About time I made a note of what I’m up to! I’ve gone for an isometric-running around trying to escape a mysterious building while being hounded by hordes of sinister enemies sort of thing. Are they human? Maybe they were… once. Who knows! Also, due to the appearance of the tiles I’ve laid for the floor, I am finding it really, really difficult not to add an element of DISCO to this. Anyhow, that’s it for now; plenty yet to do.

Tags: Flixel

Okay, some more progress. It feels like this is getting somewhere.

Pretty cheap programmer art, ’cause I want to get the engine running. Also I need to think about a name for the game. Check out the latest demo here: clicky

Progress has been pretty slow and I’m starting to doubt I’ll be able to finish on time but things are picking up now that most the kinks with collision detection have been ironed out (still some left though). Currently basic physics (gravity), basic game play mechanics (jumping, wall jumping etc), collision detection and a bit of the art are in and finished. I still have a very long way to go.

The basic idea of the game is that you’re a Ninja and you’re trapped inside the deepest part of the enemy’s base. You have already acquired what you have came to do and now you must escape while avoiding detection. If you get seen you lose. How deep the game play gets all depends on how much I can add before running out of time, I’m hoping to add things such as smoke bombs to help avoid detection and shuriken to help dispose of lone guards.

It’s quite daunting how much progress everyone else has made in the same amount of time so I’ll have to try and pick up the pace.

Here is another screenshot of my game.

Now I have a real sprite class a background and 3h extra sleep :).  Graphics looks stupid, this should be better.  Also I need a trash-story ;).

Escape, eh? Here’s what I plan to use.

-AS3, Flashpunk

-Paint.NET

-pxtone

– Magic the Gathering

– DnD4e

Because today is my monthly gaming day. It seems that my friends will tolerate my attempts to make a game while we play, let’s see how that goes!

…for dinner.

Just a frozen food pizza with added mozzarella. ’twas okay.

Tags: foodphoto

In the wise words of Ash Williams from Army  of Darkness: “Oh nooo! I’ve slept too much!”

But having your batteries charged makes a big  difference. I can already think clearer than before. Here’s a simple screenshot:

What I’ve got so far:

1. Moving between rooms engine.
2. Crappy collision detection (improving that now)
3. Layers! You can walk behind stuff!
4. Walking and running, with animation. Looks pretty good in game. Running animation is just a sped-up walking animation right now.
5. The character also blinks. Not a huge thing, but these details are the things that bring life to characters.

Now to fix the collision and make locked doors and interactive objects.

Since I don’t have a lot of time to code anything complex, everything is being hardcoded and precomputed. Here’s what the collision map looks like:

Green is ground. If a color has red=255, it means it’s  a doorway or a “transitional object”. Run into it, and the game will pick up the blue component of the color as an ID.

This ID is used to load another room with a fade-out fade-in transition. Simple stuff.

The ID is not unique for the game, but for the room.  This means that, in a single room, I can have “doorways”  to up to 256 other rooms. Ain’t that cute?

(Currently, I’m just loading the same room over and over. It’s actually quite creepy. I think I’m gonna use this!)

When I change a rooms, I have a state object that gives me the previous room name. I can use this to place the character in the proper location in the new room, as well as run state-specific events later.

All right, enough talking. Must write more code!

Here we are: the whole physics are working, the ball bounces against the walls created by clicking ! I’ve created some sprites using Inkscape, and SFML2 is really awesome to work with (it doesn’t get in your way and it gets the job done easily) !

Next on my task list: creating a level, probably adding scrolling and maybe some music and sound effects ! The title screen also needs some polish, but it does its job for now.

That's a bouncing ball !

So, last post I told you guys that I had completely changed ideas, and that’s true. Howeverm I thought it’d be fun to run through a few of the ideas that almost made it. I was initially going to make a game about trapping yourself, and then you were able to escape by pressing the escape key. However, you needed to be trapped to do it. So it was kind of like a reverse sokoban game. It wasn’t fun. A second idea was a game that revolved only around using the escape key. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that wasn’t fun. Anyways, I’ve added teleporters to my game and included some new levels (I’m at 7 now).

Here my newest level (definitely NOT going to be until much later in the game)

I

If anybody takes takes the time to comment, well, what kind of features do YOU think should be included?

Tags: journal

We had to overcome some PureBasic quirks, but the title screen is there!

I got a (basic) level editor, tile drawing, collision, crappy lightning and player movement down.

This is how it currently looks like:

In the end it’s going to be even darker.

But first I need to actually make a game out of it.

haven’t decided on an idea yet!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5227720/LD21/game/demo2.html

Now with extra plot!

Using this method of game design has meant I’m spending most of my time on content. I am happy about that. On the other hand, gosh my plans call for a lot of content.

also I hope people who want to play my game enjoy reading

It’s been roughly 11 hours since I got up (silly Europe timezones). And I think my progress has been pretty steady so far. I was most worried about not liking the theme (it’s OK, if a bit too broad), but more importantly not being able to think of any decent ideas. But I think I like what I came up with:

You help damned souls escape hell. I call it “Soul Hellscape” You play the game by placing a “Holy Light” beam that attracts nearby souls and thus lets you guide them to the gate of hell, where they can escape. All while several types of baddies attempt to nibble on the delicious, innocent souls. You can zap them with a “Divine Lightning”. Plus a few more details and mini-features. Here’s a screenshot of the game:

You can download it here (Requires XNA and .NET):

http://blog.capdb.net/SoulHellscape.zip

Contrary to what I had planned, I spent very little time with a sketchpad. Call it an “inspiration”! Then again, my programmer “art”work is as good as it’s gonna get so it all balances out ^_^ Although I will expand on the variety a bit tomorrow. Oh, and no sound.

P.S. And let me tell you, #ludumdare IRC channel is a serious distraction.

Tags: CSharp, xna

After a mishap with my ankle involving a cartwheel, I decided to get some sleep last night. Now, I’m ready to get started. Very simple concept – escape mazes and collect things along the way. The mazes will have ways of making sure you move quickly. I learned a bit of pyglet before I fell asleep, and I’m going to try to figure chrono-lapse out now, and I just installed kolourpaint. We’ll see what I can make before I fall asleep again!

Tags: cartwheel, chrono-lapse, collect, escape, herewego, kolourpaint, mazes, pyglet

I’ve made a lot of progress and have a lot of stuff working. The towers can now shoot and damage the player. Once I got that working, I switched gears to map generation. I went ahead and spent about 2 hours making a rough little editor so I can make rooms easily (pictured below). Theoretically the game will stich together a bunch of these rooms together and the player will have to navigate though them using whatever items he can find. I probably could have made these rooms in a text editor just as easy, but I always find that tedious and I like the visualization doing it this way.

Tags: Ludumdare

So uhh… yeah. Message systems rule, rite? Well mine won’t have annoying textboxes ^-^

Not doing so well, but this whole experience so far has been both enlightening and hilarious

I dunno if the name is going to stick, but here’s the game’s design:

OMG! A boulder!

In the world in front of you is a little man who is very fast but unfortunately very stupid. He has found himself in an ancient crypt and wants treasure! Naturally, this crypt has a giant boulder, lava, shooting arrows, walls closing in, and more hazards. You are a benevolent wall-building-spirit who is tired of seeing adventurers die. As a result, you will be building walls to protect the adventurer from traps, help him collect treasure, and get him out of the crypt before he is crushed by the boulder!

Click-and-drag to draw a wall. Character runs and does very simple pathfinding around obstacles. Collect treasure. Don’t die.

I’m starting late but I’m really looking forward to this one!