A much needed update: There are about 29 hours left in the competition. Already people have posted some very impressive looking screenshots!

I spent the morning losing a fight with pyode and have removed it completely from my program, replacing it with pymunk instead. Hopefully I can get pymunk going on linux — that really hurt us in pyweek, so it’s important that I get it working.

After/during that, I took an hour to help a friend move, but when I got there they didn’t need me anymore. :/ That’s ok – breaks are good, right?

Now I’m finally starting to get into my game – the physics is working and I have most of the infrastructure laid out. I don’t know if I have time to finish (above mentioned friend is coming over later as well), but as of right now I’m still going to try.

Also, I finally got the laptop out so I can get the pictures from the camera online.

Behold, the command center!

Friday’s Food:

Kolaches for Breakfast this morning!

Tags: foodphoto

Very, very happy with the results so far.  I wanted to make an unconventional game with a fairly unique mechanic, and I think I’m on my way.  Now I can focus on usability, UI, sound, and level design.

Tags: airplanes, timers, traffic

Having fun with OpenGL here. Added kittens and a ground. Now need maybe some gameplay items, and then create a level.

Hi there. Well my second time trying to participate in this. Considering that results should be open source decided to try out available for Flash physics engines. Started with APE http://www.cove.org/ape/index.htm but didn’t find it to be even close to game development demands…

Well some 4-6 hours ago started to play with http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net/

Well I must say this engine can a lot. But internally some parts of it look and sometimes even work ugly 😀

So here is screen shot of todays progress:

Basically 70% of game mechanics is ready. Trying to keep things simple cuz last time I failed to finish I have few aces left in my sleeve for tomorrow programming 😉

Tags: progress

Click here to test the current version of my game.

You need to have java 1.6 installed, which can be found at http://www.java.com/

That small rock ring will be a full tower, which you can mine for rock, slowly bringing it down to the ground. However, once you start doing this, you unleash the monsters who will start killing your doodz in ur base.

I felt like I picked up some speed, here is something remotely playable: http://enedahl.com/ld12/incomingfodder01.html

Going to bed now. Oh, the music is just a placeholder, a demo .mod file.

Tags: 2D, flash, tower, tower defense

As of this writing there are only 23.5 hours left in the competition.

And my project is in bad shape. I have some decent notes, but the actual implementation is lagging. I have to remember that I still need to create art and sounds, not just code.

Will I make it? I should, even if it means cutting back on the scope of my initial design. I haven’t been writing as much code as I would have liked, but I’m not sure how much of it is due to the fact that I’m still learning TDD and how much of it is due to the fact that I’m practically reimplementing code that I’ve already written. Still, before my last break, I found that my coding time has been very productive, so perhaps I’ll see a working game sooner than I think.

Spent a lot of time reworking the physics, especially the collisions and relaxation code as it was jitterier than an epileptic on crack. Seems to be much more stable now, although it’s a bit slower than I’d like it should hold up ok.

I ordered the vegetable entree from a Thai restaurant, and the person on the phone asked me what kind of meat I would like. That’s why there is chicken. I also asked for vegetable egg rolls, which were smaller than I expected, but they did have only vegetables in them.

Tags: foodphoto

The middle point has passed and I still have nothing playable. Doing 3D from scratch, combined with bad preparation are making my progress really slow. Will I be able to finish a game?

Tomorrow I’ll have to focus on gameplay at all cost.

Tags: log, screenshot

Almost time to turn in…

Most of the game is done, including sound and music… Just composed some stupid tunes on the acoustic guitar, recorded it, cleaned it a bit in Goldwave, and it’s done… Got a game music and a title music… even considered adding some lyrics to the title music, but I don’t have the gear to mix up the voice and the guitar and I can’t do both at the same time, because I suck! J

Going to wrap this up for tonight, get everything ready for my trip tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll be coding again in about 15 hours or so (which leaves me with about 7 to 8 usable hours left)… Thankfully, only things I miss are the Main Menu, the Instructions, some levels (which can be done pretty fast) and some gameplay tests)…

Tags: journal, LD #12 - The Tower - 2008, log

Yes…. you heared it right! Fireballs!!!!!

yes I made it using photoshop!!! muhahahahahahahaha >:} there is no resistents!!! 😀

and its allready working in the game so much fun! 😀

Here is where I’ve been spending all my time.  Yes that TV is as big as it looks.

Tags: workspace

Although my screenshots don’t look like much progress, I have got a lot futher.

My game has been combined with rouge-like sight-stuff. You can’t see anything beyond the current room unless you open doors, at which point the room beyond and all it’s nasties are showed to you. (Including a nifty progressive flood-fill effect).

I’ve managed to get my guy running around, all my level graphics, including decals, loading and displaying. All doors working, level switching working. My guy shoots (and leaves shells lying around too).

I took a small break and one point and managed to do a little industrial loop and some ambience, as well as a couple of sound effects. (I use Propellerhead’s Reason for all sound.)

Tomorrow I’ll start adding enemies – that’s when the fun really begins!

Oh I wonder what is behind this door.

Oh just another corridor.. But stairs too! Onward to the next floor!

I just woke up to find my computer off … there had been a rare power failure in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Then I went to have a shower, and the bathroom clock had stopped. The problem is, the bathroom clock runs on batteries .. it wouldn’t be effected by a mains power failure.

This can mean only one thing. In the early hours of Sunday morning, I was visited by aliens.

Of course, the power failure turned off the web cam with my computer, so if they entered the room to tamper with the code or anal probe me, I have no hard evidence.

I’ve no I idea why these inter-galactic or inter-dimensional visitors want to try and stop me completing LD12, but I’m determined to get this game out to the world in ~24 hours, whatever the cost.

On the positive side, there is no data loss, and since they didn’t touch the code I can safely still enter as a solo developer ….

LDT +2040

Local time: 01:39

Well, I’m off to bed for the night. I got a lot more accomplished today than I’d expected. Level 2 is almost done already. Plan for tomorrow: more sound effects, cutscene, maybe difficulty settings, more chrome, maybe even music. Plus anything I think of at night.

Tags: journal

Over six hours there I struggled with a completely intractable problem. The free Flex SDK, it seems, is about as user friendly as a kick in the nadgers. For over six hours I fought with an invisible error that wasn’t even triggering any events when it was supposed to.

I got a friend to run it through his copy of flex builder, et voila

SecurityError: Error #2148: SWF file file:///C|/www/flash/towerassault/towerassault.swf cannot access local resource file:///C|/www/flash/towerassault/res/assets.xml. Only local-with-filesystem and trusted local SWF files may access local resources.

In other words, because flash is running in the browser it presumed it didnt have access to local files, so refused to open them. The instant I uploaded the xml files to the server in the other room, worked first time.

I am not a happy boy.

Well I’ve managed to get the platform movement working and incorporated a nifty pseudo-3d effect with the tilemap, but I have a lot of work to do tomorrow. I’m going to call it a day and get some rest as I can barely keep my eyes open right now! A people seem to have had the same idea as me – a rotating platform game based around a tower. I guess great minds think alike

I wasted a lot of time rearranging the Ogre tutorial app… but I’ve got towers and enemies.

Too bad they don’t do anything yet.. just sit there.

Tags: journal

Local time: 02:58 AM

We woke up to see the theme voting results, and “The Tower” was not what we had expected. But in a hurry we turned an old idea, to fit the theme. Some kind of a smashup game, a clone of the SNES game “Super Smash TV”. You are in control of a random muscular character, and you’re goal is to kill all the enemies on the current floor of the tower, without dying, and then proceed to the next floor, with more and heavier enemies. We are planning an arcade mode, so you will be alive untill you are extremely outnumbered.

We began making a fast title screen to match the theme of our game, which looks a lot like the old gaming consoles Gameboy and SNES.

To give it some kind of relevance to the theme, The Tower, we made a cut-scene of our character moving on to the next floor in an elevator. This sequence, will be played every time you conquer a floor and move on to the next.

After the cut-scene you arrive to the actual game. A floor, that actual looks more like an arena, where you have to kill all enemies around you. The gates will open randomly, and spawn more zombies. If there’s enough time, we will add other enemies than just those zombies on the screenshot below.

We also managed to create sounds for the title screen, the cut-scene, floor doors open/close, weapon shooting and bullets hitting the wall. Besides that we created the animation of a zombie dying.

There’s still a lot of work to do.

• Zombie AI
• Zombie spawn system
• Balancing the game, adjust hitboxes
• Music

We are now going to bed, and looking forward to continue tomorrow morning. An upcoming journal of day 2, and probably a few comments and pictures of our workspaces and lunches will be posted later. Goodnight!

Tags: game progress, journal, LD #12 - The Tower - 2008