What’s the current policy on bug fixes?

People have found a couple of bugs on my entry so far (one pertaining ambient light levels, the other the behavior of the ESC key)… I’m I allowed to correct these bugs (since the first one kind of ruins the second level, and the other is just silly)?

I also have another bug concerning full screen (if the resolution is not that of the desktop, it just shows a black screen), would like to fix that so that people don’t have to edit a text file…

I remember we had some compos that allowed for bug fixes after the end, but I’m not sure what’s the current status…

Sorry about posting this again, but it probably got lost in the traffic and I didn’t get any answers…

What’s the current policy on bug fixes?

People have found a couple of bugs on my entry so far (one pertaining ambient light levels, the other the behavior of the ESC key)… I’m I allowed to correct these bugs (since the first one kind of ruins the second level, and the other is just silly)?

I also have another bug concerning full screen (if the resolution is not that of the desktop, it just shows a black screen), would like to fix that so that people don’t have to edit a text file…

I remember we had some compos that allowed for bug fixes after the end, but I’m not sure what’s the current status…

Time for a quick postmortem of my entry, “An Old Man And His Quest”:

What Went Right

• Initial concept: although I’m not a big fan of this theme, my wife helped me with a basic idea so I could jump right into working on the game
• Getting scripting working: this really helped me get the game working as I intended, and really made it easy to add powers and cutscenes to the game… I’m probably going to merge that component I did in the compo onto the framework for the next time.
• Graphics: by going 3d and using some pixel art skills I picked up on the latest compos, I could do something that didn’t look completely terrible.
• Music: Again, WolframTones served me well for 48 hour game music…
• Cutscenes: I love doing cutscenes, specially in this kind of limited environment… Having to think on ways to twist my meager artistic skills and limited tech is very entertaining for me
• Mixing the “game” stuff and the “menu” stuff in a single framework… All becomes more interesting, and it’s less work to make behave properly, especially with the scripting engine

What went wrong

• Time managment: Again, I failed miserably in estimating development time, most of it by not considering the rest of the things that went wrong
• Going 3d: I almost always think about going 3d and don’t do it because it’s normally harder (even 2.5D like in this game)… This ended up being no exception, and I had loads of problems getting the initial setup working correctly… It also led to some driver-related problems and things like that, that made me loose loads of time… :\ The end result is a mixed blessing: it looks better, but it took longer…
• Bugs: Ran into some bugs after the deadline, which meant the game seems more buggy to everyone than it seems to me… :\ Fixed most post-compo, but that’s too late…
• No time for level design: In all compos, I promise myself I’ll code something simple and let 4 or 5 hours at the end for pure level design, game balancing, tuning and polish… and I always fail at this… 😐 This time was no exception… I had 5 levels thought of, only had time to make 4 (and the last one was terribly unbalanced)
• Using Photoshop as level design tool: what seemed like a nice idea ended up being more complicated than it should, which kind of defeated the purpose… next time I think I’ll be back to ASCII text files… or a good tile editor, if I can find one that suits my needs (haven’t found any so far, all demand too much work getting to work properly or require me to write a weird importer)

The game has circa 3000 lines of C++ code and 1100 lines of Lua code, and the framework about 17000.

Tools used:

Code: Visual Studio 2005
APIs: DirectX 9 (Feb), FMod, Win32, Lua
Graphics: Photoshop CS4
Sound: WolframTones (very awesome, only had 20 mins or so to play with it), Midi Converter Free (online free midi to mp3 converter), Sfxr
Blogging: Internet Explorer
Listening music: Winamp

On an end note, I’ll probably grab the 3d tiling stuff and scripting binds and merge it with the rest of my LD framework, for future use… I still want a competition where I can actually spend time working on the game, instead of the technology!

Thanks everybody that participated for an exciting weekend!

…since “I’m in” seems too normal…

This is my 8th or 9th LD, and still is as exciting as ever!

Anyway, I’m using the same framework as last time, done by me, just added a 3d tilemap system (doesn’t have any type of querying yet, just rendering at the moment, I’ll add the rest during the competition, according to needs).

You can download the framework here, if you want to use it (it has two sample applications that show most if not all the features):

• D3D9 initialization and some helpers
• FMOD interface for sound
• 2d Sprites (with sprite caching, etc)
• 2d Particle System
• Text
• 3ds file loading (only tested with 3ds generated by 3d Studio Max). Loads lights, meshes and cameras.
• Small simple math library (vectors and quaternions)
• Simple 3d camera handling system (just with a “look at” operation)
• XML loading/saving (might come in handy for configuration files, load/saves, etc. The XML loader was created by Frank Berghen, not me… the writer is all me, although the loader also has save functions, but I’m too lazy to figure out how they work)
• 3d particle system (based on the 2d one, so very rudimentary)
• 3d sprite system (quads that always face the camera)
• LUA library support (it’s actually ripped from my engine, so it’s a good support system for LUA)… Last time I used cutscenes and scripting, and loads of the game code was much simpler because of that…
• DDS image loading for an offscreen buffer (just supports R8G8B8A8 images). Might be useful for some level design stuff, although I’ll probably go back to my old days of text files
• 3d Tilemap (Kind of a blocky heightmap with an automatic texture atlas generation and partition of the map in chunks for possible culling (not implemented))

On the tools side:

• Visual Studio 2005 (hope I can get used to it again, been using 2010 at work)
• Photoshop CS5 (for 2d graphics and textures if I decide to adventure into 3d, and for map creation, etc)
• 3d Studio Max (for modelling if I go 3d, or for title screens and such otherwise)
• sfxr (or Bfxr) (for audio effects)
• Wolfram Tones (for the music creation – fun tool, saves loads of time) and MIDI Converter Free (to convert the MIDI generated by Wolfram Tones to OGG)
• Live Writer for blogging

About the themes, I have a gut feeling that “Dreams” is going to win, although I don’t have any ideas for that… or any of the others, to be honest, since the times in the past when I tried to think of an idea for all the themes it didn’t work that well…

Anyway, very excited about this all!

Good luck everyone!

Tags: C++, directx, FMOD, lua

Theme is “Escape”, hum? Didn’t see that one coming…

Already have an idea, involving some insanity (escaping your own mind) and whatnot…

Anyway, time to check out the blog, eat breakfast and start cranking some code!

Good luck everyone!

Ah, obligatory deskphoto:

Tags: deskphoto

Got an idea for the game… You’re a girl trying to escape the nightmares in your mind… Each level has a different gameplay mechanic, like inverted keys, or having to follow something, and hopefully a surprise ending (which I still don’t know what it will be!).

Want to have time to work hard on the cutscenes, general ambience and level design, so I need to do good progress in the beginning.

Task list:

• Load level
• Get Lua scripting working
• Draw main character
• Character movement working
• Draw area tiles
• Game mechanics:
• Follow mechanic
• Reversed keys
• Perpetual movement
• “Just jump” mechanic
• Darkness
• Random teleport
• Initial cutscene

Got the level loading working (placeholder tiles) from an XML file:

Also designed the main character:

Imba pixel art skills…

I still have no idea on what to do on the environment front, from an art standpoint… Don’t want to do the usual “dungeon” theme I do on this kind of thing, but my graphic skills don’t go much further than that…  but I have to try, since I wanted the game to start in the heroine’s bedroom…

• Load level
• Get Lua scripting working
• Draw main character
• Character display
• Character movement working
• Draw area tiles
• Bedroom
• Corridor
• Forest
• Game mechanics:
  • Follow mechanic
  • Reversed keys
  • Perpetual movement
  • “Just jump” mechanic
  • Darkness
  • Random teleport
• Cutscene system
• Initial cutscene
• Text render

Finished most of the art for the starting area, the bedroom… It is supposed to be a night scene, hence the blue hue… I’ve screwed up on that already, since I want to make a light spark cast glow on the scene, and it will all show blue (should have done stuff in their “normal” color, and let the lighting engine take care of the blue-fication…). I may fix that before the end, but I’ve lost enough time on this, with 3d props, etc… specially considering this is just for a cutscene…

Next step is adding the scripting system to this, so that I can start coding the cutscene proper and get some gameplay in…

• Load level
• Get Lua scripting working
• Draw main character
• Character display
• Character movement working
• Draw area tiles
  • Bedroom
  • Corridor
  • Forest
• Game mechanics:
  • Follow mechanic
  • Reversed keys
  • Perpetual movement
  • “Just jump” mechanic
  • Darkness
  • Random teleport
• Cutscene system
• Initial cutscene
• Text render

I’m dropping out of the compo…

I’ve been tired like a dog, and not feeling very motivated with this game (although I have an idea and progress has been good)… Some ideas just don’t click like they should when it’s time to develop them…

Anyway, good luck everyone!

Once more into the breach (or something to that effect…)!

Anyway, I’m using the same framework as last time, done by me, just added some stuff to generate simple geometry (quad, cube, spheroid, caps and cylinders). Since my art sucks, better suck in big style going beyond programmer drawn art and going directly to programmer-programmed art!

You can download the framework here, if you want to use it (it has three sample applications that show most if not all the features):

• D3D9 initialization and some helpers
• FMOD interface for sound
• 2d Sprites (with sprite caching, etc)
• 2d Particle System
• Text
• 3ds file loading (only tested with 3ds generated by 3d Studio Max). Loads lights, meshes and cameras.
• Small simple math library (vectors and quaternions)
• Simple 3d camera handling system (just with a “look at” operation)
• XML loading/saving (might come in handy for configuration files, load/saves, etc. The XML loader was created by Frank Berghen, not me… the writer is all me, although the loader also has save functions, but I’m too lazy to figure out how they work)
• 3d particle system (based on the 2d one, so very rudimentary)
• 3d sprite system (quads that always face the camera)
• LUA library support (it’s actually ripped from my engine, so it’s a good support system for LUA)… Last time I used cutscenes and scripting, and loads of the game code was much simpler because of that…
• DDS image loading for an offscreen buffer (just supports A8R8G8B8 images). Might be useful for some level design stuff, although I’ll probably go back to my old days of text files.
• 3d Tilemap (Kind of a blocky heightmap with an automatic texture atlas generation and partition of the map in chunks for possible culling (not implemented)).
• Simple geometry generation (quad, cube, spheroid, caps and cylinders)

On the tools side:

• Visual Studio 2010
• Photoshop CS5 (for 2d graphics and textures if I decide to adventure into 3d, and for map creation, etc)
• 3d Studio Max (for modelling if I go 3d, or for title screens and such otherwise)
• sfxr (or Bfxr) (for audio effects)
• Wolfram Tones (for the music creation – fun tool, saves loads of time) and MIDI Converter Free (to convert the MIDI generated by Wolfram Tones to OGG)
• Live Writer for blogging
• Chronolapse for time-lapse.
• Everything I get my hands on…

Hopefully this will go better than the last one (in which I got totally bored halfway through and quit)…

Cya in a few hours!

Damn, woke about one hour ago and saw the theme… “Tiny World”…

Been thinking about an idea for one hour now, and I still have nothing concrete…

Until now, only two things come to mind:

1. Generate a procedural world for a side-scroller kind of game, with a very small character… This is what I feel like programming, but I have no game for this… Just a guy moving about in a procedurally generated world, in a Metroidvania style… Doesn’t have anything to do with the theme and it might push my resources a bit too far…
2. A tower defense kind of game: generate a procedural small planet and the player can build stuff on top of it (mines, cannons, power-plants, farms, cities, etc). He has to sustain and evolve the planet, defending it from stuff that comes from space (aliens, meteors, etc).
   The ideia is to do this in 3d, but that has the big problem of spatial perception: the player would be hard pressed to prepare against incoming threats, since they could come from everywhere.
   Going 2d on this idea might be more feasible from a gameplay perspective. Still, I think on this idea and there’s not actually much the player can achieve: he places some stuff around and then waits for an outcome, which sounds pretty boring.

Was hoping that writing this blog post would help come up with something else, but no success there…

Hum… Now for some web-searches on “Tiny World”…

Bah, no help there too…

Ok, let me try a different approach… just throwing some random ideas and see if any of them can be combined into something cool:

1. The world is tiny
2. The character is tiny (breaks the theme, I think)
3. We build the world, having to manage its growth so that it becomes viable for something…
4. We defend a tiny world
5. We fight to conquer a tiny world
6. The world grows/transforms from your actions
7. Our tiny world is dying, need to find a new one (breaks the theme, I think)
8. Our tiny world is dying, need to fix it (breaks the theme, I think)

Not many ideas… Most of my ideas are usually of bigger scope, so tending to “huge world”, more than “tiny”.

Can’t shake the feeling that there’s some grid-based small idea of a game that could be built, using the fact that the playing field is small and lending itself to fast playing sessions, but for the life of me, I can’t come up with anything…

……

Been brainstorming with my wife for a bit, and an idea came up… It’s not a “game idea”, but it gives me a starting point, and maybe a game will evolve from there…

I’m going to do a “voxel”-based construction kit, in which the player can put different color blocks in the world and then there will be some creatures that react in some way to the blocks…

But just making the construction kit will take some time, so I’ll start by that…

Just finished implementing a simple voxel engine…

Was complicated getting all the conditions working properly, specially because I was trying to get some subdivision code working properly in the process, as you can see below… For the record, the image below should only be a plane at the bottom…

The full rebuild process is a bit slow yet (at least in debug mode), but I’ll optimize it later if it warrants.

Anyway, it works now:

That’s just a random “height-field”.

Now I need to add different materials…

Still hoping inspiration hits me…

Finished the material system for the voxel world and added some camera controls…

Not that happy with the camera controls; they don’t seem that intuitive, but they’re the same as the editor on my out-of-hours project, and while it works fine with an editor tool, it doesn’t seem suitable for a game… But after I get some game in this I’ll revisit it….

Anyway, now for the harder part in this project: finding out in which cube the player clicked and in which face, so I can build a new block there…

Contrary to my expectations, I got raycasting working… It’s not perfect, and I still need to identify which face the cursor intersected with, but it works nevertheless!

Next step, finding which face it has intersected, and actually create blocks (updating the voxel representation)…

I might have to call it a day in an hour or so, since there’s a concert tonight that I wanted to see… Ah, the difficulties of juggling game development and a real life!

I’m ashamed to say that for the second time in a row, I’m giving up…

There’s 15 hours to go, and all I have is a voxel engine and no idea on what to do with it… And because I have that voxel engine, I’m having even more difficulty having ideas that fit the theme…

I’m more of a “huge thinker”, not a “tiny thinker”… And just making a normal game but set it on a tiny world doesn’t appeal to me, since my idea is that a game with the theme “Tiny World” couldn’t be done in a big world (the “Tiny World” has to be part of the gameplay, not just a setting).

Why couldn’t “procedural generated” have won?!

Anyway, good luck everyone!

Again, I intend to take part in this glorious event… unfortunately, I didn’t finish any of my last entries on this, since I lost the motivation to work on the games midway… a good idea is usually very important to me to finish a game, and I feel my latest ideas with the themes at hand were crap…

Anyway, rooting for “Survival”, but I won’t get my hopes up, since it never pans out!

I’m going to use my old framework (the same I’ve been evolving for these competitions, while keeping within the “no-gameplay code” rule)…

You can download it from here, if you’re interested… it has a couple of test applications so you can see how it works… It features:

• D3D9 initialization and some helpers
• FMOD interface for sound
• 2d Sprites (with sprite caching, etc)
• 2d Particle System
• Text
• 3ds file loading (only tested with 3ds generated by 3d Studio Max). Loads lights, meshes and cameras.
• Small simple math library (vectors and quaternions)
• Simple 3d camera handling system (just with a “look at” operation)
• XML loading/saving (might come in handy for configuration files, load/saves, etc. The XML loader was created by Frank Berghen, not me… the writer is all me, although the loader also has save functions, but I’m too lazy to figure out how they work)
• 3d particle system (based on the 2d one, so very rudimentary)
• 3d sprite system (quads that always face the camera)
• LUA library support (it’s actually ripped from my engine, so it’s a good support system for LUA)… Last time I used cutscenes and scripting, and loads of the game code was much simpler because of that…
• DDS image loading for an offscreen buffer (just supports A8R8G8B8 images). Might be useful for some level design stuff, although I’ll probably go back to my old days of text files.
• 3d Tilemap (Kind of a blocky heightmap with an automatic texture atlas generation and partition of the map in chunks for possible culling (not implemented)).
• Simple geometry generation (quad, cube, spheroid, caps and cylinders)

The tools I intend on using are:

On the tools side:

• Visual Studio 2010
• Photoshop CS5 (for 2d graphics and textures if I decide to adventure into 3d, and for map creation, etc)
• 3d Studio Max (for modelling if I go 3d, or for title screens and such otherwise)
• sfxr (or Bfxr) (for audio effects)
• Live Writer for blogging

Still don’t know what I’m going to do about music, but I’ll figure that out if I get to that point… I’m also probably going to try to structure the project better than usual, by making an initial timeline, scheduling my pauses, etc… Want to see if that improves my workflow…

So, good luck everyone! And may “Survival” win! 😀

So, there’s the theme… As a lot of people have pointed out, almost all LD games are minimalist by nature, being time constrained…

I’ve already made a schedule in Excel, considering break and sleep times… I need to figure out an idea to be able to fill in the blanks:

I’m thinking on an idea around gameplay minimalism and do it with minimalist graphics and sound…

First thought was a “one-button-game”, but I think that may take more effort than I have available (even with minimalist graphics, it’s still a lot of stuff to draw with my puny art skills).

So, I’m thinking puzzle game… One simple mechanic, one simple set of graphics, lose my time building levels and such…

I still have 40 mins remaining on my schedule to have an idea…

I was thinking about an idea that I could implement with a terribly simple input mechanism… I’ve decided on only using the mouse position (can’t be much more simple than that, I guess)…

The idea is that the player attracts some particles (pixels, so keeping with the minimalist approach) with the mouse cursor… The behavior of the particles is physically correct, so if we don’t move the mouse cursor carefully, we will force the particles to overshoot and hit the walls of the level…

The level is comprised of a maze like structure (keeping it simple for now, but I might extend that with other attractors and moving walls). If a particle hits a wall, it’s lost…

The objective is for the player to reach the end of the level only losing a certain percentage of the particles… Seems simples, but with the addition of a time limit, it might be enough to make a simple fun game…

I don’t have a name for the game yet, but it will come to me…

Anyway, here’s the revised schedule:

Progress has been steady and on schedule so far:

Currently, there’s particles, and they follow the mouse cursor (or any attractors I define, the code is general)… It took me some measure of tweaking the parameters until I got something similar to the behavior I wanted… Ended up by defining the force applied to the particles as “force=delta_v/sqrt(dist)”, instead of the classical gravity-like “force=delta_v/sqr(dist)”… The particles are more reactive this way… Also added a “drag coeficient” to the particles, so they lose about 25% their energy each animation iteration… This will avoid them just shooting off screen in some fringe cases…

I can setup the attractors to affect only some colors (currently it’s just a RGB mask, but that might change).

Although it’s fun moving the particles around, I’m not sure if this will make an actually fun game… But to test that, I need to add the “level”, in a form of a maze of sorts… I expect I’ll have some other attractors and moving walls on that, but everything’s open at the moment…

I never thought how “minimal” is the complete opposite of what I usually think of in terms of game design (although I guess it’s a good way to design things: start with something big and subtract until you’re left with just some core mechanics, then you can add stuff back… I think it might avoid excessive padding in the game)…

Still don’t know if my idea with result in any fun whatsoever, but I have the level loader already working, from a text file:

This one is ugly even for my standards, but it’s also minimalistic, which was the goal… I’m really no good in building “small” stuff… My dreams are always so much larger than what I can build (either in compos because of time-constraints, or outside of them because of too big of a scope and an obsession with “perfect” code)…

Anyway, still on schedule (only by 10 mins, but it’s something!):

If I had a clear idea on what I’m aiming to build, I might have a more comprehensive schedule, which was my idea on the start, instead of just having the next few tasks defined…