Someone at work pointed this competition out to me, so I figured why not give it a shot. In my usual manner, preparation has only just begun. I still don’t even know what development environment I’m going to use.
Following what seems to be tradition, here is my workspace. complete with cat and emergency supplies (the good stuff is in the fridge!)
Tags: desk
(This post manages to combine a progress report, AND a food update, in one. How great is that?)
I’ve finally got round to writing some code. Most of the morning I’d been waiting for inspiration, with little success.
So I decided to eat. Again.
Then I had an idea. After grabbing the camera and fiddling around in photoshop, I came up with…
Trust me, it will make sense later.
Tags: food
After sleeping late today, I’m needing to crack on. Here’s the current state of play:
The backstory is something about pixel-world being invaded by the sugary-snacks-of-doom. I think I’ve being eating too much candy this weekend…
The player is the purple cube. The orange blobs are pick-ups. The impending wall o’doom should be obvious. The gameplay is basically ‘survive long enough to win’. However right now, there is no gameplay code. Things move around, but nothing interacts with anything else. (Though the teeth do look pretty good when they decide to come charging forward.
Now i need to go eat. Something non-sugary would probably be best.
Nearly there. Just one more sprite to finish, and I think that’s it. So just enough time share the title screen, which I’ve now eaten 
Now to get this thing finished up and submitted…
Tags: food
Just in the nick of time, I present…
DoomCake
Strange orange sweets are falling from the sky, causing sugary snacks to mutate and go crazy. You are a stranded survivor, who must try to last long enough to be rescued by a helicopter. The price for failure: Eaten by your own snacks!
At first, the mutated snacks are slow-moving, but the more orange sweets they eat, the faster they will approach. To have any hope of lasting out while resuce arrives, you must eat the sweets first.
The game can be downloaded at http://www.banni.f2s.com/Banni_LD14_DoomCake.zip
If you have LOVE installed, then you can directly download/play the game at http://www.banni.f2s.com/doomcake.love
EDIT: To linkify the link, and add a .love direct download
Tags: final
DoomCake was my first LD entry. It was developed in Lua, using the LÖVE 2D engine.
In making this game, I learned a bit about Lua, and a lot about cake. Read on to find out what a sugary zombie invasion might look like…
Introduction
The competition was flagged up to me by someone at work, though I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it until the day before the start time (which was 4AM local time). I didn’t even decide what development environment I was going to use until the Friday evening, when I spied a Lua book in the office library on the way home from work. I’d seen LÖVE mentioned by a couple of folk here, so I decided I should give that a shot.
I should mention I’d never used Lua before, so when I started reading on Friday evening, I was literally starting at ‘HelloWorld’. I went through a few examples, then started playing around in LÖVE, seeing what it was capable of. Satisfied I could put together a simple sprite-based game, I went to sleep a few hours before the competition start. I figured no point trying to stay up late just to find out the theme, only to ruin myself for the next day.
Trying to learn a new language, whilst against a deadline
Never having used Lua before, I had to learn how to solve a number of problems against the clock. Things I take for granted in my day-to-day C#/.Net life. Things like multi-file projects, debugging and error-handling, collections & queues, and so on. At first it felt like I was reaching for a book five times for every line of code I wrote. Not very productive!
I managed to pull together enough to make my game work, with minimal bugs. However the code-quality is horrendous. Inconsistent styles throughout, as I learned my way around the language. Huge amounts of copy-paste, since I couldn’t get certain code-reuse aspects working properly. Certainly not my prettiest work, from a development point of view.
Quick and easy love
The LÖVE engine made getting assets into the game very simple. Images (static and animated) and audio were easy to bring in. I would recommend it as a good choice, especially if I knew Lua better (or even at all!)
Cake!
The idea for the Wall Of Battenburg Doom came about as I was filling up on sugary snacks on the first day. I went around the house, collecting anything that might work as ingame enemies, with the intention of taking photos of them to make sprites from. (Art isn’t my strongest skill, so I figured that would save me time). However I underestimated the amount of photoshop processing that would be required to turn the pics into something usable.
In the end, I only used two items: The battenburg cake, and some candy teeth. I had an idea that I would create a parade of Marching Sugary Doom. Doughnuts, fizzy drinks, lollipops, chocolate bars, and so on. All of these would be following behind the main wall, covering the ground with sticky, sugary rubbish. This obviously didn’t happen, which lessened the effectiveness of the other idea I had: Creating a Left4Dead parody, specifically the survival-until-rescue part.
The food. It’s… infected!
Imagine you’re the survivor of a zombie attack. Only, instead of zombies, the virus/mutation/whatever is causing sugary snacks to rise up and eat people. What’s more, their weapon of choice is CANDY TEETH! So all the while, we’ve been told not to eat too much sugary stuff, as it will rot our teeth. Now the roles have been twisted around.
Anyway, this side of the game never really worked out, simply due to time constraints. I wanted to have multiple levels, with different types of wall behind the teeth, and various obstacles that the player would have to navigate around. I also wanted to have different coloured pick-ups, with different effects. But sadly time was against me.
Rescue
One of the great parts of L4D is waiting for rescue, against a seemingly never-ending hoard. I blatantly ripped off the rescue-helicopter idea. As the chopper got closer, he would radio in encouragement to hold out just a little longer. If you managed to survive long enough, he would pick you up, and fly you to safety. (Note how he flies you over the wall and beyond, where the legions of marching snacks would be, if I had time)
I wanted to have an actual radio, sat on a table next to the helipad, with the pilot’s speech bubbles coming from it. But again, this didn’t make it in.
A familiar plateful of cake?
The final part of my L4D inspiration was the box art. I’m talking about this
which I copied slightly to make this
Spot the similarity? Apparently it was too subtle, since no-one mentioned it. Oh well…
Tags: doom, post-mortem, postmortem
48 hours later and I’m done. I might write up a longer post-mortem later, but here’s my “Game is shipped” post.
With under 2 hours to go, I was inspired by people in IRC to add audio and also a very basic economy aspect to the game. I managed to get it in just in time, and I think both additions were definitely worth the last-minute rush!
Overall I’m reasonably happy with the final result. I had a bunch more ideas that I could have included, but I managed to stick to a core set of features that I was able to get reasonably polished.
