It seems that 12 hours have passed since the compo started. It’s time to look back on what I have accomplished in this 12 hours.

I’m going to start with a small description of what is going on in the game:

The game takes place in a vritual environment (tron-like grids). Both the player and his enemies are virtual bots, living in cyber space. The player’s goal is to collect the “Intelligence” briefcase, and send it to the drop off zone. You win points by scoring touchdowns (dropping the Intelligence in the designated area), you loose points if you get killed.

The enemies (baddies as I like to call them) are not hostile towards you at first, but become so when you steal their precious briefcase. In order to reach the drop zone, the player must push (while carrying the briefcase) through the enemy lines. Once the touchdown occurs, the briefcase is reset to it’s original position.

Think of it as a Top-Down Shooter meets Team Fortress 2 and American Football. Up till know I have the following things working:

• Player controls
• Collision and Gravity
• Enemy spawning and a shitty AI that starts to follow you when you pick up the briefcase
• Dropping and picking up the briefcase
• Player bullets (enemy bullets to be added soon)

Here’s a rough concept of the playing field:

Here’s a Screenshot:

What do you guys think?

Tags: Progress Report, Touchdown, Zapaman

the game’s calle d”Enslaving Davement”. more on that. github has readme and my notes which explain things, but I think i’m going to type an explanation after this is all over, so straight to how it’s going…

the skeleton of the game is implemented, more or less. there are sort of 4 states to the game:

Day, Night, Ending, Cutscenes.

The states, of course, are visited multiple times (except the tentative ending). In the day, you collect musical notes…for a certain purpose…while also trying to keep your impending feeling of doom and anxiety from growing….

Then, at night, you visit members of the band Davement’s house. You must try to keep your anxiety low, make your way to the person, and…

If time allows there will be cutscenes (read: plain text and pictures, nothing fancy) between stages or at least the intro/ending. I’m hoping the ending will take into account performance on each of the stages, and produce snarky commentary based on how you did.

Right, so:

framework: More or less there- transitioning, making sure crap carries over, handling deaths. nothing pretty, just the logic.

level design: HA.

graphics: crappy placeholders.

music/sfx: nope.

The next few hours I plan to try and polish up the flow of the gameplay’s skeleton – after the most worrisome part (the programming) for me is done, I can focus on the (relatively) easier creative aspects, which will fill things in.

I woke up a few hours ago and got to work.

I’m creating a survival game where you’re stranded on an island, alone and confused you have to use your surroundings to survive and possibly even escape depending on how far I get.

So far I have the basics of the tile engine working along with collision detection, movement and some very shoddy placeholder art.

But now it’s time to eat breakfast while looking at everyone’s creations so far.

After a good night sleep and some healthy breakfast, I was mulling over the theme for this competition. Although I feel I could go for a story-driven game, I cannot even draw myself out of a paper bag if I wanted to. So, I will keep on brainstorming on my game idea.

In the meantime, an enumeration of my tools of choice:

For coding I will use C++ with SFML, although I might opt for an additional engine if the game requires it. As always, I will use my tricked out Vim application to write the code.

Graphic assets will be drawn using GIMP and sound assets, if any, will be generated by the excellent SFXR tool by Dr. Petter. For now, music will be absent, but time permitting I will have a look at a procedural music generator (Wolfram Tunes or something like that).

So this is going to be my work environment for the next two days. Obligatory workspace picture:

The theme is “alone” so I my initial thought was solitaire. Other concepts that I’ve been working with are “playing with the cards that you’re dealt” and “we all die alone.”

My current direction is to have a turn-based game where each turn represents a span of years and covers the changes that happen during that time. Life changes will affect aspects of your life such as health, career and relationships. The game ends when your life ends and the choices you make determine whether you’ve lived a life of meaning. I would rather not force a meaning on life by using a score as a replacement for meaning, but that’s something I’ll work out.

So far I’ve mostly been working on figuring out game mechanics. The only programming I’ve done so far is to set up the project in Flash Builder. I also started figuring out the visual style in Photoshop.

It’s 4:15 am and I’m off to bed now -_-

Couldn’t sleep and finished this scene.
Apparently, you’re not alone…

( p.s.to self: go back to bed Alex )

Well, by some miracle I haven’t slept way past my alarm and into the early hours of the afternoon. As I feared, I am not 100% in terms of health. Fortunately, I am at least over 80% in terms of health so this thing can still happen! Just need some caffeine and I can start talking a walk to develop my ideas. I have a couple of ideas already, so we’ll see how they go!

Tags: awake, Flixel

I made two typos when I wrote the title of the blog, and two more when writing this – make that three -, so I’m going to call it quits for tonight.

Oh, but PROGRESS IS MADE.

Anyways, quite a lot of brooding over how to deal with different grid sections and how lights themselves work with them – got a lamp class working, which means I could experiment.

The general idea is that, when loading a stage or whatever (Still haven’t decided how to make it work for this weekend – probably going to be a “You’re locked in the basement during a full moon – can you survive the night?” scenario, I think – with monsters assaulting you in waves spawning from light/dark sources, or in a worse case, just trying to get out, and having to solve lighting problems, I guess), the grid of parts that make up the background are calculated (Might be generic personal setup), for what lights hit what areas, then if the lights are effected, they may affect that area’s coverage.

So if a light is destroyed by attacks, for example, it would make everything it affected darker, unless there was another light there.  If two lights are weakened, and they cover the same area, the light will drop in that area, but not to full darkness.

Right now, the game let’s you click as if you were turning on a switch, and then the light would turn the one piece of grid I have right now on. Technically, it’s getting the rendering, and not actually hitting a switch…but yeah. Basically, the light is already attached to the box, and when you click, it goes through the process of assuming something’s happen to a light, and re-does the grid (Yes, of 1 right now – full grid later) – if a light is on in that area, and isn’t broken, then it lights up that area. Right now at full blast. But yeah, that’s level design. Tweaking. Comes later. <_<

I believe I covered enemy spawning before, but a bit more on that (It’s relevant):

So they spawn in pure darkness or pure lightness, and then follow you out. I’m thinking this will be done in game by, every quarter of a minute, say, it choses a grid section as mentioned above. If it’s pure darkness, it’ll spawn a dark enemey, if it’s pure light, then a light enemey, but if not, won’t spawn an enemy.

Quick enough I think to do – so once I get the lights fixed that comes after…

The player character. Still have to do that. Right. Also, probably sounds – though that’ll come last.

But with regards to the player character, we kind of need him before we spawn the enemies. Probably’ll be a box for now when I get to him, and then he’ll shoot lasers (Perhaps into the narrative as his laser guy toy and the enemies are his imagination run amok? Afraid of the dark, alone? Works for me.), and some basic physics (Single button jump ala Super Mario Bros., I’m thinking.). If he shoots them, they die. And then another wave of enemies comes in.

If I have time, that’ll be important – I think I may be able to fit in something about if you hit enemies from behind, you’d get extra something – something that goes along with the Bonus Board idea I originally brought up way back in my first post for this Ludum Dare competition – but that also requires me to use that automatic drain, and I still don’t know what to do about that thematically. Probably be scraping these two.

Hope you enjoyed my epileptic blog post for the day!

P.S. If you’re looking for the final code so far, here’s the source:

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

Okay, the theme was unexpected. “Alone”? Seriously? But I’ve had a cool idea, so I’m ready to get to work. Unfortunately, I will not be able to do so for another 4 hours or so. Ugh. This may be tight.

I have block spawning, working on a power meter and score, and then I’ll get the baddies in there, and the powerups.  A little late on this update due to getting food

… but I will try to keep up. I am all in, with Ruby, Gosu, and Chingu backing me up. There is so little time this weekend!

I stayed up way past my bedtime last night to see what the theme was and fully intended to sleep after finding out, instead I spent the next 2 hours not really sleeping then half waking up and emailing myself ideas… sleepy ideas. It’s like reading emails from a drunk person. Anyway I am now fully up and it’s time for me to catch up! Here is the obligatory workspace photo, I say workspace… more just my incredibly comfy sofa and the only computer I own

There are more fairy lights than can be seen there, and the big telly lurking behind my laptop will be playing my favourite films all day

This is what I’ve got for the end of the first night.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13349757/LudumDare22.swf

that project i said i had progress in a while ago, ya, i abandoned it. but i’m glad. This new project i’m working on is going well. i also like the graphics and name. the name is “IN THE DARK” hopefully this one will succeed. On a side note, i’m loving some of the other games people are showing, will get pictures up of this when i can. Goodnight.

So I’ve woken up. This means the hard part is over with.

Now I’ve got a couple of game ideas based on isolation. Since I figured most people are going to do artsy and depressing metroidvanias, I’m going to occupy the puzzle faction.

Basically, you get to draw a rectangle and the player has to be isolated inside it at all times. I’m still not quite sure if I should do a real-time, platformer type thing or a turn-based strategy one. We’ll see which one works better.

I’m making progress.

Tags: easter-egg, kitten-challenge

Helloo!

I just woke up and had a look at the theme… alone! – well, at least it’s not random generated (hard to do well on 2 days you know…) or kittens… phew!

So, after a bit of thinking and lots of help, I’ve come up with an idea for my game:

You’re in an expedition with someone, but right at the start, this someone dies. OMG OMG OMG… so you decide it’d be nice to drag his/her body home. So basically what I’m going to do is a simple puzzle/exploration platformer set in a cave, where you must find a safe way to drag the body and exit the cave.

If I have time (if everything goes right, the first part should be finished by this afternoon… then I’d implement the idea, and tomorrow it’s level time + bug fixing + polish), I will add some kind of day/night cycle. During the day, everything’s OK. During the night, there’s some climatic hazard which kills you slowly, so you have to take refugee at some places in the cave (there will be some constructions and natural refugees…). Taking refugee will skip the night and reveal a bit of storyline (won’t make the storyline too long, so the best players can still see it all… then it’ll be a collection of random quotes I guess).

Also my intention is to have a bit of dark ambient / creepy sfx in the cave. You will be alone… but man, it’s going to be creepy!

So.. I have zero motivation… I’m ill… But I have a idea 😀

Maybe if I start I get some motivation. Not sure about that…

What I will be using:

• haXe
• FlashDevelop
• Paint.NET
• Something for music (Or just no music for now)

Tags: flashdevelop, haXe, motivation

I’m starting to see posts about people waking up.  This is probably a god sign that I should go to sleep, huh?  I’ve got a lot of the code base put together now… but I still don’t have a solid idea of what my game will be!  I do, however, have a solid idea for a project to morph whatever this is into after LD is over and I have more time?  Go figure.  Sleep usually helps clear up my thoughts, though, so… good night!  And good luck!

Tags: alone, game, kitten, pygame, python

Our progress as far as idea go are coming a long quite nice. We’ve got our concept down and the concept art down:

The actual game implementation is pretty nice as well, but there is no art in it quite yet, because my artists fell asleep on me. Lightweights. Here’s the progress on the actual game:

I think if we can manage to get what we want made in the allotted time our game will be quite good.