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

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

Title Music

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.

I’m having breakfast.

It’s toast AND A DONUT.  It’s like the most awesome breakfast in weeks! For me.

Tags: breakfast, donuts, foodphoto, log, toast

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!

Tags: foodphoto, journal

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

So that’s my breakfast for today 😀 Yeah tea and a cookie I think i will go for a walk now and then beck to work on Crystal Towers

P.S I usually only drink tea at breakfast but today i need some strength 😀

Tags: breakfast, foodphoto

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

I’ve finally started!

Doesn’t look like much at the moment, but at least I’ve got something now.

The other entries here are looking great btw.

I’m calling it a night.  Those energy drinks aren’t doing anything, though I’m sure once my head hits the pillow they’ll kick in. 😉

Things to do tomorrow:

• Waves of monsters from the MonsterManager
• Display upcoming monsters in the current wave
• Add melee weapons
• Add scoring
• finish HUD
• boiling oil?
• number font object?
• and a number of other things, I’m sure.

Well, we’ll see how it goes.  See you in the morning!

Tags: ld48_12

Second day. Today morning i decided to get the usual annoying stuff done like proper menu screen, editor and general GUI. With most of that finished i can go to add more stages and refine constants to squeeze at least a bit of fun out of it.

Here’s the probably final menu screen.

Golden toasted flakes of corn drenched in ice-cold milk!

Like last LD, I’m having a peanut butter and pickle sandwich.

Note that my LD-ification of the sandwich has serif fonts.

Tags: foodphoto

Not much of a gameplay yet, but at least it’s possible to move around in the tower.

YouTube Version (I couldn’t find how to embed it in the blog entry :/)

Better quality (2.7MB)

So much left to do, so little time.

Tags: log, video

The game doesn’t work as it is. Needs to figure out a design that does. At first I thought (as I wrote) I just needed an slight control change (or a bigger one, but I went for the small). The actual game rules were the same, only this showed that the game was fairly pointless (when didn’t have to set workers every round). One just had to set them up and let the turns pass. Might have been better with an opponent, as then you’d have to figure out most optimal route, but that still wasn’t much work. And the bothersome thing left was to manually build the tower. Tested to remove that too. Made it less bothersome, but even more pointless. So I need to figure something out.

Oh, right, at least I had some candy.

Tags: foodphoto, log, troubles

Have made some nice progress after my late start – but I’m completely knackered, so not sure if I’m going to continue it… if I’d had the full weekend, it could have been pretty cool….

!

Oh sh-!

*pew pew pew*

Hurrah! That’s better.

(My game still has no name, does anyone have any ideas?)

Tags: ALIEUMS

13:05
Back to work with new ideas from my lunch break. Paper and pencil rule.

13:32
I now have bluish gimmicks that change state if you press space while touching them… What will they reveal to be? Ah ah, mystery!

14:21
Argh, almost done nothing since the last line… This is *bad*! Quick, let’s start the organisation of data into levels.

14:42
Operationnal level loader. Based on Lua tables in separate files, it creates level “objects” ready to use.

15:43
Mmm, not sure what I’ve done since last line… Variable floor size, maybe. It could be shower time, for instance.

16:09
Back from the shower. I know what to do.

16:57
Succesful implementation of game modes, and a basic menu with nothing in it but white noise.

17:43
Back from little snack. Ate a chocolate bar. Cheap imitation of the well known “Lion”. Tiger, they call it. Mwahaha the joke.

18:22
Conversion of coordinates from Inkscape to the ingame system during loading. Will simplify much the level making. Well, apart from the graphics, of course…

20:51
Back from dinner. Ate a good ol’ pizza in front of the Simpsons. I kinda feel like I lost a lot of time doing nothing this afternoon. I should go to sleep.

12:20
IRC log:

* Le sujet de #ludumdare est : Ludum Dare – http://www.ludumdare.com – Towering over the Olympics – Ludum Dare 12 – Theme: THE TOWER !!!
* Sujet de #ludumdare défini par PoV!Mike@14.28.86.64.velcomdsl.ca le Sat Aug  9 17:52:46 2008
<Tenoch> AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH, by all the mighty god of DOOM!!!!
<Tenoch> I slept 15 hours
* edwardoka aborts
<edwardoka> Cheers guys, good luck with your projects
* edwardoka (Edward@host217-42-161-242.range217-42.btcentralplus.com) a quitté #ludumdare
<Tenoch> gods*
<Tenoch> and still no graphics
<Tenoch> go go go go go
<mjau> i haven’t even started yet =/
<Amaroq> Ah. Here’s the tut I was reading about how to write a particle engine. http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/lesson28/index.php
<Tenoch> 16 hours 42 minutes left –> AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
<Amaroq> Don’t worry Tenoch. I haven’t started STILL. xD
<Tenoch> anyway: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

And yeah, breakfast at noon. Bad, I know.

Tags: foodphoto, journal

The Knight Owl!

He’s 32×32, and I’m worried he won’t show up too well after all the work I put into it. Note to self: learn how to use the Gimp better.

The monsters don’t stand a chance with the LD formation, hehe.

A* finally working somewhat, I got 2 diffrent monsters now, Really Stupid and Stupid (A*).

Next I think I’ll get it somewhat balanced for gameplay. Oh and polish the A* a little.

It’s strawberry flavored!

My kitchen is a mess and I’m out of clean glasses, but at least Jarritos doesn’t need a glass to be enjoyed!

And while taking the picture, I realized I have a bottle of…grape juice…and some clean glasses for it. Hmm…

Tags: foodphoto

I’ve wasted too much time trying to get the physics robust enough and it’s just not quite there. I’ve decided to cheat and make the player let go of a pipe if the tension is too hight. This is easy to code and works better than I expected actually, although it does mean the levels will have to be a bit simpler. At the moment since I have no proper graphics or even any gameplay that’s something I’ll just have to live with.

Really, really need some actual goals and gameplay now though. No screenshot since it looks the same as before.

So time for some home made pizza 😀 And Heroes series second episode in a meanwhile 😀
So this is Meat/Chease pizza and some ice cold cola for a break from playing with the game.

Considering the progress. Well controller class is ready and game is playable. Now i need to add interface and other game mechanics which can work good only after interface will be ready. Tough i think i will make interface simple for now and will start making making additional features faster(like high scores).

Tags: foodphoto, lunch

I spent most of today fighting with flash and tweaking the shapes and material properties of the cats for maximum stackability. It turns out dense, high friction cats are the most fun. Slippery cats suck, but you already knew that.

(‘scuse the weird dithering)

Tags: cats, haXe, physhaXe, physics

I’ve thrown out a lot of code and streamlined (simplified) gameplay. It’s still fairly pointless, but it’s pointless in a much more easygoing and fun way. Which is important.

I just need to figure out some restriction/bonus given by the tower height. And introduce an AI player. And fix some way to solve conflicts. And come up with a goal. I mean a single actual coded goal. I can think of lots of different other ones, like reach certain height in as low number of turns possible, or be the one with highest tower when resources are all out etc.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot. It looks kind of like before.

Tags: log, screenshot

I spent the entire evening and part of the night implementing basic object stuff (platform movement, object collision detection etc.), code I’ve written hundreds of times. Then I went to sleep and set the alarm clock for 4 hours, but woke up after 9! Oh well, I did sleep well.

The objects work nicely, I need to start making a lot of graphics now.

And I just had breakfast:

(btw, I ate the rest of those carrots yesterday)

I have steam engines and steam sources, that can be piped together. Except they’re currently nothing more than wireframe X’s so it’s completely uninspiring… Although one of my goals was to have a more complete journal i’m going to ignore it for a bit and focus on the game. Hopefully I’ll remember to take a bunch of progress shots as I go along for the end.

LDT +2145

Local time: 14:44

We had a late brunch. First we had french toast:

Then since we were still hungry we had eggs and bacon and squeezed some fresh orange juice:

And finally here’s a deskphoto:

Anyways, my entry is pretty much finished, just polishing it now.

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto, journal

More visuals:

So here’s what I have. It’s written in Flex, uses Box2D for physics, and is REALLY REALLY LAGGY. I have it open in another tab and Firefox 3 is updating the text in this edit field at about 2 fps.

This is Box2DFlash’s debug rendering – I haven’t had time to implement my own – hence lack of graphics and colours and general prettiness. The grey boxes around the edge are enemies; they spawn every 2 seconds from either the left or the right. The slightly larger grey box in the middle is the player. The circles are bullets shot by the player. They don’t do damage (the boxes cannot be killed!) but they do force the enemy boxes back. Each box jumps vaguely in the direction of the player every second or so.

The idea is that the boxes are attacking and you have to push them down to prevent them from touching you. But since you can’t kill them, eventually the whole screen piles up with boxes and you inevitably die.

The boxes were supposed to have smarter AI, and intentionally build towers of themselves rather than just stupidly launching themselves towards you, but that’s obviously not going to happen in time. The other flaw in the plan is that it’s REALLY REALLY LAGGY.

It’s kinda almost fun to play around with, being a physics simulation, but there are too many problems (too laggy, needs proper rendering, too laggy, bullets need to die on impact, need limited ammo and ammo drops, too laggy, need health and dying, needs survival timer, too laggy, needs sound) and too little time to fix them – I have to go to bed now for university tomorrow, and although the deadline is 1pm local time I won’t be able to work on it tomorrow at all. Even if I did fix everything in time, I’m not convinced it’d be a fun game. So I guess I’m calling this one quits.

I’ve failed! Hope you all have better luck!

There’s about 14 hours left in the competition. I’ve got SDL installed, its includes and libraries set in visual c++, and some SDL tuts in a firefox tab.

I think I’ll start working now.

Tags: latestart

I spent most of the past day trying to tweak the “hand” user interface so it feels right… I’m pretty satisfied with that result, but I’ve sorely neglected the final goal of actually making a game out of it. We’ll see what the next 17 hours will bring

Here’s my first tower so far:

As you can see, the nice thing about virtual physics is that you can make them a little bit more relaxed than real life. Now, I just need to stop playing with these blocks and turn this code into something resembling a real game!

The player can now actually get hurt on spikes and acid. I just realised how much like Lemmings Revolution this is starting to look… I’m going to have to think about doing some level building now.

Food earlier was mushroom soup:

I’m feeling pretty tired, so i’m not sure i’ll add much more. I’ll try though.

To be on the safe side here’s a pre final version. The gameplay is there, as are 8 stages of bombing goodnees and a editor.

The link for the pre-final version is http://www.georg-rottensteiner.de/files/Tower%20Collapse.zip. Anything else will be polish from now on.

Edit: Modified the zip file, this is now a newer version. Removed the final tag.

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

I was sketching out some of the interactions and just trying to make myself aware of what it is I am tackling with only 8 hours left.

Based on these notes, I think my schedule should be as follows:

• Code to draw tower based on height (determined by difficulty, a nice to have later on).
• Draw an enemy sprite.
• Code to move enemies up the tower.
• Code to determine that game is over if they reach top of tower.
• Code to mouse over an archer.
• Draw an arrow.
• Code to move arrow.
• Code to handle collision of arrow and enemy.

And after all of that, I should have a good base to work with. I’ll see how much time is left and make further plans when those are done. The cool thing is that I can start writing unit tests again for the classes I’ll be writing.

In classic autumn colors, it’s a delicious crunchy, nutty, raisiny cereal, with a side of the world’s finest juice (right, PoV?).  My wife was really upset to find I had put the juice in that cup.  She really hates when the food is the same color as the vessel.  But it’s all so lovely and autumnal!

Tags: foodphoto

Can’t show a screenie since I am currently working on the offline computer, the only one with decent art programs on it (stupid Vista won’t run PSP9 or Max5).  Thusly, what I am doing now is art!  I’ve got lots in so far, though endless hours spent doing it.  Six in fact.  Still need some stuff for the buttons you click on and the title screen, and the treasure the owls are stealing, then I guess art is pretty much done.  Then I’ll need to get some challenge/point/structure to the gameplay, and some sounds.  That should pretty much do it.  I’ll need more heroes than I have to reach that point, but I’ll just reuse my existing art for those, because man, I’ve made a lot of little heroes.  I think about 8 unique characters.

I wanted the game to include a skill tree for boosting all your heroes, but I think that’s something for later.  You’ll have to be content with the strategy/luck involved in which heroes you get.  Not much luck needed at this point, since the pool of heroes currently is the same as the number of rooms at the inn, and you’re allowed to have multiples of the same.  I want to change that, but can’t until there are a whole lot more heroes.  Which probably won’t happen by the deadline.

So I’m off to do that.  I’d also like to have more than one kind of monster, but that too will have to go by the wayside.  Hordes of ordinary owls is interesting enough for now!

Tags: tower defense, words

I’m finally ready to start writing. I’ve decided to call my entry Mr Blocker, after the headmaster from classic children’s TV show “Woof”. It will involve blocks and towers.

Added a pre-rendered Game Over image to the game, plus the animation now stops (so dying is now worse than being notified of your death, it actually stops play). Next up: winning!

I woke up a little late, and I have a thing to go to in an hour. When I left my computer last night, I stupidly said “I should see if I can get my resolution higher on my monitor” and went in and mucked things up big time. After 20 minutes, nothing worked and when it rebooted, I was in 640 x 480. I went to bed and tackled it this morning, but nothing was working. Finally, I realized the KVM switch was probably interfering with the autodetect or something, so I routed it all to my linux box and it now works. Unfortunately that means my Windows box is now headless, and that’s where I keep my Civ IV! Maybe I need a better KVM switch… Maybe a need a bigger apartment so I can have two monitors and keyboards.

Hey, kids! Here’s some stuff I’ve eaten lately. Yesterday, I ate this (this was some time before going to sneak about in towers):

This was my breakfast today:

And I just ate this (while watching some Star Trek with a friend):

In other news, the game is very slowly coming along. I somewhat doubt it’ll be done in time, but hey.

Tags: foodphoto

Ok. So I’m done! Thanks to timezone, I’m early too.

This has been my first competition, and it’s been a lot of fun.

Download it: http://www.ingeniumdigital.com/ldimg/TowerOfDoom.zip

Readme it: http://www.ingeniumdigital.com/ldimg/readme.txt

With all hope (due to its lack of being tested) it’ll actually work. It’s written in C++ with SFML. I’ve licensed the source under the MIT license. If this is a problem, yell.

Stay tuned for a postmortem and perhaps a less broken build after I sleep.

Tags: C++, final, LD #12 - The Tower - 2008, opengl, owl, screenshot, sfml, tower

I was up until 3AM trying to get some functionality in my program before heading to bed. I woke up about five and a half hours later, showered, and am waiting for toast for my breakfast. As of this writing, there is a little over 12 hours left in the competition, and I don’t have game play yet.

I’ll be getting this submission in under the wire.

After spending many hours trying to get the player movement done, I eventually finished it and found that there was a serious problem with it. I’d tried to take a shortcut because of the limited time and handle collision detection and response for the X and Y axes separately but that doesn’t work. What tends to happen is that the player hits the ledge and shoots off sideways by a quarter of the tower. It’s not a particularly complex problem but it will take several hours to sort it out and debug it.

Unfortunately, I have a prior engagement for several hours tonight and a minor problem of getting up for work tomorrow so I don’t have enough time to fix it and actually put any game play in so I’m not going to kill myself trying. It was coming along well and actually looked like it would be a fun game so I might have a go at doing it properly (Including descent bounce physics) out of the comp.

Leaving with a final screen shot:

Meh, too tried for details.

Tags: foodphoto, pasta

Gizmo tends to like to hang out with me whenever I’m doing anything related to programming. I nicknamed her Hacker Kitty. She’s helping me eat my vegan pizza and apple juice.

Diego, on the other hand, just wants to know when I’ll be done.

Well, I’m not done yet, but I have a few more unit tests, and quite a few more lines of code without tests. Progress is being made.

Tags: foodphoto

The last day is here. I’ve woken up with just under 12 hours to go. Can I make it? We shall see… Still to do: all the AI, firing cannons, sound, music, and the major panning effect I had planned for the fight phase.

To power up, I made pancakes for breakfast. Breakfast is so much more malleable than the other meals…

Here is the obligatory phallic pancake for the roommate:

And a spiral pancake! Culinary skills++

Finally, here is last night’s more standard fare – burritos with rice, beans, and cranberry juice.

Tags: foodphoto, journal

Let’s get eclectic!  For lunch, it’s pizza, egg rolls, and corn on the cob.  I’m not a giant pig – this is food for two.  Iced tea for the lady, pineapple juice for me.  Speaking of giant pigs…

My cat is so fat, he needs two chairs.

Tags: fat cat, foodphoto

Pipework and plumbing have been added, so I’ve actually got some gameplay now, but no proper levels to play on. I also spent quite a bit of time getting a proper menu flow (main menu -> in game -> game over). It’s amazing what a good font and a few simple gui sprites will do for the visuals.

I chose to use Python with PyGame, PyOpenGL, and PyODE. (I had only written about one Python program, and had only written one OpenGL program in C++…)

The idea was a Jenga-like tower of bricks that you must defend from owls who fly by and remove pieces. It would topple with realistic physics.

Tall, proud tower:

PyODE (well, ODE itself I believe) unfortunately is apparently not up to the task of a Jenga tower. If I created more than about 8 layers of Jenga bricks, I’d get a segfault somewhere within the collision detection code.

I shortened the Jenga tower and PyODE stopped crashing.

Applying a force to one of the bricks seems not to break the tower… I think I’m just doing something wrong there, though. But PyODE slows down the program to the “watching ice melt” realm.

Pitifully short tower:

I will try to throw together a 2D version of the game idea using Pymunk today, but with less than 11 hours, I may not submit anything.

Either way: a great, fun learning experience!

Tags: screenshot

I’ve managed to get some game stuff into the game. So it’s possible to play it, and it’s possible to win or lose (only there’s not check for it yet). It’s not overly exciting. Or intriguing. There’s an AI that plays decently if it’s lucky, but almost never wins except if you’re stupid. But it’s something.

What’s left is to fix a few known bugs, add some kinds of instructions, and end of game check, and pack it up. Exciting, huh? I’m quite tired, so I don’t really jump around in joy, but maybe I would have been. Probably would have been more had this game turned out better.

I’ll write about how you actually play in the submission post.

And I forgot to post my lunch photo from earlier. It was lasagna.

And then I just had supper. It was toast.

And no, I did not take a lot of photos of the same toast and use them to post multiple times during the course of this compo. It really was different instances all of them!

Tags: foodphoto, lasagna, log, screenshot, toast

..and coffee.

Tags: foodphoto

Ok, i couldn’t hold back.

Here’s the final version of Tower Collapse. I’ve added two more stages, fixed some small bugs, enabled window/fullmode switching and added the source to the zip file as well (forgot during the first preview-final).

Download from here: http://www.georg-rottensteiner.de/files/Tower%20Collapse.zip

If you take the time to test please tell me about any bugs! Thanks and have fun!

Edit: 20:27 local time, added a Compo Game Loader file for easier testing! It even works

Tags: Endurion, final, LD #12 - The Tower - 2008

I give up, this is what I’ve got so far: http://www.kekbur.se/junktower.rar

I tried, but I just can’t get anything going quick enough. I struggled with file I/O so much it wasn’t even funny. I am half convinced that something is broken in the libraries. I’m just going too slow to finish something. It is a shame since it is my favorite theme in a long time.

On the plus side besides learning just how weak my C++ skills have become, I did learn a little something about SDL_ttf. Not much but enough to write a string to the screen, and found some free fonts I could have redistributed with my game.

I spent too much time downloading updated libraries on my slow slow connection. I never did get boost to download. I also spent too much time trying to make my code cross-platform. Even though I have nothing to test whether it was actually cross-platform or not. However, so the whole thing isn’t a waste, I have included a screen capture below. Better luck next time I guess.

Oh, I tired out the compo game loader. It is really cool.

9 Hours and 45 Minutes left. I just finished the music and got it working in game, making this my first LD entry with sound of any kind. The song is crap, but hey, I’m still proud of it. I did it all on my guitar (even the ‘drum’ parts) using audacity. The three phases are in, although there is no AI and the cannons don’t actually fire. The turns are still set on very short for debugging, but it does cycle all the way through. There are still some bugs to fix, and the AI to create. If I finish all that, I’ll put in sound effects.

Tags: journal

OK, I’m back from a Pug Meetup, where my happy, happy pug partook in some made for dogs peanut butter flavored frozen yogurt:

As for the game, I think I am adding locked doors so that the key can go to something next.

Tags: dogfoodphoto, dogphoto, foodphoto

There are about 9.5 hours left and it’s going very slowly. I should probably forget about the graphics for now and try to get the game finished with concept art.

Anyway, I just had a pizza.

Tags: foodphoto

It’s a block that jumps on blocks. Soon it will be a ninja in a tower.

Tags: blocky, lowres, ninjas, tower

While I spoke a while ago of giving up, it didn’t happen. I got some sleep instead and worked on trying to fix the bugs.

A few hours later, however, and I still can’t figure out what’s wrong. I intend to come back some other time and compete, and I’ll make sure I’ve got my code base working first (since nearly all my time has been spent on non-game stuff).

I’ve uploaded what little I’ve got here: http://members.gamedev.net/sprite_hound/misc/tytus.zip

I’m finally finished with a version that both runs and could be classified as a game. So here it is. All important information is available in the game, really, if you just pay a bit of attention. I might include play information here later when I don’t need to sleep so much.

If you want another screenshot, here’s after having won.

The Tower of You, Windows binary download + D source.

Update after deadline: I’ve updated the above link to include zlib1.dll which was missing. The original package is still available.

Tags: building, D, farm, final, GLFW, screenshot, tiles

13:31
Drawn three levels. But they are not in the game yet!

20:02
OK, long afternoon. Friends were there. I made 4 more levels for the game. Hand drawn, scanned, vectorised, re-bitmapised, made floor detection aware. They don’t have colors yet, though. They don’t have content either. Had to code all the level transition stuff. Not that easy.

Next step: draw some gimmicks to throw in. Or go to eat…

Tags: journal

The little guy can run around and jump on stuff now, and I think I’ve got the jumping physics down. It’s actually a little bit fun just jumping around the screen. So that’s good. The engine is all Lua, with only a little bit C to glue into SDL and that, which is also nice.

The bad news is I’m about to throw in the towel. There’s less than 4 hours left, and the game doesn’t even have all the elements or logic for them, let alone any levels. What gfx there is are stubs, and there’s no sound. I’m also feeling like crap at the moment, all dizzy and my head seems to be throbbing for some reason. If it wasn’t for that last part I’d still give it a try, but I’m honestly having trouble just typing this right now.

Looking forward to play the other games, though. There’s some great stuff here.

LDT +2753

Local time: 20:53

Today has not been very productive, I had almost finished yesterday so there wasn’t much pressure. It’s rather short though, so I’m thinking about making a third level. Not sure yet…

My awesome girlfriend brought back some chicken wings on the way back from her walk. Overexposed photo:

Teaser screenshot bit:

Tags: foodphoto, journal

Here’s my noodles and soda for lunch for today (oh, so healthy!):

As for my project, I’ve decided to throw in a few sound effects to make it more complete. Back to work (and simultaneous lunch)!

Tags: foodphoto, journal

Started at local midnight, two hours ago. I had grand plans of making a generic scriptable text adventure engine when the compo started, but couldn’t find the inspiration and energy needed to get on with it. Instead I stalled and waited for the very last moment to get something half-assed out the door. It ended up completely hard-coded and very simple, but at least I got to write a text adventure. Last one I did was probably in AmigaBASIC twelve years ago.

Download and poke around a bit. You might have a minute or two of frustration fun: drpetter_ld12.zip

Tags: adventure, final, text

I’ve been unable to get any programming done so far today due to my sister suddenly turning 28, but now I’m back at the keyboard. Food has been eaten, girlfriends talked to, and bathrooms visited, so now I’m ready to really dig in these last 7.5 hours.

Good luck, all!

After quite a bit of coding I got collisions working for the “bullets” (eggs). So, now all of the enemies die when they’re hit woot. I’ve also made around 5 new maps (Total now: 10) and I’m thinking there’s going to be 15 or less maps in the finished product. Oh, and no the player can’t go to any maps after 7 currently… it’s because I’ve only drawn the maps, not added them into the game. Anyway; I’m trying to code a miniboss right now; and it’s not working in my favor. Very very annoying. I’m trying to make him randomly use one of his two attacks; but the animation gets all screwed up. *Sigh*… it’s sure to be some stupidly obvious bug that I’ll kick myself over when I find it. Until next time!

Tags: journal

Phew, finally. I had a few hours to go, but it’s probably safer not to get fancy.

You can play the game directly in your browser here, or download a zip file containing an executable jar file and all source code here.

Tags: final