Well, I sort of have this elevator action type spy game where you need to unlock doors and find the “data”.  But after doing this uninspired artwork and I’m just totally unmotivated.   Will try to keep going though…

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 18th, 2010 at 12:35 am and is filed under LD #19 - Discovery - 2010. 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.

Well, I’ve got elevators up the yang.  I did some character “art” for walking and climbing ladders.  Yeah, that’s a walk frame above, what the heck ??

Maybe I can somehow explain the weird visuals by adding a story element about the main character having to deal with a deformity and back problems.  See, that’s how real gamedev works, kids.

The apartment building is randomly generated and I’m looking forward to trying some big ones with dead ends, enemies, and treasures.

Still have too much to do at this point to feel anything but iffy, but after adding some sfx it at least “feels” pretty good to run around the level.  When the character walks there is this donkey-kong like sound effect.

Thanks, sfxr!

Quitting for the night, will be back in irc bright and early to try to turn this into something.  (I’m SethR in #ludumdare)

Zoomed out! Click for more detail

Can now actually win and lose levels!  Added a cheap-ass main menu with level select.

I’ll have a few hours tomorrow morning to somehow magically tweak gameplay to be more fun, do music, add more baddies.  (Design calls for three, only  have one, and I’m just using a tinted hero sprite at that!)

Want went right today:

• Whipped out really cool random level generation algo, it guarantees that each part of the building is accessible.  Really, I guess I made sort of a side-view maze generator.
• Added zoom settings per level – The screenshot above is zoomed way out.. I might leave a level like that just for fun, even though it’s hard to play that way.  An unexpected consequence of zooming out is it sort of minimizes the bad artwork.
• Main menu works, took a detour to make it all keyboard controllable so you don’t have to keep switching back to the mouse.  It’s the little things. Plus, this is going to be a Proton SDK sample eventually so I want its code to be usefully copyable

What went wrong:

• Bad art is bad
• Original design wasn’t much fun, dumped half of it.. better, but it still not there
• Behind schedule..  feeling bad that I skipped weekend ultimate frisbee with Cosmo (my kid) for like the first time in a year.. you’re a cruel master, LD.
• Still have no real cosmetic theme or name to tie everything together.  it’s just so generic and I HATE generic.  Dream self, please figure this out during tonight’s repose
• Connection to the “Discovery” theme feels weak

I’ve decided to try Flashpunk/AS3 this weekend! By piecing together bits from ChevyRay examples I have a basic platformer system going.

I wanted the “Planet” (player) to be able to eat stuff and scale up sort of katamari style, but this is turning out to be very fiddly, and too easy to get the player stuck if he grows into a wall. Using Box2D or such would probably be a better idea.. hmm.

Anyway, the base puzzle mechanics sort of work but aren’t fun at all.

3.5 hours in and still in the concept phase.

I can’t see the gameplay clearly yet, but I have a foggy sort of idea.  It involves me writing some dynamic level generation/growing which sounds fun though.

Making this mockup in photoshop was good though, I mentally ran through the coding stuff I’ll use as I laid it out.

I’ve learned my lesson though, not even going to attempt “real art” this time around due to previous mishaps… ahem.

Tags: screenshot

Ok, gonna hit the sack but here’s what’s happened thus far:

• Built a flexible CityMap class AI/utility toolkit that can “evolve” itself by adding socketed pieces, can rotate them if needed
• Yellow “turrets” shoot bullets if clicked, and they can damage and destroy city pieces. No anims or anything fancy though
• Realtime scaling support, so I can fit big maps on the screen if I want
• Flash target is working, but speed is questionable and huge maps really kill it, have a big update to proton coming though which will speed it up
• Title screen with my trusty old trick, have the game animating stuff in the BG for decoration
• It’s nothing but a screensaver at this point, but you can Click here to try it if ya want

Tags: foodphoto, screenshot

Well, there’s my random dungeon generator.  As simple as it is, it’s still the most complicated thing I’ve done in C# so far. I don’t know if it’s my Visual Assist or just Visual Studio but the syntax autocomplete stuff just seems to really be fighting me.

Took me a bit to figure out a vector array in C# is called a List.  Great naming, yeah.

After the maze generates you can use the arrow keys to run around the maze.  (actually you can move even WHILE it’s generating if you really want to get frozen in a wall somewhere)  It “feels” pretty good the way you can hug walls, it uses Unity’s built in 2D physics collision. (each tile has a collider, optimizations be damned!)

Akiko volunteered to do some sprites for me tomorrow if she has time, so this might turn into a Jam entry… still don’t know about gameplay really.

Wrote a .bat file to do the webgl html5 export and upload, you can try what I’ve got so far here.

I blogged a postmortem here: http://www.codedojo.com/?p=2050

And the LD page to play is here!: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/the-last-e8

my #LDJAM game is turning into a really weird shooter