Hey, I’m fairly new to programming as a whole and I was wondering to what exactly qualifies as “base code” or a “Code Library”? I’m aware of the obvious ones that are available publicly such as Flixel, Box2D, ect. I’m more concerned about the personal libraries. For example, would an A* pathfinding system qualify as either of those?

Tags: Code Library, help, New

Let’s do this. My first LD and I’m exited as hell.

Tools of War:
Photoshop CS5
Synfig Studio
StencylWorks (Libraries: Box2D, Flixel, and my own path finding base if I can get it finished fast enough.)
XSplit
sfxr

You’ll be able to watch my stream at twitch.tv/sweeteststream

So I spend a few days in Stencyl trying to create a  modular pathfinding system. I could have sworn I’ve checked hundreds of time if an open source pathfinding system was already in place. Only two hours before LD and after two days of bashing my head against dead end after dead end do I realize that there’s been such a system available for over a few months now. Furthermore it’s a lot cleaner, and a lot more effective then my own. I’m not sure if I should be happy because I finally have what I need, or I should be depressed because I have about 2k lines of code that are wasted.

Well anyhow here’s my new tools of war list:
Photoshop CS5
Synfig Studio
StencylWorks (Libraries: Box2D, Flixel, Epic’s Pathfinding.)
XSplit
sfxr
Wolfram Tones/ MUSANGI (Depends on time availible)
Chronolapse

LET’S DO THIS!

Watch me on the Sweet Stream the sweetest of all the stream! http://www.justin.tv/sweeteststream

Tags: stream

Here’s the google doc for Desolation in Hell. Watch & Comment 😀
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dRqvmlOKxgN9hDKPk5bF1alzavdh3QNM0vrOdjTVfC0/edit

Also here’s the streamlink

www.twitch.tv/sweeteststream

So the base tileset just got finished. I kind dun goofed up on the wall part, but if I have extra time I’ll fix it up. The good part about it is that for most of of the different levels I can simply change the color on it to reflect the mood. It’s still hell just a different layer 😛

So far time spent: 50 min design, 100 min art. Gonna code some basic movement after my break and go back to design.

Bah Desolation in Hell seems like a total mess now, and extremely out of scope. However, thank god I have another fantastic idea to be located: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xwly88lDmUektjmzK5Y69D4B-f-280CubWDhnyye1ig/edit?hl=en_US .

http://www.justin.tv/sweeteststream

I’m gonna be honest I’m not really a fan of the alone theme. The biggest problem is that it’s kind of shallow, and while it’s open to interpretation there isn’t much to interpret. Looking over some of the games, I’ve come across quite a few that are extremely similar to one another. In a lot of cases the theme turned out to be more Survival then alone. Because if you’re alone what do you have left to do but survive? Maybe I’m just a bit frustrated because I can’t come up with any unique gameplay mechanics that would fit in with this theme. Or maybe I’m barking a bit of truth. What do the rest of you think?

So due to everyone else’s fault but my own, I ended spending roughly 6 hours last night playing HoN. Which roughly leaves me %40 of the work left to do in %20 of the time. Time to man up and get shit done. Watch my livestream at twitch.tv/sweeteststream

The game is called Red America.

The concept is simple, to oppress all the continental United States. Each state will have it’s own oppression meter, once it it hits %100 it stays there, otherwise it declines overtime. The United States a whole also has an oppression meter which is the mean of all the states.

When the player starts he’ll look at a political map of the USA, and all states start at %30 oppression. Every few seconds an issue will arrise and the player can choose how he responds to it. At first he only has two options: Distract (Starts a new season of American Idol / Starts a random war with a random country.) And Propaganda. Distract is effective against large groups/organizations while Propaganda is effective against the individual. After about 6 events, the player gains access to the NDAA: Dissapear option, which makes an individual dissapear because the goverment says they are a terrorist. A more effective version of the propaganda option and the player should always end up using this option over Propaganda. After about 6 more events the player gets access to the SOPA/PIPA: Censor option, which is a more effective version of Distract. When the player reaches %100 operation, Russia invades America because they believe that America is a communist totalitaristic dictatorship and must be purged from the world. Russia obviously wins because most intelligent Americans decided to hide that fact on the account that they didn’t want to get NDAA’d and thus couldn’t help with the war even if they wanted too.

Tags: design

Ugh, almost forgot to make an I’m in Post. So here it is:
Unity with Othello 2D free
SFXR
WolframAlpha Tones
Pickles and Photoshop

Tiny world hmmm… This is going to be difficult.

Game is about getting your cult to control the world or the larger portion of the world. This is decided
by the ammount of piety you have at the end of game. You gain piety by getting your minions to spread your religion
and/or to massacre the faithful of other religions. The game is a realtime based strategy game that plays on two levels.

First Level – Minions
There are 4 types of minions
Missionaries = Convert the population in the region to your belief.
Inquisitors = Kill the population in the region that don’t share your belief.
Seekers = Kill enemy units in their region
Guardians = Defend allied units AND population in their region. Can only be deployed in regions with highest control percent.

Minions remain in an area until they die or “expire” (In 60 sec)

Second Level – Miracles
TO BE ADDED LATER

You gain points for killing enemies when the kill occurs. You get points for having worshipers AT THE END of the game. You also gain
points for killing enemy units.

There will be 9 regions in the game and 4 “Factions” thus regions will always be contested. Each region will be object which will have
the following in it:

Name, Array of units, population under the influnces of faction 1,2,3,4, total population

Each player has the following variables
Score
Money
Total number of followers

Each game will go on for 10 mins
Every two mins a new level “Might” will be reached, during which more powerful miracles can be performed.

Money is passively gained based on the number of followers you have.

CORRECTION! IT’S NOW ALL IN SPACE, BECAUSE SPACE IS EASIER! SO MUCH EASIER!

Decided not to go with this, adds additional complications and doesn’t touch the theme enough.

So I went out for a walk to get some inspiration and as you might guess there isn’t a lot of inspiration things happening a mid sized town at 12 AM. Just as I was returning from my walk with the disappointment of having no brilliant ideas I break a branch underneath my foot. BINGO! A Giant Sim! Sim’s are great for these types of events due to their open ended design, as soon as I finish the basic mechanics I can keep on adding additional feature until the time limit is up without making anything seem tacked on. The game’s main mechanic will be called force. The player will have a force meter which determines how much force he does each action with so “Throwing” something with 0 force will cause the player to drop it doing no harm to it, while using 5 force would cause the player to hurl it with great strength causing lots of a harm to it. Obviously throwing a human would be a very bad (but fun) thing.

The problem is that I have obsolutly no experience with 3D stuff, some I’m just going to use a bunch of blocks to represent things esque Minecraft.

So things I learned last night. Stay away from 3D. No matter how simple it seems to make minecraft esque graphics, it’s not. Incidentally, now that I hate everything 3D I’m a lot less inclined to use Unity even for 2D projects. This is kind of sad since this was on opportunity for me to practice Unity before making an iOS game with it, but screw it. Going back to my guns, come back Flixel my love, Unity didn’t mean anything, it was just a fling, take me back… Please!

FlashDevelop/FlashPunk, Construct 2, or Unity. Depends on the theme and game.

Photoshop CS6

BSfxr and p22

Third Ludum Dare. Have yet to complete game. Tonight brainstorming will mostly consist of playing drunken cards against humanity with friends.

So, I’m best at understanding a concept when I’m explaining it to other people. Combined with my fairly inebriated state, I felt like just typing out my thoughts and hoping someone would get as much use out of them as I do.

So one thing I noticed of how people instantly reacted to the theme, is that they immediately thought “minimalist” = minimal graphics. That’s a fairly strange assumption in my head. Minimalism can refer to many things especially minimalism game-play. However, I see minimalism to be very closely associated with simplicity; any programmer can tell you that the best way of solving a problem is the simplest, and these often require the minimal lines of code. Likewise I associate it with good design, breaking down a game or concept to its minimal core of what makes it tick.

An example of a game that would have been perfect under this theme is Dive Kick.

A video by TB, takes a closer look at the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uzaxQ5RF4I

The game boils down all the core concepts of fighting games into their bare bones, and creates a compelling and deep game that only uses two buttons. This is what I really see this theme about. Not about minimal graphics, but minimal design. Boiling away everything but the very minimal requirements of the game to be itself. So my game is going to take a genre or game I greatly adore, and strip away everything that is auxiliary until nothing but the bare bones of the game remain.

So continuing from my last post http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/04/26/brainstorming-7/.

I started thinking about which game genres I really love, and it essentially boiled down to : RPG, Strategy, and DotA-likes. Well DotA-like games are fundamentally focused around multi-player, which under this time-limit I can’t code (And I probably couldn’t code even without a time-limit), so that’s out. RPGs are great for this theme, but unfortunatly most of the meat from RPGs comes from copious amounts of designed content, which with the imposed time-limit is going to be difficult to execute even if I procedurally generate it. So that leaves one genre: Strategy!

So what makes a strategy game tick? Well, there in existence are two types of distinct strategy games: RTS and TBS. However, since we are focusing on Strategy games in particular we want to make a game that only really focuses on what is found in both games.

So what is strategy?

strat·e·gy

1. A plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.
2. The art of planning and directing overall military operations and movements in a war or battle.

Okay so we have a great start. In both TBS and RTS we perform a series of actions to achieve a greater goal. So I made a quick Venn Diagram 

Obviously this is nowhere near comprehensive (Just drunk man rambling), but it helps narrow down the focus on what is in the center. Some of these are derivations of one another, while some aren’t necessary but make the game infinitely better for very little effort. Currently the only concept being incorporated into our minimalistic strategy game is: A plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim. I’m going to spend the next few hours researching good strategy games, and exactly what made them good and boiling them down to the core mechanics, comparing them against this list and creating a set concepts to be incorporated into our strategy game.

Continuing from: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/04/26/minimalistic-strategy/

So, you can’t say strategy and not instantly think of Starcraft. The two go hand in hand, like American presidential scandals and Ronald Reagan. Because the game is so competitive, to understand the key concepts of the game you simply have to ask: What do I need to do, to win? So here comes this article: http://www.gamesradar.com/14-ways-to-win-at-starcraft-ii/

While out of date, right of the bat the article drops something insightful: “Enter an online match of StarCraft II without attack plans, counters and build orders already in mind, and you will be almost instantly ruined.” So this translates too: Meta-game knowledge. In StarCraft you’re expected to know things about the game, before you start the match. You’re expected to have a strategy before you start the match, and you’re supposed to be able to predict things before you start the match. So concept #2: Meta-Game.

So point 1), 2), 3), and 8) boil down to one thing: Management of limited resources. The player who best manages their limited resources will have the edge. This gives us concept #3: Optimal management of limited resources. However, this concept is incomplete. In a blank world, there would be only one optimal manner of resource management, which translating to a game would mean very repetitive battles and symbols of bad design. So what else is there to it?

Points 4), 5), 9), 12), 13), and 14) all spell the same thing: Understand the strengths (and by extension weaknesses) of your race. This is interesting, a strategy game does not necessarily need to have races. However, by giving each player a range of different possibilities for actions the depth of the game increases exponentially. So while this isn’t minimal at its core, its so inexpensive and provides so much that its impossible to pass-up. So here is concept #4 Strength/Weakness.

Point 7) Is an interesting one. Its the only point about information gathering, which in my opinion is very interesting. Having an effective strategy implies that you believe your plan of actions will defeat your opponents plan of actions. However, you cannot have certainty of that unless you know what your opponents plan of action is to begin with. So while undermentioned, information gathering is a crux component of strategy. #5 Gather information.

After reading several more articles, they all seem once again reinforce the concepts mentioned previously. However, one that constalty gets mentioned: Hotkey your units. Is an interesting derivation. It after all directly escalates with your manual dexterity, and optimizes your flow. However, since we have already established that manual dexterity isn’t at the core of strategy, then we are only left with optimization. Which allows me to change point #3 to: Optimization of resources.

So here we have our 5 concepts that the game is going to incorporate:
1) Sequence of actions to achieve a goal.
2) Reward Meta-Game

3) Optimization of resources.

4) Strengths/Weaknesses

5) Gather information.

Continuing from http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/04/26/case-study-1-starcraft-2/

Masters Of Orion is a 4X strategy game (Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate), and is as far away as you can get from SCII on the scale of mechanics. However, surprisingly after analyzing the game most of its core concepts boil down to what we ahve already previously established in our case study of SCII. Concepts that are added in this chapter are also present in SCII, but are simply much more obvious (I am pretty slow).

#6 Multiple paths to victory. You have your optimal path, but that’s not the only path. Your optimal path may be blocked off by your enemy, and thus no longer optimal. You may no longer be able to take advantage of you strengths, and thus be forced to exploit your enemy’s weakness. An important part to realize about strategy games, is that there is always more than one way to win; even if no one has done it before.

#7 Conflict is a must. Herp derp, I have no idea how I missed stating this directly. Strategy games are what they are because you pit your strategy against another. So  just like the player has a strategy, so must the enemy. This is demonstrated in MoO by the diplomatic systems, and the painting of a personality to the AI in the form of the avatars.

So now our list of concepts looks something like this.

1) Sequence of actions to achieve a goal.
2) Rely on Meta-Game skills/knowledge.

3) Optimization of resources.

4) Asynchronous gameplay (Different races).

5) Gather information.

6) Multiple paths to Victory.

7) Conflict.

Looks like enough to build a game from.