THAT DOOR!

So, I finally started working on the gameplay, even thought I was supposed to do that instead of fiddling around heavily on perfecting my UV maps and working on textures. But immediately starting to work on it,I hit the door instead of the wall, figuratively and quite literally:

I just couldn’t get a smooth closing scenario for the script to work, It kept either A. going round and round and round, or B. only opening and never closing. So after, possibly a FEW HOURS spent on a bloody door trying to figure out alternate method perhaps, I finally got it to work. Anyway, lets see how well I can do this “player->object” interaction part.

Anyway, the timelapse is probably gonna be funny seeing me fiddle around with a door for a minute or so..

After many lost hours on Saturday I’ve finally started working on something.

I’m calling it Lighthouse Keeper (pretty shitty name) and guess what it’s about?

Yeah, you are on an island and you are the lighthouse keeper. You must collect fuel (wood+oil) so the lighthouse can work during the night. I’m thinking of doing it time based (the fuel collecting part) and depending on how much fuel you can get the lighthouse will work the whole night or maybe not and ships will crash and it will be terrible.

After some hours I got some basic isometric tiles rendering (it’s my first time doing some isometric).

So I’m reasonably happy with the (very) basic interactions I have so far. No doubt I’ll decide that I want some more depth to the gameplay far too late to change it, but for now it’s turning out to be an (hopefully) interesting journey game.

Someone won't be home for Christmas.

It’s about someone exiled from their home, the journey they make to the South, and the people they meet along the way.

Back from a productive evening of drinking many shots and trying to explain some of the finer points of transsexualism and why my gender identity does not automatically make everyone dating me androsexual… while constantly claiming [my boyfriend] Audit’s gay anyway, for ordering girly drinks (What self-respecting man would get a “golddigger” cocktail pitcher? Caramel vodka and DIET COLA? I felt emasculated just trying it.)

Okay, we’ve found that, for no logical reason the graphics don’t load properly on my machine, which given I was about to take over the reigns on the graphics programming, is  a bit of  a massssive pain. It’s also a deployment issue, given that “on 1/3 computers it doesn’t work” isn’t exactly a selling point… though actually, now I’ve had a good look at the graphics, it technically MIGHT be… Thankfully, Dreadlocks is using linux, so we know it’s not a general linux issue. If anything it would be because we had  a hard time getting a recent version of Löve on my laptop (rep problems) and Audit probably installed it wrong. Yeah, probably either how he coded it or how he installed stuff. Definitely his fault.

Also, for some reason I was the only person who was getting error messages from a function call which generated a variable and first occurred AFTER the first call to a function using that variable. I fixed it, but I wonder why it worked nonetheless for everyone else. The issues are easily explained by versioning discrepancies, but there don’t appear to be any… Nah, I just say that to sound technical, I can program and I can do theory, but anything goes wrong and pop, I call in someone who enjoys that kind of problem solving, I know enough of them that I never had to learn.

Even MORE disturbing, Audit’s stupid ass case-insensitive piece of crap OS has caused him to suffer bugs when his working code is packaged (since the love packages are not so forgiving) and when the files are ported to a grown up’s OS, it breaks. Not there’s actually anything inherently WRONG with case insensitivity, but it has caused this problem, where strictness would not have.

The game is playable, contains two not very interesting levels and a simple dialog screen to transition between levels. If I wanted to, I could call it ‘feature complete’ and start focussing on content, adding bells and whistles and end up with a decent looking game. Trouble is that the game currently is not very interesting. It is basically ‘isolate the coloured ball as efficiently as possible’ and almost always involves placing at most three lines (triangle around the ball). Anyone with a bit spatial awareness will spot the solution in a few seconds. Not very impressive.

It was time to re-examine the game concept and, as luck would have it, it was time for dinner. I made myself a pizza and took a long hot shower, while pondering what I could do to improve the game. Then I remembered one of Jonathan Blow’s presentations about defining a world and then let gameplay rules present itself by examining its boundaries. In this case, the world is defined by a group of static red circles and a single static yellow circle. These two types must be separated by one or more straight lines, drawn with the mouse. Whenever one or more red circles are separated by a line, they will become inactive. The player wins by make all the red circles become inactive.

Now I have the rules of the world defined, I can experiment with modifying them. Consider the yellow circle: what if we have two yellow circles? Should these be grouped together to win the game or, to keep in the spirit of the theme, should they both be isolated from each other? How about making the yellow circle drift towards its nearest active red circle? Can the yellow circle switch places with a red one under certain circumstances? Which circumstances would those be?

These questions, all originating from the system I have designed right now, could all make a more interesting game. Let’s see what the rest of the evening will bring :). Onwards!

The player isolated the yellow circle from a red ball

The player has finished a level

Not entirely sure where I’m going with this, I’m probably going to keep things purely on the atmospheric.

Grab playable demo here : http://niu.uz/ld22/build/lastbuild.love

I haven’t packaged it with the love executable yet, so you might need to grab it from www.love2d.org

Go to http://niu.uz/ld22/ for screenshots and snapshots every 10 minutes

That pretty much describes my last 2 hours. ;_;

8 hours or so (?) of work and it’s finally a game! Nothing playable yet… maybe soon?

We’re about to start working on the artwork, the first parts of the story are written out, even our player sprite has come alive

Now for the fun part … programming the sliding images so it looks like you’re not bumping your head

Team Aphelion

Yay for videos!

http://youtu.be/yiDR6b7_N0k

Tell me what you think!

Tags: alone, game, kitten, pygame, python

Taking lots of coding shortcuts to finish my first ever game in time hasn’t been working, and I’ve been delayed with stupid memory leaks. Shortcuts cause long delays!

I have also run into the problem that, my game being 3d, I have no 3d design skills whatsoever. The graphics should turn out… interesting! 😀 Additionally, I’ve absolutely no idea how to add sound using my engine or how to texture the models. So, basically, I don’t know how to add sound to the models I can’t make decorated by the textures I can’t do. Hooray!

Eleven hours of work so far, and now I have an inventory system where I can use items and equip them! I also added in some small rocks.

I’m thinking of adding in a day / night cycle next. That or just some more items.

Soon I need to figure out how I’m going to handle crafting as well. I’m thinking a workbench station system that gives you a list of stuff you can craft based on what materials you have…

I starting to think this project might be a bit too ambitious to complete in the Ludum dare, but I will see what I can get done anyways!

Well let’s just say I’m relieved to be writing this post at all.

Our original sidescroller idea got smashed into little pieces due to the complicated physics. We couldn’t get it right in our limited time period. Now we’re working on a new idea based around the original. You move left and right to collect and avoid raindrop auras, plus pick up coins for bonus points.

Okay, I’ve been coding for hours straight, and I think it’s time I have a rest tonight and maybe do a bit more before bed, but yeah.

I’ve enjoyed this one, it hasn’t been too stressful, and I’m pretty happy with what’s been produced, although I do wish it had a bit more content.

Anyway, I won’t provide screenshots, but rather, a demo this time.

You can download the demo here. Controls only consist of the up arrow at the moment, which push the bird up, be sure to hold it as soon as you press play. There’s no collision or game over screen, so it’s still pretty empty.

Leave any comments about crashes and what not, and just a note before hand:

It’s a debug version, so you’ll need the C++ redistribution which you can get from Microsoft if it turns out you don’t have it. (MSVC100 or something error.)

The game is meant to quit when you hit the ‘floor’, I just couldn’t be bothered sorting out a game over screen yet.

Any problems you do have, please paste any relevant information, as well as the Allegro.log next to the .exe that appears after play.

We’ve had an exciting first few hours here in chilly Needham.  We’ve gotten PyGame to play nicely with Box2D, and have a nice walking sprite animation.

Screenshot of the walking test

An early phrase that came out of our work was: we cross platforms.  Between the 6 of us in this room, 3 different operating systems are represented.

Powerups are well underway, they show up and are all spicy and make tons of awesome chipnoise when you pick them up!

Still no gameplay and work, more of a proof of concept. Will continue on gameplay, sounds and graphics before sophisticating the code and mainly collisions.

The problem is that I’m short on time so limitations will be lots and lots.

Still working hard though.

Well, I was originally going to code something up in C and OpenGL… but I didn’t really feel my skills were up to snuff to do that.

So instead I’m doing something a little more accessible in HTML. It’s going to be a bit lean on the graphics, as it’s looking like its going to be a text-based RPG or something along those lines. Either way, this has been an interesting day so far, and I’m cut a bit short on time, so I really need to keep at it while I can.

Good times ahead.

The most important part of programming is finished, and I can spend most of the remaining time on level design, animation, sound and perhaps things like secrets and achievements.

Here’s a few more hours work. I’m really liking how this is turning out, I hope you all enjoy it to. Please report any missing dependencies below, it’s getting hard to keep track of since I have some installed myself.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11197643/ld22p3.zip