Oh man,

So I’ve had a nap and written a bit more code, this is my status

• 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
• add NPCs
• add environment objects
• 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

All the mechanics appear to be functional (or at least as much as they need to be), obviously it looks awful but I’m not going to touch look and feel and sounds until tomorrow evening (about 8 hours before the deadline).

As you can see, it’s going to be a story about friendship, the ‘alone’ theme is covered by the plot :-). If I can get the plot done – that middle task of “write the story from  beginning to end” is looking quite daunting – I need to complete that in the next six hours or at least get close. I don’t mind if the game is only 5 minutes long, but it needs to make sense and actually work for those five minutes!!

• Sleep since competition start: 1 hour
• Coffee count: 4
• Orange juice count: 6
• Food so far: Cereal, bacon + eggs with toasted baguette, an apple

I’m continuing to procrastinate here, you’re warned.

Holy heck the Blizzard Cup finals was so unbelievably epic I can’t find my words! DRG down 0-3, tying it up 3-3 and in almost, almost, loosing the final game in the best series since… Ever?

Now with that finally out there I can focus on the game making again. Hm.

Posted a first look of our Jam game to my blog, found at From The Beginning.

Do enjoy, good luck to everyone!

– Jonno & Nathan

Okay, a fairly mixed start to this weekend for me.

Woke up early and excited, checked the theme (“Yeah, that’ll do”), came up with an idea and got cracking. All good.

I’m using FlashPunk, which is unusual for me; normally I use my own base code, but the features of FlashPunk drew me in. This was perhaps not a wise decision, I’ve wasted a whole bunch of my morning on problems that weren’t *that* bad, but weren’t familiar to me. The advantage of working on the same codebase again and again is you learn it’s quirks and solutions. I’m definitely not at that point with FlashPunk yet!

Ah well, I’m making progress anyway.

Need to get cracking on my core mechanics ASAP, and hope that FlashPunk’s features can win me back some of the time I’ve lost.

Back to work!

yes we can jump !!! now time to add the camera to scroll the screen !!!

Tags: alone with myself, jump, platform game, progress, video

I can’t be bothered to write a blog post at this time of night(morning?) so I will instead leave you with this barely legible comic I drew about today.

please forgive me

Goodnight <3

Ok, so first up. Playable examples here!(For windorz atm only sorry ;( )

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13276897/Uni%20Stuff/IntelliJ/Fur%20Ever%20Alone/out/artifacts/Fur_Ever_Alone_jar/Fur%20Ever%20Alone.rar

For both 32 and 64 bit bops. Run the jar from command line or use the provided .bat

All is going well and eating my rice

oh yeah, stream is still going ahead http://www.twitch.tv/tentaclenoises join for weird music and shitty art and coding!

Okay. So I worked ~10 hours on the game and saw that there was no real progress from the playing perspective. I realised there was just to much work that had to be done on the engine (and art, and I’m no artist) for the game to be playable. So I restarted from scratch with a less complex game.

Current progress: None.

So I just woke up and had a wonderful (suprisingly good) english muffin with…I don’t even know what’s on it. How sad.

So now I’m of to resolve some more problems with character animations and figure out who that girl is. (I have a pretty god idea, though.)

Yes, English muffins DO exist in Amererica.

Nearly one day after, this theme turned out to be very fun to develop. Can’t wait to reveal more of it, like the really clever name we came up for it!

Tags: 72h, jam, LD #22, Make A Game, Sneak Peek

Basically this is my First Preview but with a better player light. Check it out and give feedback please!

Rolpege LD22 (Alone) – Preview 1 (light fix)

Well I’m fairly pleased with my progress so far.

You can play the first level here:

http://snuffypot11.com/LD22/ThePlace.exe

Well I’ve accomplished… what looks like a scoreless, ambiguous runner in an Irish grass field… with walls… i guess this may be called progress… i suppose….

i will come back!! and ill bring more sheep’s with me!!

Previous post here.

I’m back with a new post. 16 hours have passed since I started working on the game, and things are looking bright (hope it’s not cause I have industrial quantities of coffee in me right now). I managed to implement a basic AI system for the baddies, and I’m building upon it. Since  my last progress reported the following changes have been made:

– In order to focus more on the scoring mechanics and gameplay, the player can no longer shoot at the enemies. Instead he must dodge, run, jump and avoid the entire swarm of baddies that charge gun-first towards him.

– Enemies now feature two AI mode: Idle and Hostile! If the player hasn’t pick up the Briefcase, the baddies will run around the arena, acting cute and minding their own business. When the player steals the briefcase and heads towards the Touchdown Area, the enemies enter the Hostile mode, which has them engage the player.  Right now I’m working on splitting the enemies in two groups: Attackers and Defenders. Attackers are the baddies that charge towards the player, while Defenders maintain their position near the Touchdown Area firing at the player, defending that position.

– Got the HUD to work, both the HealthBar and the “Special” bar.

– Collision detection between the baddies! Now they bump into each other, turn around and mind their own business. (Only in Idle mode).

– I suck at 3D modeling and graphics, but I’m doing what I can. Right now I’ve added the Player and Baddies models (who are subject to change if I will have enough time left), which look like a low-poly cell-shaded version of R2D2 from Star Wars.

Here are a couple of new screen shots, and a video showcasing the Idle-ing robots.

Tags: 16 hours, Progress Report, Touchdown, Zapaman

Placeholder Graphics

Okay! I got a decent night’s sleep, coffee and breakfast, and now I am ready to flesh out the ‘rough draft’ of this game. For the theme, I chose to make a game about the character wanting to be left alone. He will find clever ways of sending random people away while he makes it to his goal.

The code is still Yuck! It’s mostly whatever I could get running last night after the theme was announced and I picked a design. I’ll probably rewrite what I have and add the opposing characters and maps before lunch.

PS: Chronolapse didn’t really work for me last night, I checked it out and it just loops through the few minutes I had captured prior to start time. Not going to worry about it, but there’s not going to be a timelapse from me this competition. Maybe I should have gotten myself familiar with Chronolapse before I began! Live & learn, heh.

It’s 8:30 AM, and it’s time to call it quits. I drank 1 shot of 151, and 5 or 6 pints of beer. I attempted to hit Ballmer’s peak, but at this point, it’s unknown to me if I hit such a thing or not. I’m drunk, debugging is hard, but I can’t tell where exactly I am. I got character movement in, my idea done, and a clear idea of what I need to do tomorrow. Tomorrow shall be a sober day of extreme hardcore working. Until then, I sleep to regain energy, goodnight~

I feel that I got the movement of this red ball exactly how I wanted it to be and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to push around and play with.

Pretty happy with it so far! I also added in some water and other background

Whew, already at 8 hours of work on this! It feels like I’m not progressing as fast as I want to, but I did take a break this last hour to get some food.

Oh look, you can notice things when looking at stuff  now.  And the basics of the inventory is starting to take shape.

You can get that coconut, and it does get added to your inventory, even if you can’t see it yet!

Next up?  Displaying inventory! I think I’m going to go with a more Final Fantasy approach… that way I can just display text and not have to worry about icons, since I know I won’t have time for that!

In the past  few hours I’ve made entities, a camera, projectiles and collision. So now I can kill bad guys. Yay!

I still have to add more stuff to the projectiles, like a lifespan, speed, and other options like AoE explosions on impact, and more stuff like that. Then I can create an xml file and define all the weapons and projectiles and stuff in there so I don’t have to hardcode it.

When I’ve done that, I’ll do the same for enemies. Then I’m going to add basic AI, and once I’ve done that, I can work on the party features, the maps themselves, and dialogue + events.

And if I get all of that done, then I still have to create proper graphics. So much to do! D:

I’ve never made a game before. Or application. Or any standalone anything of any use whatsoever. So, this cannot be too ambitious, making a game in 48 hours is in itself hard enough.

As the theme is ‘alone’, I couldn’t think of any ideas that didn’t involve programming I almost certainly wouldn’t be able to achieve in 48 hours, being as it is that I have little/no experience with my (or any) chosen rendering engine. Here is my idea:

• Aim: Stay alive for as long as you can
• Scoring: Time based
• Gameplay: You are a man/whatever I can make who can only move left and right, while enemies march towards you from the top to the bottom (like in old arcade classics, such as space invaders). However, the theme is ‘alone’ so it has a twist – you have a weapon, but firing it makes everyone else except the person you shoot disappear, making that person extremely alone and thus the game’s name, “Lonely Gun” (unless I think of a better one :P).

That’s all it is at the moment, but if I miraculously manage to finish that then I will develop it more.