More work on the map, added a village some roads and changed the sea/beach area. Also has the Gui WIP and a course a tentacle!

The map TBH is too big, too much walking towards your target, but its does invoke the feeling of lonliness, you feel far from the company of the villagers which fits the theme so I’ve decided to leave it in. Means the initial play impact might get some people to switch off before anything happens but a theme is a theme!

Giants

Some villagers to convince they should worship you, slightly harder when they are big enough to stamp on you and suish you!

But size doesn’t matter right?

P.S. And no villagers aren’t meant to have rocket lauchers…

Deano

Not much progress, as trying to get my AI to do what I want it too, has been erm challenging. Oddly its not the complex stuff, just doing anything, this is large part due to not knowing the AI system at all and it not working the way I expected it too. Still my AI needs are low, so hopefully I can get there.

More worryingly the block in AI, has meant I haven’t got to any influencing spells yets, which is the entire mechanic… ho hum…

Least this isn’t something like a Ludum Dare with only a dozen hours left, right!!

What?! It is?! *PANIC*

Another one bites the dust, i’m afraid…

Don’t use untried middleware, I added several peices of the engine recently which I’d never used in anger and its showed, simple AI tooks ages as the new interaction and systems I’d used which should have made it easier, didn’t due to lack of experience and now hit a similar issue with some effects to mark various spells.

Work out how to win/lose early… When I thought up the idea (you have to convert the villagers to worship you, so your not alone) I never really thought to hard on win/lose, the obvious “have another god competing” clearly would need a lot of AI which just wasn’t going to happen. I never quite found a substitute, I added a mechanic that your so hidous that if your followers see you, the laugh and stop following you but thats not enough.

Game design and implementation are a muscle, they need practise. All of us who have entered Ludum Dare are like Olympic athletes, you have to practice, exercise, lose sometime but dust off and go again.

This is my third time, and both this time and the last one I didn’t finish however I can feel I’m getting better at designing at speed to unknown ideas, but still I have to learn to design something I can finish in time.

NEXT TIME Ludum Dare NEXT TIME!

And one (unused action shot!)

Slimer on a stick of fire

Timelapse

Higher quality timelapse: http://youtu.be/F5NzjTvu7YY

Weird res, due to sometimes on desktop + air device to an iPad and sometimes on a laptop RDP’ed into the desktop.

Man its seemed longer!

Hmmm wasn’t what I was expecting, but I’m going to use minimalism as an excuse to go back to a simpler age of games, where the plots (as such as they were) were minimal and so were the controls but the fun factor was still fun.

So far the working title is “Kitty vs Evil Pigeons” and is a 2D scroller thingy-me-mob… haxe targeting javascript are the chosen tools, no frameworks etc. all created from scratch for that proper minimalist feel. Chronolapse is running and I have a red rectangle on the screen.

Let loose the dogs of Ludum Dare!

In the exciting development of  “Kitty vs the Pigeons” we now have a basic background and kitty can move left and right.

As the screenshows, I’d only just downloaded haxe, flashdevelop and chronolapse, and have lots of html5/haxe windows open so I can pick it up asap. Though basic it captures the feel I wanted.

Next drop I will provide a first ‘playable’, though likely will just be very badly playable.

I’ve got some things to do Saturday, so that won’t leave much time but I think it would do me good to finish something small for this Ludum Dare, due to not finishing the last few times (since ages since I actually finished something for Ludum).

Not sure what to do it in, depends on the theme and game ideas but the current slightly weird one is to use Doom III engine.

I’m pretty familar with it, as it was the ancestor of Brink engine which I was Lead on for several years and its fully GPL now so open sourced. Full 3D engine, SWF/Flash UI and battle hardened…

Of course sounds bit more of a MOD than a full game, but with full source access, it should be possible to be as different as I like…

Though still not sure if a good idea TBH maybe too big an engine for a short project… grrr some many choices

Ill and with lots to do, but the theme has planted a idea I want to try, so I’m in.

Its going to be a semi-turn based Civ like game, where things are done in 10 seconds slots.

To keep it small, Haxe using HTML5 will be the platform, as i’ve used it in previous Ludum Dare.

I’ll probably start twitching once i’m a bit more on the ball.

Got Twitch set up, for those who like to see code appearing. http://www.twitch.tv/deanocalver

Gamewise, have a basic tile system, currently just with a simple checkerboard of tree and grass.

Implemented a basic selection system, letting you click on a tile, so now to so all stuff to do.

Things are going well,

The 10 second turn system is in place, and you have that long to use each Units movement / turn points before they reset.

Have two units, but the settler has a lot of work TODO, the explorer is fundamentally working. It can move 2 squares per turn and sees an equal amount through the fog of war. Terrain doesn’t bother him so far. Settler is slower and see less but can settle a colony that will be the main focus of the game.

The basic fog of war system is working, though there is an off by half issue with the bottom right at the moment.

Even though feeling ill, really enjoying LD this time :O

Piccy of progress so far

It’s Sunday Morning here in the UK and I’ve been up and getting some mechanics in for a little while today.

The game is fleshing out nicely, the plot and complex storyline is that you are germ (the white ones) and you want to take over your little world. There are EVIL red, green and blue germs that are polluting the world and must be destroying (and eaten). A variant of Conway’s Game of Life runs the world (its a slightly modified QuadLife colour variant to be precise), but where your user controlled units don’t nessecarily follow the normal rules, allowing you (in theory) to control the board and win the game.

There isn’t actually a win condition, I leave it to the player to decide when its white enough to claim victory (due to Game of Life rules, its never static or fully white, so complex to decide in many cases…)

The 10 seconds refers to the spawn time, where a colony (a settled settler) an emit a new unit, if its had enough food, this is the next thing to TODO.

Twitch is http://www.twitch.tv/deanocalver

And screenshoot is below (more interesting in motion + needs some sprites…)

I’m pretty happy with the mechanics now, so I’m now going to pretty it up and tune it (though likely I then want to change some of the rules…)

I dropped the fog of war it didn’t add anything and make it much more random feeling than actually strategy.

For anybody who wants to play right now its at LD27 – 10 Second Alpha, be warned that without me writing up the rules its doesn’t make much sense and before I write then up I need to fix a few thing.

Mid Game

10 Second Germification

The game is a variant of Conway’s Game of Life, where you can try and win victory for your germs (the pinky/purple dudes). Its a turn based game, where you can move your units (Queen, Farmer and Slimer) around via mouse (click on the unit and then where you want to go), Queens and Farmers can settle down and then breed germs and try to influence the rules of Game of Life. Queens breed 8 purple germs, whereas farms breed some red, green or blue germs (for food).

Every 10 seconds a breed cycle occurs, whereas the board evolves every second.

Thats pretty much all there is to it, but its quite hypotic and damn hard to win (there is no formal win condition, just controlling most of the board).

I pretty much sure that no-one will know how to play it, its more of a Game Of Life Toy than a game but anyway its done and submitted!

A quick summary I did for a friend was pretty much

“You start with a queen, settle her down (click on her and menu will appear to the right) when she has enough food, breed farmers or slimers or another queen see if you can make it more purple than red, green or blue”

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=4322

Think a dose of enforced game design / making discipline will do my head good at the moment, which is in a literal spin unable to do anything as it keeps changing its mind. LudumDare 30 should provide enough panic to get it into order due to pure panic!

Its possible I might not use it but this is my C++ engine and codebase so if I do, I’m not breaking da rules cos its already open sourced and ready to go

https://bitbucket.org/DeanoC/yolk

I’m usually really bad at Ludum Dare, too slow and spend too long on things but this time I will succeed!!!

Deano

Had some stuff to sort out this morning, to leave me ready for Ludum Dare 30 (i’m in the UK btw). That also gave me time to work out an idea, get some rough broad strokes design ready to go. Just starting (I changed some of boost config the other day and had the fun of getting my engine to find it as a lovely starter to my work.

Its a Me! Deano

The design is the bottom half of the page, no 1000 page design docs for Ludum Dare! And of course a TODO list (and yes my hand writing is that bad!) The quick synopsis of the game design is solar system colonisation and how each colony on different worlds are connected due to requirements each one has and what they can provide.

I have a number of real-life things to do, as just recently moved so even fewer hours to do it but I’m in the compo!

Platform is Unity 5.X

Two button is the theme I plan to use, will see if can incorporate Growing as well.

Now some more sleep to think on the themes (I’m in Copenhagen so the announcement is early morning here), and the off to IKEA. After that I shall start.

Wish me luck!

I’m progressing slower than liked but isn’t that always the way for a Ludum Dare, haven’t got much to show but lots of the underlying ideas and code structures are in place.

I’ve always like the ‘Game of Life’ style mechanics, I’ve even done something around it on a previous Ludum Dare. The Growth theme seem to fit it perfectly, however I’m not following strict Cellular Automata rules, just the essence. I not sure the Two Button Control theme will make it in, I’m going to try but will see once the more game play part of it rather than the simulations and growth rules are being worked on.

Some lessons I never learn, should have sorted out my dev environment better before starting. Things like keyboard, and screens suddenly getting annoying waste a fair bit of time. Not yet used to twitching, to do it well I think you need to have setup your work environment for OBS. I had it on a laptop and so sometimes forgetting that when you flick over to check email, chat on slat etc. that is also shown. What I’d really like is to have it focus on a few chosen windows and show whichever one is currently active.

A migraine style headache has stolen a few hours, as needed to huddle in the dark for a bit and don’t think it will be a wise idea to push the midnight oil, but thats fine. One of the things thats always important to remember about Ludum Dare, is that it isn’t about working  48/72 hours non-stop filled on pizza and red bull, its to try something playable and hopefully fun and interesting. If you are up to it, doing the ‘extreme’ Ludum Dare can be fun, its an experience doing that kind of crunch, however its not required. I’ve done enough crunch for games to last me a lifetime and whilst enjoyable, my general health and life are beyond that.

So i’ll stick to a more sedate, less extreme version of Ludum Dare 😀

I’ll be back tomorrow with some more slack and hopefully more progress.

So my 2nd day of the compo, finished with an game (ish).

After losing much more time than I wanted to RL (I only start back on LD at 4:30pm), I managed to get something. Its not really a game, more a toy/sim (my second LD that I’d say ended up like that I blame my love of the old Sim World).

It needs more tuning, simulation type games often have very brittle parameters. So I just had enough time to get something, but I’m sure there are more ‘fun’ interesting numbers to plug in. I actually think it might be fun to let you changes some of the parameter as a part of the game.

There are only two species in the current game, but it supports more. The two are also cookie cutters with basically the same rules just different parameters. There are a lot of rules that could be added to make more interesting species and therefore behaviour.

The block aesthetic  is purely an artifact of time, I’d love to replace it with some lovely procedural plants, flowering etc. But wasn’t a battle to fight in a 2 day compo. There is a serious lack of feedback, no ‘watering’ particles or letting you know the state of each block (can reproduce, dying, fully grown etc.)

Anyway I’m pretty happy with it as a prototype, there enough there that I could see if being the basis of something prettier, more fun et.

Have a play, chill out and let me know.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=4322