So, after a good night’s sleep after the theme was announced, I scrapped my original crappy idea, and came up with a new one! Unfortunately, a final exam during the day, and a trip to NYC that took 4 hours slowed my progress and I’ve only just done any significant work tonight.

The premise is just to have a bunch of small rooms with variations of things that happen in life. The theme, alone, fits in with most of the rooms, such as repelling others, being completely alone, and even building (and breaking) relationships.

SOLITUDE: The starting room for every round.

All the rooms are randomly generated, and I’m currently spending the rest of the weekend just adding more and more types of rooms, to make each play-through unique.

For now I don’t what I’ll call the game, but I’m leaning towards Solitude (the name of the starting room), or Alone In A Crowd (another of the rooms).

With just 18 hours left, and the fact that it is almost 3:00 am here, I’m going to get some sleep, and tackle the rest of it tomorrow.

Tags: screenshot

Here’s what I’ve done so far. Basically its a zelda like game wherein you have to be alone in the screen at all times. Any other creature

in the screen with you and you take damage. You have to navigate the maze listening to your heartbeat(for nearby creatures) or following monster drops(blood droplets) because everything is dark and all you have is your light. You need to find scrolls which will unlock portals to the next level.

For theme, I want it to be Lovecraftian but I don’t have the art skills to properly execute it. Te premise of the game is you are an explorer that stumble upon an ancient Necropolis ruled by demons.

There, good luck to everybody!

As mentioned before, i started a new game, for the second time. here is a google docs about it. right now i have all the mechanics except different zombies(easy to do), Shop(med-level), graphics, and power-ups. i’m saving the graphics for last so i don’t do them for nothing if this doesn’t work out (it should though).

have this Delicious picture:

Also, my kitten has been sleeping on my pillow the entire day. Her name is Pandora.

After a short night of sleep, time to write some levels to my game. I´m a little afraid that I may have made the game too hard, and that only luck will carry you through without dying at least once.

But if I think again, not that this is a bad thing, is it?

Or maybe it is the day two blues of not believing in your own creation…

Well, time for coffee and graph paper.

Tags: content, doubts, java, level design

“One more level” I told myself

Getting hard now. Making a level is a multistep process. I’m using DAME and it goes like this:

1. make a new level file in DAME
2. import all the sprites and tiles
3. draw the tiles in
4. rename the groups it creates
5. export
6. fix the .as3 files that it generates (there’s 3 lines, and I know where they are, it’s trivial but annoying)
7. make a playstate to fit the level in

So yeah. I originally wanted like 7 levels, but I still need to build a HUD, fix the movement system, and do balancing if I want sound. The pragmatic thing to do would be to cut the last 3 levels and the other enemy I had planned to make.

Tomorrow I’ll do what I think this needs in order to be a game, which is a HUD, fixed movement, and other things, and if I have time I’ll make the last few levels and enemy.

I keep neglecting sound, so easy to overlook yet so important. Will I have time? probably not.

I guess worse case, I could try to wrap this up as a game and ship as is.

next time I need to uncomplicate the level design process.

The theme hasn’t been kind to me, this time.
I’ve had a lot of blank ideas and dead ends, and while I did finally settle on one.. it didn’t quite go to plan, so I’m in a bit of a puggled state just now.

While a chunk of yesterday was taken up with sleep and shopping, I did try quickly putting together a game.
It was going to be called Infiltrate, and be a bird’s eye view styled thing, where you run around a complex, taking enemies out, and blowing stuff up. Sortof like Commandos, except you’re all alone and have no backup, or much tools apart from what you find.
However, after committing the cardinal sin of “NOT SETTING UP TOOLS BEFORE THE COMPETITION” the majority of the day was wasted getting them ready… and seeing as I’d need a reasonable amount of art and scripted logic to get that going, it’s been shelved for the moment. I’m not exactly speedy with any kind of art, and I’m not fully competent in the land of JavaScript and HTML5 as yet to attempt something as crazy big without the full amount of time available.
The design is done however, so I may adapt it later for something else.

So, with it now being into the second day and nothing to my name, what am I going to do now?
I’m going to have a cup of tea to help wake up a bit more, sketch out some ideas over the next hour, then get a-cracking!

Before going to bed (headed there as soon as I post this) I have managed to finish the Online High-score board (currently has to be viewed online, will implement it if I have time), and the title screen. You can rebind all of the controls to other keyboard keys, or joystick/game pad buttons. All of the gameplay features are in, with Win and Lose messages.

Todo:

Music

Sound

Polish

I’m finished! Or just taking a long break. I may implement a high score system later today if I feel like it, but for now it’s done.
You can check it out here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=2884

So I had a little nap, was planning to wake up at 2am and get cracking on finalising the code behind the cutscene that introduces you to the game, so I could start nice and fresh tomorrow on all of the art and sound assets.

The nap for an hour lasted 6, my day has already been wasted! No time for waffles this morning, hopefully when my boyfriend gets up he’ll make me some bacon and eggs.

I’d show a shot of my game, but it is still all placeholder, when some graphics get in I’ll manage, and then everyone can see how me and tacograveyard have literally come up with the same concept, there is no copying involved I swear, I came up with two ideas on Saturday morning, and ‘Run Justin, Run’ was the idea I rolled with.

The game is going well so far, 17 hours is a bit of a stretch for finishing, but I’m sure I will, I always seem to manage, after all drawing pictures doesn’t take hours 😛

..yeah right

We named the game “Follow” (was originally “StalkHer”, but that sounded kind of… yeeeaaah…). It’s almost finished; this is a list of things left to implement:

• An ending scene
• Instructions
• Some animations

The stick mocks him.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 18th, 2011 at 6:29 am and is filed under LD #22. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’m making it. This time I’ve gotten as far as to add sounds, textures, and a word writer. Time to go to sleep before the final crunch tomorrow…

Well, things are looking slightly different.  On the plus side, the revised form of my mechanic seems to have a lot more potential than my old one.  The idea is that you get to “alonify” entities, and essentially make one instance of it exist and make the other ones not-exist.  I admit it’s kind of a stretch on the theme, but hopefully I’ll be able to weave it in with narrative, in the style of “The Company of Myself”.

Anyhow, before I actually had the other instances of the objects being deleted, but now instead I’m having them fade out so you can walk through them, but they still exist and you can toggle which one of the objects is physical by using your sparklies on that one.  This also means you can actually get stuck between two barriers, so I added a respawn function that restarts a level for you (looking more and more like the company of myself, really).

Now I’m sitting here scratching my head…the only thing harder than solving puzzles is making puzzles…I still don’t really get how this one works.

With 17.5 hours remaining, and 9:30pm on the clock, I finally have scrolling working!

This is exciting, because I don’t actually have an easy-to-address framebuffer or a mega-fast CPU.

In fact it’s so exciting that I’m giving you development snapshot #003. Enjoy. Note that I disabled the ground check for jumping; this is so you can see the awesomeness of bi-directional scrolling.

Time is running out.

It all starts from a cube

I decided to not even try doing texture until I have all of my Gameplay done: continueing from previous: I finally got that door simplified, and then worked on a point and click mechanic for the game it self, Al thought in my humble opinion the missing audio and visual aspects may simply degrade mood of loneliness. Oh well.

So far, all seems to be good: Althought the door it self seems to bug up with its physics, if the player happens to be next to it when opening it. (it will remain closed until the player goes out of the “Range” at which it opened at. But that is a minor bug, and Probably wont be fixed in the final compo submission.

So for now , I’m working on the interaction mechanics: So far everything is identified in the HUD and gets removed from the world when interacted with. There is a minor bug, which mainly related probably to where the “Ray” is coming from in vs where the camera is, but that’s pretty straight forward to fix.

I have the recipe system, and crafting mechanics done. It checks your inventory for items and returns a list of all recipes that you can currently craft.

I just need to tie it all into a menu now that lets you select recipes you have materials for.

http://youtu.be/TgCenCPWNng

That’s a very quiet iPhone video of what I have so far… Still chugging along…

I don’t really know why I show the camera the code for the first 30 seconds of the video…
I guess it is because it took almost all my time.

Tags: Flyinpancake

‘playable’ was the goal that I hoped I would achieve in this Ludum Dare, as I’ve never made a ‘playable’ game before. I’ve very nearly got my game idea – which I purposely made the simplest game possible – so I would at least be able to enter this Ludum Dare. However, as the only rendering engine for C++ that I knew how to use was 3D… I now have to make some 3d graphics, which I have no knowledge how to do. Also, I don’t have a sound engine I’ve ever used before. My submitted game may be a bunch of grey cubes shooting at other grey cubes!

Hello! Here’s a screenshot from my game. It’s called “Alone With a Phone”.

The concept is basically being lonely and so you use the spacebar and mouse to type and send messages (read:Tweets) to become more popular. If someone is talking about a message you’re typing you can click to mention them for bonus points and bonus popularity. The game ends when you can’t keep up and you lose all your followers and are, once again, alone.

very tired here at 4am EST but gotta keep going for now!

I now have 17 hours left, and I have the beginnings of a really simple game here. At the moment, I have a decent AI implemented for the zombies which makes them have lose/gain interest in the player, lunge when they’re too close, and actually harm the player, too.

While playing around with this tech demo for a bit, I realized that I’m probably not going to make it to the point where I had originally wanted to get the game (you wandering around as the sole-survivor of a zombie apocolypse in a pre-drawn map of multi-story buildings while zombies try to kill you). I did realize, however, I might be able to turn it around and make it into something silly. Ie: have the player try to get as close to the zombie as possible without getting attacked for high scores. Pretty dumb, but at least it might give me a chance to finish.

Most of the time has been spent building up a decent framework (which I plan on re-using down the line) fighting with weird idiosyncrasies of Java 2D, Applets, and timing issues. Had I written most of this during the warmup, I suspect I probably would have been able to get much farther than this time ’round.

That being said, I’m definitely going to the end of this — I said I was in, after all. (^.^);

After day one I have done:

the game mechanics, like Title-screen, Level-screen, Game-Over, Winner, Collision …
right now my To-Do-List:

-make some cute Graphics, maybe some Sprite animation

-Sound for jump and so on

-make more Levels

-and when I have time the music.

Screenshot

So 16 hours to go 😉 good luck.