I have a moving car and a collision map that works. Small things but I still think I can do it by the end of the day.

Psnake

Tags: LD Road Racing

Right, well I’ve got a few levels worth of simple text based in-game tutorials in, so it shouldn’t be so bewildering to people that start it. Not really sure what I’m going to look into next, but not because I lack things to do to it! I might try and get some sounds and/or music in.

I also had some breakfast, I was going to cook some bacon, but I felt hungry and lazy, so just had some toast with peanut butter instead. Will have to do something more exciting for lunch. More tea was also involved (of course).

Tags: food, screenshot, tutorial

So, I feel like I’m approaching “finished” for this silly little game.

Journal

Here it is running on the Java Mobile Edition phone emulator (“Default Color” at 240×291 resolution). I’ve heard people complain about how making MIDP phone games is tricky because you have to deal with lots of different screen sizes/resolutions. It truly can be a pain in the butt, and I haven’t dealt with it properly in this game … on my 128×128 Nokia 6230 the sprite positioning is out of whack, and I don’t really feel I have the time or energy to go back to square one and fix it to work at any resolution. So at the moment it will only be reasonable to play on largish screen phones. I may try to make a special 128×128 version tomorrow, if I get time (basically, I’ll start by shrinking the sprites). I’ll probably also release a non-phone Java applet version so people have more chance of playing it.

Still need to do sound.

Food

The “significant other” reminded me to eat a few hours ago. Looks like I got sidetracked … haven’t eaten yet. (Update: I just ate a banana. No photo, since it looks just like the banana in my last food photo).

Tags: frogger, screenshot

Just added checkpoint rings and a starting grid texture. Also got basic track selection in. It’s going to be a time-trial only game, not much hope of adding AI players at this point – so next I need to add the timing code, and checkpoint/finish/failure detection.

Ghost cars would be nice… but that’s pushing it a bit for an LD48 game…

Exproad, Improad and Reroad! is coming along well, I should definitely have a fun little game for tomorrow (today) night. It’s 4 AM where I am and I’m going to turn in for the night. Before I did/do, however, I had some yummy sweetened and dried mango strips from Trader Joe’s.

The packaging, however, leaves something to be desired. I mangled my thumbs trying to get the bastard of a thing open. It’s as if I’ve got an actual mango and I’ve got to get into it. Wait, no, it’s more like having a mango with a coconut surrounding it, and then maybe like a lockbox or something on the outside of that. But I would never cut it open, no. Got to preserve freshness!

Success! We have mangos!

On a more related note… good stuff from my game, like I said before. I’m going for a nifty 8-bit look, because I figured that would make it easier to make decent artwork. Turns out that ugly goes to super ugly, but whatever. I’m just drawing malformed pickup trucks, Asians, and zombies.

Anyway. I also went with 8-bit because I recently made my own engine for doing modern-NES games (I’m calling it JPixel, I might release it open source soon), so I decided it would be fun to use that. I also had simple physics and particle effects coded in JPixel, so that helps save some time too.

Screenshot:

And another:

Time for some sleep!

Morning of day two.  Have an itemized list of 9 things to do.  Doable things.  So: I’m on track then.

But first, breakfast:

Alright, got a good 8 hours of sleep and starting the gameplay. Taxis now drive along the road, and can do a full 180. Now to get fuel, collisions and some goal implemented!

Oh, yes, and some food shot, too! This is my lunch:

yay \o/

15 and a half hours to go, and I’ve got a simple tile map with some roads you can build:

I’ve still got to add cars, buildings, sound effects, menus, and some kind of gameplay. This is going to be tight…

Here we have a procedurally-generated motorway. Its intersecting another one (drawn with the wrong tiles), which really isn’t the best design for a 6-lane highway when you think about it, but oh well.

Tags: car, field, highway, motorway, road, wrong

I think I’ll drop out.

I don’t like the theme and I lost the whole first day, so I would have to work my ass of the rest of the time in order to finnish my game in time.

Good luck!

After a grueling 24 hours, I can confidentally say I’ve gotten most of the mechanics done and can now focus almost entirely on content.  I have a couple of small tasks that I need to finish up (extend the collision system to have a trigger collision type and fix the order in which things are drawn), but the bulk of the hard work has been finished.

The gist of my project is that you’re a freelance construction worker, namely you own a bulldozer and you pick up odd jobs bulldozing anything and anyone who gets in your way on the inner-city streets of a soon-to-be-named urban town!  It’ll mainly be puzzle-oriented, as you have to move debris and other items over the roadways to either clear a path or get to a certain location, but we’ll see what else I can do with it.  I don’t have any screen shots now since everything is placeholder art, but hopefully with the next update I’ll be able to showcase some pretty pictures.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of this weekend is that I am absolutely horrible at doing effective collision detection and response.  That part of the code is enough to make anyone cringe I am sure, and I’m dead certain that there has to be better ways of doing it than how I’ve done it.  That said, what I got up in running works (well, there’s some minor quirks that occur, but nothing too distracting, and actually makes the game more interesting), so I won’t plan on monkeying around with it any longer unless I have no other choice (ie, turns out to be a bottleneck or something).

Sleep is good. After a good night sleep I managed to think up the random roadmap generation, without any title maps.

Also got some stupid car AI working, which has a tendency to pile up as soon as multiple cars get stuck on the same road. Not much I can do about that now, that will take to much time. Guess I’ll just recover stuck cars when they are offscreen long enough.

So, I got a city simulator now… guess I need to add some game logic now.

Here is a screenshot of a random generated city, with cars. White dots are cars, blue lines are paths, green stuff are walls (box2d users will know the color ;))

So my game is now almost playable, you can set up roadblocks (only 5 at a time) to stop the cars from running over the frogs. Unfortunately you can’t really see your score at the moment because I haven’t drawn sprites for all digits yet. A work-in-progress version can be downloaded here (Requires Windows and DirectX 9).

There are more progress logs available at http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~moores8/ld13/index.html.

Tags: Frog Rescue, progress update, screenshot

food: onions + tofu + corn + tomato + mun shrooms + oregano and such + mozarella, green tea(yerba mate rosamonte), orange (nom’ed)

Well here is my first in game screen shot, if you can call it that. Basicaly created a random road generating algorithm, tweeked it a little. It would still need some tweek, in order to get a nice flowing road system without dead end’s, but that can wait. Right now it need some interaction.

Tags: road generating, screen shot

Not very surprisingly I’m a little bit behind schedule. I learned how to do particle effects in OpenGL and did some explosions and shooting (it looks much better in motion, trust me :))

Now I’m starting to write the logic for truck attacks and level loading.

OMG… It’s almost done!… for the first time in maybe 3 years I’ve got a decent LD48 entry, and not given up to play WoW or drink excessive quantities of alcohol!

Added a front end… an all in one title-instructions-trackselect screen. Checkpoints are working, best times are being recorded (even loaded+saved!) and being used to unlock levels…

I need to do some more work on the track generation algorithm, though – as of the 100 tracks that are selectable, quite a few appear to be impossible (due to intersecting track mesh). Then I’ve got some time for some finishing touches – it’s a choice between (very bad) audio, or maybe a ghost car system!

Time for a food break now… just a very boring toasted sandwich, I think…

Just a quick post lunch post. Decided to cook something properly (i.e. from scratch) for once, so I cooked myself some pasta with spicy bacony sauce.

It was great but then towards the end my plate decided to go walkies, and I’ve now got a pretty good tomato sauce splatter pattern on my jeans, grr.

Game is going well, though there’s nothing new worth screenshotting. I’ve put in some irritatingly retro sfx, bumped the number of levels to 10, and polished the interaction a bit. I think I’m going to put in a bit in a bit of saved out level progression + time taken data. I’ve also got an idea for an alternate game mode that should be very doable and nice to have, so I might have a look into that too.

Tags: food

I actually have made some progress.  I decided to forego aggression and remove bullets.  Of my list of nine things, I have two-and-a-half done so far.  Not bad, I guess, but…more to do…

My preferences linger at the chinese takeway side of things.