Tags: foodphoto

Here us the first demo of Choke Point. It is an air-traffic control game where you try land planes so they can pick up and deliver medical supplies:

http://files.onearmedman.com/games/ld/12/demo1/

(It might take a minute to show up, so don’t worry)

To play, you have to click on the planes to land them.  The airstrip can only hold a few planes at a time, though, and bigger planes take more space.  When the green bar at the airstrip is full, space has run out. If you try to land a plane on a full strip, it won’t listen to you.

Every time a plane takes off on its own, it carries cargo to be delivered to people in need.  You can make a plane take off early to clear room on the strip, but it will take off without its cargo.  You need to airlift all of the cargo (blue bar at the airstrip) before time runs out.

The fuel is always running down on all the planes, so keep an eye on that–when they run out of fuel, they crash, and you lose points.

That’s about it!  Let me know what you think and what kind of problems you run into.  Have a good night!

The game idea I had was pretty simple, it would be a tetris game where little lemmings crawled across your screen and you smashed them with tetris blocks to build up your tower. The lemmings would also scale your tetris blocks for a bit of challenge. I’d planned for the lemmings to move freely (i.e. without a tile system) but the tetris blocks to move tile-by-tile the oldskool way, so I decided it would be a good idea to do pixel-perfect collision detection for both the lemmings and the tetris blocks.

Well, I never got around to the lemmings, the tetris blocks were giving me hours of frustration… the blocks just refused to collide right. So I’m going to have to scrap all that code and start over with a tile system, which shouldn’t be too hard, but this little newbie is sad at the time spent chasing a fruitless ideal. Also, to my shame, no decent screenshots could be posted (unless someone wanted to see my angry face). Tomorrow will have to be a glorious day.

Things are going slow. Now there’s a.. cylinder in the middle of the tower. So well, I must do a lot fast from now on.

Anyway, need some sleep first. And food.. which is cooking right now.. and now done and photographed. Some kind of noodles and the last rest of coca cola which was still left in the bottle. And the small animal normally sitting on top of my computer wanted to be in the picture as well.

And my final food pic which I moved from the final post to here, so it won’t show in the grid:

I decided that I need more practice with TDD and so skipped quite a few unit tests to get a blank SDL window up that I can close. The 10 passing tests I currently have were great for splitting off a Timer class from my Game class, but I can’t afford to spend too much time making existing functionality work better.

When I start working on the various game entities, I know TDD will be a big help, but for now I have put it on hold to get the really simple run() loop going. Of course, in order to get to the point where I can write more code than the basic boilerplate, I need to sketch out a rough design.

I woke up around 3pm, having horribly overslept. But I had a good breakfast of cookies and hawaiian punch.

Then later on it was almost dinner time, so I had some Ramen to tide me over. Yes, that’s a Titanium Spork, given to me by the gods.

Then the main meal, steak. Yummy.

I think I’ll have some ice cream later too…

Tags: foodphoto

Well I’ve made a few more maps and another song for the game. My MOB class got an overhaul; it’s designed for pretty much everything so far. Animated, non animated, moving, non moving, setting a certain amount of pixels to wonder, moving in a direction and never stopping (missile type). SOo yeah. I think I’m only going to have time to put one mini boss in this game unfortunately. Oh well, I’ve been working really hard (not a super great artist, but decent enough to make games like this IMO). I also made the player able to shoot eggs; but so far they don’t actually kill any of the enemies. I hate collision detection in java so I’ve been slacking off on that section ;).

Tags: journal

The sad thing is that most likely I’ll end up using this background and the castle in the finished game. The stick figures will have to go, though. I didn’t mock up the archers, knights, or boiling oil, but that can come later.

Ugh, things are moving forward at last. Although it seems I’ve screwed myself over.. Making maps for this game is really tedious, and I don’t have an editor! I guess I’ll have to make one :/

Anyway, pics + playable test. Built with py2exe and should run.

The objective is to climb the tower of junk (not much of a tower in this level(the only one so far)) and get to blue-ish squard at the top (which will be an golden owl.. maybe). You can jump with space and move sideways with the left- and right-buttons. Btw, you can’t win yet ;).

Download here.

Well, it’s pretty much official – I’m one of the worst digital artists the world has e’er seen. I’ll try and do some polish on the stuff that I’m using tomorrow to lessen the shame that I bring my ancestors.  Collision detection is also kind of an issue using HGE – I’m seeing a little why other people don’t necessarily use it. It gives you collisions really easily – but not the direction in which they’ve occurred, and I don’t really have the presence of mind to create my own solution at the moment.

If it wasn’t for that, I’d be a pretty happy camper. Still going well enough.

Here’s my dinner for today.  Cheap chinese food; barbeque pork and orange chicken with chowmein noodles.  Oh, and my wife stopped at another chinese food place to get wonton soup because the first place didn’t have any.  She’s such a wonderful woman. 

If you are wondering, my fortune for the evening is “DISCOVER THE TALENTS WITHIN YOURSELF.”

Yea.

Tags: foodphoto, ld48_12

Three journal posts so far, and still I haven’t started working on anything at all! Boy this is exciting. (I was just too tired after yesterday, so I went to bed in stead.)

19 hours left? I’ll have to scrap my original idea, but I’ll try to come up with something, at least. Maybe.

Approaching the 24 hour mark.  Last few hours have been sluggish, as fatigue waxes and motivation wanes.  Still, here’s a screenie of current run.  Doesn’t SEEM like a big jump over the previous shot, but there’s a lot more logic going on under the bonnet now.

Tags: screenshot

I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever get back to TDD, but for now I have a main menu background.

I plan on starting this game by mousing over the start button, the same way Minimalist did. I like the idea that the menu gets you used to the mechanics of the game. Maybe I’ll have a mini tower drawn in with one archer waiting as the start button.

There are only 19 hours left, but I need some sleep. Good night!

Edit: Got a demo going! It’s Java WebStart. If you play it, let me know how it went!

Progress is going well. I have introduced an animation thread into my game so it’s not turn-based. The rendering is spotty – the player flickers just noticeably enough – but there is a lot of improvement I can make in the rendering code. Right now all sorts of things happen in the paint method, which should go elsewhere.

The camera switches direction every 1.5 seconds (it’s supposed to be a security camera). Collision detection still works, which is never taken for granted. Next thing I will do is package it up as a JNLP so I can put up a demo.

You lose the game when you get spotted by the camera:

But there is no way to win it. The key is going to go to a door. The premise is something like “You wake up in a building, not knowing why you’re there.” And so on.

In other news, it turns out poblano peppers are hot and the oil, which I now know is called Capsaicin, feels like liquid fire on your skin. Not when you’re handling them, mind you. Hours later, when you’re sitting, typing at your desk, for instance. And not fire like smoking fire. More of a smoldering, starts little and grows gradually until, 20 minutes later, you realize what’s happened. I did wash my hands thoroughly, but I think I had gotten oil on the dish towel, which then stayed on my hands. So that’s a new hurdle for me, coding while my fingers are burning. Thankfully, it’s gone now, and with any luck, I will never do that, ever again.

Tags: demo, screenshot

Yup! I got an ethernet cable today so I’m gonna jump into the competition! Yay!

Pretty much spent every hour since the start trying to get the Farseer engine to work.   My biggest and lengthiest hurdle was discovering and then fixing the fact that Silverlight uses a TopLeft coordinate system and Farseer use a center of object system. I probably would have figured it out faster, but I just happen to pick coordinates that interacted in a way that my small test box would hit the corner of the ground and bounce off spinning. Visibly the ground took up the bottom of the screen so it sent me on a wild goose chase looking for buggy forces.

PS.  I’ve been Twittering as I work in a sort of experiment.  If anyone else is, let me know and I’ll follow: http://twitter.com/MrPhilGames

Tags: MrPhil

I’m up and and working again. Have continued on the roads stuff so that now you can assign workers beyond influence level if it has road connection. Things missing at the moment are building fundament and expanding level of influence. And, like, and AI, decent graphics, multi-player mode etc etc.

I’ve noted that the way worker assignment is currently done is quite bothersome. Not sure how it should be instead. Thinking either that workers stay assigned and can be unassigned, or that one can just select what resources to buy for the remaining workers after having built etc. Currently it works that you select action for each hex during a road, including assigning workers. Then on next round those things are reset.

And now I need to go out in the rain on a quest to buy breakfast stuff.

Tags: log, morning, roads, screenshot

So it’s time to bust out the big guns.

I’m behind, I’m not sure if I have something fun, and we’re down to the last 23 hours.

Tags: crunchtime, ld48_12

Holy crap! Ogre particles are freaking awesome.. Here’s two of my three planned weapons, the Fiddy Tower and the Flame tower (the third is the “missile tower”).

Looks like those bugs don’t stand a chance. Except there’s still no gameplay at all yet…

Tags: journal