And so it began…  bluescrn’s first LD48 entry. And probably the best…

It was the start of some recurring themes in my LD entries… 2D tilemaps, too much time spent on particle effects, and a rather loose interpretation of the theme… guarding a collection of arbitrary floating crates from a rapidly spreading fire, by covering them in dripping green goo from a blob character controlled by rotating the world…  Yes, I’d decided very early on I wanted to do some sort of rotating-screen platformy thing, and it gradually evolved into something that very loosely fit the theme…

This is definitely my most fun LD entry to go back and play again – and probably the most complete

The thing I did right was to keep it simple. The level was a simple grid (trivial collision detection), the character was a blob (minimal art effort), simple textures + repeating patterns elsewhere. And fairly simple game logic – which left me time to mess about with effects. And recording some audio, including that most memorable ‘awwww b****cks!’

…So it’s time to clean the cobwebs off the old OpenGL+SDL base code, so I’m not wasting valuable time setting up lib/include paths, and fighting with MSVC’s desire to inflict Unicode pain on anything you try to build…

Here’s what I’m planning to use, should be acceptable under the ‘custom libraries’ rule (except for the font texture, which will have to be replaced during the 48hrs)

http://www.bluescrn.net/LD48/LD48Base.zip

Contains OpenGL+SDL init code (now featuring resolution switching), Texture loading, simple 2D blitting, a basic font renderer, and some pretty incomplete/untested vector maths code. Linked with FMOD and Chipmunk in case I get a chance to put some audio in, or want to use physics…  Somebody should have added ‘Chipmunk’ as a theme!

I was planning to learn chipmunk before the compo, but never quite got around to it… so it took a little longer than planned to get it up and running – but now I’ve got a load of rigid body boxes flying around the screen. And the beginnings of a level editor for a physics-y platformy thing. Minimalist in a mostly visual style way. And in my usual LD48 minimal-as-in-nonexistant audio way…

Got rigid objects working with Chipmunk, after eventually realising that adding the static body to the space is bad and makes it all go horribly wrong… No gameplay yet, but a mostly working editor mode (lacking load+save…)

The editor is fully functional now, and the objects are rendering quite nicely… now I need some gameplay!

My pet blob is back… and it’s almost a game now

As well as the graphical style, the controls are quite minimal – just the left and right keys

Well, I think I’m done… it’s rather a lot more minimal than I’d hoped, not been feeling too well this weekend, so decided to stop early. I’d hoped to make better use of Chipmunk and put in ropes/chains and other fun stuff, and some hazards – but kept getting too distracted playing it / building levels (it’s got a built-in level editor, if you press E in-game, but it’s a bit arkward to use, and I didn’t get round to writing any instructions…)

Final(ish) version is here…

http://www.bluescrn.net/LD48/LD48-11-bluescrn.zip

Tags: bluescrn, chipmunk, final

Well, been at work all day, so got just over 24hrs to try and throw something together..

So it ain’t original, but should be a bit of fun to make… Yep, a Nebulus-like rotaty towery thingy

Have made some nice progress after my late start – but I’m completely knackered, so not sure if I’m going to continue it… if I’d had the full weekend, it could have been pretty cool….

I did intend to tidy up and upload this a while ago, but never got around to it… It’s something I’m using for another project, but makes a fairly nice framework for quick little C++/D3D-based projects. Such as an LD48 entry…

www.bluescrn.net/ld48_13/ld48.zip

It includes:

– D3D init, window creation/resizing/windowed-fullscreen

– Texture loading

– 2D and 3D polygon blitter classes, using (very simple) shaders. (Easyish to add additional shaders)

– Bitmap font rendering (fonts created by the Angelcode BMFont tool, loaded using TinyXML)

– Basic render-to-texture support, and the beginnings of a postprocessing system – currently a fairly rough bloom effect

– Vector and Matrix maths classes

I know there’s still differing opinions over using ‘base code/custom libs’ like this – but this is all fairly basic stuff, and there’s nothing in here that couldn’t be found in other freely available libraries. Just judge my entry (if I manage to complete one!) accordingly…

It’s got curves and slopes.. now should I add a physics engine?…

Now added the Tokamak physics lib to the project..  I’ve got a sphere rolling around the track. I can’t render spheres, though – so it’s just represented by those red lines… but it works

(Oh – and does anyone know if you can make WordPress default to a sensible size post editing window, rather than the tiny default I seem to get?)

Not a huge amount of visual progress – but I’ve got some player control and camera code working – took a lot of tweaking to get something usable…

Now I need to get a player vehicle in (wipeout-style hovering thing), and decide whether to keep it wireframe or start texturing it…

Textured at last!… now for the arkward job of generating normals…

Just added checkpoint rings and a starting grid texture. Also got basic track selection in. It’s going to be a time-trial only game, not much hope of adding AI players at this point – so next I need to add the timing code, and checkpoint/finish/failure detection.

Ghost cars would be nice… but that’s pushing it a bit for an LD48 game…

OMG… It’s almost done!… for the first time in maybe 3 years I’ve got a decent LD48 entry, and not given up to play WoW or drink excessive quantities of alcohol!

Added a front end… an all in one title-instructions-trackselect screen. Checkpoints are working, best times are being recorded (even loaded+saved!) and being used to unlock levels…

I need to do some more work on the track generation algorithm, though – as of the 100 tracks that are selectable, quite a few appear to be impossible (due to intersecting track mesh). Then I’ve got some time for some finishing touches – it’s a choice between (very bad) audio, or maybe a ghost car system!

Time for a food break now… just a very boring toasted sandwich, I think…

It’s done, complete with some badly recorded sound effects…

http://www.bluescrn.net/ld48_13/bluescrn_LD48_0xF0.zip

Final screenshot:

Tags: final

So long as I don’t get called in to work over the weekend (big work project currently in the submission process…), and as long as the theme isn’t Evolution (lol, I’ve been voting that one down for years, still don’t have any half-decent ideas for it!), then it looks like I’m in

Just got a shiny new PC upgrade, too – a Geforce 275, an SSD, running the Win7 RC…  so expect some brute-force GPU abuse – I think I’m mostly set up ready for some gamedev…  got a reasonable supply of caffiene and snacks…

Planning to use the same little DX9 base code that I used for my last LD entry – no fancy 3D model support, but it handles all the initialisation stuff, texture loading, 2D blitting/fonts, vector/matrix classes (which I had fun discovering a few arkward bugs in during my last LD48…), and very basic shader loading

So I’ve spent the last 3 hrs or so finding out that Windows 7 + Multi-monitor + Fullscreen D3D = problems…

And that you can’t use debug-mode D3D with Win7 and recent NVidia drivers…

So nothing game-like yet… but here’s a pic of my workspace

And first random scribblings of a game idea