A sneak peak into Galcon for InstantAction reveals this tower of Brawndo Cans!!!

Tags: brawndo, tower

Tags: tower

This is my first LD, I hope I get something decent out in 48 hours. I’ll be using the following tools:

-Python & Pygame

-Apophysis for graphics, if theme allows (Otherwise I’m pretty bad off)

-A bit of Paint.net

Plus my helper…

If it looks like I’m working in a closet, that’s kind of true. My apartment doesn’t have closets, so, ultimately, it is a closet.

Tags: deskphoto

So, with all the hubris and overconfidence of a LD second-timer, I’ve made no firm plans for my participation in this compo. But I will produce something. I’m waiting for the theme to direct me.

I do have three (or four) very general ideas of what I might use:

1. Pygame + Rabbyt (the old fallback, if I decide to avoid … option 2 or 3)
2. Processing.js … but it could run too slowly if I do anything too complicated
3. Some type of browser based scene/image based puzzle/adventure game (think Myst), where the images are served up online, via Google App Engine or Turbogears. Click points encoded using a CSS hotspot grid. Maybe multiple players could interact somehow too.

Everything will be coded on Ubuntu Linux, with Gimp, Inkscape for graphics, sfxr and whatever audio tracker/softsynth takes my fancy (maybe LMMS, since I had a fairly good experience with that last time).

Also plan to use the Python debugger Winpdb for the first time on a project. I feel like it will really help, but we will see …..

Here’s a dump of stuff!  Some food photos, a desk photo.   Plus.. Loli liek corm.

I’ve put a break in to not spam up the front page.

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

This will be my seconds attempt at a solo 48h comp. Previously I had to abandon LD#10 due to work obligations.

Goal:

– Write a simple engine from scratch in C++ using Code::Blocks with SDL libs. Create a playable demo.

Tools:

– sfxr

– gimp

– c::b ide with SDL and (_image, _ttf, _mixer)

I have a development plan to write the engine and I hope to post during the dev. phase to update on my progress.

The most important place of the week-end:

Beds matter. They do.

Tags: deskphoto

It seems to be nearly Ludumdare time again. I’ll be participating again, probably using Perl and SDL under Linux like last time. I’m busy on Saturday, so it’ll probably be more like a 24-hour compo for me. I might try a “simple” sort of game like a text adventure, but who knows? Unfortunately I’m going on holiday next week, so I won’t have much time to play and vote on games either.

yeah, baby.  love you all.  and then some.

I need to flex my mental muscle, hopefully nothing stinky results.

Tonight has not been a good night for technical things; nevertheless, I am making good progress, even though my game idea is enormous.

I am making a strategy RPG based on the Tarot. What does that have to do with The Tower, you say? Well, it’s one of the Major Arcana, and it has a place in the plot I’m thinking of, if I end up getting that far. Game details below the cut.

The stat system is super simplistic: Speed, Attack, Defense and Health, each of which correspond to a Minor Arcana suit (Wands, Swords, “Shields” (Pentacles) and Cups), which you can use to buff yourself or increase stats. The Major Arcana cards each have their own special ability. Some are negative and will happen as soon as you pick them up (Death, The Devil, The Hermit, The Hanged Man and The Tower), most are positive and can be used at any time. You can collect cards by killing enemies or by picking them up on the map.

Here’s a map screenshot.

Here’s my desk:

Yep, that’s a (very dirty) Model M. I love it.

Tags: deskphoto

I’m a big fan of Python and of PyGame. But I’ve been doodling with Processing for several years now, too, and it’s idea of “sketches” kind of lends itself to a competition like this. For anything more substantial, I’d definitely rock it out on Python… and I still might. But the ease of getting simple things up and running on Processing is really appealing, as is the rock-simple cross-platform capabilities. It’ll depend on the theme and the concept that comes out of it, I suppose. We’ll see in about 35 minutes from now.

Tags: processing, python, tools

This is my last meal before the compo starts.

Description:

• Breaded Fried Meat.
• Tomatoes.
• Potatoes.
• Lemon juice.

Tags: foodphoto

Well here’s some oldish images from photobucket. They’re quite large.

http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb182/dazappa007/GEDC0386.jpg

http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb182/dazappa007/GEDC0387.jpg

http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb182/dazappa007/GEDC0118.jpg

Hehe, last photo is great. I’ve had this desk since I was like 5 so it has all of my stickers and crayon markings all over it.

Tags: workspace

Well, this is it. This is where the magic happens.

Tags: deskphoto

I’m up an about, and while the theme wasn’t something as good as say ‘pacifist’, it’s still very decent. Compared to the theme of the last LD it has super mega combo greatness. Only drawback I see is that there could be about 50 tower defense games, and 10 x-jumpy games. So I have no interest in making that, at least.

No, instead, the first idea I had was kind of like Civ., but instead of cities there are towers, and all players have only one tower. Then they need to expand the towers influence to gain more land, and then by exploiting the land keep adding levels to the tower. First I thought like these could by 20th century skyscrapers. Then I thought that perhaps it’d be better to set it in older times and make it like the Tower of Babel. First to reach the sky wins. So that’s the idea so far, yes.

For now, I’ll start by writing some hex playing field code, I believe, and do some test art. I think I will use the D programming language this time.

Tags: idea, log

My name is Emiel and I will be joining the ranks of first timers this weekend. I have no plans yet for what to make or what to use, but hopefully the theme will inspire everything.

Good luck everyone!

Friday dinner waiting for for LD48_12.  Polish sausages with peppers, onions, kraut and a little mustard.  Peas, salad and criss-cut fries as well.

Tags: foodphoto

Here i will be starting my work in the compo. (probably i will finish working in bed with the laptop)

Tags: deskphoto, workspace

Here’s my desk but there’s someone in my chair! That’s Holly, my 5 month old daughter. And believe it or not, this is her second LD compo!!

good luck to everyone!

Tags: deskphoto

hello, this is my first competition.  I am not sure how mine will end up, but here goes…

-ashton379

Here’s where I’ll spend most of my LD48_12

Tags: deskphoto, workspace

Another first-timer.  Should be fun!

This is the box I’m workin’ with. I built it myself with parts ordered from newegg.

AMD Phenom 9850 BE 2.5GHz.

Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe AM2+ Motherboard.

Radeon HD 3870 with 512mb GDDR4 RAM.

4 Gb (2x 2GB) Mushkin DDR2 1066MHz RAM with 5-5-5-15 timings.

ABS Tagan BZ series 800w power supply.

Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 500Gb, 300Gb/s SATA HD.

Samsung 20x DVD+R burner.

Thermaltake Tsunami mid tower.

The only thing I don’t like about it is that it restarts on its own sometimes. The screen will just black out and it’ll boot up as if I had just turned it on. It’s either a power supply issue or it’s my bad for using a factory heat sink on the processor.

Tags: computer

seconds before starting ld12, my desk

Tags: deskphoto

of all the really cool themes to pick, you guys had to pick this one, I hate you… almost <3

anyhoo, I’m setting off for holiday (vacation to you American punks =p) in a couple of hours so I don’t know how much time I have, I might try and get some 3D physics game going with flash. we’ll see what happens.

anyhoo, good luck everyone, and know I’m missing being on the IRC with ya all <3

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 9th, 2008 at 12:08 am and is filed under LD12 - The Tower. 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.

Hiya =] well I took two finals today, completing my summer semester. If my calculations hold, I’ll have an A in environmental biology and calculus 1 woot. This is a nice place to relax after a busy summer =]

Hmm I haven’t written code in months, guess I’ll use allegro with ms visual c++ express as before.

Good luck everyone, may the force be with you!

Tower Power!

Tags: motivation, tower

This is where I’m going to be working. Somewhat cluttered with random stuff.

Yes those are biscuit packets down the far end (fear not, I have more elsewhere), and a Sophie Ellis-Bextor cd (essential listening >.>) half obscured by my cheerful cat. Oh, and a huge plate of pasta for thought fuel.

Now for digestion, and consideration of “the tower”. Not my favourite theme.

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

looking at the crap in the irc channel and trying to think of an idea for the theme while eating my tuna salad.  So far nothing really…

Tags: foodphoto

First I had breakfast.

It was toast with butter and water.  Yum yum! Taste like ghostmas.

Then I tried out basic hex rendering.

Tags: breakfast, foodphoto, log, screenshot, toast

Im mad! you made me wake up at 6:00 oh well at least I’m ready 😛

I have energy drinks(XL), coockies(chocochips), all sorts of drinks(including Tuborg&Smirnoff) and I wont fall asleep never!!!! 😀

heres a screenshot good luck to every one! Tower Power!

here is my breakfast with Akin trying to steal my food 😛

and here are some of my drinks 😀

okay I’m gone to work on My game now and It allready have a name: “AkinTower” (c) Ariel Yust 2008

good luck everyone !!! 😀

Tags: AkinTower, foodphoto, motivation, workspace

Here’s my first sketch of a tower game.  You’re the dude on the tower.  The baddies are on the left.  They’ll be working their way to the right to attack your tower.  Not totally original, but it’s something I think I can make fun.  That’s always been the biggest hurdle in any “out there” game idea I come up with.

Now I just need to start working on the Java objects to represent these game objects.

Tags: ld48_12, sketch

BBQ Chicken, Greek Salad and Egg salad. Thinking tall thoughts. Thinking Atari 2600 … time for some research.

Oh, and while grocery shopping, I got all twitchy with excitement and managed to knock over a box of Okra at $12.99 per kg. Luckily they didn’t make me pay for it, or I’d be eating Okra-based food all weekend

Tags: foodphoto

I have a pretty minimal desk setup (I’m not at my usual coding spot). Also, hooray for late night coding food.

I have most of an idea worked out, but I think my programmer art will ruin it. We’ll see how it goes.

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

Tower huh? I like it. I think I am going to do a side-scroller (I always want to do those). Where you have one screen per level in a tower, with an entrance and one or more exits (Some exits may lead up, others may lead down woo ha ha). Exits may not show up until you collect a certain number of coins. The hero may or may not have a weapon to kill any enemy creatures on the level depending on time constraints. If the hero gets a weapon I may have a recurring boss on every tenth level or so. If not you just get a congratulations message when you pick the right door on on the top floor. That’s the general idea assuming I have enough time and energy. If I finish I think i will call it “Climb Doom Tower”.

Ok, the compo has officially started! I’m already intimidated by everyone’s food photos. I guess I’ll have to step it up hard core. I didn’t make it to the store today, so I have to go without the water jug this time around. Sad…

Anyway – all contestants new and old: don’t forget to make your gameinfo.xml file for the Compo Game Loader. Instructions and Checklist found here.

Good luck, and don’t forget the owls!

Tags: cgl

Well I created a menu screen for this game, and decided to name it Balkor.

Tags: compo, journal

Unfortunately, I prepared myself a really awesome plate of food for nothing. I can’t find my camera!! I think I left it at my other place, so I’ll just describe the food.

Three fourths of the plate is heaped with this pasta salad type thing. It’s shell style pasta with some vegetables in it, mayo mixed in, and this bacon-bits type mix that makes it smell and taste really good. (The shells, veggies, and bacon bits were in a pre-bought box.)

The rest of the plate is taken up by green beans resting right at the edge of the pasta. The beans are laying with a horizontal alignment and are flavored with garlic salt.

I cut two squares of butter into the shapes of a capitol “L” and “D”, placing these butter letters atop the green beans to spell the initials of this most favored competition.

Tags: foodphoto

Yeah… I hate being sick. It was my excuse for not finishing last time, but hopefully this time will be different! I have my idea and plan of attack and even some code written.

Tags: foodphoto

Yeah, this may seem early, an hour-and-a-half in, but I was actually feeling my way around how the  toolchain I’ve been developing would actually work in an engine for a few hours beforehand, and decided that the whole concept needed a do-over. Feeling out those problems with was my real goal, and I’ve got tummy-aches from my illness(it is being mean and nasty and letting me only tolerate sugar water and maybe some milk), so I’m not gonna stress over it.

to all those who have delicious meals prepared for LD12. may I humbly remind yee,

….all I have is …. .

teh food of gods

..

(and cheap bastards)

Tags: foodphoto, i'msickoframen

I’m relying on the power of ABBA to give me a cool idea before long. Breakfast photos coming.

Oh, and seen on IRC:

Tags: motivation

So it has begun! The theme was among my favorites as it’s an open theme. Lots of games can be made with a tower theme.

I have an idea of what kind of game I’d like to make. The gameplay details are still fuzzy but I have enough to get started so now that the caffeine is slowly starting to work I’ll start the coding.

I’m not using a fancy pre-made engine library so I have to do the boring stuff again. I hope I don’t waste the whole day just to display some 3D objects, so that I can start working on the interesting parts. It’s annoying to have to code stuff like texture loading or a timer in every compo but at least we’re not using the insane “mechanical cat” rules where you weren’t even allowed to look at code you had written before the competition (apparently the poor people competing in PyWeek still have to do that). I remember losing hours because of that stupid rule during the making of my Lightstream48 and Ring48 games.

Tags: log

Waiting for the magic to begin . . . .

Two hours past, no ideas, and no still inspiration from Tigger. Time for a bike ride to the corner store for some mind fuel.

Tags: deskphoto, workspace

The story so far:

no love

Woke up early today at 06:15 CEST (which is unusual..), but haven’t really done anything since then, except having some more or less vague ideas about what I’m going to make. For the code part I was planning to do it entirely in Lua, using the löve game box thing. I’ve briefly looked at löve once before, but discarded it then because it was missing a few features I’d like (such as fixed timestep). For some reason I thought I’d actually give it a chance though, and what better time to try out new things than during Ludum Dare? It does seem to have some nice parts, and assuming I could get it to work it’d save a fair bunch of engine coding in favour of actual game development. So, that’s what I’ve mostly been fiddling around with for these past few hours since I woke up.

I won’t be using it, though. I do like parts of it, and some annoyances are bearable or can be worked around (fixed timestep can at least be approximated, with some slight drift), but there’s some serious issues that can’t be overlooked. For example, I can’t get it to load any png images (“png library error”), and the love executable sometimes segfaults on exit.

Also, I get the impression this isn’t actually intended to use for stand-alone games(?). I couldn’t find any way to get it to autorun a game on start, you have to pass the .love file or directory as a command line parameter. A bat/shell script easily fixes that, but eh. Also, there’s a ton of dependencies, so packaging the final entry would be pretty involved for the Linux version at least (though they do provide Windows binaries).

I’ll just have to code up some Lua game engine myself then, won’t I =].  I’ll begin work on that in a little bit I guess..

—
recording a timelapse in linux

This comes a little bit late perhaps, but people always ask about this, so.. To record a timelapse in Linux, first get scrot for capturing screendumps (some distros have a package for it). You can use some other screen capturing tool if you really want to, but scrot can capture screendumps without annoyingly freezing the screen like many other screen capture tools seems to do for some reason. Then just run that every x seconds with some shell scripting. Make a directory somewhere with a couple gigabytes free space, enter it, and run this (every 30 sec here):

while true; do scrot; sleep 30; done

Hit ctrl+c to stop it when you’re done. Now you’ve got a directory filled with lots of huge image files, which you probably want to combine into a video somehow. Er, I apparently lost my script for that, but the mencoder man page should be helpful =]

I just woke up and saw that the theme is “The Tower”. No idea what to make yet, but I’ll start with some breakfast: croissants and coffee.

Tags: deskphoto

Already settled on my design and have a pseudo-working prototype. If only sprite collisions weren’t so cumbersome to do properly…

Except for doing such unproductive stuff as showering and doing laundry, I’ve drafted out the intial idea. Thought I’d share it with you.

Base tile types:
Clay – together with water and a worker gives bricks
Moutains – together with two workers gives stone
Forest – together with a worker gives wood
Field – together with a worker and water gives food
Water – nothing, but provides water to nearby hexes
Sea – together with a worker gives food

Created tile types:
Fundament – created from stone, allows for building tower, on rock it doesn’t require stone, on water it requires two rocks, and on sea three.

The tower:
Building new levels costs a bricks or stone and half that in wood per level already built, plus food for each worker, and as many workers as levels are also needed.

Workers:
You gain workers by area of influance. Area of influence is decided per tower level. 1-5: radius 1 (up to 6 workers), 6-10: radius 2: up to 6+13 workers. And so on.

Workers actions:
Workers can either build, produce or do nothing. Building costs food. Produce costs nothing.

Roads and channels:
Channels gives water to distant hexes. Roads makes it possible to transport goods. Costs nothing but a build action per hex. Can be built beyond influence point.

Ships: Allows fishing further away.

Alt. 2: Must build quarry, lumbermill, farm, brickmaker etc before getting resources from them. Or else have them as optional bonus givers? Could also build/work beyond influence, but at half speed?

Perhaps a bit too much stuff, but it’s just so I have where to aim.

Tags: design, log

Finally, after two and a half hours of thinking, an idea! A very unoriginal one (it’s, uh, tetris. With guns), but it’s good enough for a first try. Time to prototype and roll a d6 to see if I should sleep (no d20s on hand).

Tags: muscle, stalling, tower

Ok, after prototyping with parts from a board game, and drawing some, erm… concept art… I have an idea. It’s not very well thought out yet.. but it’s something.

EDIT: I just came up with a completely different, much simpler, much better idea. So there will be no more rookery. Phew…

LDT +0245

Local Time: 7:45

The plan was to get up at 7 (LDT+2) check the theme and be disappointed, think about the theme in the shower and during breakfast. Instead I did that without the disappointed bit, The Tower was one of my favorites. 😀

Leftover idea if somebody wants it: you play a giant eye at the top of a tower, kill pesky hobbits before they get near your volcano.

Breakfast pic:

Got to go, this game isn’t going to write itself.

Well, as Ed Murrow would have said: Good morning and good luck.

Tags: foodphoto, journal

Well I’ve just finished composing 2 songs, they are both very short but you guys can understand why. I also generated some sfx with sfxr. I’ve also converted all of the sound files to Java’s .snd (or .au) format, and got the sounds loading and playing happily.

Tags: journal

Well, here we go. I’ve gotten the basic idea for the game already figured out and a little progress on the construction, and the plans for implementing some of the systems are coming together. I plan to use C/C++, SDL and OpenGL to make the game, so it should be not only pretty smooth to put together, but nice and portable, should anyone want to.

Finally, here is a beautiful shot of some of the snack materials that will be within my immediate reach during the competition:

More updates later.

Tags: foodphoto

I have a cunning plan. I’m just worried it’s rather too ambitious given the time frame.

I’ve spent a couple of hours creating some pretty crappy (yet stylish) 3d models (yep, too ambitious…) and knocking around some OpenGL setup code and texture loading. Hopefully it shouldn’t take too long for me to stick in a .obj model loader (I’ve got the file format in front of me, and all I need are the basics, so about an hour or two for this I reckon).

Maybe one more tree, several bits of tower and a wizard later I’ll have all the models I need, and can start the actual game coding… hmm. Back to it!

Im going for a Tower Defence with resource and upgrade trees.

Title screen working, and filling the screen with towers works also.

Tags: 2D, flash, resouce, tower, tower defense, upgrade

07:01
Moment of actual laughing hysteria, subsequent to a ABBA related chat on IRC. “OK i’m really sleep deprived. i’m actually considering the title ‘the super great ABBA tower of DOOM'”. Don’t laugh, it might come out this way.

07:14
I may have a serious ABBA based idea. Anyway, it’s an idea and I’m in desperate need of ideas.

08:something
Breakfast. Both photos are from my kitchen. One I ate, the other I didn’t. Sort wisely.

08:a bit more
OK, I have a stick man with a jetpack which responds to gravity and keyboard. Now I need gameplay. And focus.

Tags: foodphoto, journal, motivation

And now it’s all whiteboard’d (yes I have a big whiteboard). Here’s some really low-quality pics of most of the whiteboard… I’ll actually be surprised with myself if I get everything implemented in time.

Tags: journal

So, I’ve been lurking on IRC but remaining mute … deep in thought (plus a little bit of Olympic mens beach volleyball … Go Australia !! .. just beat the Brazi… er… I mean Georgian team).

I saw Jach mention his whiteboard, and thought, what the hell, that may help. So fired up the Wacom and let the Gimp off it’s chain:

I’ll leave everyone else to have fun speculating the what these diagrams mean (like I even know myself yet ). It’s a likely to be a two player game, unless I can make some AI for a CPU player.

Ok, I have a totally different concept now. It is perhaps doable in the weekend. So here’s the first screenshot with some towers in it..

It’s going to be an auction/action game! And no.. that’s not a typo, it will have auction and action. Whee.

Tags: journal

Ok, it’s almost 3am and I’m heading to bed. I have an idea about a Wizard who must fight his way up tower levels to face a final boss. I have some working code here http://www.fivefables.com/ld/tower1.htm and I’ll keep at it tomorrow. See ya!

The Lorax

Ok, i think i will enter. Tower is not one of the themes i voted for but whatever 😉

Interestingly we had the same topic a while ago on the 3h Gamedev.Net compo.

This time i’m trying for a demolish-the-tower-with-as-little-as-possible-money-used. And probably some more stuff if i can get a decent damage routine going.

For now i’m still partially using some art from my LD#10 entry, but they’ll be replaced eventually. The goal is to get a working prototype as soon as possible.

So i woke up and saw the theme was Tower. Not what i hoped for and i didn’t have any ideas in the first seconds.

So first some breaksfast and a little C&H for inspiration!

Tags: foodphoto, ld12 food

(thanks sulix for the word and the idea)

Tags: motivation

Since so many people got a kick out of my Awesome! brand paper towels, I thought I’d juxtapose them with my Optimum Power cereal:

Awesome. Just awesome.

Tags: foodphoto

Tags: foodphoto, motivation

I’m sort of a climber. And pondering about the teme, i stumbled upon Spiderman! The real one. Alain Robert.

You will not be Alain ofcourse, unless you finish the game. Then you get the Alain Robert award of stickyness. Or something.

The game will be something like this: You have to drag someones hands/feet to different position on the building/tower and if it’s good, he won’t fall down. During the climb there will be numerous hassles like birds, window cleaners, office workers, and policeman trying to stop your tour the force.

This might be a bit too difficult for a first game, but trying doesn’t hurt. It will also involve some physics i guess, and i wonder how good i am with that.

So this will be it. I wonder where i’ll be tomorrow.

Update: I might do something different altogether.

Tags: idea, LD #12 - The Tower - 2008

09:01
I seriously need to find what to do next, instead of playing with the jetpack guy and idling on IRC while making posters. 1 days 19 hours 59 minutes left. Oah, that’s a lot.

09:20
Starting some collision detection code. I hate it. But I need it too.

09:22
First backup. My backup system is as follows: regular copy on the external hard drive, plus FTPing to the family computer downstairs. Paranoia, yes.

09:43
Colision detection works with rectangular shapes. Yay. It was pretty easy, actually, once you realise you should check for non collision cases instead of the opposite (http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article735.asp)

10:10
Randomly generated platforms, all with colision detection. Maybe it will need a bit of optimisation…

10:33
Getting a bit slow at innovating stuff. Maybe it’s time to make a blog entry and take a walk.

Tags: journal

After i got my idea, i really got involved in the proccess, and i forgot to took pictures and write a journal. So I did small video of my progress.

owerview

Here the plot. The great tower has fallen, and the poor bystander need to run for his life. He need to watch out for rocks, branches birds, which could slow him down and beery him under the rubble. It should make for a funny game, i hope. Think ill call it tou (jappanese pronounciation of tower )

Tags: journal

It’s 4:46 am here and I have a bit of insomnia.  Anyhow, I spent more time than I should have creating the main character for my game, since so much more needs to be made.  My original plan was to write a simple 3D engine, so here’s Castle Man looking at something that cought his interest:

Tags: LD #12 - The Tower - 2008

Well yesterday I was all “welp, I don’t want to make one for Evolution”

So all night I was trying to work out an idea for it – and came up with something awesome!

Then I wake up and find out it’s tower? RAWRG

Oh well, I’m doing something anyway – here is desk.

Nomming cornflakes – BORING BREAKFAST IS BORING

Tags: desk, deskphoto, foodphoto

Good morning everyone. “Tower”, eh. Hmm. I’ve got two ideas in mind at the moment; the first is a simple platform game and the second is more of a strategic defend-the-tower kind of affair. I think for the sake of keeping it simple I’m going to have to go with the platformer.

My weapons of choice are:

• Java (going to use basic awt stuff for 2d rendering)
• Eclipse IDE
• Graphics Gale (for pixel art)
• The GIMP (for any CG art)

and if I have time,

• Cakewalk (for music)

This was my incredible breakfast of porriage (made with water because somebody used the last of the milk)

Tags: foodphoto

And buying towers works, they can cost gold and wood and should be taking time to build. My goal is to get it playable and have sound and music. Something I’ve neglected in my prior entries.

Well, looks like I’m with PoV, not going to be able to continue on LD12. My wife is off to Seattle next week for her grandma’s funeral, so I’m not going to be a total jerk and work on code all weekend. I did come up with a concept, feel free to implement anything from it that you’d like. I basically wanted to flip tower defense, and make it so you were intruding a fortress (giant tower with guns)

Look & feel:

Very few colors, either monochrome with green pixels, or inverted with slight shades. Very sprite heavy 2d graphics, with small particle engines that use transparencies (removes the true old-school feel while still feeling really really cool)

The main character is either a super deformed ninja, a less super deformed ninja, a karate robot, or a robot with huge hands.

Enemies look like evil undead zombies, the fortress looks like some kind of laboratory that would spawn evil undead zombies.

So basic gameplay mechanics –

2.5D, you can move left right, slightly up and down in perspective

Two attacks, one is for launching enemies, one is for smashing enemies. The game is pretty simple, try to take down the tower’s defense system so you can infiltrate it.

The tower has 4 methods of defense:

–  1: swarming guys at you from an opening in the front. This is actually how you wind up doing the most damage, because the minions swarmed at you make ammo that you can juggle and fling back at the fortress. When you launch an enemy, they temporarily fly off screen, then on their way back to earth you can either jump and launch them towards the fortress, jump off of them, or launch them into space again using the launch attack.

– 2: two laser cannons that are rather difficulty to kill, and will fry you if you get too close to the tower when they are activated. You MUST destroy the laser cannons to get into the tower, or else you will get zapped.

– 3: missile launchers on the top of the building. Although these are somewhat docile, when they do launch a missile or two, they can cause serious harm. You do not need to destroy them, but doing so will help you greatly when you’re being showered upon by missiles and bad guys.

– 4: finally, the tower itself has health points. You can’t just enter a fortress without destroying a bit of it first!

The game also implements a time limit, so you can’t dink around for too long, and a health bar incase you let too many minions hit you, or one too many missiles injure you.

Yeah, so I really can’t work on this this weekend unfortunately, next week my wife is off to Seattle for the week though, so either I’m going to work on a new TIGs entry for “demake”, finish Ultraviolent Moon Patrol, work on beatShmup, work on Tetris for NES, or start some totally new game. Anyways, I’ll lurk on the IRC channel and judge games

Bit late I suppose, but just to make things clear I’m using a really simple template for Slick apps which does nothing but opens up a window and listens to key events, that I’ve done beforehand. You’re welcome to it, of course, but I doubt anybody will find much need for it :>

Tags: LD #12 - The Tower - 2008, template

I have written hex picking code, so now I could add some kind of interaction. Might be fun. Also been to the store and bought some microwave food for tomorrow. I really should have prepared yesterday, but you know what they say: “If you work all day and play all night you don’t have much time to prepare for LD48”.

Also bought some cheap low quality donuts.

Tags: donuts, foodphoto, log, picking

For my first compo, things are going well. I have an idea. I have a prototype and I have icky, vomitworthy, stretched and scaled programmer art.

The idea is based around owls (as I can’t draw owls, at the moment they are O.W.L. spy planes) that poo on towers. There is one evil tower and several good towers. The aim is to destroy the evil tower while harming as few good towers as possible, without being able to tell one from the other. I hope to add a time limit and owl limit (or perhaps owl feeding limit), and possibly some powerups.

So far there are:

• O.W.L.s
• Poops
• Extremely dodgy particle effects.
• Code to remove particle effects if the framerate drops.
• Randomly generated levels.
• A poop sound that changes pitch depending on owl height. (But that doesn’t work perfectly).

The game is being developed in C++ with the SFML library. I hadn’t used SFML before, and I quite like it, although its sound code is horribly broken and there are some grating design issues.

Unfortunately, my win32 machine is br0ken, and the game has been developed under 64bit linux, so I may have to release it on a platform that no one has :(.

We’ll see how this goes.

Happy Hacking!

Woken up about 2 hours ago, and saw that the topic is Tower… Basically, it sucks… My wife came up with the basic idea of what I’m going to do: a brick tower building game… the game part is still unclear, but I probably will think of something… I want to try to have most of the game built today, since tomorrow I’m off to Dublin and will loose lots of time in travels and such…

Anyway… Here are the obligatory pics:

My office:

First food of the day:

And the screenshot:

Tags: breakfast, desk, deskphoto, foodphoto, journal, LD #12 - The Tower - 2008, log, screenshot

LDT + 0725

Local Time: 12:25

Progress is being made. Unfortunately, I can’t draw. And the collision code seems more buggy than I thought. Oh well, still plenty of time.

Tags: journal

Here is the initial design I’ve come up with. Over a year ago I wrote down a one-liner idea about defending a castle, and these notes flesh it out a bit more.

I want a microphone because I really do want my knight to say “STAB!” when you mouse over him.

Level generation is mostly complete, most of the player gfx are done.

Now its time to get the game logic done.

Working for about 4 hours now and I only have this design made in inkscape and some code written to setup SDL+OpenGL and some Stone throw code. The only thing it does is set an initial speed and position and then can be thrown way.

Screenshots:

I’ll post screens of the code after a while.

I’m going to make a platform game about climbing a huge tower, where each floor is a new level. I’m not sure how the gameplay will be, but here is my first little screen shot.

Spent far too long figuring out the .obj loader code (just a stupid mistake too – using glVertexPointer twice instead of glNormalPointer). :-/

Have discovered that I probably need some kind of camera class (I may just blag it with glTranslatef), and am beginning to wonder why the heck I decided to make this thing 3d. Also need to set up a decent input system somehow. This is all stuff that could have been done before the compo really. At least I’ll have it set up for next time though.

I leave you with a random picture of a white tree half underneath an unfinished heightmap.

Woke up a couple of hours ago and saw the theme. Cursed. Threw a couple of ideas away over breakfast. If anyone wants it “Extreme window cleaning” is up for grabs. 😉

I’m now going to attempt a steam-punk-esque platformer (with a twist, so hopefully a bit unique). However it’s going to be a lot of code and art so I don’t know how finished it’s going to be, so I’m keeping this breif and to the point.

Progress so far is a blank window with some text in it. Woo!

I’m finding IRC and the compo blog to be terribly distracting, so I’m going to go dark and thrash out some code and try and really focus…

A lot of the progress on the game isn’t visible, because the cards aren’t showing up on the screen. They are, however, being shuffled and dealt, and the programming for most of the Minor Arcana is done (those are the suit cards for those of you not familiar with the Tarot). A lot of the stat work is also done. No enemies yet.

Screeny:

Also, from what I understand, I am NOT allowed to scan in pictures of the Rider-Waite tarot, or use any public domain Tarot images, so I am probably going to either mspaint the card art or, if I get ambitious, break out oil paints.

More screenshots when I get cards showing up on the screen proper and playable.

– What is your name?

– Tenoch

– What is your quest?

– Looting the closest store for more or less advisable food.

And then cooked a little while watching the Olympic Games:

Let’s get back to work now. I found that I was more productive with paper and pencil, in front of the teevee and with things to chew than in front of the computer… I got a redirection for my game. Yay. Let’s code now.

Tags: foodphoto

And here we go with some demolishing action. You can switch from build mode to action mode and watch the whole building collapse. Or not.

Adding particles was a good idea, it makes it look quite nice pretty easily. And it’ll probably add for another game element: Try not to break too much from the nearby buildings.

I can’t work the full 48 hours (family time!) but i’ll try to get a half decent game finished though. Anyway it looks i’m at stage based design again. Looks like i’ll never get rid of that

Whoever’s idea it was to put the Save/Publish buttons on the right side has some weird ideas. Do not listen to him/her again.

Dinner for night one. The Parmesan cheese should spell “LD”.

Meanwhile, the game progresses… The homework less so.

Tags: foodphoto, LD #12 - The Tower - 2008

Well, I fail .. but here’s my concept art:

So the concept was you have your PixelSlaves build your PixelTower .. and you could whip / feed / water them, and give them more straw and mud to build your PixelTower.  But, I’m not really sure if this game idea is in good taste, nor am I sure if it would really work out to be fun anyways.  So I think I’ll leave the experience to your imagination.

I’m also a bit distracted by my iphone Galcon project, so I’ll be working on that a bit, but I’ll still hang out for the LD festivities today   I might even bring in a surprise!!!

Tags: conceptart, fail, quitters

Ok, i made the litle criter jump. The pixel art has exhausted me. I need a brake. 😛

Tags: journal

When I heard the theme last night, I thought I’d try to do something special. I googled “define:tower”, and saw that it could mean someone who tows, and thought I’d make a game about someone in a spaceship, towing wrecked ships around. The graphics were supposed to be Wing Commander style.

Of course, now that I’ve slept a bit, I realize how utterly unrealistic that idea is, so I’m reusing whatever code I can and starting over with a much simpler idea. 😉

Here’s a screenie of how far I got last night (about three hours of work):

Click here to test it (applet)

There’s no actual gameplay in there, and you can’t move your ship, so don’t expect too much. 😉

Last night I made some notes and drew a picture of my idea, and I felt ok about it. This morning I woke up and felt a little lackluster about it. Part of the problem is that I don’t particularly like the genre of puzzle, plus I don’t like games about timing (i.e. pacman, avoiding your enemies by timing your moves). And I ended up making my idea both of those. I think I can redeem it from timing, and add some sort of weapon, so if you don’t want to time your moves with the guard’s patrol, you can just kill him. But that is definitely far off in the future.

I think I will go ahead with my current design, because I’m committed to not being tied to it when I want to change stuff later. I will try to reconsider the game after each feature, so hopefully I can push it towards a better design without spending a lot of time up front. Also, if I finish all the features today, I can always dream big and keep going, right?

And now, for the breakfast:

Yogurt, granola bar and juice for me. Wellness Super 5 Chicken for Max The Dog.

Tags: foodphoto

LDT + 0900

Local time: 14:00

My awesome girlfriend got us some takeaway Sushi. 😀

Regarding my game, I’m still making progress. The collision code is less buggy now, hopefully enough to get by. I made a silly mistake planning this though: a game which relies quite a bit on images knowing my drawing skills are inexistent. Anyway, good luck to everybody, keep on chugging along!

Tags: foodphoto, journal

At morning I just checked out the theme and left home for other things. I just came back to home a while ago, having iterated through over a few ideas… I also discussed the theme and ideas both with my wife and my friend. I think I have now settled with some stuff to work on. It’s clearly too much work to do all the things I’d want to do (once again?). Still I think I can reduce/simplify it to something worth trying.

I just copied over the example framework of Turs2 library which I used last time as well.. although I think this time I’ll stick with some 2D graphics and not make a full 3d game like last time.

Here’s a photo of my first scribblings. 😉

(1 days 14 hours 55 minutes left)

I just made some pea-soup for lunch.

Tags: foodphoto

Baby peas, baby potatoes, baby carrots, baby mammal sausages.

Hidden, then revealed.

Tags: foodphoto