Tags: academic costume, advancing wall of doom, ld48_14, motivation

Good morning! Well I guess this is a pretty late start even for us GMT’ers…

“Advancing Wall of Doom”?!

Last night when “Yo Dawg” was in the top 5, I started planning for the worst case scenario and actually came up with a pretty good idea for it – some kind of Warioware mini-game affair where our protagonist must race against the clock to make a game with a “Yo Dawg” theme and halfway through realises that he can make a game about making a game about making a game about…

But anyway, I sort of have an idea for the Advancing Wall theme. I’m about to start scribbling on paper and flesh out the design.

So, here are my weapons of choice this time around:

• Python 2.6 – such an awesome language
• PyGame – really does take the “C++” out of game development
• pythonutils – a library I have lying around with some basic utility classes
• Eclipse IDE with PyDev plugin – people tell me to learn Emacs but having written Java for so long I just can’t part with my IDE
• Graphics Gale – best thing I know of for creating animated sprites
• GIMP – for any CG artwork I might need
• GoldWave – for editing sound effects
• Cakewalk Sonar – if I actually get time to rustle up some music for this one
• SFXR – Dr Petter’s incredible sound generator tool – like MsPaint for sound effects
• Pen, paper, food, maybe even sleep!

Tags: first, ideas, tools

08:12
Decided to go with some kind of destroyable wall of doom. Throw stuff at it to detach pieces, and thus slow the progression. For now I’ll try to work on the geometry bit.
10:03
Stupidely made my own vector library in Lua. Didn’t like the others I found, but inspired from those. Now the fun begins.

11:35
I can has destroyable geometry. Just a line and you dig holes in it.

12:03
Corrected lots of bugs and made the computations more general: more case are covered, includind when you “cut” a bit by drilling all around it. Hungry now. Food now.

Tags: journal, screenshot

I’ve got basic IO stuff & a game Idea – more of a Falling Wall of Doom than an Advancing one, though.

The 1.5l pitcher of black tea has been drank and have made way for the 1l of coffee with cream & sugar.

So I’ve got up, showered, done some morning yoga, had breakfast, done my weekly grocery shopping and now I’m ready to go.

Luckily for me the wall of doom theme was the one theme I’d already been able to come up with a concrete idea for.  It’ll be called ‘Die, you stupid hurdlers!’ and you’ll play the part of a wall who hates hurdlers, and tries to set traps to trip them up so he can crush them (hurdlers obviously run faster than walls can).  It’ll be a bit Tower Defence-ish…

My desk:

(the bear in the corner is an Atari Punk Console I put inside a teddy bear – you twiddle the knobs in his ears to play him.  He probably won’t be getting used for the competition)

Morning all from sunny Huddersfield.  It is actually sunny here for a change but sadly I can only see a tiny bit of the outside world from my prison for the next 48 hours, I mean delightfull cellar workspace.

It’s my first Ludum Dare and my first game competition so I’m not sure how I will get on but I’ll give it a go.  The theme seems a bit limited to me but that is probably my just limited saturday morning brain.  Anyway I just wanted to say hello and good luck all.  I’m looking forward to playing all the games, I just hope we don’t all make the same one ; )

P.S. No exciting breakfast photos here sadly as I’ve already eaten it.  I’ll try and remeber to take a photo tomorrow. Of tomorrows breakfast that is, not of todays breakfast. That would just be wrong! Back to the code face.

Tags: hello, morning

Not my most favorite theme, but already starting working a bit.

My game will be a strategy, where you as a farmer will fight against locust, who will eat your crops. Still deciding, if I should go for 2D or 3D.

Here is the motivator anyway :).

So the theme was one I thought I liked earlier in the week, but decided for the final vote that I was wrong.  Of course, it was selected so we’ll have to make due.

I’m still not sure I can get something totally fun done before the self-imposed deadline of tomorrow night.  If I don’t get it done by then, it probably won’t get done since I have a party to go to and then the second game of the Sharks/Ducks playoff series.

I stared at the computer screen, helped with my kid’s bath and watched some TV before I settled on an idea for the Advancing Wall of Doom theme.  The idea is simple:  The wall goes from left to right, and words go right to left.  The idea is that you have to type the phrase before the untyped characters run into the wall.  Essentially a tool to help practice touch typing.  If you can do that, then you get a new phrase, and so on.  If you make a mistake, the wall creeps faster.  Successfully completing the entire set of phrases in that round may reset the wall, or just give you a short reprieve, I haven’t decided.

So far I have the text scrolling and typing stuff done.   It keeps track of what character you are on and knows when you’ve typed the wrong one.  The wall creeps to the right, but nothing happens on collision yet.  I created some sound effects using sfxr by DrPetter.  It’s quick, easy, and awesome.  I may mess around with musagi later tomorrow for backround music, we’ll see.

There isn’t much to show off, so I didn’t bother with screen shot tonight.

I think it’s time for sleep.  See you in the morning.

Tags: advancing wall of doom, ld48_14, typing

mmmmmmm oaty clumpsters

Realizing my breakfast is more delicious than it is interesting, I’ve gone ahead and given it the Andy Warhol treatment. Now it looks like fishtank scenery.

Tags: food

Obligatory Working-area photo!
The most important piece of equipment here is the cup of coffee.

Finally got Pyglet loading tile maps exported from Tile Studio, and doing collision against the edges. Loading a y-down tile map in a y-up coordinate system is surprisingly confusing when you’re tired. ¬_¬

Physics next!

Tags: progress, pyglet

Hi all! This is my first post. I woke up at about 8:15 AM to check the theme and realized that it didn’t really appeal to me that much. So I slept over it a couple of hours more, it’s now 11:26 AM, and I decided to toss away my high ambitions and just make something for the sake of being able to enter in this frenzy at all. So, a little board game/RTS hybrid is my current crappy idea.

Just made myself a cup of green tea to get me started. My tools:

• the D programming language
• SDL
• OpenGL
• a couple of homebrew classes I regularly use for game programming; vector math, font rendering, that kind of stuff. No time to post that now, but it’s online in a couple of places, so may link to it later.

First step: read up on hex grids and implement one.

Playing right now: De Stijl by the White Stripes to power me for the day. This is exciting, let’s get started.

The basics are in, plus squishy purple plants, but I think I’ll add a space suit to protect the player from the total lack of atmosphere.

I’ve got some students over watching The Fifth Element now. I think I’ll take a break and sit down with them for a bit. I’m hoping to get the engine and graphics finished tonight so the only thing I’ll need to worry about tomorrow is adding the couple of small levels I have planned.

Tags: progress

I have a car. It can drive. It has a wall of doom attached to the front of its hood.

11543 instance? WHY? WHY? I have no idea, but magma seems to create much more magma than it should.

Edit: Solved…

I just woke up. Wat is dat!

Man, it’s too early for this. Morning apple pastries, with apple juice for fuel. Apparently I’m going for the GBGames style of LD nourishment this time around.

Did some concept art last night, which I really don’t remember — things got a little bleary around 5am. Still no good ideas, so I guess I’ll just go with a dumb one. Hey, you work with what you got.

Tags: food, LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009

It’s still too early; but people may like it.

Link: Mirror 1

Description: Don’t forget to look at the picture to learn the controls, and rules.

Still clueless about my concept, all I finished so far is a menu system. Wow.

Hope, I don’t have to drop out this time.

Here’s my LD48#14 starter breakfast…

Some delicious coffee (french roast) and two Karelian pies (Finnish specialty) with salty raw spiced salmon (also Finnish specialty). With some biscuits from the bag on the right which are baked with oil and don’t contain any trans fats. I didn’t eat any of the small tomatoes, at least for now. I just put them in the pic to fool you.

Tags: food

Woke up about 1h30 ago, had breakfast and saw the theme… URGH!

Advancing Wall of Doom is a terrible theme… Anyway, after a city-wide power outage, I had an idea.

My game consists on a maze-like scenario, where the player has to find a key to open the exit to the next level.

Only thing is that some of the walls is the labirinth move from time to time, picking up speed and killing/dragging the player.

Other ideas include a weapon that can help the player manipulate the environment in some way, lava pools, enemies and all the normal goodyness of game development…

Now to get a map working…

I was asleep for about 3 1/2 hours – but I am up and might as well apply myself.

Not sure about breakfast – but here is my work area. It’s taken with my camera phone which isn’t the greatest/

I am so very uninspired this weekend — it looks like I’m going to fall on that (trusty) old standby, the sidescrolling platformer. Having some fun playing around with the visual style, though.

Wait — you don’t see the game in that screenshot? It’s right there! No? Aww, comon:

Yeah, you can really see where my priorities lie. Or at least my ability to prioritize.

Anyway, it’s a wall. It’ll kill…anything on the stage. Too bad the stage is empty. Sigh.

Tags: LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009, screenshot, SSSP

I’m going with an ink on paper (recycled, ‘bamboo’ colour) visual style, and I’ve just got a title screen up and running:

I wrote a wee command line app to take the greyscale ink jpegs from my scanner, and convert them into RGBA pngs with the inverse average of the RGB components becoming the alpha channel (i.e. any white spaces in the original image are made transparent).  This way I can just draw the ink images on top of the recyled paper image , and not worry about the (white) paper I did the inking on.

My gameplay mechanic just started working, so I thought I should share a screenshot. If you can imagine the white blob in the middle as a character, and the other white milky blob as ‘lava’, you get some idea of where this is going.

In case there’s any doubt, the blue bullets are going downwards.

Only one problem: I haven’t implemented collision detection yet, so no shooting enemies and no getting shot. And the framerate is already acting funny for some reason. -_-; I have to force myself to concentrate on making the gameplay work first…

Tags: LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009, shmup

first ld… i’ll have to fail spectacularly..

a late start is me

Basic hex grid logic is working. Ahh, don’t you love the old-school strategy flavor that they radiate?

Yeah, it’s fugly. So what.

Now to actually come up with a gameplay idea. This is always the hardest part for me, I hope I won’t fail this time.

Currently making myself some spring rolls for lunch, hopefully they’ll inspire me.

Tags: D, hex grid, spring rolls

Poor stupid kitty:

After much struggling with getting all of my tool chain setup, I finally have alpha blended particles in OpenGL. That’s what I call amazing progress in just three hours :).

decided to go with having zombies as the wall of doom, kind of like Zombies!!!. I decided to use ncurses (should probably have at least tried it out last night) so you will control @ and try to get away from zombies marked from 1 – + (the numer of zombies on a square or just a + if theres more than 9). You will probably have some kind of AOE attack that doesnt kill zombies, but move them to either a random place on the  map or to graveyards or something, will have to see.

So far I only got a basic drawing and halfway map loading done, but it’s coming along nicely.

Also for some reason I have gotten addicted to Dead or Alive – you spin me round (youtube link), so it will be interesting to see what happens when I combine sleep deprivation and You spin me round on repeat for 48 hours

Ah, noodles with stuff:

Still waiting for a geistesblitz though.

Tags: food

Bunnies, advancing walls of doom (the spiky things), and player interaction.

I have NO idea how to turn this into a game..

Construct just crashed on me. I had forgotten to save.

All my progress is gone. Fuck. 😀

Woo, the toys store downstairs is having a relocation sale.

Earlier on I was thinking how fun it might be to ‘digitise’ myself for the weapons in my game. I’m no longer planning on adding guns, but I still felt like macing Mao.

Tags: procrastination

Ok, so I’ve got a solid 8 hours in. 4:20am now so I’m pretty tired, going to get some sleep after this.

The game I’m making is Advancing Wall of Math and it’s set in outer space! Hmm, didn’t I do a math game before?

Well, this one is going to be of the shmup style, but you’ll be shooting numbers into ships to complete math problems. Here’s an advancing wall of doom if you consider 1+3=doom.

Spent most of the day pondering the theme, procrastinating, and playing TF2. Finally opened up flex builder and drew a sprite, I guess this is progress.

Game is basically humpty dumpty walking along his wall, having partaken of a beverage or two. The wall advances in front of him, and there’s plenty of doom on it for him to avoid.

Tags: alcohol, compo, eggs, progress

I spent the morning not doing anything, most of the afternoon playing UT2004 and Red Alert 3, but then maybe 2.5h ago I figured I should actually try doing anything. So I started out drawing some graphics (mostly vegetation sprites). Then I coded a little to get a random forest sort of thing.

And it’s doomed, you know. You are going to convert this cute little forest into a dark waste. At least, that’s the idea. We’ll see.

Tags: doom, forest, journal, random, screenshot

13:01
Lunch break is over. Back to coding.

(mmm, noodles and an apple, and chocolate out of the photo)
14:23
Isometric view is complete!

No 3D engine here, just a bit of geometry and vector graphics, oh yeah! Imagine it going slowly downwards, and it’s really scary. Woooh.

Tags: foodphoto, screenshot

Crackers – the ultimate comeback food.

I’ve made some further progress, but I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this:

Tags: Arrow, LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009, Sky, wall

Just completed the tilemap loading and rendering (yeah, yeah, tiles are ugly!):

Anyway, now to get the player character moving and such… Problem is I have awesomely bad drawing skills, so I don’t know how the hell I’m going to make something decent…

So.. finally got an idea I feel like running with on this theme:

First, the mockup!

(Click image to view larger)

Anyway.. the simple concept is you are controlling a fleet of the last ships of your race.  You are fleeing your planet as an alien armada of doom approaches.  You will be able to move your fleet up/down/left/right and there will also be a key that lets you toggle the density/pattern of your fleet.  Think of it as able to expand or contract.

You will move through the armada avoiding colliding with capital ships and what will surely be horrendous energy weapons fire as they attempt to anihilate your race.

You must get a least ONE of your ships through the armada to win.  The more ships you get through the larger your bonus at the end for saving a larger gene pool of your race… 😉

Simple idea, hopefully the scope will be one of which I can get a fun, playable game out of before the deadline is up…

Tags: alien, avoider, concept, doom, fleet, laserbeams, lasers, mockup, rays, space, swarm

I’ve finally settled with a concept:

Help the Wall of Doom destroy the city! Some bold villagers will try to evacuate so it’s your job to stop them with uplink cannons and TD towers. Pretty morbid, lets see how it turns out.

Tags: concept

Ideas anyone?

Inspiration: The scene from Shining where hallway is filled with blood

It’ll be less disgusting, I promise.

Brown bread with ox-sausage, young cheese, peanutbutter + chocolate hail, and proper good cherry jam, and a glass of Chocolate Milk

Ox-sausage is tradionally a dutch treat from Amsterdam, made of ox. It also includes pepper, clove, nutmeg and some other spices, originally imported from the far-east (Indonesia) back in the seventeenth century. Chocolate hail probably is typically dutch as well, and cherry jam is just delecious as it’s got whole cherries in there.

I’ve switched from my original plan and im now using flash instead of love2d. It suits me better. Im currently working on creating a tile editor so that i can cleanly export level xmls to my game. Hopefully i’ll get it done in 3 hours time and go on with the game. I don’t have any solid ideas yet, but they all included tiles anyway so i thought i fixed that first 😉

Thats it for now, more to come in a couple of hours 😉

Tags: lunch, progress

Okay, it’s lunch time.  And lunch time is story time…

You are Wally the wall.  You hate hurdlers.  You have hated hurdlers ever since your girlfriend (Tina the Shopping Trolley) ran off with a handsome, athletic, talented hurdler called Harry.  At the time you were too small to do anything (being little more than a bollard), but now you’re all grown up and determined to take your revenge on all the hurdlers of the world.

By going round to athletics tracks prior to a big race and setting traps, you can trip and crush the stupid handsome, athletic, talented hurdlers beneath your mighty bricks and make them pay.  And maybe you’ll be able to win Tina back…

Also, a 1st screenshot of the game itself.

It’s just the track and the wall (in need of some scaling) at the moment.  I’m not sure what to do about the track showing through the wall – maybe I’ll fill it in with a solid colour?

Wewt, worked ’till 3 in the moring and woke up at 8. Overall I’d say the progress was pretty good, except now my eyes have this funny not good feeling…

My music just cut out. I frantically searched for the cause of the problem, tried Winamp instead of Foobar, checked the mixer, all to no avail. In the end I rebooted the PC because there’s no way I can work without music.

Then I realized my speakers’ power plug had come loose. D’oh.

In other news, I’ll probably go for a space theme now since that’s the only way a non-artist like me can make something that doesn’t hurt the eyes.

Well, while googling I saw this japanese painting… and the wave to the left looked like a big wall of doom. So here’s my rather unimaginative concept… a sidescroller where you control a Chinese surfer who has to escape from the wave…

Well, its a start.

I’ve actually been drawing lots of graphics so far and am only just starting to write the code. My idea’s a bit ambitious and I needed a fair amount of graphics down before I could start to make them into something.

Tags: screenshot, sprite

I just woke up, so it’s time to design!
My light breakfast:

And part of my workspace:

It’s true:  Real men like Pokemon.  😛

Already, I have my first error…  Has anyone else seen this?!

g++ -Wall -c Advancing.cpp
Advancing.cpp:28: error: unexpected Doom at end of file

Physics objects working, courtesy of the awesome Chipmunk library. You can’t see it in the screenshot, but the level spawns about halfway up the screen, each piece just in time before you reach it, and falls down to the bottom.

Gameplay? I said I had physics — you want gameplay, too? Jeesh.

Tags: chipmunk, LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009

Hi all,

I’m running a quick stress test of my game (pre-alpha 1) to make sure it runs on as many machines as possible. (Min spec is a Geforce FX or equivalent – i.e. about 4-5 year old machine.) If you have the time, it would be a great help if you took a break to play it!

Here’s a direct download link to the file:

http://haitaka.googlepages.com/WallGirlAlpha1.zip

Since it’s made using XNA, you’ll probably need to download the appropriate files. I’ve placed links to all the needed files on my contest page:

http://haitaka.googlepages.com/ludumdare14

If nothing else, you can download the redistributables etc. in the background while working on your entry. (Pretty please?)

Controls are Up, Down, Left, Right (arrows) to move, hold Z to shoot. When the program starts you need to press any key to start the game. Esc exits.

You have 4 lives, and when all are gone, the game doesn’t return to the title screen (yet) – you have to exit and start again. Sorry about that – I’m planning to fix it up before I submit the final version.

Thanks in advance!

Tags: ld14 playable

Not really 3D yet, but getting there :).

slept much too long today… first i wanted to stand up at ~4am look what the topic is, and sleep on again. ludic, ehm, lucid dreaming about something i could do. – anyway, i didn’t managed to do that :).. so. 1day, 14hours are left to pull something off. i hope it’s still okay to enter late…

i’m trying to do something in Flash, with the APE physics engine. i’ve never used actionscript before for something real, so i don’t know how far i will get. but i’ve already managed to compile physics powered swfs yesterday with Flex3 SDK + FlashDevelop… that’s a start!

here, my first, and probably final idea for what i’m gonna try to do…

(code_name: doomdoom)

After some difficulties finding a way to draw the player character, I finally got it drawn and going…

First idea was to use something like:

(that’s my cat, photo taken during the compo). But then I realized that I didn’t know how to animate even that crap, so I went for the amorphous gelatinous blob concept, which worked out… Still ugly, but at least usable…

Camera follows the character around, no collision detection yet (that’s my next move)…

There’s a title screen now. But I don’t think I’m going to be able to make a game out of this random mess of bunnies and crates, heh. Time for a break, I think.

I’m going to a bday party in an hour or so, and after that I hope to be full of ideas on how to make this a game. =D

A healthy breakfast: a banana, a bowl of Trader Joe’s Twigs, Flakes, and Clusters (which sounds horrible, but tastes great actually!) covered with blackberries, and washed down with good ol’ orange juice.

Another idea came to me while eating: Remember the game Rampart? How about building walls to surround resources that you use to defeat your enemies instead? BRILLIANT! Maybe.

Tags: foodphoto

I hate tutorials.

I hate them.

But people seem to like tutorials. I need to convince them to play.

So I made a tutorial! How wonderful!

I guess I will need to redraw the sprites. If I get time, that is. I don’t really like them.

Harr! I’ve finally done all the basic stupid boring stuff like drawing and input and timers out of the way and now I can start programming some gameplay to my game. Being worked on in c++ using allegro :3 Pics will come soon when I get something graphical done.

Tags: tigs

Finally started coding – water drawn with pygame. Next I need some wave physics, then collision detection and some surfing physics. I’ll try to code it all in Python from scratch – in a few hours I’ll know if that’s a big mistake.

Things my game is capable of:

• Draw tiles for the background
• Move the wall of doom forward

In my game you start out with a single piece of wall which is moving forward. As you move along things will appear that the wall will crush. When you crush things you get resources. You can use these resources to upgrade existing pieces of wall or build new ones. The two red wall pieces show you where you can build things.

The image is not very impressive. Looks cooler when you can see the thing actually moving forward.

Collision detection is now working (at least with the walls)…

I also managed to add a small shadow, that makes it look a bit better… Still sucks, need to redraw the wall tiles, if I have time…

Anyway, I just remembered something… The scrolling view is cool, but might kill the gameplay, if the player doesn’t see the tiles moving in his direction… Need to test this more…

Anyway, next step is to get some walls moving and doing their thing…

Spent some time going outside, and also eating stuff.

Still, I’ve now got a black screen that tweets! This can’t possibly go wrong.

Paper, a few coins and a letter from the tax authority to represent the wall of doom = my paper proto

Started about 30 minutes ago and this is what I have so far…

it’s not much but it’s a start.

There are now hurdles in the game!

(and I coloured in the wall too)

The idea is that you get a small number of points before each race to do something that will trip a hurdler up.  To start with, you’ll just be able to move the hurdles so the hurdlers are knocked out of their stride, but hopefully I’ll be able to add traps and things too for later levels.  And each hurdler you crush beneath the wall will give you an extra point for the next level.

I’ve got a good idea now of how the game will play when it’s finished. I’ll keep the gimmick a surprise since it’s really only got one (hint: it involves walls and doom).
The first level (of a planned three) is done sans an exit, and there’s a strange bug that causes the invisible portion of sprites to obscure background sprites–but only sometimes. But I suspect it’s a weirdness belonging to Construct’s 3D boxes so trying to fix it might have to be my very last priority.
Everything else is coming along so well that I’m gonna take a break to wind down before bed. End of day one for me.

Tags: progress

I have it playable. Graphics need alot of work.

You are the green circle you are trying to get treasure from the maze – there is a wall of doom moving through the maze (semi transparent).  Now you can spin the wall one way or another but it keeps moving towards the center.

My timeline this morning

6:32 exit pops up

7:15 my wife forgot her insulin and needs it at work

8:17 add graphics to count down number of treasures you need to get

8:25-8:45 make it load next level

8:45-9:05 fight with son to get computer back – he likes my game

And away they go! On the way out wacky races!

You played the Nibbles and watch your ass turn into a deadly wall? You played a tron in which your opponent would build a wall just in front of you to kill you off? It’s time to take the challenge into 3D! Now any direction is a valid escape. Now every wall is a place of deadly struggle against other… well, so far cubes. My first LD attempt. Go!

Tags: lightcycle, tron

After a so-so night’s sleep and around a dozen wall-o-doom ideas, I returned to the basics: what was my goal in entering Ludum Dare? The answer was “to finish a game.”

Stating the goal in very simple terms was helpful. My goal is not to write a good game, or to write something original, or even (unfortunately) to write something fun. It’s just to finish the competition.

So I’m pressing on. I’m pretending LD 14’s theme is “Tetris Ripoff,” and my game will be the best of that sorry bunch.

When I first saw the theme I wasn’t sure if I should enter at all. It doesn’t seem to be all that applicable. Anyway, since right now I’m on a Buggy Boy trip i thought about this:

A future gameshow. Run towards a goal without getting stopped by the advancing walls of doom. Grab the cash prizes in between but don’t forget that the next wall is moving towards you.

Here’s a preview with a tiny wall of tiny doom advancing slowly:

Tags: Endurion

I just came home from an orchestra rehearsal (which was fortunately finished a little earlier than planned), so now I can finally get started with LD14!

I’ve been thinking about the theme all day and even have an idea what to make: in my game you are running away from some kind of dangerous liquid (something like lava) that turns into a solid mass after a while (seen from above). There are blocks lying around and you can build little walls to hold the liquid back for a while, so it advances slower and you have more time to find your way, get past all kinds of obstacles, and build more walls, and so on.

At the rehearsal we had soup during the break (tomato vegetable soup).

I recorded the music we played, in case I can use something, but it’s not really the kind of music that fits with a game like this (mostly Bruch).

New progress screenshot. I’m not sure if I’m going anywhere at all with this, but I just have to keep going.

Still no nice graphics and only basic interaction. Hmmmm.

I was originally planning on sketching out some basic designs for each of my main ideas, but I had a lot of fun making the one I started with that I decided that it was the game I was going to make.

As you can see, I had some snacks while working on this one: blue corn chips with garlic lover’s hummus.

And here’s a close-up of the initial design:

Tags: foodphoto

ooops I’m a bit late…I forgot I have to clean the house

well, let’s see if I can do something

Now listening: Comeback Kids – Wake the Dead

Current build playable here in your browser

Working title is Fleedom. Wanted to handle what I felt would be one of the most challenging parts of my game design which was making a fleet of small ships that you could toggle through various flight patterns while moving.

Got a decent enough working version now.  Z/X toggles next/previous fleet pattern.  Arrow keys move.

Here is the background on my current game’s design

Tags: as3, flash, fleedom, fleet, movement, pattern, test

I’ve spent most of today drawing some tiles and getting super-realistic-blob-bouncing-physics to work.

Here’s all I have to show for it in screenshot land.

I promise you there’s a game here, I know what’s going to happen, how it’s going to fit into the theme and all that crap. First though I need to add particles… (They are the most important part of any game.)

Tags: blob, bounce, lol, physics

Some of the blocks now move (I define which can move and those that can’t in the level def file).

Must be interesting in a medium size level get blocks to start moving every 100 ms or so, should be quite chaotic…

I’m already seeing some pitfalls in the design basis of the game, which isn’t nice… :\

One is that the blocks should affect each other during the movement, or I can end up with a situation in which the blocks will try to be in the same place, which would be bad. Can solve it by either making them stop if they hit each other, or by adding lots of collision response code to them, instead of just validating with the map.

Another issue is that I’m not sure if this is fun like this… Thought so, but the moving walls are not that difficult to avoid (at least for now, when I add enemies and stuff, they might).

Anyway, next step is to make the collision response on the player/creatures when they get hit by the block (they should be dragged, not insta-killed)… Seems much more fun to squash them against a wall with blood dripping, etc…

Okay, I am ready to start this now. I’ve been busy earlier today but I am free now. What’s the theme?

. . .

Oh, no..  I have no idea what “Advancing Wall of Doom” is supposed to mean. Damn, I have to be very lucky to make anything with this theme in mind.

Tags: theme

Yeas, I know this LD is not about roads but I decided to have some in my game:

Now it’s going to be using Flash CS3 for everything. I just hope that I can learn Flash and make a game in the next day or so, all while listening to Pennywise :P.

EDIT: I thought I posted another post, so ignore the title.

Alright, alright. After 12 hours in I finaly have an idea I like.

You are a scientist at CERN, working on the LHC – LHC malfunctions, a blackhole is generated and you have to flee from the CERN (act 1), run to the parking space and steal a car (act 2) and finaly drive over the highway to the super-secret anti-blackhole-buffer-device-powered super-bunker….. :/

I’ve started on the hurdlers now.  Here’s a shot of them getting chased by the wall:

I should probably make them run at different speeds, but that can wait.  Right now I’ve got to get them to trip when they meet a hurdle that’s not in the right place…

Well, it’s a start…

Because I can’t think of anything except climbing an infinitey wall.

Have the basic tile/slot drawing code in place. The idea is that the bunch of tiles at the top are a wall that is slowly scrolling down toward the bottom of the screen. You drag individual tiles to any of the four slots at the bottom. If you form interesting sequences (maybe four of the same shape, four of the same color, etc.), then they’re removed from the wall. The hope is that the game is made challenging by the conflict between the need to remove bottom tiles quickly (lest they reach the bottom of the screen, causing your game to end), and the desire to remove higher tiles because they are part of interesting sequences (presumably awarding more points than boring sequences).

The number sprites will be replaced with something more polished and abstract (probably circles, triangles, etc.). And the colors will be lighter so it doesn’t look like a 3 year-old’s bedroom floor.

I’ll finish the first iteration with these simple rules, then see how gameplay goes.

Big milestone here. The other 2 player-weapons are finally done! Next update: THE WALL.

I’ve released a version with all 3 weapons:

http://haitaka.googlepages.com/WallGirlAlpha2.zip

As always, I will be very grateful – not eternally so, I’m afraid, but very grateful nonetheless – to anyone who feels like testing it.

As with the previous version, controls are Up, Down, Left, Right (arrows) to move. Z launches firebolts (spread), X fires the laser, and Z+X launches magic missiles.

When the program starts you need to press any key to start the game. Esc exits.

You have 4 lives, and when all are gone, the game doesn’t return to the title screen (yet) – you have to exit and start again.

For those of you who are missing a redistributable, you can find it on my compo page:

http://haitaka.googlepages.com/ludumdare14

And now I must sleep. Good night (or whatever the time is where you are).

Hint: The Malice Cannon technique is alive and well, for those of you who know what that is!

Tags: LD14 - Advancing Wall of Doom, shmup

Last LD or two, I didn’t really give it a shot. I was expecting myself to be able to install SDL and set up myself a development environment to make a game in C++ when I’ve never done any of that before.

I wasn’t going to compete this time around either. I have work tonight and I haven’t been to sleep yet. But when I was laying in bed, thinking about the theme of this competition, thinking about the idea I had for the theme and how easy it should be to implement in something simpler like python, I suddenly got up and decided, “I’m making the game!”

First thing’s first. I’m pulling up all the relevant tutorials I can find. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna be making it in blender’s gaming engine and using python from there to do the actual programming. (It’s pretty simple graphically as well, and the python can generate the… *ahem* content for me.)

My wife has finally approved, so I’m going with it:

Of course, the slugs will use water guns instead of swords…  but swords are so cool!

(This post manages to combine a progress report, AND a food update, in one.  How great is that?)

I’ve finally got round to writing some code.  Most of the morning I’d been waiting for inspiration, with little success.

So I decided to eat.  Again.

Then I had an idea.  After grabbing the camera and fiddling around in photoshop, I came up with…

Trust me, it will make sense later.

Tags: food

So last night I started working on my title after it was announced, and then bam, power out. We had power outages in the Boulder area last night for a while because of the heavy snow. We got about 6-8 inchs, one of the branches in front of the house broke, and it was a scary drive home. But its 10 AM, I’m awake and ready to work on stuff. I came up with a few ideas before I fell asleep last night. We’ll see if I can pull them off.

Got the crushing and the blood working…

When the player is crushed between two walls, it desintegrates in a particle system of blood, and the blood splatter continue on the floor, which is neat:

No occlusion, of course…

Now for a small break, stretch out for a bit and afterwards, maybe get the entrance/exit logic in place, along with the door/key system…

Progress! I woke up around 6:30 this morning and squeezed in a couple hours of development before my stomach forced me to seek out food. Warning: placeholder art ahead.

Unfortunately for the player, shooting the advancing wall only makes it grow faster, and there is not as yet any way to beat it back. That’s next. I have no idea if this idea is actually going to work out to be any fun, so I’m focusing on gameplay today and I’ll worry about art tomorrow. Hopefully.

Also, breakfast! Words cannot describe my love for waffles.

Tags: breakfast

Well, this looks weird.

My first official Ludum Dare. I decided to make a typing game. I use Python and Pygame.

Typo of Doom v0.5 (Python sources)

It’s simple and the game is already working well. But now I’m out of ideas. Should I just polish the game or should I add something new to make the game more interesting?

Progress update: I’ve got a little bit of spaceship goodness, flying around and such. Lots of time to tweak things, still. Unfortunately there’s a math glitch somewhere; the camera is jumpy in an unpredictable way. Possibly just some numerical instability — debug it now, or keep making progress and wait until later? Decisions…

Tags: inprogress, screenshot

Baldies! And they throw cans down. Next step: Make the player.

Now I just need a game!

So, pancakes with powdered sugar and cherry jam. Im doing allright with my level editor (it requires a large reso screen ) and i’ve started on the game. I’m allready able to import the level i make with the editor and im now working on player logic and physics stuff.

Thats it for now, more coming soon

Tags: pancakes, progress