I’ve done a few game jams, but this is my first time going solo. Since coding is totally my weak point, my goal for this weekend is to clean up some of my bad programming habits and create a functioning game with code that I’m not super embarrassed to show other people!
Using the Flixel library, Photoshop CS5, and LMMS and Audacity for music and sound.
OK, here’s what I’m working with at the moment. Totally open to critique!
(The dot is you.)
It’s a set-pace side-scrolling “runner” (sorta) where you are some type of organism (undefined, may keep the whole thing abstract) traveling at a constant speed toward the right. The controls available to the player are the up and down keys, which they use to move between three different lanes.
There are two “phases” of the game: constructive, and destructive.
In the constructive phase, the player is picking up dots that will change the composition of its organism. There’s nothing that harms the player. By picking up lots of a certain color of dot, they develop greater immunity to that color. Switching to picking up different colored dots will give an increased immunity to that color dot, but result in decreased immunity to other colors. Immunity is expressed as a percentage, so you could be 20% immune to red, 20% immune to blue, and 60% immune to green, for example. If you then changed to an all-red lane for the entirety of the rest of the phase, it might result in an organism 100% immune to red, and 0% immune to blue and green.
In the “destructive” phase, every dot that the player runs over that the player does not have 100% immunity to will do a little bit of damage, (inversely?) proportional to the player’s immunity. Therefore, the player wants to strategically switch between lanes so that they’re running over mostly dots that they’ve developed an immunity to.
These two phases presumably repeat, but to what effect, I’m not sure.
I’m hoping to make the game a little more interesting by having, in lieu of music, a background drone, and then having the dots play different notes within a chord as the player picks them up (although time will tell if I even have time to attempt that).
The part that scares me most is that this is probably going to involve A Lot of Math. Not hard math, but math. And I’m not sure I’ve ever done anything even vaguely resembling procedural generation before. But that’s what LD is for, hooray!
(I would post a picture of my breakfast, since that’s apparently a thing, but I haven’t eaten it yet. Going to go do that now.)
After my LD24 project code was such a mess that I didn’t even finish it in time for jam, my main goal this year is just to have a finished, functional project to enter into compo.
Since I have a tendency to be hard on myself, I added some festive decorations and a friendly face for encouragement:
Trying to remember to cut myself some slack. This time last year, I had never even touched object-oriented programming. Now, I’m about to make a game in a weekend.
Using Flixel (in FlashDevelop), Photoshop CS5, LMMS.
Now back to obsessively preparing all of my meals for the weekend so that I only have to zap them in the toaster oven.
Tags: deskphoto
This is anti-breakout, where your goal is to place blocks of varying strength on the screen in order to try and deflect your opponent’s ball into unreachable corners of the screen. There are not yet any blocks. Right now, I’m trying to make the AI player not really stupid.
Also, here’s my stuffed squash & hot lemon and brandy, which imo is more impressive than my game so far:
Tags: foodphoto, progress, screenshot
The ball, however…
Yeah, a sign error definitely should not make me laugh this hard. (Give it 10-20 seconds.)
Which means I have a full hour to clean off my desk after turning in this job application!
I’m probably going to do the jam rather than 48 hour deal, since I’m having a yard sale tomorrow morning (not much choice, as homeowners’ association only lets you sell your crap on the front lawn two days a year here). I may try to jam while I sit out there, although the glare will probably do me in.
I’ll likely be utilizing:
My last #LD48 entry was successful in that it was done and fairly decent, but I’d like to challenge myself to make something a bit more interesting/challenging this time.
Challenging myself to make my first 3D game.
Regardless:
“I’m in there like swimwear.”