Well, less slacking off. Might have been able to do more, but with temperatures well above 27°C , I just took it easy. Also, BBQ yesterday and only waking up around 13.00 didn’t help either… (but no hangover *cheer*)

TimelapseDayTwo

Pic:

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Escape the Fate, a suicidal puzzle game, is now done with a handful of hours to spare. I’m surprised I made it considering the roadblocks. It was certainly a motivating experience and I’m willing to do it again.

Not right away, though.

Escape the Fate: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5551

 

Tags: pygame, python

After 40 hours of hard labor, and 28 hours still ahead, our little project is working out quite nicely.

We’ve got graphics, sound effects, mines, rockets, turrets, and highly amusing physics. What more could you ask of… well, of our game.

It’s more or less a topdown agility shooter puzzle flyer of sorts. And we haven’t got a clue what to call it.

Unfortunately, the sparkles and damn hawt action don’t show up on screenshots.

It may look simple, but dear GOD this is a hard boss D:

I am going to switch to the jam, as I can’t keep up with it, and finishing it now would just make it look shabby. Anyhoo, I’ve got the gun done, the movement, the sheep and the health and scores and stuff. Pics tomorrow, now I sleep.

Tags: gmae, jam, switching

Enemy AI. CHECK. Multiple levels. CHECK. Sound / music. CHECK.
I want more gameplay elements in there, and is therefore adding pushable crates. Will hopefully be able to finish that before the deadline.

Tags: update

Stranded is an arcade-style game where you are a tiny brown spider living in a research lab, and you’ve recently gotten a new resident… a teenage girl was  throw into the room last night by some very angry men.  She cried and screamed all night, pounding and kicking at the door, throwing things around the lab.  She finally exhausted herself, and fell asleep on the floor.  She awoke this morning, sobbing.  She wants to run.  She wants to Escape.  You will help her Escape, and free yourself as well.

You can play it now here:

http://sandbox.lakehomegames.com

And you can see my entry and leave comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4703

 

 

 

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This is getting a bit stressful. I’ve been busting my ass off since yesterday, my project isn’t that ambitious, but I fear I won’t make it for the main compo deadline, I will for the Jam’s though, but that pisses me off as that was not my intention

I’m liking the game so far, no name yet, it’s a somewhat trippy puzzle-adventure game. Here’s a screen. Back to work!

Tags: s, screenshot

Well, as it turns out, my netbook’s graphics card’s lack of Linux support has doomed my entry from the start.

I’m really upset about it.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’ll think of something for tomorrow and do it as a jam entry. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll be a game.

Until then, I’m out. Not forfeiting, not quitting, but letting this game go for now.

I’ll post again in the morning.

Peace, love, and another day’s fight,

— Henry

Scripting enemies is very time consuming. I am 1/2 way through it, an I may not finish in time.

My android app is coming along! Just got enemies animating. Need to finish plugging in assets, implement two or three more large features, then generate some levels and screens! Damn, I’m coming down to the wire again, but my entry will be a lot more sophisticated this time. This one has been fun!

Tags: android, escape, final escape, java, LD21, ludum dare 21

I did a lot of work and have little to show for it, but I have a solid frame to build my game on. I’ll explain my game a little bit more. You are a king and you have to escape a city with the help of buildings around you. A lot of gameplay is inspired by Age of Empires, so think of that. I have units that can move and attack each other, and pretty solid controls.

I’m partway done with the GUI. What I mostly have to do now is art, AI, the GUI, and some loose code to tie that in. The art part is a little hard for me but I’ll try and get it done. Maybe I’ll take 72 hours and make a really polished game.

Well, here’s some crappy art so you see what you’re in store for.

I find when I run my game that the FPS is terrible, also not always winable and glichy as hell. So I not going to compete in the compo. But here is my entry for posterity. But I plan to finish this at some time and make it a proper game.

http://megaswf.com/serve/1164242

Arrow Keys to Move, Enter to restart. Goal is to get out of the well.

OK im tired but happy, here are some pics, its all HTML5.  Time laps and details to follow later, after sleep.

 

I think I’m done, at least within the compo time limit. I could spend the last few hours trying to fix more bugs, but I’m not very motivated so I’ll share some early postmortem thoughts instead.

I have a process I’ve developed for game design based around these concepts:

1. The way people become interested in a game is through its pieces. Good pieces = instant tutorialization and obvious mechanics. Therefore I now always start off by making good pieces and a fitting playfield for them. In the past I didn’t do this and my games sucked. Now they suck much less.

2. I try to achieve good game dynamics using the available pieces(or tailoring the pieces a bit more to fit). I use a very specific definition of a game dynamic, which is the intersection of two feedback loops produced via game mechanics. In general, the more intersections that occur, the more compelling the gameplay is going to be. Game events that occur outside of a feedback loop should only exist to support the fiction of the game pieces. That said, I don’t follow this rule too rigidly – it’s a model that I’m trying to test, not a dogmatic order – and I try to name and categorize what I’m achieving in broader terms. In this case the theme of “Escape” suggested someone nearly powerless, trying to escape hazards.

Starting from that little kernel of an idea, I drew some inspiration from other games: the “Deathrun” maps seen in some FPS games, Tower Defense games, Transformice… It seemed inevitable that I would do a multiplayer game where you had a whole group teaming up to get past a “big boss” type.

So I drew up my game’s playfield in Pro Motion, making some early assumptions that I’d have a low-res, single-screen game running more-or-less strictly on a tile grid. I was a bit worried that the playfield would be too small, but it turned out not to be an issue. As I drew I quickly decided it would be an ice cave rather than a generic cave, because the ice cave would suggest more interesting pieces. (as someone remarked, I could have done a lava cave instead. Different game, maybe that’s “Heartbreaker part II.”) Quickly I nixed the nascent generic obstacles I had first thought of(spikes, gun turrets, etc.) and replaced them with their ice-cave equivalents: icicles, slippery ice patches, and a yeti. I thought about the obstacles as I drew up the character portraits. First I did the Ice Queen – an obvious villain for the cold setting I was developing. Then I soon decided that it was tending towards a magical feeling, so instead of generic runner characters with torches or something, I opted for the counterpart Fire Mage. The “broken hearts” setting came out of that – I had been wanting to use the title “Heartbreaker!” for a while, though I had had a much different kind of game in mind for it. I had some trouble getting the portraits looking good, but left them for the time being.

By this point it was getting a bit late into my first evening, but I pressed on to set up my base code at this point. It’s all dribs and drabs from earlier projects – the build system, some timer code, the scene initialization process, the Player.IO connection code(the cloud service I’m using to host this and run the multiplayer APIs), the algorithm for collision, the sound management. I finished with just a tiny bit of proof that I could make a real-time multiplayer game – I’ve never tried doing a complete one start-to-finish, though I’ve worked with multiplayer/network code in other contexts.

The next day, I basically pounded away at the game until it succumbed to my will. It’s not pretty code and has some major architecture flaws, which is why I’m unmotivated to try a bugfix now. The biggest flaw is that out of inexperience I tried to push too much data into too little state, resulting in desyncs between the mages and the queen’s viewpoint, and various bits of oddness with how the characters move around(e.g. when a piece is brought onto the playfield the mages can be killed by its tween animation – a very unexpected game mechanic). Also, Flash is generally poor at networking for games – it supports some obscure stuff(various kinds of streams and proprietary protocols) and it has UDP in the AIR client, but if you’re making a web game you’re basically stuck with TCP, which means things periodically go berserk as the reliable delivery “catches up” with the game.

In any case, by the end of the night I had everything in a more-or-less playable state, which I mostly credit to player.io having a sane API and a decent service. I even had some players who got addicted to the game, buggy as it is. So I went to bed, and when I woke up(a few hours ago) I immediately got to work on some sound and music assets in Renoise, cleaned up the portraits a little, and got it all integrated. And that’s where I’m at now…

I’m a bit torn between trying to rearchitect the code after the compo is over and make a bigger game out of it, or just moving on with my main project, Moto. I guess I have some time to think on the matter.

I’m wrapping it up now because I have some stuff to do tonight and I figure I’ll just submit what I have so far, since I won’t be able to get much more done anyway. Overall it was a great weekend (even though my end product didn’t have anything to do with escaping!) 😀 Good Luck to the rest of you finishing up!

Arachnid Escape: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1022

Another Ludum Dare beaten! YAY! \o/

You’re trapped in some kind of endless corridor, with two hooks and lava chasing you. Best story ever, right?

Try to escape the advancing lava with your hooks and swing around obstacles in your way, as the wave gets faster and faster, until just a single mistake seals your fate as you are engulfed in the hot doom.

Think you got a good score? Submit it to the online highscores and compete with all the players!

PLAY IT! – VIEW THE HIGHSCORES! – VIEW THE ENTRY!
Post Mortem coming tomorrow. Maybe.

Hi, everyone!

So, I recently submitted my first game for Ludum Dare 21 competition – Maze Escape, I’m very proud of myself, cuz I finish it and code everything I was planned

Because I recently moved to another city I haven’t any workspace in my new apartment, I only have a table, a chair and my MacBook 13″. Before this moment I didn’t use it for the development and this is my debut. For creating my game I used this tools:

•     IDE: Flash Builder 4.5 (any alternatives are welcome)
•     Engine: FlashPunk
•     Art: GIMP

My game doesn’t contain any “mad skilz” art or any sound, I think for the first time I did good enough

Thanks to my friends, who tested this game during this two days, and thanks to all Ludum Dare competitors, guys, you rocks!

Tags: ld48, ld48_21

Qua-tzar is a simultaneous turn based multiplayer game where opposing sides are trying to get their BITs (small squares) to the spaceship (long white rectangle) at the other side of the board. The TZAR (large square) is the only piece that can capture BITs. The DOM (diamond) cannot be captured, nor can it capture other pieces. The advantage DOMs have is if multiple pieces move to the same tile, the DOM will beat the others in a competition. If two pieces with the same priority attempt to move to a tile, neither one will move there. If this doesn’t make sense I will be writing better instructions soon.

Next step for me is to polish the game and if there is time I’ll start adding more special pieces. It looks like I’ll be able to finish it on time.

Click the screenshot to play it (Unity 3D plugin required)

Tags: unity

I have spent a little short of 20 hours on active development. This is roughly two fifths and not quite the 48 hours. Then again I haven’t broken my 1am-10am sleep routine and did take a break or two (or more).

Since my first post, I have been partly polishing the existing features, partly struggling to add new ones. New large ones include a few more objects, a minimap, lighting, sounds, and tutorial and menu screens. In the end, I rather go for a finished, brief game, than a feature complete, but too rough-around-the-edges game. Then again, I went for a “sandboxy” gameplay, so you cannot really tell something is missing until you try it first. Here’s a screeny:

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

http://blog.capdb.net/SoulHellscape2.zip (my LD48 entry)

P.S. sfxr is awesome, I did not expect to have any sounds in the game, given very little prior experience with sound effect creation and total lack of musical hearing.

Tags: CSharp, xna