It’s 1:24am and it’s high time to head home, if I want to work on the game tomorrow. Added bit of fixes to camera, displaying text and some other minor thingamabobs. Things are looking good.

Easier to play now, but very dull. Source here.

I wanted randomly generated wrapping terrain. Perlin Noise! Done. But I want lakes, so I throw in a flood fill. Done! But I don’t want to deal with programming boats or whatever, so I want all of the land to be contiguous. I want people to be able to walk from any piece of land to any other piece of land, so there can be no islands. That was trickier, but, inspired by Photoshop’s “solarize” filter, I came up with an algorithm to generate contiguous wrapping terrain (99.99% of the time), with no islands and plenty of lakes:

wonderfl example

Tags: peak

this stuff was smuggled straight out of colombia! so goooood

Tags: coffee, food

Took a break to do something different for about 45 minutes:

Yes.

Tags: towlr

I used Senocular’s KeyObject Class for the key presses, FYI.

Game with or without sources? (EDIT: Or in a page, with it the right size, etc?)

Rather simple game, just use the up and down arrow keys to move, and avoid the rectangles that are coming for you. You have 5 lives. You are the circle. The game gets rather hard pretty quickly too, so post your scores! You get one point for each ‘wall’ you sucessfully avoid.

Tags: final

Making some progress, there’s collapsing squares now and buttons which will open doors.  Need spikes!

Tagging your posts is easy.

From inside the WordPress, scroll down past the post box to the “Tags” box.

Enter your tag in the box and click Add.

Easy. If you make a mistake, you can click the X beside the tag to remove it.

Common tags include:

• Final – for your final entries
• deskphoto – for any pictures of your work environment
• motivation – for amusing images in the spirit of the competition
• foodphoto – what you ate during a compo. Yes, we’re silly

Tags: howto

Blast them NMEs!

Yes, spaceships it is. ETA for “full” game (music won’t make the cut): 4 hours or so?

Wish I could get Ubuntu to take a screenshot when it’s in full-screen mode, but, alas.

Tags: inprogress, screenshot

I’m back! Casino was a smashing success (only lost 3€ overall, heh), ’twas nice to meet some people, and I feel moderately refreshed (considering that it’s almost 3 AM here). In fact, I feel good enough to code a little before I go to bed.

For a change, I started to play around with music. I was in a need of some club music for one of the levels in the game, so I thought about making some club tune. Since most of the sounds I made so far are chip, I thought about making chip-club tune.

The result wasn’t that great.

Chip-version

Trance version

Tags: music, trance

Need to take all that empty space out some time…

Well, this is probably all I’m getting done tonight. Added some little helicoptor dudes to attack from behind, make the game a bit more exiting. Also made it so you can only buy from a store ones and magic does twice your attack rather than the same, in order to have some incentive to using it.

Latest version: http://willhostforfood.com/access.php?fileid=63226

Tags: LD14 - Advancing Wall of Doom

Been having a bit of trouble with matching up bitmaps to physics objects, so I re-wrote all my renderers to draw wireframes and solid colors instead of gradients and bitmaps. Solid 40fps, and you can switch between quality levels on the fly — a nice side-effect.

Bugs fixed, everything’s in place. Time to start whipping out some gameplay.

Unfortunately, I just spent the last hour reading up on the history of Texas’ annexation, because our sly governor just dropped the word ‘secession’ in a public forum. omgwtfbbq. He’s clearly floating the idea for personal political gain, but still…the phrase “We have an excellent union, no need to dissolve it. But…” hasn’t appeared in serious American political discourse in, what, 150 years? An odd notion to even entertain.

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

Ah, well, I managed to get in 3 hours’ work tonight, and given that I haven’t been near Python in aeons, and I’ve never used PyGame before, I reckon I’m doing alright. MOTOJUMP is getting there, slowly. All that is left is to make the moto jump, as it were. Then slap on some sound with Musagi, some amusing effects and hey-ho! I fully expect to get plenty of zeroes, mind!

Tags: LD14 - Advancing Wall of Doom, MOTOJUMP

I’m back from dinner, and it seems NONE OF THE WEBSITES I OPENED ARE LOADED! D: And my service provider says “Right click the connection and click repair”, even though I even stated I tried that. Apparently Ludum Dare is the only place that actually loads. So nothing is gonna happen until this is fixed.

At least my dinner was awesome. I near the end of today, as stuff happen.

So instead of spending this evening coding the game, I spent it trying to get SDL/Allegro working with Lisp/Scheme.  No love, so back to C++ tomorrow for the final push (and, indeed, the first push…).

so far, so good, saving gameplay for after a power nap 😉 wish art wasn’t such a pain

Here’s a shot of the Giant Laser of Doom.

I didn’t start work on this until 9.12pm as I had a lot of things to do today (visit bank, go to museum, take a bike ride, cut grass, etc). It’s now 2am (UK time), my brain is fried and my body is knackered.

I’ve concentrated on keeping my entry as simple as possible because I know that my time is limited. I got thinking about the theme when I was visiting the museum. I just liked the idea of a giant laser of doom, erasing everything in its path, darkening the screen as it went.

I figure that I have until 4am on Monday morning local time, which is just as well as I’ve got a few commitments tomorrow, but let’s see what I can do with the remaining time.

Tags: compo

I’m too tired to continue. Drew the final programmers’ art placeholder graphics in Gimp, and added a particle effect.

Started coding a little while ago and just finished a pixel font class.

I’m working with the Flex SDK in FlashDevelop.

Tags: as3, flashdevelop, flex, font, thread

Got a second alpha version, now complete with lava and spikes…

Got a nice scrolling effect on the lava and all (useless time gameplay-wise, but it’s fun anyway).

You can download it here (AWD_Alpha2.rar). Hope to get some comments, feedback would be nice…

Think I’m calling it for the night… Lots of stuff still to do, but nothing really hard (enemies, gameflow, music/sfx), and then it’s off to level design (want to build at least 10 levels for this one).

This one is shaping up as one my best entries ever (gameplay-wise)… Graphics are as sucky as they come (wish I had time/will to make the maze itself 3d, for example). One of these days I have to try one of those competitions that are similar to this one, but that allows for an artist and/or an pre-made engine.

i’m having cat troubles as well.

Tags: cat

Gosh, I’m moving really slow. I’m going to have to start working harder.

My game is sort of playable. The game is about being on your deathbed, and in this build you can experience yourself slowly dying. You can focus your energy on different parts of your body by clicking, which has no effect right now except clicking on the brain, which slows down your death.

I guess you guys are going to want me to make this more GAMEY now. Fine. I’ll add points and crap. That’s coming up next.

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

Tags: browser, closing my eyes, death, deathbed, demo, flash

Play in yo browser here…

Yeah– I’m excited.. so far… OK.. the two largest ships fire these purple beam weapons.  The largest ship with the chance of firing 2 of them.. the second largest ship firing one.

I also have doubled the level length but that will change as well eventually.. I just wanted a larger amount of ships to fly through.

Also.. I made it so if your fleet touches any of the screen boundaries.. they asplode.  Ideally… this wouldn’t be the case.. but after fighting collision detection logic (it is complicated due to fleet coords/ tweening patterns etc..) there were so many ways to rig the system to get your ships to hide.. that I just made them asplode…

Anyway— Beam weapons give you a tiny bit of warning via visual clue.. think any robotech episode when they are firing the reflex weapon.. there is always that .35 of a second where you can get out of the colorful path before you are so many cinders.

So.. recap: running into screen boundaries.. capital ships.. or giant purple lasers will kill your little ships..

Let me know if the effects are killing anyones computers yet.. i’ve done 0 optimizations.. (hey.. its LD)

Tags: as3, blur, cinders, demo, energy, flash, lasers, reflex, robotech, ships, weapons

I thought I’d point out that Twitterbot is back up and running. If you’re a twitter-er (a-twitter?) just tag your tweets with #ld14 and they’ll by magically re-tweeted in the #ludumdare IRC channel. If you want to view a log of tweets, join #ld14 in IRC and do (in #ld14, not #ludumdare):

!rss show twitter

If you’re in the IRC channel and you want to tweet out (???), do:

/msg twitterbot twitter identify twitterusername twitterpassword

!twitter status Tweet

Actually, I don’t know why you’d use this last feature — I assume you have a working twitter client. Though I suppose it lets you avoid switching windows…

Also: Please do not spam #ld14! I’ll just have to kill the bot and we’ll all hate you.

Tags: LD14 - Advancing Wall of Doom, twitter, twitterbot

Implemented tiles. Okay, it’s still at the stage where everything is boring. I think after this one, I won’t post until I have something a little more visually stimulating.

Tags: as3, flex, thread, tiles

Just a simple heat map implemented in flash, gradually updates as the heat sources move. Click to move the heat sources. Gonna use it for pathfinding. 

wonderfl demo

Tags: peak

Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Four in the morning is late enough (early enough? couldn’t even say). Here’s my last screenshot for the day:

Yes, that purple stuff is the wall of doom. What? Yes, I wish I was kidding too.

I’m a bit worried if I can make a finished anything out of this tomorrow. Still, good night everyone.

Good morning. A little update. Yesterday I added The Dark Tower (player starting base) and tree zappers (drain trees for power and for simply draining trees).

After that, I wasted a lot of time on how the wall of decay etc should progress, only to ending up with something that wouldn’t work. So I’m still thinking about that. I could spend some time describing what didn’t work, but I’m not going to. Instead here’s a screenshot showing how the decay thing for the ground would look (the tree decay in this shot is just for testing purposes).

Now I have some thinking and showering to do. And breakfasting.

Tags: dark, journal, screenshot, tower, trees, zapping

You are the glacier. You move ever southward. Your job is to ensure the extinction of the mammoths, neantherthals, giant sloths, and other pesky ice age animals.  That is the way of the glacier.

Those are temp mammoths. I’ve got the wall building working pretty well, but there’s still a ton of gameplay missing. For example, the mammoths don’t move. They just stand there. Which might be accurate mammoth behavior, but it’s not very interesting.

I’ve got a long ways to go on this one, but so far it’s coming together.  Hopefully it will end up being fun, it’s not quite playable already, and that doesn’t leave a lot of time for tuning. 

Mistaken Mines

You are a miner deep in the earth, when you accidently blow a hole in a pocket of lava. Now you must race back to the top through a maze of mineshafts or die!

Also added scoring. Source here.

I’ve got most of the game play mechanics functional, yet untuned. There is a problem with my keyboard input locking up, but I haven’t investigated whether it’s my keyboard or my code. I’m using GLUT for input. The game is more or less playable, but I haven’t got any ‘score’ feedback for the player yet.

The graphics are still just blocks used for bounding box collisions. I’ll be loading some textures on to the boxes at some point. I’ll probably implement some minimal animation to spice things up. I haven’t switched in to artist mode yet.

Sound; haven’t gotten there yet. Still looking hopeful though.

Well,…I decided to do soemthing like a simple platformer-game where you have to climp the wall of doom! But acutally I need much of time for the simplest tasks! I’m still tweaking the “physics”: running, jumping, falling! It’s  a mess! 😀

One Day in over now….and this is what I got! Not much,…but maybe afte some sleep there will more progress tomorrow

I’m tired now, developing the game with only three breaks in between. I’ll call it a night, and hope the Internet fixes itself overnight.

Alright, rectangle box rooms now.

Next, give the rooms an occupant.

hmmm.
some “progress” here…
…more tomorrow.

Tags: doom

…no screenshots, because my game is a bit messed up at the moment. But it’s nearly winnable now! Or at least it will be when it’s no longer messed up. (It’s been losable for hours.)

Incidentally, doing this project has reminded me what a cool language ActionScript 3 is. Don’t want to declare your types? You don’t have to! But you still can if you need the speed, either way is cool. Of course there are things I could bitch about too, but I won’t. Feel the excitement wash over you as you look at this screenshot of my text editor.

Edit: I do actually have something to show now!

You have to use the little platforms to get over the wall and then shoot it in the butt.

Tags: coding

Here she is, coming nicely (?) along? As per usual I’m wasting all my time on graphics up front, so that I won’t have enough time to actually finish/finetune the game.

They look better animated! Also, the tree zapper aren’t actually supposed to attack the butterflies.

Tags: butterflies, journal, screenshot

Gave the game out to two friends and let my son try it. Everyone seems to understand it, but as suspected it’s still lacking in the fun department. I’m going to introduce a new tile type that can be removed only by removing its neighbors, which should give some meaning to the currently meaningless wall layout. Latest source here.

I ate out with a friend who was visiting from out of town, and every aspect of the experience took longer than anticipated.  Still, feeling pretty good about the progress I’ve made so far (and what I got to eat).

Look on in envy, mortals!

If I have more time today, I may continue on this, adding sound etc, but here’s RELEASE CANDIDATE 1 of my quickie.

I won’t tag this ‘final’ yet.. I’m pretty sure I have a few minutes before midnight to re-tag this =)

Tags: release candidate

Well, I’ve almost ended my first day of near straight up programming, and am suprised by my results. I’ve auctaully almost gotten a complete game with semi-tolerable graphics and gameplay. I still got plenty more to do, namely fixing a few bugs and putting in the sound, but I am proud of what I’ve made so far. It isn’t nearly as good as some of the other games I’ve read you all are making, but I’m happy what I’ve made so far and look forward to playing everyone else’s creations!

decoration ready !!! fishes hanging around the screen !! bounding boxes of collision regions defined, now its time to take a shower, the smell is getting really bad LOL

Tags: bounding boxes, decoration, fishes, shower time, smelling bad

Actually it’s not, very… but it’s going to grow up, soon.

http://vimeo.com/4219935

Making slow progress. Had to throw out my initial stab at a vertically oriented game and ended up going horizontal instead… I’m liking it a lot more this way. Got my moving beam and I can pick up and rescue people. I like the feeling of it so far, but I need to put more pressure on the player. Luckily Entar kicked my imagination and I have some ideas now.

So much to do before I sleep! I’m hoping to get the gameplay ironed out tonight, and focus on art + polish tomorrow.

that’s how it is: if you decide to code on the last day without sleep and get to bed early the day before, then  it is no wonder if you feel like crap after getting up early if you normally don’t.

I still have to travel, since i’m visiting my parents

I need coffee. now 😛

At least, FINAL ENTRY round one.

EDIT: Round two — Fixed what was hopefully the only one or two misuses of the OpenGL API that worked on my machine but croaked on others’. Still no confirmation from a 3rd party that it runs, though. After I get back from snowshoeing, I’ll try to get it running in VirtualBox. Also, if time allows, I’ll pull out my nice nebula pic with something photoshopped since it was a photo from the ‘net.

EDIT TWO: Uploaded direct to LD. Final entry, python source version, hosted on LD. Wait, never mind. “File type goes not meet security guidelines. Try another.” … I thought I was following the instructions; I’ll try again later.

EDIT THREE: The background, although not nearly as nice, is now one done from scratch.

EDIT FOUR: Post-deadline: Added two bug fixes that ought to make it work nicer on other computers than mine. (a) Some sloppy python code was restarting the game, and not properly re-initing the display, when you clicked “start game”. (b) I was using non-power-of-two opengl textures. (c) stripped out all the subversion crap, slimming the download considerably.

EDIT FIVE: A million thanks to allefant, who wrestled with pygame + pyopengl to create a windows executable that seems to work!

Python source version. Run src/game.py from the ld48 directory.

Windows executable. Run game.exe.

I’d appreciate anyone letting me know how (if) it works. This is my first time using pygame or python, so… at least I’ve got a full day (minus all my prior engagements) to fix anything.

EDIT: Oh yeah, move with arrows and left control to fire. Use the mouse to work the menu.

Tags: final

So, this is my first LD and most certainly not my last!  I’ll just make this a quick update as I’ve already posted a big chunk of exposition on my own dev blog http://dev.chadgodsey.com/

I’ve got most of the code and gameplay working.  I figure I’ll spend tomorrow adding extra flair and sprucing stuff up.  Or maybe just go outside…

Tags: zombies

You play on the side of the advancing wall of doom, which is trying to engulf all. The lousy civilization’s set up barriers, though, which the cloud can’t cross! Your job is to destroy these defences so that the cloud can continue its conquest.

Basic mechanics are working, the main things missing are enemies that fight back. Better graphics should be on the way, as well as some sound effects.

Tags: compo, progress, screenshot

the Louisiana BBQ down the block will get official mention in my game credits — gumbo, yam pie, baked beans, potato salad, and a snack earlier on top. I hope it’s OK that I seem to be paying more attention to my food photos than screens of my game…I’m very happy with how things are going, and I think I can I have something playable tomorrow, and hopefully with more graphics and sounds.

Tags: food

Battled with a stupid bug for maybe an hour. Turned out I had written an asymmetrical comparison operator which crashed sort. I’m not so great at debuggin D yet, at first I didn’t get the debug info, and when I finally did and found a debugger, it wasn’t so helpful. Funnily enough, I ended up solving it with traditional writefln debugging instead, which just took a couple of minutes. Hmm..

Anyway, what I had done before the bug was adding attack towers, which charge up blobs of darkness and fire them at the butterflies.

It mostly just looks like chaos, becuse I just randomly place everything.

Tags: attack, blobs, bug, journal, screenshot, towers

Spent the morning profiling and banging my head against the wall, hence all the timing data on screen. Finally figured out why my game was rapidly losing FPS over time. It was all because I forgot to clear my flex canvas before drawing to it, whatever that does.

I think that about wraps up my tech stuff on the graphics, dodgy 3d in flash and all. Time to add a game, or at least some wall doom.

Picture should take you to a “playable” version. There’s nothing to do but move left and right (arrow keys) and you might have to click on the screen after you start the game to gain focus (it is a mystery).

Tags: beach, compo, egg, forest

Very liquid based but that is all I can manage at this time on a Sunday Morning. Being up this early and not being at a carboot sale, it’s just not natural.  I predict a more substantial bacon based brunch later to address this unholy liquid / food imbalance. MORE NING ALL!

Tags: foodphoto

Finally.

The circles that make up the wall will absorb same-coloured enemy bullets. If you move into the circle and shoot, it will reappear (after a brief period) as the colour of the shot you used.

Enemies who hit the wall are immediately killed, but the circle they hit will be pushed back towards you! If the circle is pushed back too far, there is a chance that it will disappear. After three circles are gone, the entire wall disintegrates.

Currently there’s no way to regenerate the wall other than dying. However, once I implement the bomb/super attack (the next item on my agenda), the player will have a way to regenerate the wall.

Also, have an advancing wall of sickeningly cute.

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

Advancing wall of gray goo…

Tags: goo, progress, screenshot

http://wardtek.ca/pictures/LD48-14/Doom.html

I decide to break down and learn flash so I bought a book on it 3 days ago and started reading.  Figured this competition would be good motivation and testing ground.  So far I must say I’m impressed with how easy it is to get things done in the language and how easy it is to learn.

For the game itself, I’m working on making a mini-rts style game with a focus on ‘sovereignty’ which gives you large bonuses while on your own turf.  So it turns it into a slowly advancing wall of doom!  Or something like that.  Tomorrow is all about polish.  Better (any) graphics.  Intro screens, help screens, visible win conditions, useful HUD.  Balance on gold in vs gold out and tactical management.

Controls are simple right now.  Spacebar spawns a new warrior (currently a cow) and you can let them wander about or you can click on them and move them into the field of battle.

I had mixed motivation levels today.  I did manage to get things to a playable point.  I should have gotten more done though.

Play my current build on line.

I am now at the point where I’m happy with how my game works. You can win, you can lose, it doesn’t glitch when you touch stuff, and there are even a few sound effects. I made a new wall, too:

He’s not much of a wall just yet, but give him time. Anyway, I still have a lot to do, because:

* There aren’t any enemies other than the wall

* There’s only one level

* Your gun isn’t much use

* No music

So, back to work again…

Making steady progress. The game is playable, win and lose conditions are working. Now for more touches and lots of levels.

A preview with one and a half levels can be gotten from here: http://www.georg-rottensteiner.de/webmisc/Endurion_LD14_DoomRunner.zip

It requires DX8 installed.

Tags: Endurion, preview

Well, I had a demoralizing bug that wasted 4 hours of my time and almost made me give up, but I finally managed to make some progress. Here’s my latest screenshot:

I’ve got guards moving on the wall, and enemies that move faster on land and slower when climbing. Still no actual gameplay though, so I’m not very happy with my progress.

Walls of doom are now in..

Should finish in time. Probably wont have any player/weapon models or sound/music, but I will have a game done this time.. yay!

There are buildings you can destroy, traps that make you grow, and a lovely pink background. Destruction of buildings is a little less than exciting, however….

Well, better than nothing!

Now all I need to do is to compose some music and add extras!

Tags: foodphoto

The above screenshot says it all. I wanted to have more enemies and bullets on screen for the picture, but they were gone before I could take it *grin* All the player’s abilities are now complete – after this I’ll be doing the level design.

http://haitaka.googlepages.com/WallGirlAlpha3.zip

Please test if you have the time and energy. I really do appreciate the feedback.

The controls are: any key to begin, then arrow keys to move, Z for firebolts, X for laser, Z+X for missiles. When the wall is up and running, C launches the super attack (which consumes the wall). When the wall is not up and running, C will expend one bomb to summon it. You have 3 bombs.

The circles that make up the wall will absorb same-coloured enemy bullets. If you move into the circle and shoot, it will reappear (after a brief period) as the colour of the shot you used.

Enemies who hit the wall are immediately killed, but the circle they hit will be pushed back towards you! If the circle is pushed back too far, there is a chance that it will disappear. After three circles are gone, the entire wall disintegrates. This is a good time to use the superweapon (before it disintegrates, that is).

Esc exits the game when you’re done (sorry, it still doesn’t return to title screen).

For troubleshooting, etc., please see my previous entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/04/18/wall-girl-all-player-weapons-complete/

Tags: LD14 - Advancing Wall of Doom, shmup, wall girl

Still running behind schedule but I think I need some sleep. I finished a chunk of the bitmap artwork I’ll be using. Next task will be to implement my texture loader. The time pressure is on!

Note:

Tsunami (wave) = A.W.O.D. #1
Lava = A.W.O.D. #2

In this game you play

a small purple rectangle

who must eat the cake.

Tags: final

I had a few hours of sleep and got back to work. I’ve now implemented player movement, gravity, collisions, etc., and just finished my class to handle animations.

Collisions caused me quite a bit of bother as I made a load of stupid mistakes (as usual), but they seem to be well and truly out of the way now.

I still need to pull the sprites I made over from my other computer so I won’t bother with a screenshot this time.

Tags: as3, flashdevelop, flex, thread

So I’ve had a good night’s rest and spent the morning adding sounds to the game.  I recorded them all myself so they’re a bit, um, ‘lo-fi’.  But I reckon that probably goes with the visual style.  I videoed myself while I was making them, so I might try and edit that into a video if I have time.

The new alpha’s at: http://www.niallmoody.com/downloads/ld14/DieYouStupidHurdlers-alpha2.zip I think the only things I’ve added since the last one are the sounds and the background music, but there might be more I’ve forgotten.

Next, traps!

Well, at least I’m saying that to myself when I notice what’s the time after I woke up, went to shower and ate breakfast. Anyway, here’s a screenshot of the latest progress from last night before I went to sleep… too much stuff is still missing, even lots of the essentials. I feel I’m behind the schedule, although I don’t even have one except for the deadline. How typical.

[ PLAY CURRENT BUILD IN BROWSER HERE ]

Well.. grabbed some sleep last night.  Just played my game this morning to see how I felt about it’s progress and direction.  Time to make the short list of goals that is so important in these compos to trying and pull off a playable and hopefully fun game in time.

I find a good trick to use is decide what makes the compo version versus what I’ll save for a post-compo version.  I’ve been pretty good about actually doing a post compo version lately that I’m not too worried that I’m using it as a fake crutch.  You can learn so much from a rapid prototype like this that it is still worth it to finish a reduced yet playable game for many reasons.

Anyway, knowing that some of my favorite features will likely still see the light of day makes me more willing to cut them for the compo version.

It is with that in mind that I am thinking about the following design decisions:

Compo Version Features:

1) One formation only of your fleet ships… the long and lean horizontal one.  This is because I am not sure if I’ll have time to code enough of what I want to justify the other formations right now.  I may have to focus on just making this a fun space avoider with the twist of having multiple lives / health built into the number of your fleet ships remaining as you fly along.  As long as 1 ship makes it you have been considered to win in that you’ve saved some of your race’s people.  The more ships you save the larger the score multiplier probably.

2) Probably not going to implement player ships fighting the enemy armada of doom.  I’m really trying to focus on not making this a shmup but rather sticking to the fact that these are light and nimble colony transport ships that are trying to get the hell away from their doomed planet / advancing wall of the enemy armada.

3) I think that since I have a simple but functional way to hand code in all the enemy ship placements and movement speeds I have the ability to build an exciting armada progression that will have some fun surprises and such along the way for the player to fly through.

4) I am worried that since these compos don’t afford much optimization time I may end up making a version that in order to look as cool as I want will likely suffer performance wise on slower computers.  I may have to go the route of a simple button to: “play high quality” and “play low quality” to turn down all the beam / particle effects I want to use.  I think that is a fine compo compromise.

Of the 16 hours remaining I fear I may have some domestic duties to attend to as well unfortunately… laundry and the ilk.

Oh well.. it’s crunch time here at LD so good luck everyone!

Tags: armada, as3, crunch, demo, doom, flash, fleedom, flies, goals, space, thoughts

My heatmap code was very slow in the Flash Virtual Machine on my ancient PowerPC Mac, so I optimized the hell out of it and now it is actually useful. Here is a demo. Green dots chase red dots, red dots chase yellow dots, and yellow dots chase green dots. The blue clouds you see are the heatmap representing proximity to the nearest green dot. (the red and yellow dots have their own heatmaps too, but you can’t see them)

wonderfl demo

The “advancing wall of doom” isn’t obvious yet, but hopefully it’ll make sense later. 

Tags: peak

Hall of Choices is almost done. Only Party, Casino and Doctor doors left to implement.

Tags: tigs

Slowly progressing I’ve got jumping almost done, and collision works much better now. I’ve got the scrolling thing working, so it actually is sidescrolling now. I reworked tilelogic a bit to make more sense and improved querying time of the tiles from linear to constant time which ofcourse is the usual way to do it. I did a graphic for the player, it looks cool. Up next are switches, advancing walls of doom, slopes, triggers and doors I also want to do the whole thing black and white i think, because my graphics skills suck and i don’t want to spend a lot of time on it; we’ll just see later.

I won’t bother you guys with more food for now, as i’m eating the same as yesterday. In a couple of hours i’ll post another update, and perhaps more food 😉

Hey all.. I realized I had forgotten to post a lib I wanted to ask about using that is related to online high score ability in a flash game.  Would just want to know peoples thoughts about using it for this compo.. or other compos if deemed too late.

Link to mochi leaderboards api docs

Link to mochi api v3.0 (as2/as3)

Basically it’s just a 2 line call someone can drop into their flash project that enables online leaderboards via mochi.  You don’t have to use their ad network or anything but it would easily support the ability for people to see others scores in my game.

Anyway.. thoughts?  Too late for this time perhaps..? but what about future compos?  It isn’t really game code per se.. but it does give a game an advantage in that online leaderboards often lead to more competition with the score motivated players.

Tags: as2, as3, flash, leaderboards, lib, mochi, rules

My game already looks quite okay, now it’s finally time for some gameplay coding.

With coffee and some leftover pineapple slices!

Tags: food

Good morning sunshines. It’s time to code again. List of priorities is as follows:

1. Single/Multiplayer XML setting
2. ASSPLOSIONS (particle system)
3. Removal of walls on dying (assplosion related)
4. Start countdown
5. Camera fixes (still some problems when player can’t see why he died)
6. Sound
7. Speedup as you ride along wall of other player to catch up on him
8. Best out of 10 rounds highscore system
9. Death cam replays
10. Player names in XML
11. Networked multiplayer (as opposed to split screen that is now)
12. AI, if there will be enough time.

And here is some breakfast of champions:

Tags: food, journal

Just finished the enemy code (pretty fast, as I expected, which is always nice)… Unfortunatly, I found a bug in the rendering system that almost drove me nuts (since it was hard to debug)…

Apparently, stuff was being drawn in the wrong order (which screwed up the shadows and the blood stains)… Apparently, the problem was the particle system flushing the sprite cache, but it was hard to track down (had to resort to Pix, to be sure I was doing everything in the correct order). This bug made me loose almost 2 hours…

Anyway, now that I’ve got enemies, I can probably think about gameflow code… And for that, I need to find a name and a background story for the game… I’d get started on the music, but my wife’s still sleeping after a night out with the girls…

This morning I realized that I had not really thought the gameplay through before jumping into the tech implementations, and as a result of that the game is now in a state where im not sure that I can save it. I’ll keep going today though, and hopefully i’ll get struck by some ideas that’ll help the game turning out as an actual game!

Anyways, here’s another progress shot:

Some additions since last night:

• Queue displaying whos turn it is
• Simple text fade-animation whenever a piece loses or gains units
• New icons for some of the pieces

I lied, I ended up making a game all tonight. Tomorrow is going to suck because I’ll have had no sleep. Oh well, so it goes. I made this one in Unity. I sort of sucks because I wasn’t able to spend any time balancing it (I spent about… 8 hours start to finish on this, including design). Still is a pretty nifty entry, I suppose. It’s even got 5 levels.

The idea is that you’re in a space ship and you’re trying to land on a planet, but your space ship is too heavy to do so without burning up. So, you’ve got to ram your ship against various obstacles in space in order to break pieces off and reduce your total weight. As you break parts off, your ship loses functionality. Breaking off your wings reduces your maneuverability, breaking off your antennae reduces your ability to see around you, and breaking off your cockpit actually kills you. If possible, you want to break off the body of the ship by ramming into something just as you pass it – once the cockpit is free.

Anyway, you can it for PC at:

http://www.otcsw.com/files/TooHeavyForReEntry-PC.zip

And for Mac at:

http://www.otcsw.com/files/TooHeavyForReEntry-Mac.zip

Screenshot:

Tags: final

Hobnox Audiotool

The audio tool is a fantastic way to make cool sounding music all from within your browser. Make 10 short loops and randomly loop through them for a simple background track. The tone matrix tool is particularly awesome.

ColorLovers Palettes

Sticking to a palette will improve the appearance of programmer art tenfold. The palettes are only of 5 colours so try finding two matching palettes to get a good range.

If you know any other handy sites like these, post them so we can all use them 😀

Tags: art, music

Last night I wasn’t too happy with my mockup:

But I even switched to C++ because it allowed me to add some features that I wanted to do for a while. Also, I ate delicious tempeh burgers:

And suddenly, my game looked a lot better! I also had some ideas for more interesting gameplay last night, so today I’ll hopefully be more productive:

Tags: C++, gosu, tempeh

Well, I’ve just been made aware that the media (i.e. Zip file) uploading doesn’t work for most people. Thusly I’ve hidden those instructions, and updated the “how to submit” post.

Oh well, maybe next time.

So, we’ll do submissions as we’ve done for years. Provide a link. The submission instructions page include an entry naming guide that you may want to look at too.

If you don’t have webspace of your own, ask in the channel and we’ll try and help you out.

lol. Looks like the aftermath of a paintball game.

I’ve done quite a lot although it might not look like it. Game has an actual beginning. (This is the first screen)

Gonna carry on just making levels from now on I think.

Oh yeah, the game is now called “Happy Blob is Unhappy” too.

Tags: blob, cyoote, levels, messy, paintball, stuff

So what we have here:

…is my latest screenshot. I think it actually looks pretty nice by now: we have an actual backdrop (thanks to Universe Image Creator), slightly nicer sun sprite, and scrolling/zooming implemented.

There’s also some more gameplay now, hardy visible in that screenshot though. This may still go somewhere after all; I’m very afraid of time running out though.

For now, I’ll make myself some tortellini though.

I think it looks pretty good. Made some other changes, to.

Last night I spent way too long on making the ground for my game. I’m using a Perlin noise function and wanted to modify it so it the edges would fit together, but couldn’t get that to work that way. Anyway, this is my first screen shot:

This morning there was the yearly fair here (just like during LD12) and I went to take pictures for a local newsletter. Now I really need to work hard and get something finished!

And here is some more food I ate:

Tags: foodphoto, progress

I’ve got the basic mud traps up and running (mud slows the hurdlers down so the wall can catch them), so hopefully I should be able to add the other trap types really quickly now.  A screenshot:

02:44
Have a menu, and more importantly a working “game state” thingy to switch cleanly from menu to game and back, and possibly a help screen or prefs. Not always obvious since Löve don’t let you control the game loop (you overload functions like draw(), update(), mousepressed(), etc, and they are called by the engine). Also, it’s late and I should sleep a bit. Game mechanics are almost complete.

02:51
Yeah, going to bed. I’m affraid I’m now useless.

09:40
Allright, it’s a nice morning to make a winning entry. *Back to work, lazy ass!*

10:38
Now with a goal, a winning condition, and two game modes.

12:16
Added the critters. They just walk around and wait to be blasted away. Oh yeah

14:05
Face sorting is working. Took three different algorithms… And I’m pretty sure this one doesn’t cover every case either. But it seems to be quite OK anyway.

16:26
Just lost two hours researching and implementing an ear-clipping algorithm. Cause: opengl (and thus Löve) can’t draw non convex polygons. And I really need to draw one. I must admit I had fun coding that. But still, two hours…

Tags: journal, screenshot

I can’t get the media uploader working so I’m going to just link this for now. This is a game where you play an aspiring super-villain trying to make his big break and complete his thesis by crushing a hero in a death trap. Unfortunately, he cannot afford a very good death trap, or a lock to keep the hero from escaping. Push the wall to crush the hero before the cops take you down or rescue the hero!

Thanks to all who supported and encouraged me in the production of this game. First thing I’ve made without THE MAN telling me what to do! Woo!

Game is here

Source code is here

Tags: final, tigs

Play online! 😀 or download the source.

I would have loved to have worked on it a bit more, but alas I have to sleep for paintball tomorrow. Life is tough.

It has been great fun, and thanks to everyone on #tigirc and #Walls for keeping me awake.

Tags: final, tigs

I didn’t get much done last night,. I work best in the morning.  must be the coffee!

You can see the “wall” collapsing in the back,. and the loosely defined pac-“worm”, that is the player, runs toward the screen in an attempt to escape it,. . Here the Advancing Wall is an Advancing Collapse of Doom.  This is going to be a bit rought, but something will be done.  I’m going to add some good/bad objects to play with on the wall, and then synth some sounds and music,. .  this all depends on how much time I get to work today,. . fingers crossed.

Tags: coffee, collapse, doom, objects, wall, worm

argh !! the pigs are flooding the sea with the batteries, or cans ?, who knows =)

Tags: clean, Diodontidae necandi, flood, objects, physics, pig, sea

It took me more than I had planned to finish the game, but it is done!

Music, ending, extras, all complete!

(Looks much better in full size)

Download Link 1: Download

Download Link 2: Download

I don’t seem to be able to upload it to the blog. It says “File type doesn’t meet security guidelines” even though it is a .zip file. I may need help on that issue.

Tags: final

Food photo for me and pythong (picture related).

Meetup at university, with three kinds of Fritz Cola and tasty food (except we forget plates).

Now if the wireless was a little bit more stable for me…

Tags: food, pythong, university

UPDATE:

Sadly there was a tiny bug in the final version of my game – the line “state = STATE_LEVEL;” was missing, so no pause screen would be shown between levels (although the code for layout and mechanics of that screen was already in there, as can be seen in the source).

I have fixed this and uploaded a new version to my site as both zip and webstart. I realize that this may not be taken into consideration when judging the entry, but I thought I should at least upload the entry as it was meant to be (and as I was certain it was!)

• Webstart
• ZIP file

Sorry about that!

—

ORIGINAL POST:

Okay, here’s the final version of “Sky Upon Us!”, my entry for LD14.

I tried to upload the zip file containing launch files for Windows, Linux and OSX to the blog. Sadly, WordPress wouldn’t accept it even if I changed the file extention. Meanwhile, the game can be downloaded or started from all the following links:

• SkyUponUs.zip (Including Windows .exe and Linux/OSX .sh files)
• Java Webstart 1 (Java 1.4+, retroweave)
• Java Webstart 2 (Java 1.5+)

While the game didn’t quite turn out the way I hoped, I’m still happy with most of it. However, the gameplay does get a bit repetetive; excuse!

As always, any comments are warmly appreciated!

A screenshot from the game:

Tags: Arrows, final, LD14 - Advancing Wall of Doom, Sky, Sky Upon Us, tigs, wall

Squeeze Maze – Ludum Dare 14

This was my third attempt at Ludum – the first time I made something way to complicated – and while it did get finished it was too complicated and did not do that well. My second try I was only able to get on the PC 6 of the 48 hours so while I completed something it was also fairly week.

This time – I had my tools ready before hand, and a pretty good schedule. I picked a simple concept and wanted to see how far I could go with it and am happy with my work,.

The tools

PC Athalon 2600XP running Windows XP, 1 Gig or Ram

Scratch for those of you who are not familar with it – it’s designed by MIT as a teaching tool for young programmers.  You build blocks of code. It’s very visual which is why the code directory is all snapshots of the code from the different sprites.

Reasons why I think this is a good platform for Ludums.

Multi – threading made easy each physical sets of blocks is it’s own thread.

Good messaging – sending broadcasts to every ‘object/thread’ is easy – limited in you can only send a fixed message with no variables.

Sprite Tools – in the code, rotate, hide, resize and move are all right and standard commands.

Easy to debug – the visual nature of the code as well as the single stepping option helps stretch the 24 hours.

Other tools

Pixel Art – Kolourpaint, Harmwave, www.cooltext.com and my LG515 cell phone, took a shot of my lawn, some decorative rock and some bricks.

Audio tools – cgMusic, sfxr, audacity, my LG515 cell phone, and  format factory

I am getting the following error when I try to send it through the blog.

File type does not meet security guidelines. Try another.

So you can get it at

http://ludum.twobrotherssoftware.com/SqueezeMaze.zip

Tags: final

After sleeping late today, I’m needing to crack on.  Here’s the current state of play:

The backstory is something about pixel-world being invaded by the sugary-snacks-of-doom.  I think I’ve being eating too much candy this weekend…

The player is the purple cube.  The orange blobs are pick-ups.  The impending wall o’doom should be obvious.  The gameplay is basically ‘survive long enough to win’.  However right now, there is no gameplay code.  Things move around, but nothing interacts with anything else.  (Though the teeth do look pretty good when they decide to come charging forward.

Now i need to go eat.  Something non-sugary would probably be best.

All the traps are in, and now I just need to tidy up various bits and pieces.  Here’s a screenshot of all the traps:

And there’s another alpha build here: http://www.niallmoody.com/downloads/ld14/DieYouStupidHurdlers-alpha3.zip