(Follow-up to 2011/12/16/im-going-to-bed/)

I finally figured out some kind of story/concept, check out the full list of changes on YouTube.

Well it was an exhausting and late start for me, but here’s an update! After a long day, all of us at the LD Cape Town meet have been afflicted by a strange tiredness, along with all manner of delirium, and strange obsessions with seagulls and rocket ships. We need a break.

I had quite a hard time coming up with an idea for this theme, but am currently  here:

The idea I have is that the player has to catch up with his flock, but also has to maintain and gather energy (food) along the way (still to come). It has some promise, and may be more do-able than my previous attempts, as even in it’s current form, it’s almost complete as a simple game. Tomorrow I will work on the energy/food/diving mechanics, and do some graphical changes.

It’s midnight, and I lost count of how many times I’ve read developers on here saying that sleep is important, so I’m gonna go to bed now. 😉

Picture above is me selecting some of the items in my game… It’s a platformer with a mentally disturbed guy who’s wife and children has died, so in his loneliness he develops a disease which traps him inside his own mind, and while being there, he has to survive different threats.

As a weapon in this game, I’ve got lots of random items, that you get in presents that you create yourself. Using the cursor you can select a box, and when you put that over a present it bursts open, and the things lay there ready to be lifted around using the dragging feature.

I haven’t done any threats/enemies yet, but I’m planning on having you pushing the items into enemies and threats for them to die. It probably sounds weird now, but I’ve made it so when you walk into the different items they fly to the direction you pushed it with great power, so I hope for it to look great as soon as the enemies are incorporated.

As for the actual GOAL of the gameplay, I am not really sure yet, I really hope to come up with that tomorrow. It’ll be some kind of survival, I suppose…

Good night everyone, and good luck.

Finishing up the title screen/intro.

Getting tired, still loads to do. Hope I can make in time.

Aw yeah, I forgot how awesome LD is.

Here it is!

Here is my current to do list:

1. Add polish to game
2. MURDER MY IDE UNTIL IT ACCEPTS MY CODE BASED ON THAT DARN COSINE RULE!!!
3. …profit!

a^2 = b^2 + c^2 - 2 x b x c x cosA

It may not be much but it runs.

Day 1 + warmup

Considering the theme, I decided to go platformer style.

Here’s a brief overview of the things I’ve done so far:

• A world, in a 720×480 viewport (canvas html5).
• Movement physics
• Item system : collide, use, pickup, drop, ..
• Weather (parallax)
• Clouds /background (parallax)
• Mood/atmosphere color
• Pause menu
• Sprites & Animation

• Weather, repeating image
• Clouds/bg, also repeated
• Data image, transparent with different colored pixels on it, placeholders for objects/walls
• Graphic, the actuall map graphic
• Json file: Taglines, mechanisms, mobs (?)

• Mob enities, but, alone? Didn’t figure it out yet.
• Mechanisms
• Levels
• Music
• Sounds
• More sprites.

Finally have something nice coming together. Random sound created (Thanks http://www.bfxr.net/) and some blue lines that do stuff. Swheeet.

See Video: Ludum Dare 20 Hours Progress

Yes, this title is different form all “I’m in” you could see yesterday.

I’m really late and will try to make my best to create a little game in approximately 10 hours (I must sleep !).

Theme : Alone.

Hmm…  *brainstorming* *brainstorming* *IDEA*

I just tell you it will probably be original.

Have a nice night (here in France, it’s 0:33) !

Well, I was hoping to finish the game engine itself by the end of tonight, but I’ve got like, 6 hours before that happens and, as far as I can tell, the game works perfectly, and never crashes. There’s still some balancing left to do, though. I’m really surprised at being in this situation because my code is incredibly ugly, uses a massive excess of pointers, and has plenty of one letter variable names. But it works, so I just need to not touch anything except the rendering code.

Here’s a screenshot from the game. You can see that I have been very focused on the game engine, and less focussed on graphic or interface. For example, there is a black button on a black button that you can’t see, but has a pretty important function. Also, the title is “SFML Window” which isn’t really the most creative title ever.

Then, the same scene a few seconds later. See if you can spot the dead dwarf. It’s in the cluster of red things at the bottom left.

So, I guess the todo list looks like this:

• Fix a rendering bug that makes a new dwarf spring up randomly whenever a dwarf dies.
• Add some visible particle whenever a dwarf dies.
• Give everything real graphics.
• Differentiate between valuable ore and not valuable ore.
• Label what each button does & what its cost is. Also, actually charge the player money for placing stuff.
• Step on a kill trap, and record the sound I make for use in the game.

AI is now 100% less friendly, however to compensate player is now 100% more deadly to AI.

In other-words things now die when they get shot!

also added power up create’s and a basic level system. shoot more baddy’s and more show up to ruin your day.

Pew Pew!

As you can see the games visuals need a lot of shiny. something I will work on tomorrow.

As the last human left it’s just you and the open skies…

Just make sure you take everything you find or your journey may be cut short…

I’m going to be adding meteors, missiles and improving graphics. Seriously considering adding ETs!

Looks like there’s a lot of people making good progress!

After all, I have the whole second day to finish off this game.

And yeah, I added lots of different stuff:
– Dropping water from the ceiling,
– Game asks you if you want to restart when you die,
– You can now collect grey and green plates,
– Shootable flies. They can kill you,
– A checkpoint. When you enter it, your plate collection is saved and you don’t need to collect them again when you die.

That’s a great progress in my opinion! I hope I’ll finish it for tomorrow.

Download here!

Super tired now, Ive started getting a bit of the story in and the character walks, which is useful! Took me ages to figure out how to alpha fade in the text, silly tint(); I love processing though so Im not going to complain.

I want to change so many things, the text needs to be thought of ALOT more, the visuals are no where near finished and the actual key to the ‘gameplay’ has yet to be written. I think I’m starting to think more that this isn’t really a game it’s just something that looks like a game oO

Good luck to those who are staying up late!

I had originally planned to start yesterday (LD started at 1pm Sydney time), but an hour after the theme was announced I had to organise and cater for a party of 20 people which consumed the night.  Now it’s morning, time to resume game making.  I have a rough idea for where to start.

Thus ends the first 22 hours of Ludum Dare 22 for me. It’s almost like I timed this! (no I didn’t)

Unfortunately, lacking any of the graphics, sounds, or narrative kind of reveals my game to have precious little game in it. Here’s hoping the rest adds something it’s missing right now, or I can think of a neat and quickly implemented little mechanic to spice things up a little.

You can get access to the prototype HERE!

Tags: as3, demo, Flixel, prototype

I’ve been working on adding a bunch of scenes to my text-adventure which starts to really look like something releasable soon.

I think I’ll be able to finish it in time, and it’s the first time I do something web-based for LD, so I’ll have to see how I’ll host it. It’s a simple HTML file, so that shouldn’t be hard…

I’ll try to sleep a few hours: I only slept 1h since LD started, which means I’ve been programming for more than 20h straight, with 10h spent on two failed prototypes, and 10h spent on this game ! (Of course, you can remove the time spent on IRC, but that’s part of the fun 😛 )
Good night !

Thought i’d share this with you guys, although i haven’t really made that much progress today, i’m confident that i’ll finish this one tomorrow

Here’s also something to fiddle with, although it has no gameplay value yet, i like the mainmenu music
Chilly

Previous post here.

Ok, 20 hours have passed like a breeze. I’ve kept myself busy, coding and doing my best to create 3D models that can be identified with ease! Got most of the Core Mechanics working quite well. I now need to polish them and focus on Level Design and media (textures, models, music). This is a full list of features that have been added today:

• Collision
• Player and Camera controls (1st person, 3rd person, top-down – although top-down is what I am going to use)
• Bullet handling for the Enemies
• Enemy AI. There are two types of enemies, Attackers and Defenders. The Attackers will engage the Player gun-first, while defenders will rush towards the TouchDown zone, in order to defend it.
• Switching between levels.
• HUD (Health Bar, Special Bar/Stamina Bar)

I’m happy with my progress today, managed to do most of the things that I had planed. Gonna take a quick nap (2-3h maximum) and then I’m back to adding the rest of the features, and polishing the game.

As a bonus, here’s my Timelapse video. Hope you guys like it.

Tags: day 1, timelapse, Touchdown, Zapaman