Kitten was just released! It’s a little game about a kitten, rainbows and failure… lots of failure…

It’s source is already on github.

I don’t what else to write. I’ll soon start to play the games!

Hey LDers!

Timelapse

It’s almost been a whole day since I finished my entry. Since I remembered to stop chronolapse most of the moments I was AFK, I didn’t have to cut any part of the timelapse and already finished it. Since I set chronolapse to take a screenshot every second, the resulting video became quite long (26 minutes)… Perhaps, it could be more useful (even being so long) if I commented it with what I was doing… Let’s see if I can overcome my laziness and do that (probably won’t happen).

On a side note, I’m thinking of recording a play through of my game. A proper one (the way I indented it) and another with some skips I use (there’s only one, actually… but I heard of others and I will try to get ’em).

Postmortem

After so many walls of text, I think I was finally able to make it concise enough:

The good

• The game is somewhat complete (it has an ending)
• Few features cut (more on that later)
• Map isn’t completely boring; I was able to polish it with some details (albeit random)
• Updated my status quite frequently (if compared to previous LDs)
• Even if really short on time, I was able to composed a song (though it’s quite short…)
• Almost all the code was properly commented
• Didn’t spend a lot of time debugging
• Game compiled flawlessly on Windows (I sometimes forget one ‘#include’ or another and GCC won’t complain)
• An awesome jazz touhou playlist kept me going through all Sunday (I had to comment this… XD)

The bad

• Wasted too much time trying to come up with an idea (I could have made this game pretty much from the start of the compo)
• Made yet another platformer (my 6th one, in LDs)
• Spent too much time coding basic stuff (started to make the actual game late on sunday)
• (continuation) Had to write a custom Tiled plugin (so I wouldn’t need a parser)
• Didn’t have enough time to make enemies, nor a boss battle
• Made the map in quite a rush
• (continuation) That last spikes section is there for some cheap difficulty
• Couldn’t write a proper story
• Didn’t even consider enabling fullscreen (some people have mentioned that… >_<)

I just added some comments to my timelapse. It should be clearer what I was doing, now.

Now, I probably should review that… but I’m too sleepy for that. Tomorrow, perhaps…

Please, tell me of any issues (except about the fact that the video is too long XD).

Hey, LDers! I just published two videos of playthroughs of my game.

The “hard mode” were some challenges I set to myself, based on what I knew was possible and what rockhoppergames commented.

So… this was supposed to be a simple “I’m in” post, but it turned into quite a changelog for my library… oh, well… XD

Once again, I’ll be making a game using my own GFraMe, a Game FraMework based on SDL2. I re-wrote most of it since last LD, since there were a lot of things that had to be fixed. Click on “read more” to read about what was modified.

As usual, my tools are going to be:

• Language: C
• Library: GFraMe (now on version 2.0.0-rc)
• Music: VMML
• SFX: sfxr
• Editor: Vim
• Tilemap editor: Tiled
• Timelapse: Chronolapse
• Image editor: GIMP
• Beverage:Coffee, as always =D
• OS: Ubuntu 14.04
• Streaming(?): Open Broadcaster Software (Don’t count on it…)
• Base game resolution: 320×240 (I like this res… don’t ask… XD)

I’ll probably use this game I did on a previous jam (two weeks ago) as a based code… if needed.

That’s it, for now. See you guys in a little under two days!

Let’s all have a great time! o/

Now, on to a wall of text….

Re-writing most of my base code took a lot longer than expected, but I think it’s finally ready for this next LD! It’s still missing gamepad support and a save system, but I’ll see if I can do anything about the gamepad tomorrow…

So, I’d already used my own framework on the previous two LDs (32 and 31), but there were a few things that annoyed me and I had to fix:

No “main loop”: Well, since I didn’t use any function pointers (except when spawning threads), there’s still no main loop… but now there’s a function to query if there are any update or draw frames! This allowed me to finally add a fps counter to the library! (which is disabled on the release version, by default).

No easy way to load tilemaps: On LD#31 I got around this thanks to the theme, “The Entire Game on One Screen”; while on LD#32 I wrote my own exporter during the compo (it worked quite nicely). Not anymore. Now I have a Tiled plugin ready to generate a tilemap for my library! Also, it can export tile’s types and areas, which can be used by the…

No single collision solution: I had some functions to help my overlap two objects, but there was no easy way to collide a complete scene against everything. Now, I implemented a iterative (i.e., non-recursive) quadtree for collision. It works by stopping an “add” operation and signaling that two “objects” overlapped. After handling it, the quadtree may continue until another overlap happens or it finishes adding the current “object”. And since I implemented some sort of inheritance (a “gfmObject” has a pointer to the “gfmSprite” that contains it, while this one has a pointer to the custom object that it represents).

No easy way to export GIFs on Ubuntu: Well, I couldn’t find any software for that… and since I like to do things the stupid way hard way, I got the GIF specs and coded my own exporter. I think it may be somewhat broken and unable to generate GIFs that are long, but at least I’ll be able to post nice 5s GIFs (at 50 FPS XD) of my game. *-*

No easy way to rebind controls (also, event handling was a complete mess): This was something that I rushed the first time I did it, hoping that I’d fix it someday… Well, it was easier to re-start everything than to clean up the mess I had done.

With all those modifications (and a few more that I may have forgotten), I fell pretty ready for this LD! =D

Thanks for reading! =D

(And it never ended well… XD)

So, when I first saw the theme I was kinda disappointed, since it’s so similar to “You are the Villain”. But now that I got a different idea, I really liked the chance to do something with this theme, again.

It’s something like this (I wrote this in a rush, so it may not make a lot of sense):

“The game could be about a kingdom infested with monster. A hero raises to defeat every enemy and the evil dark lord behind it, rescuing all imprisoned villagers. But, after defeating a lot of enemies, the hero snaps and goes bersek, destroying everything in his path (until his rage fades away). If he accidentally kills an innocent person, his mind starts to break (yeah, he “lose a life”)… When he is completely out of his mind, he turns into a worse threat than the dark lord himself… And then, a new hero rises…

This could be a game about trying to break that cycle (even if that meant giving up on the quest).”

For now, I’ll stream while I try to draw a few mock-ups… Here’s the link: http://www.twitch.tv/gfm123.

Good luck to you all! o/

Because that’s the best way to organize one’s ideas, right?

• Enemies may be in one of the following states:
• { wander, pursuit, flee, help(?), avenge(?) }
• Enemies and NPCs have levels (which linearly grows its power)
• Enemies and NPCs may pose as a threat to the other, if its level is higher and it’s nearby
• If the player kills a non-threatening enemy, its insanity grows
• It also grows if the player is nearby a NPC when it kills a non-threatening
  enemy
• The player recovers some of his sanity whenever it saves a NPC/Enemy
• At the end, the player will face the dark lord
• If the player battles it and defeat it, its insanity will increase quickly
• If the player goes insane, he becomes the new dark lord
• The player may not face the dark lord, but he will need a relic to convince the dark lord there is a third way
• This relic is only obtainable if *secret* (c’mon, I can’t spoil all the fun, right?)

Also, this will be the player:

I do wonder why I drew a cool guy with a jacket if I want him to defeat enemies with a sword… Oh well….

Now, time to get some sleep…

Hey, LDers!

Just got up after a little more than 7 hours of sleep (noooo, my precious time… >__<). Now I’ll start to code the game’s base, ignoring sprites for now. As soon as I have something somewhat playable, I should go back to drawing sprites… let’s see…

Also, I’ll soon start streaming once again! Watch it here: http://www.twitch.tv/gfm123.

Tune in for some gamedev in C (because that’s what all the cool kids use nowadays, right? … XD).

So… Just now, all of a sudden, my game wouldn’t run anymore. I though it was weird, since I shouldn’t have modified anything that would make things explode at random times… Well, since gdb wasn’t helping a lot, I tried to see how much free memory I still had… Just… look at the print screen:

125 MBs free…

Since it was the first I was streaming, chronolapse was on, two browsers were open, a few GIMP windows were also open and was coding my game, I blamed all the softwares (and not the stupid person that started ’em all) for the lack of memory. No big deal, after restarting the computer everything should be normal again…

Or not…

My game still wouldn’t run and gdb was still breaking in random places. Now I had to admit it was something on my code that was causing it. After trying to make in run again and fixing a unrelated bug, I noticed the it started to happen after I added a new “object”.

When I looked into its initialization function, it was quite clear what was wrong. This is how it looked at the time:

gfmRV mob_getNew(mob **ppMob) {
 gfmRV rv;
 
 ASSERT(ppMob, GFMRV_ARGUMENTS_BAD);
 ASSERT(!(*ppMob), GFMRV_ARGUMENTS_BAD);
 
 *ppMob = (mob*)malloc(sizeof(ppMob)); // <---- pay attention to this line
 ASSERT(*ppMob, GFMRV_ALLOC_FAILED);
 
 rv = GFMRV_OK;
 __ret:
 return rv;
 }

Instead of alloc’ing enough memory for the object, I was only alloc’ing enough for the object’s pointer. So, when the game tried to update it, it would modify random places in the memory. This was the cause to the random crashes.

Well, lesson learned (once again). Coding in C can be *fun*.

Gosh, I still haven’t done any gameplay yet… but it will work out… somehow… XD

Now, on to add it to the game whatever-I’m-doing-that-still-isn’t-a-game. XD

Well, polish first and add content/gameplay later… Or maybe I got this order wrong… XD

Jokes aside, I may still be on control of my time… I’ll soon find out…

EDIT: When at a loss for graphics, surf pixel joint! You are sure to find something that may help you! The bg was somewhat (well, a lot) based on those two images: Forest Lord by ADrawingMan and GBA Mockup by Adarias.

You know something I missed on my previous entry? Particles! I think I added enough, this time… XD

There’s 2 hours left and there’s still a lot left to do…

It’s still doable… somehow… I think… XD

Thanks, again, for all the comments! Getting feedback on what I’ve made (and trying to write constructive and useful feedback to others) is one of the reasons I really like taking part of Ludum Dare! This community is the best!!

There are two main issues that people seem to be having with my entry: gameplay feels clunky and it doesn’t seem to relate with the theme. I’ll write another post to explain all the possible actions and how combat actually doesn’t works, all with animated GIFs to illustrate everything.

For now, I’ll address any lingering confusion about the theme (even though quite a lot of people seemed to get it).

But, before that, I’ll quickly talk about this game’s future. I really liked the original idea, and I’m quite happy with how the combat could work if fixed. Also, finally having big sprites is great after using small 16×16 sprites for so long.

So I do plan to extend this into a “full short-game”. Something that should take around a month to make (and I’ll probably take three or so), just to make it into what it was supposed to be. I may still fail, so it’s more of something I’ll try to do, but don’t get your hopes up (I’ve never been able to  finish a project that requires as many assets as this game will… and I’ve tried quite a few times, already…).

Now, on to talk about the theme! It will be a kind of spoilers, so be aware of that before reading on…

One of the issues is that the theme isn’t clear… and that’s intentional! I like to leave it to the player to interpret the game as they want… but that requires proper story telling, something that I usually fail do.

Adding the story quite late into the game’s development (I did it pretty much before the SFX, which was the last thing I did), also didn’t help. I didn’t want the story to take too long and the small virtual window (160×120) didn’t allow for a lot of text on screen at the same time… So I just decided to make the text scroll quickly and didn’t add a confirmation button afterward… Terrible decisions, I know…The resulting game is quite different from the original idea. It was supposed to be about a hero getting confused and despaired about the current situation (and then becoming a monster), but it came out like this:

You think you are a righteous hero. Sometimes, you do have doubts about yours instructions, but you follow them, nonetheless. This time, you were asked to kill “dangerous” monsters on the forest. When you get there, you find cute little slimes. After so many people passed through here and annoyed them, some of the slimes even did become aggressive. Instead of doing the right thing and letting the slimes be, you blindly follow the orders and begin to kill ’em all. No matter if they fight back or not… You are truly a monster…

Someone said on the comments that this would had been clearer if no slime fought back… and that guy was probably right… I didn’t think about this during the jam, but it would really had helped to tell this through the gameplay…
Well, I gotta keep trying! One day I will make an awesomely polished game that doesn’t fail to tell its story (nor has terrible gameplay).

Hey there! Judging is ending soon(!!!), so I finally rendered the timelapse and uploaded it to youtube. I only recorded half of the jam, since I had some issues with timelapsing, this time…

Thanks for all who played my entry! This LD was great and I had an awesome time both making my game as well as playing entries! There were a lot of amazing games. Congrats to all participants! 😀

I won’t deny that I’m quite disappointed with my results, this time. I usually try not to care all that much about the ratings, I simply check how my game did and that’s it. But this time I aimed at getting a good score in graphics, putting pretty much everything else aside (well, except audio… somewhat). I focused more on polishing the graphics than on making a playable/balanced game… When the compo was ending, I simply designed a simple level, added some screens for the menu, the intro, the win/lose “scenes” and called it done.

Well, let’s take a look at my score before moving on:

Only taking into consideration that I focused a lot on graphics and that there were 1199 compo entries, I didn’t do all that bad. I score above ~88% of entries in graphics and ~83% in audio.

But if I were to compare my latest entry with my previous ones…

Scores per entry (per category)

Percentage of how close I’ve got to first in any category

Yeah… still not all that bad. It’s in fourth place, when sorting by graphics. So, why am I so butthurt annoyed that I’m even ignoring conclusive (and absolute) data?

I thought it deserved a better score. During the voting, I really thought that a game with graphics as good as mine deserved at least a 4.0. C’mon, look at that parallax, those leafs on the background, the smooth animations… How could all those, even considering the lame gameplay, score less than a 4.0?

So, I replayed my LD#31 entry Cold Remembrance. It got 20th place in graphics, even without any gameplay; you simply hold left! I wanted to compare both and try to understand what that “game” had that this game didn’t.

Well, that “game” felt complete, and there was nothing unnecessary. But the experience looks and feels great. The audio merges with the graphics and the story; each aspect of the game make the other better.

On this entry, on the other hand, there’s an element that really takes it charm away. Although the graphics and the audio do merge well, the first impression the players has is with that ugly title screen. It’s not even functional, as the text goes through really fast and fills all of the screen…

I could probably had gotten away with telling the story on the entry page and removing the title screen. I didn’t even need a win/lose screen… I could had simply displayed a message (in front of the “playstate”) after you got to the end/died and then I could had restarted the game…

Yeah… it was probably just that… =/

Well, lesson learned!

I’ll still probably work on a post-compo version, but I want to first work on a post-compo for my LD#32 entry… XD

Thanks for reading! Until next time! o/

It’s been three months, already, since the last LD. Since then, I’ve made some improvements on my personal framework and I think now, a few weeks before the next event, is the perfect time to announce its existence to the world, once again.

And is there a better way than doing that with a small demo with lots of particles? How about with ten tousands of particles at 120 FPS?

OK, my computer has quite a good CPU (which is the main bottleneck to this test, as it runs in a single thread), but it’s possible to achieve nice results even at smaller FPSs:

(Small cheat: on this seconds screenshot, the particles are being sorted and rendered from oldest to yongest, so it takes quite some more time to update and I can’t get it to run much better – i.e., at highers FPS or with more particles – than this…)

How about giving it a try? I could really use some testing in various machines… So far, I’ve only tested in 4 environments:

• Ubuntu 14.04 64 bits, AMD FX 8350, ATI Radeon HD 7750
• Windows 7 64 bits, AMD FX 8350, ATI Radeon HD 7750
• Ubuntu 14.04 64 bits, Intel Core i3-5005U
• Windows 8 64 bits, Intel Core i3-5005U

It ran nicely in all of those, though I couldn’t get it to run at 120 FPS nor with too many particles on the i3 on Windows. It glitched if I tried to run the test at anything more than 120 particles per frame and 60 FPS… Since it work as expected on Ubuntu, I suspecting it happened because I still haven’t updated the video drivers on the Windows 8…

So, if you guys could test it and give some feedback, I would be really grateful! You can get it here, for Windows, and directly from its repository (on github), for Linux. I’m still working on some things, so the devel  branch (not the master!!) must be cloned. If anyone wants to try it on Linux, get in contact and I’ll rewrite the README and add some missing pointers…

I think the next thing I want to do is to get it to run on emscript. It would be great if it worked nicely before the next LD. (last time I tried, I run into a few issues…)

Thanks for reading! See ya!

Before the jam starts, I always get my repo ready and check were I can find my base assets (namely, a bitmap font and a sample song).

Here’s everything:

• My game’s repository (there’s only a Makefile and the license, for now)
• My sample MML song (so I can check the syntax somewhere… since I still haven’t written the lib’s wiki)
• And my base bitmap font, below. (at most, I’ll swap its colors)

With this…

I’m ready!

I’ve just woken up and had breakfast. Which means I’m ready to start developing again!

I’m streaming at http://www.twitch.tv/gfm123. Fell free to drop by!

I was able to finish something to the compo. The linux build should work (well, worked on my system)! =D

However, the Windows version didn’t work out of the box… As usual. XD

It’s probably something quite simple, but I’ll look into it tomorrow, after work.

For now, I’d rather rest.

See ya. o/