I figured out how to put the physics objects into groups and how to define a handler for collision events. I am now detecting when the player object collides with an object in the “wall” group, and telling the player object to switch to manual control then.

I’m getting tired, I think I will call it quits for tonight. I’m in good spirits as I feel like I made decent progress tonight. See you all tomorrow morning!

Two hours in,  and I have animated movements in 8 directions, basic collision with tiles in the background, and a moving camera that follows the player until you hit the edge of a map.

Working on making objects I can interact with next.

Wild speculation as to what I’m making:

Don’t worry, the Foreveralone is just placeholder art.

right, 2 hours in and i have a basic engine with collision on the way.I’m building a basic age of empires inspired thing.Its top down and you need to survive in the “wilderness” ALONE! Basically You chop down trees and build shelters to survive the night. I think that’s the way it’s heading. I would post a screenshot but there’s not much to see yet just a bunch of ugly colored squares.

Good luck to everyone else!!

I have been working on the game for a little while now i have a map editor working and collision working  im not happy with the speed the game is progressing time to kick it into overdrive.

So, the game can currently load and render a 16×12 level.

It’s harder to do than it looks.

I would like to get larger levels working, but for now physics are a bigger priority. The data is there, it just needs to be used. I think I’ll need to add in some slope dirt tiles though, which is one place where the tile flipping capabilities of the VDP may come in handy.

Although to get THAT working, I need to be able to move the player around. I think I’ll need to pull out something like that OO framework I used in LD19.

In other news, I’ve shifted the player graphics handling stuff to a VBlank interrupt handler.

Oh yeah, I’ve had some music playing for quite some time now. It starts with the equivalent of 6 channels worth of echo (then drops to 4 due to the bass). Have a listen.

I think I’m moving more quickly than I ever have before!  I have a lovely screenshot!

The thing is… I don’t actually know what my game is about yet.  That’s also not a real title… probably.  Need something catchier.  The real thing I’m trying to show here is that I not only have graphics up, but I have those little dudes!  Who move around by themselves, and deal with colliding with one-another!  It’s pretty sweet…

Tags: alone, game, kitten, pygame, python

I spent most of the night messing with art and coming up with ideas. I think I have something going, but I’m going to sleep on it.

Here’s what I’ve got so far

I was going to do a more adventure type game.

Now, feces to that. It’s time for a TOWER DEFENSE GAME. TOTALLY ORIGINAL.

Now here’s what our main character was going to look like. I know, it’s utter crap, but it still took me like an hour.

I’m so good.

Tags: epic, epicfail, fail, kitteh, tower defense

So, the theme ‘Alone’ was a right kick in the proverbials.. I didn’t think anyone would vote for such a bland theme that’s clearly angled towards artists rather than programmers, but oh well.

I’m thinking of just making a tower defence game or something, seeing as I haven’t done one before, but I may not submit it, we’ll see how things go.

I started with probably the worst thing.

Art.

My character was generated using charas (http://www.charas-project.net/) and doesn’t look half bad. Unfortunately, the environment is very much bleh!

Yeah, that’s supposed to be a beach.  Have yet to put the trees in. Thoroughly unimpressed with my artistic work so far.

Gonna go pass out for a bit, maybe my muse will wake up with me tomorrow morning?

I’ve spent the past few hours watching the sun rise (I’m in Belgium) over a snowy railway line, drinking coffee and contemplating what it means to be alone.

I’ve got a game concept, and yeah – it’s a platformer, I get the feeling those are popular – hopefully I’ll be able to enact something to make it feel good by the end of the day.

Where I am? Well you can see for yourself, I’m continually deploying to my Heroku instance here:

http://ld22-ashton.heroku.com/ (Warning, spins the CPU a bit as I’m not mitigating that yet)

So that’s level loading, level creation, basic player physics and controls sorted out. Not bad really, I’m pleased with that progress. Now I’m going to step back and do the following:

• make sure I can write a script to tell the story I want to tell,
• sort out a splash screen, loading, and basic application life-cycle
• write the story from beginning to end
• Make sure the game has a logical beginning, middle and end
• Tweak tweak tweak, polish, real  graphics and real sounds

I decided at the last minute that I wanted to try my hand at straight LWJGL and 3D (which I have never done before).  This was probably a mistake.  Normally I have Slick2D to help with the heavy lifting.

So after three hours of fiddling with OpenGL settings, I finally have TTF text on the screen as well as a first person camera.  Woo!

Results:

The font (Fifteen Okay) is a freeware font I found online.   I hope we aren’t expected to make our own fonts from scratch.

As I said in my previous post, I struggled to come up with an original idea around the “alone” theme. I thought and mulled over it and brainstormed a few things. Then got to prototyping some movement and controls, and voila: my first screenshot for LD22:

It’s going to be a top down point-and-click “adventure” with fixed cameras. I’ve never made a point-and-click adventure before, hell I can’t even think of the last one that I played. The theme is really evocative of stories and that’s hard to really hammer out in 48 hours. I’m not expecting it to be too terribly long, but I’m hoping I can get core gameplay down fast so I can produce what little art my inferior skills can produce.

Decided on “GodMaker” for a game. Have a game grid, turn-based WASD movement for player, and AI with a “follow first visible opponent” running. AI not really doing much though. Going to call it a night and debug in the morning.

LD48 #22: GodMaker

Here I am, well rested and ready to rumble.

The theme is alone – I suppose that’s the closest we could get to “it’s dangrous to go alone, take this” 😛 Much better theme though, I only had lunch and I already have multiple ideas:

• You’re a coder who wants to be left alone so he can code for Ludum Dare but people keep bugging him
• Something involving a dating service
• You’re all alone and hate it, so you clone yourself
• Some kind of evil god game where you try to separate the people

Those are settings, no game ideas, but so far I like the theme. I’ll still spend some more time figuring out what I’ll actually do.

–edit–

More ideas!

• You’re some kind of monster who really just wants to have a friend, but everybody’s scared of you and runs away. When you try to talk, you scream unintelligibly instead. It’d be some kind of point & click adventure and your goal is to find a friend – maybe by destroying the city and building a heart out of the rubble?
• You’re an RPG hero who’s just “beat the game” – you found the best sword, beat the boss with two hits and saved the world. Now what should you do? Any monster you encounter flees when it sees you. You’re all alone. (But seriously: what should you do? This sounds like an interesting problem, but how should it be resolved? Let’s ask the IRC!)

I’ve never actually done one of these before, and I’m late, and it’ll probably be not very good if I even finish it. Gotta try anyway. Gonna be using Stencyl cause I’m not great at programming. We’ll see how this goes.

The swarming and avoidance behaviours are working correctly, and it’s all pretty easily tweakable too. The basic mechanic is there, all I need to implement is the goal and I have a fully functional game to mess with! No fancy graphics or anything until everything is working

Basic hero dude with walk animation done, along with concepts for antagonists and npc’s and most of my level design and game mechanics white-boarded.  Taking a little break and then on to coding!  Haven’t come up with a title yet, but the idea is the more you’re alone in your thoughts the closer you become to going insane (kinda like doing an LD).

Tags: LD #22

Concept

So I’ve begun my entry. It’s called Zolcan. You are an astronomer traveling to a distant planet. Your buddies disappears and you are stranded, alone, on this alien jungle planet. Classic shmup story and game play.

Tags: flash, Flixel