Good morning friends!

For anyone who feels like playing a very unfinished game, here’s the state of mine as of last night. The beginnings of the gameplay are there: notice now as you switch between your senses, sometimes you experience portions of the outside world. That’s what the deathbed experience is all about.

I have like 10 things on my list for the next 12 hours, so I better get to work.

CLICK HERE TO PLAY THE WORK IN PROGRESS IN YOUR BROWSER.

Tags: browser, closing my eyes, deathbed, demo, dying, flash, prototype

I’ll keep going since I’ve always submitted something to each LD I’ve done so far. The natural place for me to cut stuff out is AWOD (the advancing wall of doom) eating things, upgrading, and sound/music. So I’m going to rush to get AWOD shooting beams from his face, and blowing things up, and only if I can get that done will I add more.

As it is, it’s obvious to me that I underestimated the difficulty associated with starting with an entirely new set of tools in every way. TileStudio still rocks my socks, but Wiering’s basecode (though obviously very well designed) is too sparsly documented for a competition like this, where you need lots of documented examples to work quickly. The switch to flash itself was more difficult than I thought, and then deciding to go with haXe, which has fewer tutorials, was another debatable decision. As it is, I now think I know enough about haXe/flash game development to do a 48 hour game competition, but I’m 36 hours too late to take advantage of it. Ah wells. Lessons for the future.

Ok this will have to be good enough. I guess I’ll call this game “Drag the Wall”, because that is what you do. Your aim is to squish the bloxes that run around (imagine that they are humans!) while avoiding the “defenses.”

Drag the Wall (Windows, 2.5 MB)

Tags: final

Yeah, I know it’s not the catchiest title. But it’s done! Explory first-person thing. I won’t spoil it with a description.

Thanks to my unstable connection tonight getting this thing online felt like more effort than actually making it. Three cheers for Morre for helping me finally get it uploaded.

Download (win + source)

As well as being my first LD entry this is also my first game made in Construct. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out. There’s still one odd problem with sprites sometimes obscuring each other and I could probably dress up the level transitions a bit, but I’m totally out of steam for tonight. I might get to it before the deadline in the morning but I think I’d probably rather sleep.

Tools: Construct, Goldwave, Paint Shop Pro 7, and a bottle of knockoff Lifesavers (they make terrific crunching and ambient wind noises).
Total number of Construct fatal errors: 16.

(If you get errors trying to run the game, please try updating DirectX. It seems to help.)

Tags: final

Something I meant to show yesterday, but the Internet was b0rked. So here are the Deadly Lasers of Doom.

I had a good night’s sleep, got some coding in, and have decided on a plan of attack that should result in a completed game. But I have less than 7 hours left. It’s going to be tight.

First, I moved the laptop from the living room to my office. I had to clear a place for it on my desk, which meant moving papers and books to the coffee table in the living room, but what’s the point of having a dedicated work space if I don’t use it? It will be a lot easier to focus just by knowing I’m in a place to do just that.

Second, I showered. It’s almost subconscious, but knowing in the back of my mind that I hadn’t done so today is distracting.

Third, I had lunch:

That’s an awesome-tastic peanut butter and Nutella sandwich that I washed down with apple juice. Note the shout out to all LDers, everywhere, especially those who are essentially making an entire game in the last 7 hours of the competition. This sandwich was for you.

So, I’m clean, I’m full, and I’m in an environment conducive to hardcore concentration and hacking.

Now imagine I put on shades when I say, “Let’s do this” in as bad-ass a way as possible.

Let’s do this.

Tags: badassery, foodphoto

So far I have a handful of levels. Needs way more. Still a little coding to do also. No sounds, no models.

The pressure is on!

I’ve made a quick update to my entry, to fix a minor api misuse that prevented it from working on someones’ machine last night:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/04/18/i-hereby-dub-the-spacewalls-final-entry/

Still planning on:

• Pulling out the starfield with something homebrew after a bit of time in photoshop — if I get the time.
• Virtualboxing up a windows executable.

If anyone tries to play the game, leave a comment! I’m a bit paranoid that it only works on my machine…

For now, I’m off to go snowshoeing in a National Park!

ahhh, breakfast!

Tags: coffee, food

Getting down to the wire here. I am still behind schedule, so I probably shouldn’t be doing stuff like this, but I’m still officially eating breakfast so it’s cool. Thanks to my awesome girlfriend Gail, I have pankakes for said breakfast!

Looks like i’ve been using Lua’s tables feature incorrectly, so much of the code i’d written for the past few hours is wrong. One word – oops.

I’d love to sleep on this and figure out a better way to do it in the morning, but i don’t think i have the time, so it looks like i’m dropping out for this round.

I decided to use Lua because i wanted try out the (admittedly excellent) Love framework, but it looks like i didnt do enough research to really master the language. And, ok, Lua could seriously use a few more features…

Anyway, i had a lot of fun, and best of luck to everyone still blazing new, amazing trails through the game-making universe! See ya next LD!

Right, so I decided to post this as a non-entry. Reasons include laziness and stuff. Here’s my last progress shot re-used as the ‘final’ shot.

While ‘playing’, press keys 1-3 to build stuff:

1. is a tree zapper, it gets you power for nearby trees. It costs 15 power.
2. is a mini tower of darkness, it creates darkness nearby. It costs 30 power.
3. is an attack tower, it shoots blobs of darkness at the poor butterflies. It costs 50 power.

To goal was supposed to be getting everything dark, sort of. There’s not actually any winning condition, but there’s not much other things either, so that’s all right then.

Don’t resize the window (don’t tell me I didn’t warn you).

Download Something of Doom Something Something (Windows binary, uses OpenGL, should work in wine).

Tags: D, doom, GLFW, non-entry, opengl, Windows

Having bit of a problem with particles in multiple viewports. Using the DrawableGameComponent of XNA for it might have been a mistake:

From someone’s opinion, I shaded most graphics. I didn’t shade the baldies or the windows though, I’ll probably do that last.

The wall crushes everything in its path now, and there’s blood. The rocks will continue rolling for a bit if you push them, the carrots attract bunnies, the player repels them, but there’s absolutely no gameplay still.

Crap.

I just made myself a huge omlette which my sister and I shared today for brunch. Here’s a pic:

It’s a 3 egg omlette with bacon and spanich and bell pepper, tomato, and basil, along with 2 pieces of toast and a scone. As you can already probably tell, it was delicious. I’m pretty happy now. Back to work now…

Tags: food

Hey-ho!

My game is finished! It’s a very simple game, and it turned out pretty decent. Skalle even gave me a neat idea when he asked if my game was meant to be a GH-Clone.

I wonder what gave him that idea.. Oh well! Anyway, here’s my final. It can actually be played with your Guitar Hero or Rock Band guitar controller, so if you can connect that to your PC, I totally recommend it. Otherwise, you’ll have to hold your keyboard like one, fingers on F1-F5, and strumming with the enter key. 😉

Enjoy!

Final: http://www.deepflame.nl/ld14/Deepflame_LD14_RockBank.zip

Tags: final

So, here’s my entry. I don’t think I’m going to get any work done today, so I’ll upload it here, and mark it final when it’s done.

There’s not really a lot to it. In fact, the fight game play was never implemented, there’s no win condition, etc. Maybe you can see where I was going with this. Here’s the download. All you should need is python + pygame.

Tags: final

So it’s animated and playable.  I’m not sure how well the concept actually works as a game, for a few reasons.  The whole idea of “everyone declares their attacks and then they are executed simultaneously” is interesting, but it doesn’t fit into any preexisting molds in my brain.

In terms of how the game plays, there’s so much surface area between players that it feels limiting that you can only move one piece at a time.  Currently, the (dumb) AI opponent can deal with the situation and put up a reasonable fight, but if I make it so that people can input more than one move per turn it will complicate the user interface and I don’t think the “AI” could cope with the change.

I wrote music late last night, and while it works on its own as music it’s really not appropriate for the game.  I should do the sound effects first, then come back to the music with a fresh approach.

Everything’s too dark and drab.  I should make one of the tile types a little brighter for contrast.

Well, my game is almost done… Added gameflow, splash screen, instructions, game-over and hooray screen…

Just level design and music to go (already have sound effects, cortesy of the awesome sfxr!)…

As you have noticed (if you’ve followed my posts), I deviated from what was my main goal this time: have enough time for level design and balancing…

Making levels is pretty fast (in 30 mins I can probably build about 10 or 15), but they won’t be interesting unless I play them and test them and all that… Unfortunatly, I won’t have time for that, since my guild is raiding Ulduar for 3 hours now, and I wanna go…

Music is also pissing me off… All my previous entries had music in one form or another, but I’m simply not inspired enough to do anything decent that don’t make a person want to shoot himself in 3 mins… Maybe after my raid I can work on it…

After the raid, I’ll probably have 2 hours of solid work to finish my entry properly (need to sleep, I’m dead tired and I have work tomorrow)…

Looking forward to playing lots of stuff that came around… People really streched this (stupid) topic to the limit…