I decided to have a go, wasn’t sure originally as I have another thing I want to work on but decided a break to something completely different and small, should be fun and interesting and think I have an idea that fits the theme.

Engine: Torque3D 1.2 + AFX2 + GMK + GuideBot (All available from GarageGames.com)

Art Packages: LW 10.1 + 3DCoat + Daz3D 4 Pro + Photoshop Elements 6 + Paint.NET + iPad photoshop

IDE: Visual Studio 11 Preview + Torsion

Sounds: Not yet decided

Background Music : Spotify and currently Paul Hartnoll – The Ideal Condition

Timelapse : Chronolapse

Main worry is actually finishing something…

Let the fun/pain begin!

Deano

After a lot of tweaking of variables, some really insignificant parts of my game are just right.  But despite the unnecessary hangups, I’m starting to get a good idea of what this game is going to be.

Here, have some really unilluminating Programmer Art:

And I think that’ll be  enough for tonight, gotta get some rest, even during LD.

I wish well to those in other time zones just waking up! Happy coding!

Right after some much needed sleep we now know that the theme is alone!!

I reckon we can turn this into something good #LD48

So I was coding when suddenly my music player played one of my favorite songs, “End of Solitude” by Kagamine Rin. Have a look at this part of the lyrics…

Ah, a mirage at the end of this solitude
The moon that is blue is caught in the back of here
Ah, At the end of repeats, I can only see
I see, the moon is gently dreaming right now

Waste the property and then forget and leave
It disappears like that because it has no form

Now compare to my whiteboard ideas: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/12/17/here-we-go-again-9/
“Waste the property and then forget and leave” -> “upgrades by destroying”
“Ah, At the end of repeats, I can only see” -> “repeats”
“The moon that is blue is caught in the back of here” -> “goal: blue spheres”

I can’t tell if this is a coincidence or I subconsciously wrote that down. Well, while I’m at it, I might as well take more ideas. A game based on a song, woo!

The only game in which you play as Jupiter!

One day, Jupiter was sitting around in his orbit, when he thought to himself, “How lonely I truly am.” So a kind wizard give him omnipotence, so that Jupiter could make friends! Join Jupiter on his travels through space as he uses the power of gravity to make friends! Through assimilation!

Jupiter while "making friends".

I’ll be using Stencyl for the game itself. Can I get this finished? Work would disagree with me.

It’s twelve o’clock here in Italy (LD is from saturday 3:00 am to monday 2:59 am, according to local time), about 9 hours passed.

It’s twelve o’clock and I didn’t come with a feasible idea yet.

Oh well… It will come.

To be honest I had some, but there are, like, a zillion platformer where the player is alone (or based on “loneliness”). Not so original. So I’m searching for something more original.

After restarting the project a few hours ago I finally have a concept and something that works!

See Video: Ludum Dare 8 Hours Progress

I plan for a top down shooter set in a steampunk dungeon full of robots. I hope I’m successful in getting this done, and if it goes well I may try and put in procedural generation. I’m almost certainly soloing it in the compo.

I’ve been sorta battling with creating a good skybox with photoshop. Took a while to figure out how to actually work with Cube maps, but the result is going to pretty interesting directions. Perhaps the most problematic thing that I might encounter is the sound world, as it would be a critical component in setting up the world around the player as they are alone in the middle of ‘nowhere’ as they are looking to alleviate their loneliness. I will possibly have to look through my existing sound libraries I have to have the best effect.

The only issue that I see right about now is the fact the resolution might have been too small, 256 making the sky box look at bit too low res. I will be increasing the size of it as time goes on an fixing the proportions of the sun correctly, but for now I’m focusing on the other aspects of the environment.

As of the moment I’m using the First person package in unity, however I will possibly end up rewriting that code, as soon as I can get my self more fully familiarized with it.

On the after setting up the sky box, I’ve been working on the some of the lights that will be in the scene: mainly the flickering light bulb that would. Shadows and lights will play an important role in my game in guiding the player to their destination.Unfortunately , I only have the basic free version of unity 3D, thus shadows will have to be crafted by hand into the scene, with various trickery which I will be experimenting with..

Being still -very- fresh to unity 3D, only having a week of practice on my belt, and its JS-like context (more of unityscript, some of these are completely unique to Unity) I’m possibly going to spend a bit too much time still learning the ropes, but lets see.

You can now walk around the area and collect coins!
It’s displayed in the HUD at the bottom.
This isn’t the aim of the game, but you collect them throughout and it’s just something else to do while you play.

Here’s a .app for any mac users that wanna walk around
Download .app

Because this is my first Ludum Dare, I gonna participate in a Jam.

Your character lives in a town where mysterious disappearance of its citizens has recently  taken place. The game starts by the time when presence of anyone other than the character is doubtful – he might as well be the only one left. The goal is to find evidence of other citizens’ presence in town.

BUNNY ^_^

So since I live in an unfortunate time zone the theme was announced 3 AM. Therefore I decided to just wake up at 8 AM and get started then. I was suprised that the theme was alone, I had expected it to be kittens. (I am happy that that is not the theme) My game will be a turn-based RPG, very much like the card game munchkin. I got pretty far already with the main codebase, but there is still a lot of work to do.

For those of you who have an emulator for the Sega Master System, I’m releasing development dump #001 of my game.

What’s there:

• Music engine from my LD19-derived base code
• Working level loader
• Offscreen objects don’t appear on screen
• You can move the player around

What’s not:

• The level does not scroll (needs to be able to draw individual rows / columns)
• It won’t draw levels correctly that aren’t 16 level tiles wide
• Physics are broken at the moment and thus dummied out (tile collision data is there, though)
• Objects and functions pertaining to them need to be more generic. Apart from collision detection, which doesn’t even work yet, all the functions that operate on objects directly interact with pointers pointing to the player object.

So good night guys, and hopefully I’ll be in bed before tomorrow rolls over.

So, almost 9 hours have elapsed since the start of LD and I have…actually done absolutely zero coding and I don’t really have any ideas as to what I’m going to be making.  Am I screwed???

Well, on the plus side, I managed to get my test app running on Windows, OSX, and linux–and I got it to work on windows and osx without additional dependencies!  (I think…well, windows i might have gotten lucky in terms of test subject.  but I’m confident that even if it doesn’t work I can get it to)  So it’s settled: I’ll be using C# with SDL.net.  I’ll probably still be developing in Visual Studio with the .NET framework, but then my releases will be using Mono.

It was really coming down to the wire, and a tough call…if I hadn’t figured out how to get it working on OSX I probably would have started trying to learn pygame (which I should still do at some point).  But this is hopeful.  Ever since trying out XNA I’ve really liked dev’ing in C# with Visual Studio, it’s just…nice.

As for ideas, well…going to a social dance event for 5 hours didn’t really help me think about “alone” too much, haha.  I still really have nothing…maybe some really scatterbrained ideas, but nothing concrete.

But in any case, I’m really dead tired so I’m going to just get a really good night’s rest (I’m gonna have to sleep sooner or later anyways) and then wake up ready to both brainstorm and start setting up the project.  Who knows–maybe I’ll come up with a neat project idea while I’m sleeping xD

Interestingly enough, Alone was the name of the experimental way-short visual novel I made in a day.  I think as a theme, it kind of begs me to think of something artsy–as in, a game that tries to make some sort of psychological or emotional impact.  Something that sends across a message of some sort.  In contrast to say, evolution or something, which I’d just regard more of as something to make into an interesting game mechanic.

I guess the ideal way would be to make something that is both a game mechanic and has emotional impact.  Hmm…what to do?

I do have to say though, that I like Alone a lot better than most of the other top-placing themes.  Randomly-generated, meh…Evolution, kind of okay I guess but I can see that one a little too easily.  Parallel dimension too, that’s too game-mechanic-y.  Forgotten places might be kind of interesting.

But anyways….alone.  alonealonealonealonealonealonezzzzzzzzz

After 3 hours of work when the theme was announced, I got some sleep. Now I woke up, ready for more sleep. But no! I must continue my game! No more sleep for me.

The plan is to create a top-down dungeon crawl-ish game with a party, and shit hits the fan and people are dying and stuff and it’s very emotional somehow. I’ve no idea if I can get the mood right, but if not, then at least I’ll have a actiony game. I’ve currently got a simple world and camera running. Next step is to add a player character and NPCs, and a fight system. When that’s done, I’ll have to work on a dialogue system, and create some nice levels, and a lot of other stuff like the characters themselves. Lots of things to do!

you know can warp between future and past yay now to add a past timer and past enemies

All game play elements are implemented, now I just need to work out a good balance, positioning of food, and mess around with the swarm behaviour. I’m really itching to start doing the graphics and music for this ^_^

So I’m taking part again, hopefully this time round I will finish my game as I was a little unsuccessful last time

Coming up with an idea now, I was going to do a livestream but then realized my xbox live vision cam doesn’t have a mic, and then I tried to do a stream of my webcam off my laptop along with a stream of my desktop’s second screen. But it didn’t work out, plus Game Maker HTML5 doesn’t seem to allow itself it be streamed.

On with the thinking up ideas, once I’ve got one narrowed down and started working on it I’ll allow myself some food

Tags: ld48 ld22

level editor is working 😛

map[0] = ' 111 ';
map[1] = ' 111 ';
map[2] = ' 111 ';
map[3] = ' ';
map[4] = ' 1111 ';
map[5] = ' 111 ';
map[6] = ' ';
map[7] = ' 111 ';
map[8] = ' 111';
map[9] = ' 111 ';
map[10] = ' 111';
map[11] = ' ';
map[12] = ' 111 ';
map[13] = ' c 111 ';
map[14] = '11111111111';


Tags: alone with myself, editor, level, screenshot