Hi All,

Yet Another First Time Post.

Java developer who’s done a little C OpenGL (yes, C).  I’m hoping for a spectacular failure this year as this is the very first Game Jam I’ve done.
I’m thinking about doing a strategy game using key based menu options similar to Dwarf Fortress, but showing the menu options on the screen near what they do.

To prep for Ludum, I’m going to practice a bit with Slik and then try out my own personal Jam (using a few spare hours a night after work).

Here’s what I’ll be using:

Language: Java
Library: Slick
Art: PyxelEdit
Audio: sfxr most likely

Questions:

Does anyone use recording software for Jams?  If so, what do you use?  For Livestreaming I think I’m going to use twitch.tv

Poll: Which do you use?

– Coffee
– Tea
– Energy Drinks
– My own special blend 😉

Here we go!

One hour down, 47 to go!

So far I have my states set up (Main Menu, Start game, Settings, Credits).  Also, I’ve added music to play when you start the game.  Didn’t realize how insanely easy Slick2D was.  I was horrified that I only got through 2 tutorials before jumping into it when LD24 started.

Here’s a terrible screenshot!
http://i.imgur.com/byeQg.png

And Another!
http://i.imgur.com/xuHVg.png

Good luck to everyone else, and can’t wait to get some art in this game.

P.S. SEE THE COPYRIGHT?! CREATURE RANGER, I CALLED IT!

=) Toodles
-belk

15 hours in and I have a main menu, volume settings, start screen with save slots, and an intro framework.

The game still looks very similar to what it did last night.  I’ve spent way too much time setting up for save games and fixing up my SoundManager.

Well, it’s almost time to abandon saves for right now and jump into something a little more visible, Maps!  It’s going to be a Link-to-the-Past style map only grid based instead of free movement.

I have ideas for implementing evolution, and a combat system but that’s after I get the map in place.

Keep going everyone!

Hooray!

It’s tiny, it’s in the wrong place, and it’s not that pretty but I finally managed to spit out a tiled map!  Note: this isn’t one picture but rather a map of tiles.

The GameMap class still needs plenty of work, but it’s finally doing something!

Next up is to finish off this class, and then get a player down on that bad boy.  Once I have some more basic map functionality in, I think I’m going to actually make up some graphics for the menus.

The little things…

So I’m following more of a regular sleep schedule than I intended.

Anyway, a good night’s rest helped me figure out my sound issue.  You can’t play multiple Music(s) at once!  That was throwing me off.  So I swapped out all but one of my musics for Sound(s) and that should make it so i don’t have overlap.  Unfortunately, that now means I can’t use the fade function anymore

Here’s a screenshot!

Finally LD24, I’m finished with my game!  There are a few more touch ups I could do, and there is a vast number of features I could have implemented but that does it for my 48 hour challenge!  Here is a screenshot of Creature Ranger.  Enjoy!

Developed on Windows (linux/macosx untested)
(Don’t know how to run it?)

Simple, yet complete – Click the image for the game!

We’re off and running in the Charity Game Jam MiniLD!

The theme for this game jam is the Nintendo Entertainment System.  The funkytron that McFunkypants wrote up can embed HTML5, Flash, and Unity games.  Unfortunately, I’m once again writing mine in Java, so I’ll use the image overlay he sent out in the e-mail.

5 minutes before the jam started, I was sitting here still wondering what to do.  I decided on a jousting game along the theme of Joust, but not at all like it.  I’m hoping to have the camera centered on the player and his horse, and charging along the jousting arena.  The player will control his speed, and the angle of his lance.  The combination of speed (power) and lance position (accuracy) will determine how well the player does!

Last game jam taught me a valuable lesson: Don’t expect the game to come out remotely how you want.  Well, I’ve got a concept and I’ll get as far as I can toward it.  We’ll see how it turns out!

I’m using some of the framework from my last game, Creature Ranger.  It’s available in my earlier blog post (from LD24).

I’ll post some updates as I go.

Good Luck LDers!  Lets make some games, and support a worthy charity!

Tags: belk, Charity Game Jam

The main menu is up and running, though none of the buttons work yet.  I have each element loaded in dynamically, and I’m using a TrueTypeFont I borrowed from a free font site.  Music I made on Otomata plays when you load!

Here’s a screenshot of what I have so far.  Not too pretty, but the theme is the NES!  I’m not worried too much about art yet.

Next, I’m jumping right into the game.  I’ll come back to the main menu later and fix up the credits, exit, and add a volume adjuster.

Tags: belk, Charity Game Jam

Off to get some sleep, so I can stay sane and keep my efficiency up.  The main menu is done, I made it fully functional, and the framework for the game state is starting to come together.  I was also getting the physics manager written a little, and figuring out what variables I need to track for movement and player control.

Here’s some screenshots of the “art” I’m trying to work on now.  I’m not very good at this.

I’m going to try to get some more scenery laid down in the Game state (Weapon Racks, Stands with crowds, etc.) then get to work on the movement and physics.  After that I can work on the spyglass where you see the enemy knight coming at you, and eventually spruce it up with some more details.  We’ll see how far I get tomorrow!

Tags: belk, Charity Game Jam

Womp womp.

Sorry gang, I got distracted with some personal stuff this weekend and didn’t end up finishing.  Luckily, LD25 is coming up soon so I’ll give it another shot then!

Here we go with Ludum Dare #25!

This round I’m not going to be using Slick2D.  We’re going a bit lower level and I’ll be using the 2D engine I’ve been working on using vanZeben’s tutorials linked here.  The engine he’s building didn’t have all the components I need for this LD, so I’ve been working a little on getting my own StateHandler.  I also need a SoundHandler, but we’ll see how much I can get done between work and the start of Ludum tonight.  It’s just the game engine, no game code in here yet I promise!  If anyone wants to see an example of my StateHandler before the LD, just post a comment here.

The king of all TDs

This time I’m shooting for some sort of tower defense map.  I think to avoid too much feature creep, I’m going to start by first getting the map rendered, and a player on the screen.  Then, I’ll add in a few block types (the Base, a wall, and a spawner block).  Then, I’ll give the player the ability to edit the tiles on the map using some sort of limiting factor (like gold or something).  After that, I’ll add in enemy entities that walk straight at the Base tile.  And if I get THAT far, I’ll have to make a decision.  From there I could allow enemies to attack the walls and towers, slowly eating their way to the base.  This would mean me adding extra towers (fences, stairs, cannons, spikes, etc) and ignoring the pathing algorithms.  The other option is working on an A* pathing algorithm so we can have a true tower defense map.  This would put a heavy load on development toward the middle-end, but if it gets done it would leave some fun fast development near the end (new towers and blocks!).  We’ll see how far I get by the time I’m ready to make that decision, but I’m hoping I can learn some A* pathing this weekend.

There’s a cool A* pathing article here if anyone’s interested.  If anyone has better links for me it would help out a lot!

Pathing in a Tower Defence game? Probably optional.

Usually, this is a bad thing.

Ludum Dare 25 ~ BEGIN!

Welp, a Tower Defense map wasn’t quite what I thought would fit within the realm of “You Are The Villain” but I think I’ve found a great idea!  In Tower D’s, generally you strike a balance between upgrading your current arsenal, or advancing your technology to get access to better weapons.  Well, being a fan of the Fantasy genre, I’ve decided to make a dungeon crafting tower defense.

Dwarves love digging, and digging always gets you to the heart of something evil.  We’ll start out our tower defense with basic towers (rock throwers, hammer traps), and as the game progresses the Dwarves dig deeper.  An unknown evil resides within the earth and at some point you gain access to eeevil towers.  The deeper you dig, the better towers you get!

Unfortunately, all that digging releases demons that try to escape into the world.  If you don’t kill them, you end up losing the eeevil essence they took with them.

Let’s do up some art and see what my crappy dwarves look like!

See the small text? See it?!

Ran into an issue with the 2D engine I was using where I couldn’t scale the size of the level.  I needed more tiles on the screen, and my Font’s minimum size was based on this integer value scale set to 1 (can’t go lower than that!).  So, a few hours later I managed to find each place I needed to factor in the scale, and finally got it to work!  It’s not much past what I started with, but here’s what I have so far.

Next up is going to be the ability to EDIT tiles with your player.  That, and a HUD overlay so I can show some stats like Gold, a block selection menu, and a minimap!

Time to grab some food and get cracking on the new features!

We have editing!

Awesome!  Finally, I managed to pump out some features I’d been planning on.  So the first screenshot shows me playing around with placing tiles.   It’s kindof obvious which tiles I placed.  The water around the edges was there from the start.  The brown plus signs are supposed to be fences (we’ll see if I get around to making them smart-connect, probably not) and the red is lava.

I’m planning on having some more blocks here like walls, and stairs.  Currently there’s a bug where if you move close to the bottom of a square, then place a block you can actually place a block inside your hit box and end up clipping through obstacles.  Shhh! Don’t tell anyone.

The next screenshot shows the menu system I’ve been working on.  A small upgrade I’m planning on doing to it before I move on to the next set of features is to color code the blocks you can’t afford with red and the block you have selected with yellow.  That way you can tell what you’re using.  It might also be helpful if you could see what block you’re going to be placing, so I’ll probably add that on the bottom bar.

I hear the Swadians are buying Lava at a high price

It’s close to midnight and something evil’s lurking in the dark… ‘Cause this is thriller! Thriller night!

… For those of you in EST.  It’s a new day, and I made great progress last night.  Just before I hit the hay, I made an Enemy mob which for now will serve as the object for all of my enemy models.  All it does right now is slowly shamble in one direction, but I’m hoping to get to pathfinding today.  Since pathfinding might be a large effort, I’m going to do some polishing before I get into it, just to make sure that if I fail on that there is still a semi-working game.  I could always just spawn the mobs and point them at the player’s base.  I would probably have to give them the ability to break through blocks, but that’s a backup plan.

For now the plan is to create traps!  A spike trap, and a hammer trap for now.  They’re going to have triggered animations, meaning they’ll animate only when someone walks on them.  Hopefully that will only take me an hour or two, and then it’s on to pathfinding!  The game is looking better since my last post.  I added a few more block types, and reworked the map we’re on.  Take a look at the progress!

Delve Deeply! (not a tower defense)

Well, it turns out I didn’t get any towers or anything implemented, but I did get my ambitious A* pathing algorithm finished!  Take a look at my submission here.

You start the game with some cash and a house.  You have the ability to mold the landscape by buying tiles, and you can spawn zombies that path toward the target location you can set by pressing X.  Zombies are damaged by spikes, and you get money for killing them.

I hope you have fun playing around with this.  It’s not a deep game by any means, but it looks like a good base to start something cool off of.

Special thanks to vanZeben for his video tutorials here that started me off with the 2D engine.

Minimalism.
Welp, lets see what I can do with this.

I’ve been thinking about doing a platformer, so this could fit in pretty well with that.  Every platformer needs its gimmick, so I guess I’ll directly apply the theme to the game!  I’ll be going for a growing/shrinking platformer where the goal is to shrink yourself far enough to live in a cell!  Why? for Science of course.

I’ll be using Slick2d, sfxr, and gimp.

Lets get right into it.  GL HF to all Ludum Dare participants this weekend!

Something like this

The player physics took me a while to finish, and there are still a number of tweaks I have to fix in it but it’s playable so far.  You can move around, jump, and double jump.

The level draws properly, but I’m still working on level hit detection.  Level edge hit detection works right now, and due to a bug in it, you can wall climb.  Not the good kind of wall jump, you completely lose all momentum when you hit a wall.  Yeah, I’m working on that.

Here’s a screenshot of my progress!  It’s pretty similar to last time.

No background yet, working on it.