I can get away with recoloring sprites. No new screen shot as the game looks just like the did in the last shot.

Tomorrow’s check list:
– let heroes buy things at shop
– let salesmen sell raw materials at shop
– let enemy castle generate tougher and tougher enemies
– let castles have energy
– win and lose screens
– balance gameplay
– draw, draw and draw

Cheers for now!

You now have the right to be scared, but don’t wory, there are flashlights to be inserted next 😛

http://www.mediafire.com/?fw5gdla68pv5mf4

PLEEEAAAASEEEEEEEE download, play, and give feedback!

A cute otter to draw attention to the post.

Okay fine. here’s a screenshot:

Now to spend some time playing other people’s games, if there are any available.

At first, I thought that the theme was not good. At all.

Then I got an idea.

Those are trees 😛 it's a pseudo-3D thing

I spent most of the day sleeping and helping at a yard sale. Then on my way home my car’s back right ball bearing started making a racket, and the sound doesn’t go away until the tires stop rolling or I turn really hard.

And I scrapped my ideas from last night and decided to make a game about a photographer that parachutes into unknown territory where there’s a lake with black water and unknown inhabitants. It’s dangerous to go alone, take this backpack! And he loses the backpack immediately; you can regain tools one at a time exploring later. The only thing done now is an aesthetic-gimmick to make things rotate and scale based on perspective.

I’m hoping to have a story and a dirtbike but some things may be cut for time.. Though I did sleep through 25% of the competition already. Maybe cut some sleep?

Everything I have done has failed now for no reason I can understand

I hate making things

I’m pretty happy with my progress though

Got all the basic elements working, just a few little things still to do, then I can concentrate on art, level design, and stuff ^^

Just a quick progress report before I go grab some sleep (no screenshot because it’s just boxes and lines at the moment):

• I have a tank that moves realistically enough.
• The tank has a turret that can be controlled by AI or can follow the mouse for the player.

I still need:

1. Guns – lots of guns! (I lie, just 2 actually)
2. Enemies – lots of enemies! (Same lie)
3. Terrain
4. Intro, menus, etc…
5. Graphics
6. Sound

So as of now I’m very far behind, but I think I’ll be able to accomplish a lot more tomorrow – in theory there should be fewer distractions from working on the game… if not then I’ll switch to jam to polish it a bit more on Monday (a holiday here in ZA fortunately).

Good night all!

So, my concept has been to have the item you’re given be an acid spewing thing! It’d be a puzzle-ish game where you try to kill some evil thing that is quite dangerous by using your acid to melt enemies and walls!

While developing this game, I’ve just been constantly running in to problems with movement; I didn’t think ahead far enough, and decided to use lines, which, considering that I neither had any base code for that, and have never written code to move stuff along lines affected by gravity, has proven to be a huge pain. Of course, being a person who really loves continuous systems, it’s not surprising that I missed the discrete alternative. I don’t think I’ll be able to write the code for enemies that move in the time, and I’ll definitely have to keep the bugs of the system I implemented in mind while I’m designing levels so that players won’t think to do something that will cause weird movement (hehe… good practice there. Of course, as previously mentioned, I have no idea what I’m doing, so those bugs aren’t gonna get fixed in 48 hours, so it’s better than nothing). These technical limitations are certainly gonna show in the final product, because it really limits the amount of stuff I can do with my concept.

Other than that, it’s going better than I expected for my first time, considering I’ve never really finished an original game before due to my ambitious goals (See: Above). I’ll probably get something out, if not for the compo, I’ll probably be able to get it ready for the Jam. Also, I screwed up my timelapse, somehow. I am the image of competence, aren’t I?

Difficult to gather my thoughts and list everything I’ve done since this morning so here’s a screenshot.  It’s all playable and I’ll post up a preview version soon BUT BACK TO WORK .

After a trip to a V2 test site from WW2, I am now officially 12.5hours behind schedule with only 4hours of work in… So far the kernel is done, engine is done, threads are mostly done and particle effects are done along with menu launcher… And to top it off, a nice screeny of the main menu with particle background:

Yo, I’m EmptyFlash, working on the jam with Nineball. I didn’t check in, but I’m writing my game with Java, using only standard libraries, and he’s using Paint.NET for graphics. I was pretty upset about the theme, but what ever, we’re making it work. Here’s a screenshot of our progress:

Most of the graphics aren’t done yet, and there are a few things not implemented yet, but coming together quite nicely.

Still did not find the problem with Opera and IE. Added a tweet function.

http://keksdev.de/kitten.html?w=108,117,100,117,109,32,100,97,114,101

I read a study somewhere, sometime, that claimed really productive people slept more than others. Well I think I’m gonna give that a try here, I’ll need all the help I can get. I’ve got a lot left. Ugh.

At least I’ve got something that looks like… Something.

Me and my friend this

There is no way you could escape.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 8:38 pm and is filed under LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Stupid helicopters chasing my little birdy. Well… I don’t have a helicopter sprite yet, so there are these nice humans instead. Oh – and I named the little bird Ludum (for no obvious reasons 8) ). So it’s now “Ludum – the magic bird of AWESOME” 😀 Next is: helicopter sprites XD, keys to unlock doors and triggers to do events (like spawn even more bullets)

I decided to work on the art aspect of my LD20 entry instead of coding for a bit. But it’s going slow as hell, because I haven’t pixeled “seriously” in a few months. I wasted a bunch of time drawing brick tiles, before realizing it was ugly. So I backstepped that, and tried to make something a little simpler.

Needs more work, but here we go!

Alright, well, I better take a supper break soon, and then I’ll resume work.

Made some graphics, I think I’ll work on some levels now.

Playable! Click here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4785344/ludumdare/LD20WIP/index.html

Update time! I have made some progress! Buttons for selections are in and the item panel is done (aside from how to actually deal with the items being “used”). In any case, here is how it looks after you select ITEMS:

Game idea is based around this old man in a cave (yet to be drawn, wizard placeholder visible) who all adventurers go to for things, namely items and advice (much like Zelda geeet iiiit?). Anyway, people come in, ask for something and you are free to give them something suitable or something completely random and zany dialogue occurs. You are scored based on how well  you do, but going for a high score would be just as much “fun” as going for a low score so the player is free to do whatever. The title of the store changes depending on score.  Tomorrow the plan is to implement a bunch of worlds/levels that are simple 10-15 second minigames that show the adventurer using the item/advice the player gives them. Example: Trying to do a shmup with a banana is not going to go well, or trying to host a dinner party with a robot is… actually that sounds awesome. You get the idea.

Sleeping takes way too much time. I think I lost like 6 hours there!

My idea for this LD was pretty simple: Since it’s dangerous to go alone, bring weapons! Absurd weapons! LOTS of absurd weapons!

Basically, the concept is that you have a friend (call him Q, Lucius Fox, Isaak, whatever) who likes making weapons. Every time you go on a mission, he gives you something new, shiny, and destructive. And you always come back thanking him.

So… now that I have a full parallax-based sprite engine (hooray for PyGame!) I’m starting on actual game mechanics. I’ve had 3 slightly different concepts for how to execute this concept:

• side-scrolling space shooter (similar to Raptor)
• vertically-scrolling space shooter (similar to Tyrian, Galaxians, etc.)
• top-down, free movement hover shooter (similar to Zone 66)

I’m still not entirely sure which to choose, though I’m leaning toward the Zone 66 style, only with better controls.

Here’s a screenshot of what I’ve got so far. Its an adventure game that I’m calling Robot Village.

Dinner was great:

And after, well, I started by drawing some imps, but the end result was that they looked more like hell-rabbits than imps, so I decided to change the story…

They have a particle system to be more hellish…

Anyway, they already wander around (they don’t give chase yet), and all is script driven (which is quite nice)…

Anyway, I’m calling it for today… 24 hours still to go, and I have most of the actual game to make (including the object management, etc). Anyway, I should be able to finish this one, at least enough for the compo…

Task list:

• Framework working
• Loading a level data (from a DDS image)
• Rendering the level (3d generated from the level data)
• Drawing the character
• Rendering character
• Design levels/items so I know what to implement
• Spawn points
• Bind spawn points to scripting events
• Draw “old man” and do speech system (seems like a polish thing, but it’s kind of important…)
• Give and take objects to the player (through scripting)
• Spawn creatures and give them rudimentary AI (also through scripts)
• Draw and animate imps
• Wand of Unsummoning
• ….

soundtrack attached to the scene,
lots of zombies generators marks in the city and some zombies are coming !!!!

Tags: mailman, progress, zombie, zombieesss

There be strange red towers on that there island…

I wonder if there be a link to that there red lightning that destroyed our ship lad…

It may be dangerous to go alone!

What be that thing on the rock…

Hmm could just be just the thing to get our own back, me thinks!

Maybe if I were to pick it up and press leftly thus it would be thrown and thence thrown if I were to press again would return such are the ways of enchanted things.

They be no use for carpentry though…

Red Tower Island

That’s it for day one, sleep needed!

Viewable here. Man I spent a lot of time on IRC…

Added some smoke effects for my downed pilots, and their parachutes:

no big change between this image and the last one

enemies implemented with a box hunting other boxes and a box dropping smaller boxes. about an hour ago i hoped that drawn better graphics would raise my coding spirits, but after inserting them (see the mailboxes), it actually looks very ugly.

not really what i would call great

1am over here, so i’ll stop coding and grab some sleep. I don’t want to mess up the sight algorithm.
Tomorrow’s objectives include :
*Sight
*Item implementing and interactions
*Mob implementing and interactions
*Random starting set, with a guy saying “It’s dangerous to go alone ! Take this , this and this !” Of course, some of the items can be completely ludicrous, forcing the player to count on his wits to earn points (or those items could give extra points).
*Point system, not shown during game but only at the end. Different actions give different amount of points…
*So obviously, a losing screen

Still quite a lot to do, but I think it’s possible ! Anyway, HUD is implemented as is a text system. I can “feed” the message system and the player will read through the messages with the spacebar as they came. This will be useful for fights.

You can try out a demo here : https://rapidshare.com/files/460001144/BUILD1.swf

And a little screenie just beneath.

Good night and good luck to all !

Hud in game

Oh, yeah… screenshots.

Yay for color-blind friendly game

Yay for no bugs! \o/

I know it doesn’t look much different than my previous screen, but the engine has been improved a lot! Tomorrow i will implement entities, collision, and… well, gameplay!

Done a bunch of art on my craptop which I’ll incorporate into the game tomorrow. Made some music too.

Yayy

Have a screenshot as I celebrate whilst watching Alien!

Is that a...sock on his hand?

Here’s what my game looks like so far:

I’ve spent too long on the graphics and not enough getting the actual gameplay to a point where I can find out if it’ll be fun, but I am at least happy with how it looks.

The idea is a puzzle-exploration game with completely unique enemies that you certainly won’t recognise from any other game.

Tags: screenshot

We just sad down and discussed some game concepts, and we all agreed with making a zelda styled game. We are 3 people. 2 Graphic designers and 1 programmer (me) :). Here’s an EARLY screenshot of the attack collision :).

Anyways, back to work!

Tags: zelda game attack collision awesome life

I have decided to name my almost functional game “another rainy day” because it has a dark feel to it but is also relating to the rain, which will play a key part in the games atmosphere.

Flashlights now ready, ghosts can be scared (minimum 2 hits) and even banished (4 hits) with them, ghosts do non harm yet and there is no target, but that’s next, graphics, audio and leveldesign are also pending. Messing around with those ghosts can be quite funny.

you can play the current version here

Here’s the trusty sidekick that my main character will have to walk around during the game.

I’ve added the protagonist .. the harmless cabin dwellers!

I also decided that my photos of the physical can of Blob Repellent weren’t awesome enough, so I CGed the label on so it looks shinier. Next up – making some real gameplay .. Once I’m happy with that it’ll be time to wrap things up with some good ol’ fashioned polish (music, sfx, menus!)

-Phil

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 9:44 pm and is filed under LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This is the only thing we’ve eaten today:

At least it’s starting to look like a game now.

I doubt I will finish it, but I’ll do my best!

Although my main theme is ascending a mountain, I’m starting out with some underground sections.

Here, our hero has found the first of his brothers and gets his first powerup.

I am stuck… Love2D doesn’t have a collision engine that I can get to work, and I can’t even seem to get something home brewed made. I’m still trying though!

Well, basic greater tile map is done, now to add spikes.

Greater Tile Map

SFML is not compatible with my IDE of choice, VS 2010, so a few days before the competition started, I downloaded the source code and recompiled it so it would be compatible.

It turns out the source didn’t come with libsndfile-1.dll and openal32.dll, so I couldn’t  use sound until I obtained the binaries. Fortunately I found them in the folder of another project, so now my game will have sound.

I don’t think that I get disqualified for this since I previously declared that I would be using SFML for my project.

Surprisingly I am still here.

Night one was a good start.

7:30pm (pst) start. I managed to get a working GL app with mouse input and some text output.

9:00pm?? mmm burgers

MEAT

11:20pm I had a game design and started to code!

Drinking and coding proceded until about 1:00am when a friend arrived. Promptly forgot about LD and hung out with friend until about 6:00am when I decided I should sleep.

~12:30?? wake up

breakfast cartoons.

mmm food. mmm coffee.

~2:00pm started up again!

Game has enemies with ‘intelligence’!

5:00pm

Mmm leftovers.

Salad + Leftovers

Clearly I need to start busting my arse if I want something more than just-barely-complete.

I’ll do a screenshot post of game progress at the end of this thing. For now all you get is GRATUITOUS FOOD SHOTS!

Now I have missiles, it still checks for Fire( ) every frame so there are a whole pile of missiles launched with each click.  It really slows down the game when there are like 100 missiles going.

So after a long night of sleep, I woke up to get started on my game. Its a bit of a late start, but the engine is almost complete 😀

Here’s a screenie:

Alright fellas, I have a request.

When you accidentally hit a friendly planet in the game, they will yell out hilarious sayings (pictured above).  I want your help coming up with additional funny, wierd, or awkward sayings.

Some so far include:

• What the Wooz!
• Ima turn you inside out when this is done.
• F U bro!
• -__-

Lets hear some funny shit; you bet they will be in the game.

Messenger dog is clearly bemused at the lack of progress today. Nevertheless, things are starting to fall into place with the art, and early code tests finally turned out successful, so I should be okay to achieve something tomorrow, however limited. Sleep now, then work like zoom tomorrow, with some heavy prioritisation on features. o_o

Well, I the “engine” is nearly done. I just need to give the game difficulty progression. I’m confident that it’s going to be fun, and the design is simple enough to let me concentrate on what I have more difficulty in.

I have 4/12 characters. The was unhappy with the 5th, so I’ve decided to redraw it tomorrow. I still have no sound effects or music, and I have no idea how I’m going to come up with some, especially with over half of the graphics still not done… I guess I can record some sounds with my microphone or look for some sort of sound resource generator? As for the music, I can’t exactly compose a tune out of thin air.  Any tips on these would be greatly appreciated. So here’s another screenshot (In the final version the items will only appear when their respective character starts showing up):

I feel like dropping this one. Not because I can’t finish, it’s because I can. Let me explain. You see, I’m working on a visually minimalistic game using Curses. The reason I want to drop out is that my game feels subpar to all the others in the compo, and more importantly, dull. However if I receive at least two comments asking me to finish, I will.

The point is, I want to know if there are some people out there who want to see something like this on the list of games. Thanks for reading.

Hi all,

First day is over. My filmation engine is almost done. I failed with a couple of goals, but not too much.

My partner sent me the sprites for the main character… still waiting for the rest of the sprites, before use them in the engine, so the “graphics” were made by me in the following screenshots:

Still working on the gameplay concept

Good luck!!

Here’s a link to a playable version of my progress so far (click it and go!):

Arrow keys move, spacebar deploys/picks up cat.

It’s still missing quite a lot of content (and quite a lot of gameplay for that matter!), tried my hand at sprite animations for the first time and I think they turned out pretty good.

My IDE is in the browser so it will automatically update as I add new features.

Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Progress is slower than expected, largely due to my lack of experience with Flixel.  I’m pretty happy with the player movement and shooting though.  Next up up is enemies.  But first I’m going to take a break and meet some friends for food.  I’m hoping to have most of the gameplay wrapped up tonight, and then I can spend tomorrow on things like art and story.  No screen shots yet, as it is all still rectangles and Flixel defaults.

Making progress.

Stuff done since the last update:
– prevent the player from leaving the sides of the screen
– Doors to get to the next level
– fix brush drawing to be less laggy
– Ink limits / ink bar on top
– switching ink
– WASD support
– Laser tripwires, buttons
– dying

Stuff left to do:

– Add enemies: turrets, especially
– health system
– crumbling blocks, blocks that appear/disappear with switches
– make current levels fully functional
– Pop in stealth fog and vaporizer fog
– Erase ink, create surfaces that you cant draw on
– ten more functional levels
– End game boss
– Menu stuff, end game / skip level, pause screen
– Saving progress, dialog / instructions
– sound effects, background music,

Okay, first update. I got something together today but it still needs….a lot of work. Here’s a screenshot:

You can move the green square, and attack the other squares that try to hurt you. Never entered one of these before so I’ve obviously overestimated how much I can get done in 48 hours. I’ll try make it be more of a game in the morning.

First, a cryptic screenshot:

As I said, I am going into the “Portal” direction. Without portals, of course, but ego perspective and environmental puzzles will be in it. (Which means that I will have to make some levels, ugh.) The gameplay is finished now, at circa 80% (hopefully the Pareto principle won’t hit me here).

I will go to bed soon and tomorrow work on minimalistic graphics, levels, story, and perhaps sound and music (even though I’ve never done that, but maybe there will be time for it).

You probably noticed that I didn’t tell anything about the game’s gameplay. There is not much to tell, you get a device which looks like a gun, and have to overcome obstacles to reach the exit of every level. At least that’s the plan for now. I don’t want to do the obligatory robotic voice which tells you what to do, maybe I add some NPCs.

So after almost 24 hours of the contest is over, I’m home and going to tackle this compo!! It also means I had plenty of time for conceptualization…

Think Press Your Luck (the old game show) turned into a battle system and event interface, with RPG style stats and dungeon crawling, using a board game as the method of moving around! BOOM! That just happened

Just felt like posting a few screenies from what ive done already:

On the picture above you can see the first enemy i added, ill start working on the watergun and killing the enemies later on the night. Everything looks very promising for the moment and im quite satisfied with it, i think ill be pretty tight with the time (specially if i keep making the animations frame per frame colored in photoshop..)

The main game will be a mix of the classic platform physics; three or more lives, if an emeny touches tou you loose a life, you have to grab some upgrades for the weapon and one or two keys on the way to unlock the big boss.. pretty standard.

Cheers! ^^

LD20 mailman progress – zombies moving and sound from Hamilton Lima on Vimeo.

ha ! zombies moving around in the city, soundtrack playing, each different type of zombie with his different sound ! hahahah I love zombies !!!

next step check zombies colision with the walls and with the main char

Tags: city, mailman, moving, sound, zombies

I’ve just now gotten a proof of concept tile engine scrolling around. It doesn’t draw any characters or do any collision yet. I think I should have done this first, not the title screen, lol.

Why’d you have to snap it in half Tubby. Seriously?

Success! The protagonist has been turned away from his sheep-sodomizing ways and finally rides his trusty steed into – and over – battle.

Made some music in musagin that refuses to export – wasted an hour there, but see where it comes back.

Currently: zombie AI (they need to learn that falling encompasses moving downwards), weapon collisions, cutscene delays and health.

EDIT: Wrong pic.

It was kinda hard to decide what I would do with this theme because it was really not my favorite. But after watching some videos on the internet I got an idea. A banana. In your ear.
The game is still a far from finishing and I need to work on school projects tomorrow so I can’t join the competition but I try my best to get at least to the jam.

Our jam game is called Avarice and it’s taken a while to get the fundamentals down, but it’s starting to take shape. Some of this screenshot is mocked up but most of it isn’t. Most of what you see on screen isn’t where player interaction happens, but we’re working on this part first because it’s the biggest technical challenge. We’re looking forward to getting it done!

Core gameplay mechanisms are getting closer to done -- fun begins shortly!

here’s the latest demo :
Use left/right arrows to move, and click to add more fleas.
Flea Bitten Demo

I also got them to use the slopes, so you are no longer from them again. I added what look like little yellow cookies to you maybe – you ravenous developers with all your baked goods – but they are placeholder art for birds…planes.. and things that might be in the air. As you can see, if given the chance they will use them to propel themselves further into the air!

Fleas if given the chance will seek prey at higher altitudes

Now I am going to move on to the aiming/launching of your little friends. You might have thought that the dude you move around is looking to get away from these fleas. But quite to the contrary, his goal will to infest other things with his little friends. So the next update should have the ability to aim/launch fleas. I believe this is where the game will really start to take shape as I see it in my head.

I’m probably going to want a good 2-3 hours at the end to just focus on artwork. So my goal is to get as many gameplay mechanisms into the game tonight. Possibly a little bit of enemy ai. The introduction of breeding/eggs will have to wait for tomorrow.

I need more beer… I have 2 bottles left in the game dev bunker, and this is not a good thing. I can see it causing major damage to the project. I severely underestimated the amount of beer I could drink in this type of a situation.

So far I’ve been trying to rewrite some example tiling and level code I made before the compo. And since I didn’t want to cheat and look at it, I’ve encountered some bizarre bugs that I didn’t have before. Well, I’ll have to do some serious coding tomorrow.

Maybe I should enter the Jam instead.

Awesome
For the 2nd time my IP got blocked from IRC for no reason

Hey guys – have been coding for more than 22 hours in a row now (not counting eating, etc.), so it’s time for some sleep. What I’ve done so far is here: may contain blood – depending on your skills 😉

Oh – and if anyone could beat level 4 – let me know. Because it was too hard for me XD

Tomorrow I will add trigger to do events, possibly more enemies (bigger ones), more levels and sound. Good night @ all

Well, I finally got a *functional* movement system. Mostly. Except for a little. Or a lot. In any case, I’ve wasted FAR too much time on the movement. I mean, look at what the graphics are:

Pretty bad. I also have to create maps for this, which is gonna be pretty annoying. More content to generate. Ugh… I really should have put more effort into thinking before I developed, because I don’t think I chose my best idea, in terms of a game. Then, I chose to have a system based on lines. I did not realize that I could just do a discrete grid, and that would be equally good. In fact, that would’ve been BETTER because I could have done work on things that weren’t movement. Oh well. It’s better to have this than nothing. Well, I gotta get back to writing code so that I can actually have a product, however bad.

What’s better than an undead baby in order to generate splash domage bullets ?

Even dogs in video games need to do their business:

I know it doesn’t look like much, but I’m having a blast doing this.

I’m getting too ambitious again.

After a slight roadblock because I didn’t test my “new” font code as well as I thought I did, I got more gameplay basics in there.

And also there are enemies. And they can hurt you. Woo. But there’s still no way to fight back. And only one map screen. And I’m starting to fall asleep.

Gonna be a busy day tomorrow if I am to finish this.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 11:51 pm and is filed under LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Just over 24 hours to go!

I’ve just about finished the tutorial level, and am now working on the store that players access mid-way between 2 levels, where they can purchase items with the money that they get during the level.

Today’s Tasks:

* Finish random level generation (Add complexity as level ID increases)
* Store
* More Enemy Types
* Cover System

I’d post a screenshot… but not much has changed in that area since last time 😀

But no show… well there is a show, just don’t want to show it yet.

You’ll understand later.

I’ve been lagging behind on my blog posts – I’m about three progress shots behind, I’ll have to catch up tomorrow as it’s 3am here.

NPCs! Shame that they're mute at the moment...

Here you’ll see Cage Grin, a salesman who just sold our hero a new suit of Scale Mail for one billion ruples.

The trick of the game, of course, is trying to avoid buying the armor. Something you’ll find it very tricky to do.

Sitting here at the 24 hour mark, and things look to be way ahead of schedule.. which is odd.

What we have is a polarity shmup. Most of the vastly different ideas got canned due to balance issues, but I’m still tweaking it a bit. Currently later levels introduce blue ships which can’t be absorbed.

I got a bit ahead of schedule so I’m adding unplanned boss stages in now, which are turning out to be quite fun and very challenging. General polish should be easy to meet and some has already been started. I’ve been going at a fairly relaxed pace too. Overall its a nice change from last year, and makes it far more enjoyable when I’m not frantically looking up documentation every 30 seconds