My title music loop is very simple, but I think it gets the point across. The point is: YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE KILLED BY OWLS
I hope seeing/hearing this stuff early doesn’t kill the funny for you guys when judging comes around 😉
Tags: music, screenshot
I’m starting to feel ready to give up on this.
I have some ground, some trees, a tower and an owl (with messed up normals). I’ve spent so much time on just about anything but gameplay, and still haven’t got it to a stage where I can really start on that.
The idea was that the player is the owl, and flies around collecting moths that are drawn to the wizardly tower in the middle. The wizards were going to be mildly crazy and shoot fireballs at the owl. Or something.
But like I said. I’m too far behind on the basic 3d stuff, and still have some insidious bugs that probably won’t go away in time.
Just recently in the IRC I said I was going to sleep. I was wrong. Anyway, I am now nice and awake, sort of, and am going to get started on my game: It takes place in a 7(planned, should be less) story tower. You have to go around getting keys. Why? I don’t know. There is one key on each floor. There are also going to be traps that take away one of your (insert how many stories there are here) health. There will only be one, non-random level, unless I make it with Game Maker. But my planned tools are PDN, MSVC and the free version of PTK. Now, off to get something to eat.
Two mintue noodles with mini dim sims.
I’ve been having lots of minor disasters here that have really impacted on my productivity. Around lunch time, the electricity went off again. This doesn’t happen where I live in Australia very often … geez, you’d think we were a Third World country or California with all these “brown outs”. Anyhow, I went into my workplace to use their electricity and internet connection (and the microwave for my delicious quick meal above), but didn’t manage to get much actual work done. I tried to make a quick video blog post about the saga using Cheese on Ubuntu 8.04 … but it was just buggy enough on my system that I failed to even finish that.
Driving home, I think I mentally debugged a problem I was having with collisions … back to it ….
Tags: foodphoto
Here’s a quick render of my tower, the game is basically shooting zombies inside a tower. The tower may not seem to be that tall, but i got time constraints dammit.
Tags: screenshot
Only a few cards left to code now, and we also have this:
Dinner was good, including (but not limited to) burros, beans, rice, peaches, and cherries… a picture says a thousand words, so:
My project for Ludum Dare 12 is coming right along! I’ve got the scoring system in place, as well as HUD, particles… etc. Again, pictures are worth approximately one thousand words, so here’s a screenshot for you:
Onward and upward!
Due to a little joke in the IRC about my craptacular drawing abilities with the whiteboard, I have decided to call my game Femme Tower. Here’s a screencapture of what’s been done as of about an hour ago… At least my windows are pretty.
I’m not done for the night, but it seemed like a good time to post a screenshot. There isn’t much gameplay to it right now. The idea is that monsters will progress from the left to the right towards the tower, where you are the person defending. At your disposal is arrows that you shoot from one of three places on the tower. Ok, so the arrows don’t do anything yet, since I didn’t implement the collision routines. I have spent most of the past couple hours making the game look better than the black and white sketches that I’ve been using. Now it looks like colored versions of my sketches. I like the style, so I am going to keep it. I think they look better than anything pixel pushed.
Next up is probably the HUD display for the top of the screen to display the game info.
Oh, and the screenshot capturing is done from built-in code that dumps the frame before it displays it. I think its neat. 
Tags: ld48_12, screenshot
Ok, wtf I cant think of anything good it seems.
so the lame idea that I do have is you have to drop crates off the building at the owl that comes near the building. i have no idea why an owl would come near a building and why it wouldn’t just fly to it, but whatever. ill probably change the building into something that makes more sense like a tree with an owls nest that has gold in it.
so the thing is there will be a power bar that will determine the force to launch the crate off the building and you have to hit the dam bird really hard to push him back.
its not really too late to switch to something else like a suicide game? lol
I’ve added small icons so one can see directly where things have been ordered and where things can be done. Also improved the roads. It looks more promising than it plays though, so not sure I’ll get this stuff to be fun or not. It really needs an opponent to make any sense as it is.
Tags: log, screenshot
When you have to rewrite your collision detection code. 
Which isn’t such a big deal, I guess – if it works, the game is basically done except for content-y polish-y stuff. I am learning a lot about what you can actually do in 48 hours.
PS. I think I eat a box of these almost every day. Blueberries and strawberries are the EMPERORS of fruit.
Tags: foodphoto
Well it’s the end of the day for me. I’ve got a pretty solid chunk done, and at this point I’m implementing game logic. I’m stuck on a weird memory bug, but I’m too tired to process it, so to bed! Let’s aim for 6-7 hours tonight.
Tomorrow’s tasks:
Finish up game logic (75% done with this at least)
Implement user-interaction (simple probably)
Sound (potentially time-consuming)
Some kind of intro/title screen
Owls?
Tags: update
Oh. Hey.
It’s time to bust out can number two. And I’m running dangerously low on Gobstoppers.
Tags: crunchtime, ld48_12
Well – things are looking quite well under os x. It runs under tiger on intel computers – and all the libraries I use are cross-platform so it should go well in a port over to windows. God I hope.
The gameplay is turning out to be quite nice – I’m actually spending too much time playing it rather than finishing it. I also need some sort of win condition…
Libraries are Ogre, CEGUI, OIS, ODE, and prolly SDL will come along sometime soon for cross-platform audio. I don’t know if this falls under single player – but I would like it to run under windows just so judges can judge it! I don’t think it would take much tweaking to work as long as you have those libraries, because they are all well supported.
I played around with ODE for a couple of days a week ago and hated it, switched to chipmunk, but had to go back to ODE for this since it’s 3-d. Man- I finally “got” the joint system and it is quite nice.
Man – this post is really boring and dry. Ok here is me giving everyone a thumbs up
I’m trying to figure out whether I’m to change the control scheme. The current one is a bit of a bother at lower levels and will be a lot of a bother at higher, or so I suspect. Just feels there’s a lot to rewrite, and I’m not sure how I should adjust the tower building. Most this probably doesn’t mean anything yet to you guys as you haven’t even played it. But just so you know I’m pondering.
Tags: log
I did it again. Yesterday I started to whack up some “nice” physics stuff, thinking I’d have it covered quite soon by lifting some collision algorithm code from Real-Time Collision Detection book.
That was a mistake, and it certainly isn’t the first time I have done it. The stuff by itself worked well in single-frame test cases and I have tested the algos beforehand on that level, which fooled me to think this would be quite easy. But making things move and then testing borderline cases, that usually uncovers things to fix which takes a lot of time, and are still necessary to make the whole thing robust enough. So, once again, when in hurry, one should rely a bit more on tried&tested stuff than making something new.
So yesterday I spent most of my day just tweaking that stuff and not working on the other parts. I had built a nice hierarchical level structure, but I was relying that I’d build simple editor stuff for it, so for now it’s more or less unusable as well. After trying to fix the system I just finally got tired (and slightly angry) enough and went to sleep.
So, if I want to continue with the idea, I’d have to integrate some phys. lib in and try to fix the stuff work with it.. and create an editor.. and make some levels.. and all the other polishing. I’d say it’s quite probable that there won’t be an entry for me this time. I still might tinker around with the pieces for fun though.
(0 days 19 hours 10 minutes left)
LDT +1652
Local time: 09:52
Just got up for day two. My there seem to be a lot of entries this time.
I noticed something odd about my development process, I’m doing all (-most all) the coding on my mac and almost all the graphics on my ubuntu box. I think one would expect the opposite.
Tags: journal
