I went to bed last night thinking my LD48 was over, after wasting so much time trying to make a fundamentally incorrect depth-sorting algorithm work for my isometric objects/tiles… I stripped it down to something much simpler (ground layer, tiles/objects layer, simple sort based on one depth value) that worked well enough – but I’d lost a whole lot of time.

But I got up this morning, and decided to give it another push… and it’s amazing what a difference a sky texture and some very simple lighting makes:

Loads and loads still to do, though… map loader, player logic, enemy logic, collision detection, and more…

Player blob is in, with controls and basic collision detection. Enemy ‘attack’ logic is in, and they can be made to destroy each other (although they just disappear for now)

Unfortunately, the game is probably going to be much simpler than originally intended, with just one enemy type. I’m going to concentrate on making it a bit more playable (game progression, player death, etc), then decide whether there’s time to add another enemy type, or to add death/destruction effects for the enemy/player/rocks

It’s as finished as it’s going to get. I’m reasonably happy with the end result – as it didn’t go so smoothly this time – going isometric was a bit trickier than I’d anticipated… Download it here

So less time for the gameplay itself – but maybe that wasn’t a bad thing, as keeping the game simple forced me to be a bit more creative with the level design. And although the game is short, just a few small levels, the last couple should present a reasonable challenge

Cool, came in 5th in a compo that I almost abandoned halfway through due to isometric sorting woes

But looking at the scores in general has reminded me just how much the Humor category needs to be nuked from orbit!

Being hit with a load of 1’s and 2’s in this category (which isn’t relevant to a lot of games) isn’t much fun. It’s obviously not just my games that suffer from this – even Notch’s epic Metagun was given a couple of 1’s in this category, and that was a solid 4-5 game. How about just removing the humor category, if a game would have scored high here, that should add to the ‘fun’ score, shouldn’t it? (Maybe even score Fun out of 10, instead of 5?)

Also, there’s been a bit of what I can only describe as ‘troll scoring’ going on – with solid 4+ games being given 1s and 2s across the board by at least one voter (in a lame attempt to vote down the competition?)

I’d almost suggest filtering out the highest and lowest couple of ratings for each game when calculating the final results?

Discuss…

‘It’s dangerous to go alone… take this…. grappling hook!’ is the basic idea

Using Unity this time, and I’ve only spent a couple of days learning the basics. Been having a real hard time getting meshes from Blender into it cleanly, but now I’ve got a first block in, I’ve been writing some scripts. Got a basic (brute-force) tilemap system, and simple platformer physics/collision (just done my own, to avoid some of the trickiness of using ‘real physics’ for a platformer)

Also figured out that you’ve got to smooth time.DeltaTime values yourself if you want anything to run smoothly when vsynced…

‘Playable’ version here

Created a fairly crude player model. So I’m not running a box around the level any more… Also got collectable gems, but I can’t get Unity shaders working, so they don’t look very gem-like – I just want to make them lit+additive, to look a bit like oldskool Amiga ‘glenz vectors’…)

So I recorded a timelapse of this LD48 – Chronolapse did a great job of capturing screenshots, although doing a batch resize+crop and high-quality encode from jpegs was a little trickier… The end result was pretty good, though:

And of course, the final game is here

Very early progress

The theme seemed a bit uninspiring. And I wanted to do something that’s not a tile-based platformer this time…  ended up thinking about the motorbike chase in ‘The Great Escape’, and decided to do a physics-based motorbike game, with procedurally generated terrain (rather heavily inspired by Tiny Wings/Extreme Road Trip/Smuggle Truck/Elastomania etc.)

Got a basic sum-of-sine-waves rendering+scrolling, but I’ve got some ideas to make it more varied. But first, time to add Chipmunk for physics, and get the beginnings of a player in…

Got the bike physics working quite nicely, after turning the friction up to 11.  Enabled bloom, added a smoky background.

A massive volcano has erupted… can you escape the advancing lava (well, I missed out on ‘Advancing wall of doom’ when that was the theme)…

Need to sort the camera out next, it’s not very playable that zoomed in…  but it does show off the bike that I spent far too long drawing, and which now has nicely working suspension…

Bike bits

Why did I decide to make a game that needed a human character… that’s my golden rule of Ludum Dare… minimal art, and *absolutely no humans, or other hard-to-draw creatures!*

Spent hours now trying to draw this bike and rider…  this will have to do, let’s get back to some code…

Sine Rider

Struggling a bit to get decent bike suspension/controls working, but at leas there’s a partially controllable bike in there now…  time to work on the level generation code, and think about how to make it into more of a game…

It was going fairly well – but after staying up too late last night working on this, I’m low on energy and enthusiasm, not sure if I’ll actually get it into a submittable state.  Too much time spent drawing the bike/biker, and learning about Chipmunk constraints…

So I’m in for another Ludum Dare (as long as the theme isn’t too silly…). I’ll be joining the #MidlandsIndies in Coventry tomorrow, but may spend Sunday at home in front of my ‘real computer’, as I struggle to be productive on a laptop in an unfamiliar environment…

This time, I’m giving up my usual C++/D3D this time, and I’m going to use Flash (AS3 in FlashDevelop) using Stage3D!

I’ve put together a little framework for doing sprite-based 2D games using Stage 3D. I call it ‘Turbo2D’, and the source is available here, if anyone fancies messing with Stage3D themselves.

There’s also a little test/demo here!

Spent too much time messing with Blender and graphical stuff yesterday, I’m still lacking any gameplay – but I’ve got a scrolling map, and  aplyer that the player moves+shoots, and has collision detection. A slightly unconventional control system – arrow keys for forwards/backwards/steering on the player – but with mouse aiming.  WIP build here:  http://www.bluescrn.net/ld48alone/

It’s going to be an arena shooter of some kind, with the aim of staying alive but getting the minimal score (*avoiding* power-ups, collectibles, and bonuses?). Perhaps a score that ticks downwards over time, if you can avoid killing/collecting things?

But for now, I’ve at least got basic player movement and done the mouse-to-world logic for firing. And spent too long messing with SpaceScape to create a skybox…

Did I misread the theme? – was it supposed to be Mondrian-ism or Monochrome-ism?

It won’t be the first time that I’ve made a Thrust-style-game for an LD48, but this time it’s in Unity, and so far, I’ve been doing some editor scripting to allow me to build levels within Unity. As I’m rubbish with Blender…

Sometimes Unity editor scripting can seem a bit scary, but when you get things right, it’s very powerful and surprisingly easy

Only a couple of days left to rate LD41 games, or to beg for a few more ratings! :)

Here's the team entry that I did a lot of the code for - It's snake. With guns. And some fairly shiny graphics, for a 3-day jam game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p75P0R5xU0k

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/mechasnek

(Native PC build recommended, but there is a WebGL version. Requires a reasonably decent GPU...)