I don’t know what a framework is, but I wrote one, I think. I will be my secret weapon. No man’s land may be littered by corpses of my former self, but this time I might just run a little farther before being mercilessly gunned down by optimistic time estimations and delusional designs.
Arne’s Tiny BlitzMax Screen-GUI-Text thing – Rushed together in 2 days.
I ran into a dead end with my first project, a Yaoi dungeon crawler (dungeon “master” *wink wink*). Something about minimal outfits being reveled?
Drawing the walls.
Took too long to crop and position in engine. I gave up having reached a draw distance of 0-2 despite having walls done for 0-4.
Some face practice.
With maybe a third of the time left I started on an Atlantis meets Rampart game.
Screenshot.
The story is that they are potato farmers. Hostile forces assault from the sea, the peninsula and air. The island shrinks (becomes minimal?) as it is destructible and if the bottom gravel is removed the whole column sinks. The player gains income from potato farms and some multiplier buildings, and may purchase turrets (fires like individual Scorched Earth tanks at end of turn). There are buildings and fortifications and other stuff to buy too.
Back to code/art/music.
A lot of people seem to be exploring the idea of using a new language for Ludumdare. Wouldn’t it be neat if we could create an archive consisting of simple code in different languages which can get you started with 2D game programming specifically? The demos should be very thin vertical slices of the first things that you need to master as a games programmer, such as opening a window/screen, loading an image and drawing it, outputting text, loading and playing a sound, setting up constants, variable and using arrays to draw enemies/maps. If we could agree on a standard demo (or function collection), it could serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone because the learner knows what the code is supposed to be doing.
BlitzMax Demo Screenshot
I started on a version and feature crept it into a complete “game” so I remade a separate first version which is much cleaner and easier to reference. Uploaded both version along with assets here:
http://androidarts.com/BlitzMaxSlice/
Not sure how this could be organized, as this place is getting chaotic very soon. Maybe it’s something for the next LD.
Here’s a screenshot of the game I’ve been working on, Wizard Raider. Killed by feature creep and general laziness as usual, but there’s a small chance I’ll have something up tomorrow. The game is a mix of two Gollop games, Chaos and Rebelstar Raiders, so you’ll play as a Wizard who spawns minions in an attempt to invade an castle. Good Night everyone!
Actually, planning and feature-creeping is my main obstacle, so the plan this time is to:
1.) Not plan! Not look at the theme. Avoid Twitter. Instead, I’ll sit down and just let the code… flow like water (not uphill).
2.) Day 2 however, I’ll look at the theme and shoehorn it in! Hopefully I’ve got an engine-blob in place that is flexible enough to be shaped into something which works.
Yeah!
