Hello again everyone, I am officially checking in for LD13. I have participated in one LD before, LD 11: Minimalist and came up with a very simple text adventure. I had a big goal to overcome last time as I did not know how to code when I started the competition and I did not start learning until about 1/3 of the way through the competition. I ended up choosing Python for LD11 and I will stick with that but will be using PyGame this time. I am now familiar with the base python language but have had little experience with PyGame so this will be another learning LD for me. I am really hoping I do not cut my entry so close to the deadline this time as I had some trouble getting my game hosted and almost missed the deadline.

My goals for this LD:

-To learn how to use PyGame and use what current knowledge I hold to be more organized with my process this time.

-Create something with some decent graphics, nothing over the top but I would really like to go a different direction than the text game last time.

-Test my project more thoroughly this time around as my last entry was quite buggy.

-If I have time I would like to add a story screen with changing pictures as an intro and add some sound effects or music.

I had a brain storming session tonight and came up with a really strong idea that plays with a different take on the theme, I came up with many ideas but this one really stood out for simplicity and fun being strong points but also seeming very versatile in that later down the line I could refine the idea and keep building on it. I have already got 90% of it mapped out and I think I will be ready to start coding when I wake up tomorrow.

This is going to be a big undertaking for me, but I am ready to give it my all and really work hard. I hope you all have a great night and good luck with your ideas. I am really looking forward to seeing everyones games and catching up on the journals. Catch you all on IRC!

Progress:

Design: 90%

Code: 0%

Art/Music: 0%

Testing: 0%

Sleep/Eat: 0%

edit* I threw together a quick reference picture for my play screen. I was hoping not to give away much with it as I want to work out the details before providing a full explanation of the game mechanics.

edit2* Just wanted to throw up a before deskphoto before heading to bed.

Tags: deskphoto

Roads, eh?

The plan was to go to bed early, get 9-10 hours of sleep, then get up at 8 am, check the theme, then make the best game in the world.

Didn’t quite work out like that. I had trouble sleeping, so I didn’t fall asleep until about 1 am, then I kept waking up during the night, excited about Ludum Dare. When I woke up at about 4:45 am, I decided to stay up another 15 minutes so I could see the theme that would be revealed at 5 am my time.

Roads. Huh.

So after another half an hour or so of contemplating different game ideas based on roads (including coming up with the terribly witty name “road island”, I finally fell asleep and slept like a baby the rest of the night.

It’s now 9:17 am, I’m feeling groggy, and I still haven’t thought of any ideas. I’ve started ChronoLapse to record this spectacle, and I’m about to start trying to find game ideas.

I didn’t get home until ten o’clock, but I checked on my phone to see what the theme was.  Luckily, it was the one I had done the most thinking about on Monday, so I didn’t have to do much thinking while away.

I’m going to do a racing game, perhaps like Outrun or of the Night Driver/Enduro variety.  I’ve done a little mock up of the screen, just a sketch really.  I’m not sure I like the perspective, but the sprites will most likely be used.  Click to enlarge (sounds like a Viagra ad!?)

From here, I’ll probably colorize the art and then cut it up to make individual sprites.  I should probably just use bounding rectangles for now though, and get some actual game logic going…..but I have learned that if you don’t do your graphics right the first time, you’ll likely not have time to return to them later.  So take the extra minutes now so you don’t have to set everything back up to fix them.

I’m tired, but I want to get something going before I go to bed.  I’m being kept company by a neurotic kitty and a can of No Fear Energy Drink.  Oh, and my Gobstoppers!  Though I think I’m already candied out…  Listening to Iron & Wine right now cause it’s calm and quiet.  Tomorrow I’ll bust out some loudness.

Tags: art, enduro, ld48_13, night driver, outrun, roads

Suddenly realized I hadn’t eaten anything today, so I made some food.

Still haven’t decided on an idea yet, or even started doing something, but I think it’s either going to be a pseudo-3d racing game ala lotus/outrun (though I’ve noticed other people already doing that), or a top-down driving around in maze-like streets where you possibly pick up stuff and avoid other cars or something. Either way I think I’m going to start off by extending mjaulib to support OpenGL and textures, for easy stretching and rotating and such.

Tags: foodphoto

I got up at 5 am this morning to see the theme, but went back to sleep again after a while. Now I’m going to start. I’m thinking of making a 3D racing game called SPACE ROADS, something between Skyroads and F-Zero. I want to do this in Flash, so I’ll need to figure out a way to get some kind of mode 7 working.

I had breakfast, here is part of it:

Tags: food

Managed to get up, read the theme and eat some breakfast.

After about an hour of generic coding I finally came up with an idea for a game, did some modelling in Blender. I would like to write a chopper vs cars thing, so I’m aiming for

• shooting
• explosions
• roads
• 2D collisions (yeeey)

Let’s hope I can finish

That how i start off. One screen full, for good measure.

Tags: code shot

So, an admission: I first heard about this contest yesterday. Or rather, at about 4am this morning. I don’t see this as a problem, really — just think of me as sort of fresh. Anyway, I made a deal with myself: if I woke up this morning and the theme looked good, I’d do it. I mean…why not?

I awoke; the theme is roads. I am in.

Pending unprecedented tool failure or attack by giant anti-Japanese robots I’ll be using Ruby, RubyGame, and SDL. Design-wise, 2D is definitely a possibility. In fact, it’s the only possibility.

Ok, I decided on a much simpler idea than I was thinking about in the earlier post. Whew..  This one i have a chance of completeing.

It’s called “Crossroads”. Get it? Crosswords + Roads.. heheh.. It’s not really going to be crosswords, more like scrabble, but close enough. Anyways, I’ve got the beginnings of the board worked out. I love word games, and I’ve always been meaning to make one for LD, the closest I’ve gotten is “Headline Recycler” for tins, which was really neat but not fun at all.

How do you mix roads and crosswords? well.. wait and see..

Anyways, It’s 1:20 am here,  not too late, but I’m hoping to get an early start on the gameplay tommorow. Goodnight all.

Well, just past the 3 hours of implementation mark. What do I have to show for it?

• A tile based world
• Restricted player movement in said world
• In ‘game’ level editing
• Level saving/loading

So all in all I’m pretty happy with how things are going so far. The problem is I now need to figure out how I’m actually going to make a proper game from this. I’ve got some vague ideas, but they seriously need fleshing out. Eep!

Important Stats Update
Hot Brown Caffeinated Beverages: 1
Food Consumed: NULL (this needs to be rectified immediately)
Time Spent Coding: 3hr
Total new Lines of code written: 296

Finally a new progress screenshot, it’s not desperately exciting yet, you’ll just have to trust me that I loaded the level from a file, and the ball bounces around the ‘roads’ compellingly.

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that today is NegativeGeForce’s Birthday, so be sure to tell him Happy Birthday when you catch up with him either in IRC or on his Journal.

Happy Birthday NegativeGeForce!

Important Update!

I finally have breakfast. Porridge with Golden Syrup and tea (what better breakfast can there be?!)

Tags: food

The game idea so far:

1. Get from A to B (the goal and the essence of a road).
2. Initially the road does not permit that (the challenge).
3. You can rotate the section in front of you (the interaction principle).
4. Probably this will trigger some mischief (the real challenge).

I am using Blender 2.48 with the Blender Game Engine and Python for Game Logic.

I need to get some food.

Paperwork is done (and breakfast acquired). I am switching to Blender.

It’s got curves and slopes.. now should I add a physics engine?…

Zero tangible progress on the game. Thought about making a driving game (duh, obvious), drew a picture of a road for no apparent reason, did some research into SNES Mode 7, played with some Processing libraries for pathfinding and loading .obj format meshes. I’m thinking I’ll probably end up with some variation on Frogger at this rate.

Tags: food

I have three scenes

1. the stage to build objects and test them
2. the game where everything is assembled
3. the menu

Currently I am working on the stage. You see the road sections built by extruding the standard cube. The sixth is a spare part I am experimenting with the SCA (Sensor- Actuator-Controller) setup. At the moment you can rotate a section with the mouse wheel.

Odd: you have to enter 45 degrees to get a 90 degree rotation.

So I have finished my first day’s work on my game Frog Rescue.  The idea of the game is that there are frogs crossing a network of roads and you set up roadblocks to prevent them being run over by cars.

The game can be downloaded here. Currently, you can press A to zoom the camera out (although I’ll probably change the camera controls tomorrow).

I’m also documenting my progress on my (web 1.0 style) ‘blog’ at http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~moores8/ld13/index.html

And now I’m going to bed.

I think sleep is near… I’ve not done as much as I wanted, but I think I have a decent start.  So far you can control the car with the mouse, left and right.  I’ve done a simple one-image background that will eventually be replaced with separate dynamic pieces.  Here’s the screen shot:

Hopefully I don’t sleep in too much! There’s still plenty to do!

Tags: ld48_13, roads, screenshot

Finally managed to get my 3D model loading and displaying :). Took my an hour longer than planned and it looks damn ugly :).

I wonder if everyone has problems finding their models in 3D? I usually don’t know, if I’m drawing them improperly or if they are just off the screen

Brrr. Roads, not my ideal theme by a long way.

I wont be able to start working on it until much later today, thanks to the joys of crunchmode overtime.

My guess is that I’ll do a prototypical sim city dealie in PHP/JS.

Now added the Tokamak physics lib to the project..  I’ve got a sphere rolling around the track. I can’t render spheres, though – so it’s just represented by those red lines… but it works

(Oh – and does anyone know if you can make WordPress default to a sensible size post editing window, rather than the tiny default I seem to get?)

Development is going fine. Map travel and conquering areas by killing monsters to build roads is now complete; soon I will add the ability to build hotels, gas stations or oil wells.

Below is an old action screenshot with placeholder UI and graphics.

Mandarines are delicious. And my progress is blocked by what should be a simple problem.

Tags: foodphoto

This is starting to take shape, and I’m fairly happy with the way the roads happen. I have some z-sorting problems that I might design around, and the road markings ‘stretch’ which I’m tempted to pass off as a ‘feature’ :p   I’m pretty happy though, and I think I’ve earned a pot noodle for lunch!

Looking kinda pole-position-esque at the moment.

Time to design the tracks.

Here’s my desktop, in all its dusty glory.  I usually keep an a4 graphics tablet on here, but it’s staying off the desk until tomorrow, so I can focus on coding.  The laptop is running Windows, which is why I need it there.

And in the spirit of things, here is my lunch! Neither impressive nor especially healthy, but it keeps me at my desk! Omnomnom!

Tags: desktop, foodphoto

Cooking up some ideas while having brunch:

A little while since my last entry, but I’ve been pretty busy at least. I’ve come up with some slightly more road like graphics (I kind of miss my old hyper abstract ones, but it feels like I should work the theme in when I can). I’ve also added some AI opponents, so now instead of one blob there are several 😮

Each enemy has somewhat different behaviour, kind of like in pacman. Actually the whole thing was starting to become very pacman-esque which was a little worrying, I didn’t particularly want to make a clone of something if I could avoid it. I was getting a bit bogged down generally too, so decided it was a good time to get some fresh air, go to the shops, and stock up on some food. It worked pretty well, I’ve got a much better idea of what to do next now, and I’m much less worried about the pacman thing (there’ll be similarities, but I don’t expect it to feel like a clone).

Got back from the shops, was hungry, so mades cheese on toast for lunch, served with more browny beverage goodness \o/ (my count is now 3).

Tags: food, screenshot, shopping

I added

• the menu  – simply to start the game or quit.
• a player with WASDQE movement
• two cameras (first person and scene perspective)
• game logic (usually I use an empty that is set to receive and send messages to the other objects)

I hit a roadblock 😉 with replacing the material of an object via Python controller in BGE.

This is my frist post and is also the first time i participate. I’m using gcc/sdl/sdl_image/sdl_mixer.

I’m not a design and i’ve already done most of de design parte

I found some example code for mode 7 (which works pretty simple actually, through a matrix) and was able to implement it into my own code base. So now I can make complete maps in Tile Studio and display them in mode 7! Still needs a lot of tweaking though.

Still with the healthy stuff.

Finally, dynamic map generation + clickable objects. The final game is (hopefully) going to be a business/trading sim, where you control a trucking company — the interface is supposed to be a road atlas. Maybe tomorrow I’ll figure out how to make more squiggly roads. Right now, though, it generates a map with random cities & roads, and lets you click on cities to find out what they produce & demand. Screenshot (!):

Tags: screenshot

I have a functioning screen that you can press ESC on, and a font that prints!  It’s miraculous!

I bounced zillions of ideas around last night, never found anything that struck me square in the face until I gave a moment’s thought to Night Of The Cephalopods.  It’s not a very good game, and I don’t think it does anything very impressive in the realm it sets out to impress in, but it’s a fun idea: having the game narrate things as the player does them.

Well, my game is no action game, in fact it’s a point & click adventure.  So narrating that is more akin to building a story that is being read to the player, based on their actions.

Or in this case…. a poem.

I chose this project because it will be *extremely* easy technically, yet a huge challenge in terms of content.  I’m going to have to invent rhyming lines that work in various sequences so that any path you take continues to conform to the poem’s meter.  Basically, I chose a project that I will have fun making as opposed to something you will have fun playing.  But it’ll probably amuse you a time or two.  It’ll certainly be interesting.

So prepare yourself for Two Roads: An Interactive Poem.

Tags: narration, poem, roads, screenshot

Here see, I have a tile editor that saves and loads and stuff!

That’s most of the battle I swear D:

(Someone will pay dearly for this choice of theme..)

Tags: omg, roads

Up and at it again, here’s the first food shot. Onto coding base classes and grid structures…

Tags: food

Greetings.

Only learned about the ludumdare a few days ago, and decided I’d give it a try if I could come up with an idea when I learned about the theme. Now almost 12 hours later, I’ve finally got an idea at last. 36 hours to make it? Might be enough. Got the monday off anyway.

I’ll be using Python and Pygame btw. Beyond that, most will be from scratch I guess.

Cheers.

Tags: roads

hello!

It’s a road simulator.

I didn’t originally even plan to participate since timing of this compo was bad for me.. but then I ended up doing something anyway since our plans for the day were cancelled. Not sure yet if I will actually make an entry or not!

I wanted to try out some track generation stuff using control points, and that’s what I did… without any goal of what could be a viable game. That was done pretty quickly, but I don’t actually have inspiration to continue to make a game which looks like this test.

With 1 day and 11 hours left I start working on my entry. I’m confident this time, I really think I can pull a good game this time around.

I’m thinking in a racing game or something like it. Anyone remembers Road Fighter?

Goodluck to everyone, and better luck for me 😛

Psnake

Well I’m definitely getting back on track, the past few hours have been rather productive. I just love the feeling rolling out lines and lines of reasonable code, I’m really enjoying myself at the moment.

I’ve mostly been doing stuff behind the scenes stuff. I’ve put in an entity spawning system so that player+enemy positions are all stored in my level data. Rather happy with how it’s worked out (I’m wondering why I haven’t done something like it in the non-compo game I’ve been working on recently).

Then I’ve put the groundwork in for some rescuable stickmen things, I’ll come clean and say the *idea* of rescuable things that follow you I’m pretty well ‘borrowing’ straight from my other game. Having said that, time is (obviously) at a premium, it’s a concept I’m particularly fond of, it looks pretty cute, and it’s going to work a bit differently here, so, *shrug* I don’t really feel bad about it.

Here’s how it looks at the moment (the stickmen things bob up and down a little, it’s kinda cute).

Oh yes, and finally, why the title? The suns going down now here, and I started working before it started coming out. The bulb in my rooms light has blown, and the bulbs I bought to replace it don’t work for whatever reason. So, coding in the dark it is!

Tags: screenshot

Well I’m off to a great late start 13 hours into the compo.  We’ll see just what sort of entry I can pull off.  I’m afraid I may end up using TGB now since I am a bit more short on time than I’d like.

Not a huge amount of visual progress – but I’ve got some player control and camera code working – took a lot of tweaking to get something usable…

Now I need to get a player vehicle in (wipeout-style hovering thing), and decide whether to keep it wireframe or start texturing it…

Progress?  Well, it has been SLOW.  Last night after the theme was announced I must admit I was quite stumped.  I couldn’t even remember if I had voted for roads or not.  I knew that this time around I wanted to pick a game scope that I could pull off in the allotted time.  All the immediate ideas I had were way to ambitious though and I felt like I was merely wading through game ideas that were either too complex or just not interesting to me to put the energy into in order to accomplish them in the timeframe.  Also, I admit I was blindsided by not being able to get past thinking about cars instead of roads.  So, I basically took last night to let the ideas seep and the subconscious work on it.  I played a bunch of Left 4 Dead with two friends and another Ludum Dare steam group member who was also (procrastinating?) like me. 

That was a lot of fun, but anyway I digress!  I went to bed late and uncertain.  I loaded my subconsious up prior to bed by browsing hundreds of google images for “roads” looking for inspiration.  I then slept about 6 hours but had no dreams about roads.  Before sleep I had a few ideas running around in my head but nothing felt “right”.  I was thinking about a mailbox baseball game but couldn’t decide on perspective.  I was thinking about a garbage collecting game but decided it would be too ambitious.  So, this morning after a bunch of coffee I was suddenly hit by a vision and sketched the following:

And thus, CoMuTor was born.  Basically Rampage + Gridlock = CoMuTor.  I feel that I just *might* be able to pull off this idea in the time remaining.  Still a lot of details to work out but basically I’m thinking that the idea will be as follows:

You are CoMuTor a monster that for some unknown reason have appeared downtown during rush hour and must battle your way out through gridlocked traffic to the suburbs and then the country.  Of course you will get to smash and battle many things along the way as any “Rampage” type game should allow.  Why are you a monster in the city?  Umm.. why not?  😉

As you can see, many details remain.

Tags: comutor

Eating Cinnabon cereal is easier than working on path finding.

Tags: foodphoto

Now I have three layers of stuff drawing properly… It’s about time I got the player in there I think..!

Tags: fonars, hate, roads

Just woke up a couple of hours ago, and saw the theme. Ferociously busy, but have an idea.  Will try get the engine written today, add some game tomorrow…nothing coded yet though :/

and: breakfast (wip shot):

Tags: food

It’s Saturday morning!  Here’s breakfast!

Apple-cinnamon pancakes that my wife made while I started working away again.  I don’t really have much to show for it yet, since it’s all behind the scenes stuff to manage the background and road.  When I get something, I’ll post it, hopefully before lunch.

Tags: breakfast, footphoto, pancakes

Well, I think I have a functioning idea for my game, just how much ends up being implemented I can’t say. The basic outline is something like this:

In a post-apocalyptic world (nuclear disaster, baby!), a major raised highway still runs across the country. This highway is known to the people simply as the Road — the lifeblood of the communities that still exist across the blighted landscape. Your people have lived here at the Road as long as you can remember, trying to scrape together a living by trading with and providing services for travellers. When your father dies, you take over leadership of the village — but as bandit attacks get worse and worse, your village loses too much, too many people. Eventually you end up resorting to attacking travellers for what scant supplies you can scavenge from them. You become… Highwaymen.

Epic, eh? Sweet. Ok, so I’m thinking it’s gonna be a top-down action game inspired by Zelda. You have a village that you can upgrade through money and materials you scavenge from attacking traders and whatnot. Likely the village will be off-screen, merely controlled through a menu. The game will play out in a large patch of highway, where your allies (other people from your village) and you will fight people, getting money and materials with each kill. Upgrading your village gives you better weapons, armor, and more people. Basically, it’s gonna end up being an arena fighting game (set on a highway), with allies and enemies, and an upgrade system based on cash, that happens in between fights.

Now, I fully recognize this is a fairly large scope, especially considering that I already wasted 3 or 4 hours last night doing things like playing L4D with HybridMind. I’m going to start with just you fighting other dudes, top down, on an open plain, and go from there.

Spent a lot of time playing around with this game and trying to settle on some gameplay, and I think I now have it.  I also completely re-did the controls, and they have changed from ‘bad’ to ‘good’, haha. The biggest addition is a ‘bridge’ move that works like a jump, but you will have to recharge it. It means that you can avoid crashing into your existing roads and also jump over streams.

This will probably be a small single-life scoreboard based game. I’m pretty excited about how this plays now… lots of work to do this evening though!

And here’s an older picture with some trees, to prove I still have trees in my game! XD

.. Dinner.

Forget about the ‘healty’.

.. but MrPiglet does!

Please excuse the blurriness.

I’ve been taking a couple of hours break for a shower, food, and some general mooching, figuring there’s no point getting burnt out too early. Back to the grindstone now though, time to make this game a game!

Oh yes, also about time I did an Important Stats Update
Hot Brown Caffeinated Beverages: 5
Food Consumed: porridge + cheese on toast + quiche
Time Spent Actually Working: around 8hrs
Total new Lines of code written: 727
16×16 Sprites drawn: 17

Many thanks to my girlfriend for cooking a baked potato for me! Omnomnom!

I have a follow-camera working in my game now, and it’s starting to feel much more like a real game. I need to start working on implementing the rules now.

Tags: foodphoto

I think I’ll drop out. Theme is uninspiring this time around, and I can’t seem to come up with a good game idea. I might throw together some sort of Towlr game with Lua, but I’m not going full-out and making a big epic game 😛

Good luck to everyone else. Have fun LDing

Here is the idea behind my entry : you’re a car with a crane on it and you have to fill the gaps on the road, so that the vehicles behind you don’t get stuck. The gameplay is that you have to approach the gaps enough to fill them, without falling into them. And of course each gap you miss (which leaves the screen) makes you lose a life, points or whatever.

Here’s a screen :

and here is the game in its current state.

Well I think I’m loooong overdue a status update on my entry, so here I go with my first post for LD13.

Screenshot:

I’m using python and pyGame this time, with other tools of choice including the Eclipse IDE, Graphics Gale and GIMP.

I was hoping to get some kind of Grand-Theft-Auto-style engine working for my game, but I think I’ll have to pick up the pace if I’m going to get there. My game currently consists of a red car driving around in a fields full of red dots, with some questionable from-scratch-written physics. I hope to get some actual roads in there soon

Tags: car, dots, field, poor

I’ve been working like mad since my last post at trying to mock up some CoMuTor animation tiles to have something to work with the soon to be written game logic.  I always forget how long animation takes and am hoping that these placeholders won’t become permanent as far the deadline goes….  we shall see!

Here is a detail of my Tile Studio CoMuTor project:

Here is the larger image of even more tiles:

I have to draw some final frames of a CoMuTor attack where you reach down and fling cars up into the air and/or a smash attack as well.

Tags: comutor, tiles

This is the concept for my game, BLDR. You basically have to build roads to guide things from somewhere to somewhere else. With obstacles, and not running over your people.

Tags: BLDR, concept, follow, LD #13 - Roads - 2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV8n_21RlMc&fmt=18

It’s a dream.

So far so – so. At least I have some idea what I am doing

Things figured out:

• General idea for a game – aiming for skyroads made using modern tools, but I’ll be also happy with just one no frills circuit running
• Map making and general what to click where in blender
• How to make a car sim in bullet physics lib
• KDevelop started working after emergency switch from 4.0alpha to 3.5
• Build chain for making windows .exe’s in linux

Things to do:

• Sleep
• Eat
• Exporting maps and models from blender into my c++ app
• Some sort of drawing it in c++
• Ripping needed stuff from bullet examples and evolve it into sth game’ish
• Model for the racer itself?
• ????
• Profit.

And for those who are curious it looks like this:

Textured at last!… now for the arkward job of generating normals…

A progress report, full of blood, glory, and beautiful trigonometry. I now have some semblance of game state; the game keeps track of how much cash the player has, and you can buy new trucks (if you have the cash) and set up routes between cities. And, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, the trucks will actually point the right way as they travel. Grr.

I’m starting to worry about the game idea, though. It won’t be fun unless it’s precisely balanced, and I almost certainly don’t have time to do that here. Oh well, no time left to start over (again)!

Also, I’m really digging the sheer variety of games, designs, and skill levels that’s already emerging in people’s screenshots and status reports. This is fantastic, and really, really exciting. Way more so than I expected.

After getting some boilerplate code down, I took a break to have lunch:

Peanut butter, cinnamon, and raisin sandwich, plus some blue corn chips and hummus, washed down with Tutti Frutti flavored Jaritos. Also, some carrots (not pictured).

I spent lunch and the hour after trying to nail down a specific direction to take this project. Here are my design notes:

I’m still hoping to get basic game play by dinner today. We’ll see how ambitious a goal that is.

Tags: foodphoto

I have been slowed by two things : collisions and scrolling, for the scrolling, it is ok, but collisions with pygame … I hope that I will have enought time to fix it.
Tomorrow, I will begin with the end of scrolling, then I will improve IA, make missions, buildings and signals.

Well, I’m calling this my halfway point. I now have a (single) fully playable level, with goals and dangers and a timer to keep track of how well you did. In other words I have a game! (woo, yay, fireworks etc.) 15 hours ago none of this existed, so I’m pretty happy to call day one a definite success

I’ve still got a long way to go yet though, still to do:

• Tutorials of some kind
• Several progressively harder levels
• Score tables
• SFX
• Music
• More graphics
• Some sort of menu to glue it all together
• Polish! Polish! Polish!

So.. it doesn’t really sound like I’ll be twiddling my thumbs tomorrow either then!

I’m actually really enjoying this 😀

It might not be clear from the above screenshot, but it’s been a tough landmark to get to!  Okay, I’m only clocking in at 366 lines of code, and I haven’t even started on the game yet proper (no graphics done yet, for instance), but I’m finally in a good position to make progress.

First though: dinner!

I didn’t have much time to work on my game today, but I think I will still be able to finnish.

I’m making a turn based strategy game related to roads. I’ll post some more info about the game tomorrow, but now I’m going to sleep.

Good luck everybody!

development moving forward at a nice pace! yay!

I spent quite some time getting the mode 7 to work properly, but I’m happy with it now (it can also rotate around the x axis, but I probably won’t be using that now).

There is still a lot to do before I have a game. I’ll go to bed now and start working hard tomorrow morning.

Oh, and I also had diner tonight: pasta.

Tags: food

I should mention first that today is my 24th birthday !

I am starting a bit late.  I had a problem with my computer and had to format.

This time I am using the Ogre3D engine.  Language will be C++.  My game idea to start with will be a frogger style game, except your a human.  It will be 3D.  All art assets will be made from scratch using gimp and blender.

I do already have a stripped down framework to run the Ogre engine.  Its maybe 500 lines of code to just startup the core Ogre system and run a game loop.

I also recently got a new desk.  I thought it might of been too big, but apparently I already managed to use all of it.

Food for today consists of apple pie, orange and birthday cake.

Tags: deskphoto, food

Happy birthday negativegeforce!

I don’t really have the time to make games right now, but I’m in. I spent one full day studying though, so might run out of time too soon.

I’m going to attempt a themed 4kb java game within ~33 hours… many of which I’ll be sleeping. This should be interesting!

So far, I’ve got almost nothing:

Tags: 4kb, java, LD13 - Roads

Gotten an, at least in my opinion, good start. A susurprisingly good start, as I always have problems when it comes to starting. Also having a good time, though my head is starting to hurt a bit from the hours.

Good Things:

Most of the needed art is done. Still need a car though.

Gameplay DESIGN is done. Decided to do it simple, so ended up with frogger only you are running down the road instead of trying to cross it.

Got a, sort of, backstory: While in town you where jumped by all the townspeople because they want your fancy sombrero. Because you, our hero, is deadly afraid of grass you had to run down the road with heavy traffic to get away (with your sombrero).

Got most of the basic programming done

Not good things:

Only got most of the basic programming done. Still have to finish up the controls (got a temporary solution to test movements), add collision, add cars, add scoring, add extra stuff.

No sound. Guess I have enough to do later tonight and tomorrow.

No menu’s yet.

Things I want to do, but dunno about time:

Visual variety. right now its 1 road piece on loop, 1 grass background and 1 obstacle (the grass on the road) and 0 (but soon 1) cars.

Add 2 player. Don’t think this is going to be too hard to make after I get the rest of the game mechanics done.

Highscore. I plan to have scoring based on how far/long you manage to run before getting hit by a car (our sombrero wearing hero is very allergic to getting run over by cars, in addition to his grass phobia).

SS (cars hopefully  coming on next report):

The yellow circle is the player characters sombrero, which was easy enough for me to make and still look decent.

Food so far have been bread for breakfast/lunch (which was the same meal). Dinner ended up being Spaghetti with Laban Seigmenn on the side. For those who don’t know Seigmenn, which probably is everyone not from Norway, is sugarcoated jelly shaped like small men. Don’t have any camera’s so no food shots. Will try to see if I can get one taken using the built in webcam on my laptop next time I eat however. Also got 3*1.5l soda ( 2 * cola rippof and 1 orange taste ) so I probably won’t run out.

Tags: First entry

Just out for a nice drive around the city in my car…

Huh? What’s all the commotion?

Zombies??

IN MY CITY?

AH HELL NAW

Left4Bread!

You play four old age pensioners, during the zombie apocalypse they were left inside their carehome to fend for themselves completely oblivious to what’s going on outside.

Then disaster strikes! Ernie tried to make everyone some lovely pea and ham soup but there’s no bread left.

They take on a grand mission. To leave their home, and find the nearest shop.

And no young, green whippersnappers are gonna get in their way.

Tags: are, better, roads, than, zombies

I’ve managed to get the 3D models properly working. Apart from that I wrote control system, so now you can fly with the chopper around the screen and quite nice logic system, which allows me to define, how the objects interact with each other.

The game is however still not present :). I’m going to implement shooting and destroying of trucks before I go to sleep, which leaves for tomorrow

• truck following roads to the the base (which the chopper has to guard)
• truck firing back
• camera to follow the chopper around
• different enemies
• propeller
• etc

After managing to seriously mess up my sleep schedule and “wasting” much of today on real life stuff, I ran into heaps of trouble with the physics library I used, forcing me to rewrite most of the code I had written so far.. and then I find out others are making the same game I’m doing.

It was SUPPOSED to be a zombie road carnage splatter fest with advanced scoring. Instead it ended up as an abortion of a physics test that you can try by clicking this link.

Well didn’t do much, still don’t really know what i want to do. Quickly made some road tiles, and a road landscape pic, which i am not sure anymore, how i want to use. Maybe a menu.

Tags: pictures, tiles

Well I’m going to call it a day and pick things up again tomorrow. I’m way behind but I know exactly what I’ve got to get cracking on with tomorrow morning. Here’s a shot of the current version:

There are some pavement tiles now! The reason its taking so long is because I had a crazy idea to generate a tile-based city procedurally on the fly, so currently my time is taken up with getting that to work. Here’s one of the many debug image dumps I’ve made of the tile map:

Its actually just a snapshot of part of the map, which is technically infinite in size. Each pixel is a 4×4 block of tiles. As you  can see, all I’m generating procedurally so far is the fact that there’s more pavement the closer to the centre of the city you get. There aren’t any roads yet (note to self: must actually get the damn ROADS in at some point…). The red and yellow pixels in a grid which you might just be able to make out – they’re marking the areas that the map is broken up into. The idea is that the game only needs to hold the player’s current area and the 8 surrounding areas in memory at the same time, allowing me  to have an infinite map.

So, on tomorrow I’ve got my work cut out for me. Procedural roads… collisions… traffic?!… I may have to revise my plan if I’m going to get something finished on time.

By the way, the other entries are looking totally awesome. I can’t wait to play them all!

I started late, still I’m only working on something for two hours and nothing has failed disastrous yet. So I have not lost hope yet.

Pulled in some libraries and with some handy dandy box2d work I got cars with reasonable realistic stearing working. So now I just need roads, AI, and all other game logic… oh and sounds effects. Did I mention not losing hope yet? Scrap that…

Well, here a screenshot for your enjoyment: It’s not much, but it’s something. Road generation is up next…

Well hitting a few road blocks that really shouldn’t be that hard to circumvent. But here’s the first screenshot of the TileEngine. Now I need to code all my units, and a way to save and load maps.

Tags: progress

So, its my first ludum dare ever! In front I was not quite sure if I should participate or not, and with the theme I hesitated even more. Guess I am in at last.

Started coding with OpenGL with no real idea in my head, but got a easy-to-make one in between. Scrapped a few hours of opengl-code because GL_SELECTION was giving me a headache – switched to gosu instead and till now I havent looked back!

My idea is a little puzzle game – you have to make a way for taxis that want to go from A to B, clicking on a tile rotates it. Taxis must not crash into each other, but the drivers are smart enough to do a 180 if they hit a dead end. No gameplay implemented, yet, but here is a early screen:

Well, I’m finishing up for the day on my Pole Position type game. I have a rendered track described by Bezier curves and have some mist, ground and sky. I even have a sort of car shaped blob (which after a lot of work is even lit properly). Tomorrow, I need to look at actually getting some game in there somewhere although only after I have improved the control so it drives more like a car.

Well, till tomorrow.

The start of Ludum Dare totally blew my mind. Looks like I’ve got only a day to complete this. Hmm…

Roads?!? You guys seriously chose roads? Man, sad news. Well okay, I’ll do it, but next time you people should do something that is way less genre defining.

So, I’ve got 27 hours to make a game. Well, I think making the best overall game is out, so I’ll go for the comedy options. The ideas are churning.

needs more collision, but…reasonably okay progress for the first day…will add basic sound effects, then catch me some sleep.

Update.. Not as much progress as I’d hoped but I still think i can get something playable today. I got car movement and pathfinding working, and more work on the maps, even though you can’t see the letters yet because there’s no texture or shading.

Also, even though it doesn’t look much different, the dark blue aand beige colored blocks are actually 3d models, i got a simple obj loader in there. Next up… letters

So, after a few hours of mucking around I have a basic scene with all the elements required for the game.  I just need to add collision detection.  Aligning the cars to the road normal directly under the car is probably sufficient enough.  The player will just walk ontop of the level.

I would really like to add rag doll physics to make the event of the car hitting you a bit more dramatic then a game over screen.  That is going to be my primary objective in the next day after adding the basic collision detection.  That way I wont have to scrap my entry entirely just because i dont have physics implemented.

Hey LD peeps! Some really cool stuff being posted here today!

I’ve been working on something for this too, but I didn’t want to post until now because this is the first time I’ve tried taking part in Ludum Dare and I wasn’t sure I’d be finishing it – but it’s starting to take shape, so here it is:

[bigger version]

It’s an experiment in non-linear storytelling – I’m taking a somewhat metaphorical approach to the theme, heh. Also there are actual roads in it, I promise!

I should have more tomorrow, all going well. I think I’m more or less done for today…

I’ve spent most of the day recovering from a heavy night out so I’ve not even begun to start yet. So without even a game name decided upon yet I’m starting with 26 hours remaining… That’s probably not possible but I’m going to have a good crack at it!

I’ve not got much to show for today so far.  I spent a lot of time fighting with some stupid physics things before I gave up and just went with the simple stuff.  Since this isn’t Gran Turismo, it doesn’t really matter.  I can flub the calcs just as long as it feels natural enough.

Here’s the latest screenshot.

The car is away from the bottom of the screen a bit, due to the acceleration.  I still don’t have anything that shows the car is moving, so that is what I will work on next.  After that, I still have the difficult task of doing the road curves.  Since this is all sprite based, it’s not going to be as easy as doing it in 3D, I would think.

The day isn’t over yet, so I could still get some good progress made later on.

Tags: ld48_13, roads, screenshot

I found the theme to be difficult because all of my ideas seemed to big for the timeframe available.  So after a lot of thinking and brainstorming I decided to just to shoot for the idea that interested me most: railroads!  I’m calling my game Iron Roads and hope it’ll be a playable but simple railroad business sim.  Honestly, I think that it is too big of a a project, but we’ll see.

The main menu! Yay!

The game. Aww.

Finishing up tonight – pause menu, driving controls

Tomorrow – people that follow you, obstacles, and a goal.

Tags: BLDR, C++, game, LD #13 - Roads - 2008, menu, roads

Well, apparently I didn’t have nearly as much in me this time as last, I’ve been procrastinating a whole lot. I have most of all the boilerplate stuff done, and a playfield, but no movement, collisions, A.I., or upgrade system. So essentially no game. Might push it really hard into the night tonight to try and get all the gameplay functioning before tomorrow. Screeny of a basic map:

Tags: Highwaymen

I have a demo. You die somewhat haphazardly when objects collide, and it doesn’t tell you when you win (but you have when all the blue thingies have reached the opposite side). I do have win detection, it just doesn’t show anything. What else… Ah, you place roads by clicking the gray tile in the toolbox and then clicking in the world. Roads make objects go twice as fast. Restart the game by clicking [R].

Demo

I’m afraid I won’t be able to add a lot of maps though… I’m aiming to do this in under 4kb (so I can submit the game to the Java4k competition as well), and I’m almost out of space.

Screenie, in case you can’t try the demo:

Tags: 4kb, java, LD #13 - Roads - 2008, LD4k

Food

Didn’t really have a breakfast. Guess I should have photographed the cup of coffee and the Gingernut biscuits.

Pictured above – Lunch, ~23 hours in: Salad roll with beetroot tzatziki (otherwise know as Pancar dip), with Danish fetta and the flesh of a pig. Banana, and instant coffee with one sugar.

Progress

Not much. Out of desparation, I started making a Frogger clone in Processing, the idea being that once it is functional, I can change some things to make it a little more than regular Frogger. We will see.

At some point this morning, I decided it would be nice to have a mobile version, eg Java J2ME / MIDP game that could run on most Java capable phones. Since there is Mobile Processing, designed for running Processing apps on phones, I installed Java Wireless Toolkit and Mobile Processing (the Linux alpha 0006 version worked for me, while the official 0007 Windows version didn’t. Go figure). I scaled down the sprites, made some porting tweaks (‘real’ Processing supports Java’s ArrayList, but it appears Mobile Processing does not, although I’m probably missing something), and set up the webserver to allow downloading of MIDP apps to my phone (hint: .htaccess needs the mimetype lines AddType text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor .jad and AddType application/java-archive .jar).

It runs ! It’s not really a game yet, but I still have time to turn it into something that resembles one. If anyone wants to try out this totally unfun useless version, you can get it here (at least for a while). The best way to get it is to go there using your phones browser, click on the download link, and it should install the game for you.

Tags: food, frogger

OK here it is,  This is totally different from the game I thought I was going to make.  I wasn’t thinking Horses, or even 3d when I started.  

I’m not too sure about the gameplay, but I’m fairly pleased with what I got it to do from a technical standpoint.

The source and everything is here

but to play it you can just jump on over to here

I think it’s taking me longer to find my way around wordpress than it is to make the game.

.

Tags: final, horse, troy, wooden

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 6:35 pm and is filed under LD13 - Roads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.