and animating.. except upside down and huge :S

and fixed

I tried to do a video capture of the game in its current state, but the upload to youtube failed… I put it on Dropbox though, so you can admire the laggy capture and the ugly placeholder obstacles over wich you must try to avoid tripping

BUT I have all the basic elements for my game now, including interactivity. I need to implement proper win/lose conditions, add some menus and context, and maybe record some music/sfx/whatever…

At least this time around things seem to be going my way. Let’s hope nothing bad happens tonight nor tomorrow !

So here’s the video for those who are curious : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17113774/video-day1-20h21.ogg

Stayed up all night putting the platform engine together and now I’m so tired, but I’ve just been writing non-stop about the plot for my game and I don’t know where all of this inspiration is coming from. Now I’m just going to hammer together the levels, work furiously on the graphics, and then sleep straight through my classes on Monday and Tuesday!

After getting back from shopping, I did a little brainstorming about the game. One thing led to another and i eventually settled on this idea.

In short it’s “Exploration vs Minesweeper”

The basic idea is this. You play as a little character who has been sent into a mysterious cave with the aim of reaching the other side and all the glory that holds. Its dark, cramped and scary in the cave, and the place is sure to be filled with monsters at every turn but you don’t know where!

Upon reaching the cave (totally unprepared for venturing in) you are given a magic hammer by a passing stranger (how mysterious). He explains to you that by tapping on a wall with the hammer it will reveal what lies beyond the wall for a very brief time.

Using this knowledge you must decide whether to knock the wall down, and move further into the cave, or try another wall.

If you stumble across an enemy it will kill you, not even the mighty hammer will be able to avert your fate.

Right now all I have is the tile reveal part working, and a rough echo reveal effect (the numbers)

Next i’m going to work on putting the character in which moves around the cave and the basic game logic. (i.e hammering, moving)

Graphics will be up-rezed at the end time permitting, as right now i’m more focused on the gameplay side.

Starting to look rather zeldish…

My rendering strategy is “punish the gfx card” as you can see by the wireframe.

Hopefull it will be playable soon

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 4:55 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.

Cave Jimmy II: Physics Breaker is now running as smoothly and with far better graphics than the original Cave Jimmy, and I’ve even got the original classic umbrella for him in.

But I have no idea where to go from here.

Well, anyways, here’s lunch:

Progress so far.

My game needs a name.

Brainless dude stuck in a magma place

17 hours down, 31 to go!  How have things gone since my last update?  Well… it’s really hard to say.  I took about a 4 hour nap/sleep in the middle of the night, which was probably a good idea.  I’ve written about an additional 300-400 lines of code.  So far, though, I still have nothing to actually show beyond a (new, slightly improved) title screen.

I’ve set up the bulk of my procedural map generation system, which is probably the single largest piece of code for the game… so I’m probably actually quite far along… but so far I still have no art and have ability to actually put a dude on the screen and move him around.  That’s what I’m working on now; a little bit of artwork, and then I’ll be trying to move around a simple test screen before jumping him into the game-proper.

Energy wise I’m doing okay… very drowsy, but a steady stream of caffeine, sugar, and music are keeping me focused and on task.  I’ll probably end up having to take another nap this evening, though, especially if I plan on being up most/all the night.

Hopefully I’ll report back in another few hours with some screen shots, or possibly even gameplay video!

Tags: LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!, pygame, python

+  = BADGER CANNON!

Since I had some work to take care of this compo’s time has been basically cut in half. It’s a simple enough mechanic that is should be done hopefully by tomorrow morningish. Another point whore game here I come! I was going to bike down to the studio and camp out there till it was done, but it has been raining all day and I don’t want to bring the wacom out in the rain to play.  So I might do my art work at home before I hop down there to code.

great progress recorded the zombie sounds, the kids had som fun on that lol, selected soundtrack from http://www.freesound.org/index.php, and found a model to use as city for the game

now its time to rest for some minutes then start to put everything together in Unity.

Tags: city, mailman, progress, sounds

Here you go:

Screenshot features:

• World map

• Small bitmap in a separate window, from which map is loaded. Yes, I’m using bitmap for world map, too.

• Some poor fellows that are later to become prey of evil monsters. They currently just walk around randomly, but don’t walk through walls. They spawn at the magenta zone on the world map.

• Complete absence of animation whatsoever. Also, mobs don’t walk but instantly teleport to the adjacent tile. Smooth movement will be added soon.

• Shoddy programmer art

• Complete absence of gameplay 😀

Tags: screenshot

A 48 hour compo is not the best time to learn all the vagaries of an expansive language.  Maybe I’ll be up for C# next LD.  Let’s give javascript a try instead!

This last hours don’t show much improvement visually:

But below the hood, I’ve done tons of stuff, mainly a Lua-based scripting system capable of driving cutscenes and other game events! Really proud of it, since it can really makes the code cleaner and handling of the lifespan of objects easier…

The old man in the screenshot appears in a cloud of smoke and will give the object needed for the current level… Just need to add the talking component, which shouldn’t be too hard…

Problem is that I’m running short on time (30 hours to go, but I won’t work that whole time, since I have to rest a bit for work next week… )…

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)
• ….

That I’m not finishing again. I’ll see how far I get with this platformer tonight. But otherwise, not finishing. Not even Jamming. Again.

Finished working on the main character and did a blender rendering of what it should like

Well… except for the shadows which are kind of expensive for mobile devices.. and also the cellshading… and probably the diffuse shading will be a little bit different… and probably everything else as well… :p

Yes, these are the final graphics for the game. Deal with it.

All 5 levels are now playable, we have HUD showing magic item cooldown and cloning limit, CLICK TO PLAY:

My TODO list keeps on shrinking:

Things going pretty smoothly, I’m gonna grab some dinner and then on to title screen and cutscenes, then some sounds and music

Tags: flash, progress, screenshot

The engine is entirely done (I hope), with support for scripted cutscenes and automatic level loading.

Now it’s just time to pump out a bunch of levels, tie it together and hope it’s fun.

I’m worried about how long it’ll take for me to upload the final product on my extremely slow bandwidth. Might have to plan for a couple hours of upload time…

Well I’m into it pretty good now. I have to stop doing the frilly stuff before I have an actual game though. As you can see below I took the time to paint both of my robot models – hopefully that won’t come back and bite me.  I’ll be offline for a bit as I am hosting a dinner party – I’ll be back around 8:30 EST for more fun.

I’ve created a victim class that has brains, and zombified the brains of my flea class. The result is fleas that seek out victims.

flea_bitten

yes, they are indeed in search of brains

You can use your left/right arrow keys to try and escape – but even though you might go off the screen — rest assured that even if you are off the visible screen, they are still chasing you through memory. You CANNOT escape. I made sure that you were only fast enough to “think” you could actually escape. There is no happy ending in this demo.

(disclaimer, if you end up using precious hours from your project time trying to prove me wrong by escaping these fleas and therefore become unable to finish your project — i am in no way responsible. But I am not saying that I am NOT putting forth that challenge to prove me wrong. )

I am not entirely happy with the flea movement in terms of jump velocity, and have added that as a TODO for once I have more of the gameplay logic done. This will have to do for now.

I believe my next goal will be to create some type of level. I am kind of thinking that slopes would be nice. I see alot of block stuff going on in these posts. I’m kind of thinking I don’t want these fleas to drown in the sea of platformer clones.

The more I think about this concept, the more I love it. Killing a single flea, is quite a trivial process. But infestation is not at all trivial to survive.

Part of the concept here is that you are playing the role of a zombie. You see, mankind is very well versed on surviving a zombie apocalypse given all the training they’ve gotten via zombie movies. So in this one, merely 4 days after 28 days, you are the only zombie left. I shall not reveal all the twists.. but I shall tell you that your “this”, is a single flea egg. How could such a microscopic little egg bring down the entire world as we know it ? That is a great question, and it truly deserves an answer.

Zombies tend to have a single-mindedness when it comes to their search for brains. In the animal kingdom it is much the same, as it’s often instinctual for them to attack in packs. What if… a telepathic zombie was able to communicate his wants/needs to his offspring ? What if a zombie took the time to hatch a tiny flea egg ? What if that baby flea thought the zombie was his “momma” ? what if they were family ? What if they wanted to join the Mafia ??? errr. ok, that last one is not a part of the story, but if i’ve been trying to work the mafia into this story somehow and sometimes i forget i axed that part.

Anyways. Enjoy this little flea zombified flea simulator with no blood. run you pansy.. run i say. cause there is no hope for you.

Zombified Flea AI development a success