Well, I’ve started! Here’s a sprite for a non-human player!

  wow, very animate, such sprite, wow etc…

Next up, (very simple) procedural map generation!

So the procedural map generator’s pretty much done; just gotta sort out doors between rooms.

Had to draw room and tile id’s along the way to debug though: thought people might enjoy this mess:

oh god.

Well, getting the splitscreen 2 player viewports going was much quicker than i expected, though some of that is definitely thanks to existing libraries.

In other news, the procedural map generator seems to be working fine and dandy: the development progress is somewhat documented and demonstrated in the videos below, for anyone that cares.

I know it’s bad to prematurely or pre-emptively optimise, buuut I was concerned about CPU usage, and it all seemed to stem from drawing routines…

So after a bit of reading around and testing and worrying, I rewrote all the drawing to use a spritebatched tileset image, and it’s now much much more comfortable. hooray!

If I’d been using images in the first place for tiles, I’d probably have done this from the get go, but because this is all solid colours, I thought creating images for them was madness. Turns out I was wrong; at least the images are being created once at runtime each, and only ever sat in memory. Making 32×32 flat coloured squares in Photoshop would have felt really botchy…

obligatory screenshot of progress:

Rooms are now randomly coloured, which I think is nice. Breaks up the monotony. Map view works, for each player. I think it’s rather nice, even if it is just scaling the live render.

Heading to bed now, tomorrow will see fast implementation of mechanics and UI (hopefully). At least I have a plan for those and they shouldn’t be too complex – I knew graphics-y stuff and the procedural thing would be the hard work on this, but I’m pleased with the results!

Wow, never expected this. Doge vs Doge is ready to play!

Of course there are many improvements I would like to make. Maybe I’ll do a detailed post-mortem in a few days.

But I actually sat down to make a game for a weekend, and ended up with a game that can be won, and lost.

Here’s hoping it doesn’t immediately crash for everyone who runs it, eh?

I hope everyone else had as much fun as I did!

Well, I’ve made a start on my Mini LD 52 project, making some kinda game for MSDOS 😛

The good news is I’m up and running with some basic input and graphics!

The “bad news” is my progress so far is basically a rudimentary etch-a-sketch:

For those interested I’m using the following bits and bobs for this:

Oracle VirtualBox, running MSDOS 6.22 on a VHD

VHD means I can mount it in Windows 😉 so can use Notepad++ for most of my coding, and also mount that path in DOSBox for testing the game in the way it’ll be run by most.

I’m also using a DOS port of vi when I need to quickly edit a file in the DOS environment.

OpenWatcom is compiling and linking my C++ for me

If I get as far as some actual bitmappy graphics, I’ll be using Deluxe Paint II Enhanced for MSDOS.

Sound and music are kind of on the backburner at the moment, when I start thinking about them I’ll decide what DOS-based tools to use!

Well, seen the theme this morning, think I’ve got something I can work with in the time I have, so I’m actually in for a real LD!

Gonna use Lua / Love 2D, figure out art and music tools later.

Wasn't sure what I would do, so decided to wait for the theme and see if I got any ideas.

I thought of something, so I'm in for trying to produce a game with LÖVE

Hey look, I'm procedurally generating a small world!

Added a procedurally generated river to my small world(s).

Should be able to get to work on some mechanics using my multi-terrain-typed randomly generated maps now...

Even though it's still square tiles with poorly tiled textures, i think it looks better.

Before | After

There's a human and AI player, and they can have stats and own buildings. And their buildings show up in their team colour, yay!

The buildings remind me of Sim City 1.1 zones...

On a more serious note, I can start doing gameplay stuff with player stats now :smile:

Yeah, I've done some structural gameplay work, but don't have much to show for it yet. But I've got the camera behaving how I want it to, so that's all that counts, right?

Also started on some UI work.

Video, since screenshots are boring:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZNHU2PvT78

Having spent much of the day faffing with UI, and Camera, I have finally started to get some mechanics logic into the game loop.

We now tick occasionally, and every tick people can be born, or die, and house building is triggered by need of the population. It's turning into a small living world!

Gradually as more of the tick logic is added, the game will come together!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prcP9IkFk

I hope that the time I have available tomorrow is enough to get enough gameplay in worth submitting. But either way, it's been a great experience so far. Even the UI layout and camera bugs...

Well, it's been a great weekend, and a few extra hours this evening, but I've not been able to make enough of a game to actually really submit, so I'm calling it here and going to bed, before work tomorrow.

I have done a quick video update of where I got to and what I wanted to do, and partly why I fell short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLOfBWSHJm0

Maybe I'll continue to play with it more after.

I hope everyone else enjoyed their jam, and I look forward to playing some games!

Edit: Source if anyone's interested: https://github.com/beforan/ld38-populization/tree/develop

OK, I've got an idea, it shouldn't be too demanding, so I'm gonna try and do this while also not leaving my three week old son all to my wife.

We'll see how it goes ;)