Alright i have been hard at work again today and have finished my game play completely, that is right i have finished the meat of the game, only thing left is to add in sound and music which i am leaving myself 3 hours to do tomorrow before the contest finishes, i am not foreseeing any problems ;).
Again if you want to give the game a go head on over to www.nothinggames.com/ld/skx/ and enjoy! see you in 8 hours my fellow LDers!
Level Transitions!
Robots!
Splodeys! (that look crappy in stills but I like how it looks in motion)
Death!
It just got to a point where it is fully playable (minus the “you win” screen), but it has only one level, only one type of enemy and no audio. Working on all that now!
Tags: progress update
Got a lot done, sound and graphics are all done. For once I didn’t use sfxr! Now the game is only missing interesting levels… which is a quite a problem, but I’ll have rest of the evening to concentrate on that.
Here’s a screenshot again (not much progress visible there though):
Ok, I’ve fixed the collision detection problems, and implemented a 3D arrow that points to the exit, aswell as the health bar and the score section…. it’s certianly coming together, I think I’ll go try my hand at the….. music *dun dun duuun!*
I’m making a fairy tale of a self-reliant princess who has to rescue herself from a tower. Pretty crazy, right? The mechanics are pretty simple, so now I’ve got to focus on content. Here’s how it’s going:
Despite the mind-blowing 3-D graphics, this is a pygame (SDL) project. Still sticking with what I know here.
I have actually felt really productive today, even though the effort is not showing much in the screenshots. Now there are a number of skills and upgrades that you can buy for the coins you collect. I’m currently working on the shop screen and it’s taking a whole lot of time to get all the components right.
I plan to implement highscores and maybe achievements if I can make it.
Shop
RED ALERT! I really need Photoshop help, I’d HUUUUUUGELY appreciate it :O
What I need to do is change a color on multiple layers. I’ve got 27 layers of an animated character. Character is black with white eyes by default. However I need to reskin him a few times, one of which being orange with blue eyes. I COULD use an adjustment layer, but then when I Export Layers to Files it ignores the adjustment layer :'(
How do I replace a color (black, and white) on multiple layers?
I would HUGELY appreciate help with this, big time. 
Hey, all! I meant to post this yesterday, but a certain server decided to be a jerk. Anyway, here was a screen of “Shotgun Man Will Shoot You” yesterday, along with one from just now. I spent a lot of time making it look nicer yesterday, so hopefully it’ll turn out well.
#gallery-1 {
margin: auto;
}
#gallery-1 .gallery-item {
float: left;
margin-top: 10px;
text-align: center;
width: 33%;
}
#gallery-1 img {
border: 2px solid #cfcfcf;
}
#gallery-1 .gallery-caption {
margin-left: 0;
}
/* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */
This one’s from yesterday morning.
Here’s from this morning.
Um…the uploader’s a little…Well, you can see them, anyway.
When I started work on my LD21 entry, I have some vague notion that I was going to have to create maps, AI, and easy-to-use controls… but I really underestimated how much time all of these would take. It looks like I’ll be able to finish something, but I’ve already had to cut about 90% of the feature I originally planned
Map Editor (4 hours): Rather than manipulating large arrays of numbers in my code, I decided to make a simple map editor. In the end, I”m sure this will pay off because editing the arrays by hand is very tedious (and error-prone as you get tired).
Screenshot:
Collision detection/resolution (3 hours): This was actually the first time I’d written collision detection for axis-aligned boxes and walls. Fixing all the issues where you could get “hung up” on walls was a little tricky, but now I”m happy with how responsive the controls are.
Enemy AI (2 hours): This is still a work in progress. My original plan was to have enemies move about randomly. It took about 10 seconds of gameplay to realize that this would not work. To fix this, I had to add scripted paths (and update the map editor to handle this).
Line of Sight (2 hours): Late last night, I realized that I needed honest-to-goodness line-of-sight testing to make the gameplay fun. I wasn’t totally sure how to go about implementing this and I was pretty tired, so I was little worried. Fortunately, I was able to come up with a very simple algorithm and implement it, even in a half-awake, half-asleep level of consciousness
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WkDGD1BSZw
Screenshot:
FOOD!
I had some delicious nutella crepes for one of my meals yesterday, and they were amazing? Crepes are the greatest contribution French culture has ever had on the world.
Cookin' a Crepe
I made a giant stack of them.
Nice stack, baby
The nutella formed into some very strange letters, too!
Mysterious "LD" in my Crepe
So far, I have got nearly everything working that I had planned for the game yesterday. Now I just have to mix it all together and turn it into something that feels like a game and design a few levels. And maybe also improve the art..
First screen is from yesterday before I went to bed. Second one is from just a few minutes ago after I found a better way to get the theme into the game.
In the last – frantic – 3 hours, I started Ludum Dare, wrestled with my screenshot program, wrote a level editor, went for a walk and took photos with my new camera, and did absolutely no programming on the actual gameplay.
However, I’m very pleased with my progress. I now have my game loading pieces of “level” from the level editor, which includes some basic physics that lets the pieces float around in the screen. I chopped some of the photos up and now have rudimentary graphics, which look something like this:
It’s very tempting to keep adding graphics and making things look prettier, however I really need to get some gameplay in there. The next step is to add a character who’s trying to escape the end of the world by running across the pieces.
And of course I need to give the game a proper name. I welcome any suggestions.
11 hours and counting! Time for dinner.
Okay, so maybe the name is now Death Boulder Jones. I have decided to call the main character Jones, as a little “hats off” to the character who inspired him.
I have the following done:
– Jones runs! He steers!
– Jones takes damage and dies when he hits traps!
– Traps are made:
– Arrows that shoot from faces in the wall!
– A massive boulder that follows you unceasingly!
– Bubbling lava pits that kill you instantly if you touch them!
– Click-and-drag to create walls in order to protect Jones and show him where to go!
– Moar exclamation points!!!!!
Still to do:
– Game tweakage
– More traps
– Level design
– Powerups
– Money pickups
I have a few hours I can work today, then that’s it. Hoping to get this done to a level that makes it fun. Still, I’m really very proud of this already and I think it’ll be great for only having 10 hours or so to work on it.
Outrunnin' Boulders and Arrows
OMG Close Call
Magic Walls!
I did it! I thought it might take 2 hours if I ran into problems, and it of course, problems cropped up!
But it’s done. Finished. Submitted.
I may upload an OSX and Linux version too if I get time.
Post-Mortem to come tomorrow.
Main points:
* MMF2 allowed rapid development + SWF export (Linux & Mac to come hopefully)
* Game idea changed mid way due to a couple of things that just weren’t working > result = better game!
* Finished what I set out to do 😀
So, I managed to get my game logic finished last night, and now since the site is back up, here’s a demo (without so much
milo.grotonma.net/uploads/LD21.zip
It contains no instructions, so I’ll give a brief rundown:
1) Each weird redish-thing is a building. If you click on it, cars spew out. Red Building = Not evacuating, Green Building = Evacuating, Gray Building = Empty.
2) Cars always take the shortest path to the exit (which is any road leaving the left side of the screen). This usually causes gridlock.
3) There is a deadly wave bearing down on the cars. Evacuate the buildings before it’s too late (or don’t; it’s your choice).
4) Clicking on roads makes them into 1-way roads. Cars will obey these UNLESS there is no path to the exit.
Okay. That’s where I am now. Also, that’s an entire game. That means that tomorrow is left for assets, tweaking, and making menus and stuff. Which is AWESOME because, last time I did the Ludum Dare, I was working on the game logic until up to the deadline! Also, my timelapse is working this time! Things are really going up my way this time.
Of course, I have to say that if I had been a fool like last time and tried writing a fairly elaborate physics engine, I would be failing again (Read: All the blog posts I wrote last time about HOW ANNOYING that code was. Debugging it took up, probably, 90% of the entire time I was working on that). Also, every system in this game is discrete, so I didn’t waste time on difficult math (I love doing that math though). I think that, even though I only intended to do the Jam this time around, I’ll be able to make the competition, which is pretty sweet (although, I don’t have any windows computers nearby, so they’ll have to compile for themselves; shouldn’t be too hard though, since its only dependency is SFML).
I’m quite pleased with this game, especially considering that the theme completely caught me off guard (what were you thinking, people who voted for “Escape”?) and that I didn’t really have any good ideas (~first 16 seconds of my timelapse = creating a game below my quality standards) until about 8 hours ago. I’ll have to think about whether I want to keep working on this game after the dare (it needs more spicing up though).
Skel as I call her, is now moving around the map, doing some A* and playing some directional anims.
The A* is pretty rough and boxy, and the anims states don’t have transition or loop etc. Oh and the Idle doesn’t play half the time its meant to but still it will do for now.
Onto Doll NPC to give you the basic overview and first up two missions, one a ground puzzle, the other is looking a little more action orientated
Saturday was both a disaster and an extremely productive day. On the positive side, I was able to hammer out lot and lots of code and complete everything on my todo list for the day.
On the negative side, I wasted many hours sorting out issues to things that shouldn’t have needed to be sorted out. Included in the problems was one in which my ftp program was uploading a text file as ASCII when it was being read locally as Unicode. This resulted in the game working fine locally, but as soon as I or anyone else tried it online, the thing stopped working almost entirely.
I also had a code issue in which I wasted nearly two hours trying to sort out. In the end, I decided to recode the offending block of code. Thirty minutes later, I had a perfectly working second version.
A little frustrating that the 2-4 hours I wasted may have made next next 11 hours much much easier, but such is the nature of the Ludum Dare, I suppose. At this point, I’m treating my first Ludum Dare like an Ironman. I’m not here to win, I just want to cross the finish line. Regardless of what happens today, I will cross the finish line.
On to what I have so far:
Expanded the level a bit more to allow for testing. My first trap has been implemented – As noted by the /0 block. Monsters are functional and working.
I feel I Should expand upon my theme idea a bit. The basic premise for the game is that the player is a Virus, escaping the Anti-viruses of the system. Due to lack of time, the end-goal will be to survive the longest before being overrun by the anti-viruses. To aid in the escape, the player will have access to 3 traps that they can lay. Essentially the traps all have an effect on the anti-viruses chasing you. My current goal is to have 3 different anti-viruses with different behavior for the final release.
With the 11 hour deadline looming, I feel as if I’ve already wasted too much time writing this blog post. Sheesh, back to coding.
Implemented Water System and Material harvesting
Plants have a need for water, well watered plants take less damage, not watered plants starve.
Material is Harvested from Plants, build a Harvester
ToDo:
Energy System for buildings
Win/Loose conditions
Different attack animations for different buildings
A Menu
Content
Maybe sounds
