Well, after two and a half hours of planning and graphics making, I’m came up with a starting position. Things are looking on the up and up, however, but I think I need to be well rested tomorrow, and so I leave here today with a new vigor of game-making. And a screenshot. I got those two done in a series of “what can Ido with only black and white” designs and erasing and redesigns. Then those tiles are messed up so I have to change it. Again.

Who is this strange pair? But they aren't alone!

…Really, though, who are they?

…Wait. The top of her head is cut off. Crap.

EDIT: Oh, wait. It’s supposed to look like that.

Actually, you can ONLY jump using UP arrow key, and obey gravity. That’s it!

First step
try it

Which is odd, this early on. I must be getting better at this whole rapid game creation thing. The name is “Dwarven Isolation”. It is about preventing dwarves from mining into each other, which is important since dwarven handshakes cause catastrophic explosions (but I’m sure a smart reader like you knew that). The dwarves, of course, are attracted to shiny objects, like gold or treasure, and are quite good at whacking stuff and making solid rock walls go away.

More seriously, here’s my entire design document.

Dwarven Isolation
The game starts out with a maze through rock and ore. Several dwarves enter, and begin walking around and mining stuff. The goal is to earn as much money as possible before two dwarves meet.

Capabilities of the Player
-The player can place treasure chests and valuable ore.
-The player can place hard rocks on the path.
-The player can place traps which kill or injure dwarves.
-The player cannot do anything in direct view of a dwarf.

Rules of the Dwarves
-If two dwarves see each other, they will run towards each other. Unless there is a trap already in place, this is certain doom.
-Dwarven line of sight extends infinitely in all directions.
-As dwarves mine, they become better at mining and do it faster.
-If a dwarf sees treasure, they will run towards it. This is not as strong as seeing another dwarf.
-If a dwarf finds a body, they will scream, alerting all in a radius. They will find the fastest way, including mining things. You’ll probably have to kill someone else if they find a body. Yeah, it won’t end well.

And, if possible, ACHIEVEMENTS! Gotta love achievements!

What’s done right now:
Line of sight stuff is done.
Half of pathfinding is done (which really isn’t significant; it’s just A*).

What needs to be done:
Everything not listed above.

I’ve put quite a lot of work into it, but now I finally have a very nice prototype.

The theme is alone, so I got creative. The storyline is that there is a place where all of the Stereotypical Slimes, blobs, etc. Take shelter from the players of RPGs. War breaks out between the Green Slimes and the Red. As everyone knows, Red slimes are higher level, so the greens are slaughtered! You are the only survivor, and you must run for your life! Earn points by surviving, unlock new arenas, and create your own!  So far I have a few levels, enemies, spawners, a points system, and a level editor! Looking good, I think I’ll make the deadline 😀

I don’t know what to make yet, but setup some basic things and now have some scrolling tiles in Flixel with Haxe.

It’s very late now, so I’m off to bed.

I planned on starting right when the competition started, but I got distracted with other things, but I am here now.

I didn’t vote for alone, but honestly I’m fine with that theme, as I’ve been wanting to try and make an island survival type game, and this theme fits perfectly.

I will be using FlashDevelop, Flashpunk, GIMP, audacity, Bfxr, and perhaps this music generator.

Time to get crackin and see what I can whip up in 45 hours.

So the base tileset just got finished. I kind dun goofed up on the wall part, but if I have extra time I’ll fix it up. The good part about it is that for most of of the different levels I can simply change the color on it to reflect the mood. It’s still hell just a different layer 😛

So far time spent: 50 min design, 100 min art. Gonna code some basic movement after my break and go back to design.

Haven’t touch any code yet. I want to make sure that the idea and design are cool. After that, we will work on a Game Concept Document.

AHHHH!! How could I forget the one thing I needed. A CAMERA.

So there goes the first few hours as I had to implement a camera to move around the scene. Otherwise I have a basic idea of what I’m doing.

Let the game begin…

I’ve made some progress!
I have the tile map drawn, and a sprite that can move around the map!

Also with basic collisions!

Tags: alone, cryptix, progress

Since we now know the theme of this Ludum Dare “Alone” the team that is working with me has been brainstorming like crazy.

They came up with the wonderful idea of making a side-scrolling adventure type game. So we’ll be working on that a bit more.

But for now, time to get some sleep as 5:55 AM just past me …

Good night for now and we’ll see you back at the “Dark” side

Team Aphelion

You know, as much experience as I have with 2D games in the Flash world I am still relatively new to it using Unity3D, and it’s not as though the tool is actually created with the intention of facilitating a 2D game experience.  This would be why people tend to write and sell their own implementations.

That said, I’ve done a few very simple games in the past six months and I think I could make one of comparable scale in the 48 hours listed.  The theme sounded challenging at first, but I think I have a reasonably nice concept:

“The Hug-Monster (-o^_^)-o can never get enough love or hugs, and is always happy to see you.  Unfortunately, it’s a little too excitable and at times doesn’t seem to know its own strength.

You  on the other hand (1) are small and fragile, and most definitely want nothing more than to be left alone, especially from the big, scary Hug-monster!

How long can you avoid its warm, snuggly, and loving arms of death?  Find out in this classic platformer!”

 

Notes:

(1)(Your player is represented by an 8px sized rendition of the skull and crossbones icon from the wingdings font set, which astonishingly looks more like a little guy than anything else at that size)

I feel like I’m a bit behind, but I’m doing this from scratch so eh, I guess.

Working on the movement and jumping, then I’m going to figure out a dialogue system, interact system, and keep going from there.  Might have one short story, but it’ll be cool I guess.  Not really too enthused about the theme right now, I don’t feel like this is the best idea I could come up with, but I’m pretty blank otherwise.

Maybe.

She Really Really Loves You

So, yeah, i’ve got an idea for a game :-P. Hopefully i can make it…

Watch My Live Stream!

Tags: motivation

10

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2011 at 3:01 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.

Still going through a pyglet tutorial, seems pretty straightforward so far.

Got text and sprites on screen within minutes.

 

I actually lost about an hour trying to find a way to turn my python game into a .exe anf getting that to work.

Got it working, using cxfreeze.

Most of my time was wasted trying to make cxfreeze work, kept on getting errors. Later found out that I should just install the 32 bit version, even though I’m running Win 7 64 bit.

Worked on the first try after installing the 32 bit version.

I’ve filled in the other 3 frames required, and set it up so that it only loads one frame of animation into VRAM. There are enough scanlines to do this completely in VBlank with a comfortable amount of headroom; unfortunately, the method used isn’t fast enough to require me to slow it down during not-VBlank, and so this provides no speed advantage.

Anyhow, on the topic of sprite flipping. The TMS9918A provides a lovely feature which allows you to flip tile data horizontally and/or vertically. Unfortunately, this was not provided with sprites, despite the fact that there’s a blatantly unused section which would have been perfect for sticking these flags in. So you have to flip the sprites manually.

This is where we use a table to perform the flip. It looks like this:

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Erm, I mean THIS:

.macro m_build_fliptab_gen
.redefine mv_q 0
.rept 256
.redefine mv_x mv_q
.redefine mv_x (((mv_x<<1)&$AA)|((mv_x>>1)&$55))
.redefine mv_x (((mv_x<<2)&$CC)|((mv_x>>2)&$33))
.redefine mv_x (((mv_x<<4)&$F0)|((mv_x>>4)&$0F))
.db mv_x
.redefine mv_q 1+mv_q
.endr
.endm

I also have one which generates a “no flip table” which is just a bunch of bytes from 0 to 255.

Here’s the code:

ld de,$0000
–:
.rept 4
rst $08
.endr

; load sprite
ld hl,$4000 + ($7C * 32)
ld bc,$80BF
out (c),l
out (c),h

ld hl,g_spriteset_plr
add hl,de
push de
ld d,fliptab>>8
-:
ld e,(hl) ; 19
inc l ; 23
ld a,(de) ; 30
out ($BE),a ; 41 – SAFE
djnz – ; START: 12
pop de

ex de,hl
ld de,$0080
add hl,de
ex de,hl
ld a,d
and $02 -1
ld d,a

; there’s still plenty of breathing room
; mednafen reports $DA with the occasional flicker of $D5

jp —

I hope you can work out whether the walk animation is any good or not. I’ve loaded it into an unused space of VRAM. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that one of the frames involves the player bobbing up. See, I put in effort!

 

This is the set up I'll be using for Ludum Dare 22.

11″ MacBook Air, first-gen iPad, fourth-gen iPod touch, and a Dell UltraSharp display. Timelapse is being recorded onto a Seagate USB drive.

So…not too much at the moment done, but that’s in part because I now may (I presume, that is) the final official jump to Actionscript 3.0!

 

…

…Okay, this is an important point for me because I’ve been stuck in Actionscript 2.5 (Half 2.0, half 3.0) for…about four years now? I haven’t been actively working on it that entire time, in fact…not really at all last year, and well, I’m proud of this change, at least.

 

I’ve done Python and Java OOP programming fine before, but I first got programming in Actionscript 2.0. Which let you code on frames. Which I do. A lot of the time. So…transitioning to Actionscript 3 has been…not so smooth.

 

Part of the problem…okay, pretty much all of it, has been creating an ActionScript object.

 

Which I got the final working copy of my code working by going here:

 

http://www.flepstudio.org/forum/object-oriented-programming-tutorials/440-tutorial-1-my-first-3-0-class.html

Thing is, this doesn’t *quite* work for me – I wanted variables already, and functions!

 

So…aside from that tutorial, the following things to keep in mind – some of these are somewhat interesting:

 

• First off – even if you aren’t putting your Actionscript .as files (See the tutorial above if you don’t know what I’m talking about), you still need a package wrapper around your class. Which is different than Java, where having no named package for the file let you leave it alone. Default package is just “package{” – Yeap, no name, just the bracket (Make sure you close it at the end of the file – properly).

 

• Secondly, the constructor’s…considered a function. So for your constructor, it has to go like so:

public function LightGrid(){

        //....

}

•  Thirdly, when doing this, and linking it from an item in the library of default Flash (Right-click object in library, go to Linkage, Make sure you select “Export for ActionScript”, and input your .as file’s name in there, and hit the checkmark to validate it), DO NOT leave versions of it on your stage – it’ll complain about them if you reference them, so it’s just better practise.

Um, yeap. About all I can think of now – though you can start viewing the source (When updated) here:

 

http://www.sfu.ca/~ajr12/LudumDare22/LudumDare/

Enjoy!