I will be using an eclectic mix of modern and older tech.

Pre-contest updates:

ms paint, gimp, scanner, writing instruments, paper, iconfu.com, pixlr.com

flex, java, mysql, html

google for syntax as needed (fully annotated in my source)

audacity, anvil, sfxr, musagi, algomusic, soundhelix

I will be making an online game of some kind.  I probably wont be able to commit as much time as some people, but hopefully my game will make up for it with oh-so-crappy charm.  I will try to adhere strictly to 100% from scratch (i.e. no frameworks, pre-made game maker engine stuff), so my game may look “bad” haha.  we’ll see.. if i can be creative enough, it should still be a worthwhile play. I’m trying not to make this a reputation-on-the-line thing, (I know what some might assume I could do with 100% focus), just something for fun to see what happens.

are you fired up? I am. It is really hard not to try to think ahead to what I might do, but that makes it way more exciting which I will use to help me bust this thing out. The general strategy I will use is what I know lets me build the absolute fastest based on my vast experience:
1. few drawings of the concept
2. bust out prototypes in qb64
3. bust out some images in gimp/paint
4. dump it all together probably into flex
5. repeat from step 2 for each add’l feature i can add in the time remaining

Smores attack.  You are a marshmallow and you have to throw the chocolates at each other to make them blow up so you don’t get made into a smore.  The floor is graham cracker and the background is supposed to evoke a campfire.

Smores attack is finally in progress after a day of mostly life delays, and with coding almost entirely wrapped up in cobbling together a simple way to handle my graphics in a java applet. That part is finally working, leaving only the game guts, which i should be able to do pretty quick. I can see why so many people use a code library, a framework, or “not java” haha.

Yeah, this is real.  Java applet screenshot, with moving player and enemies, as close to from scratch as you could get.  The movement is not super fluid, but the graphics do NOT flicker, and the enemies collide with each other and pursue the player.  Now I just have to make it so you can pick them up and throw them at each other, shouldn’t be too bad to get something reasonably close to that.  The time lapse video of me making this is pretty cool, even if the game itself is simple, even building this with the time I really had available is no joke!

I am pretty happy with how Smores Attack came out in the end, although it is not as fully featured as I had hoped.  With my first LD done, now I understand the basic issues I am likely to face making an applet game.  I have made a bunch of games before, but I hadn’t made a sprite-based, flash-looking applet game in a while, and dealing with the initial graphics setup in Java took the vast majority of my time, effort, and motivation to get through.  I had to throw away 2-3 attempts at getting the sprites to render correctly, but finally I achieved success. 

Once I had that done, making the game itself was pretty easy and fun.  I can see why so many people start with frameworks now, although I think it is really rewarding to not start with one because then my game doesn’t have all this other overhead that it doesn’t need (I’m sure it’s not as optimized as I could make it anyhow, but still it’s pretty small for what it is).  The background color change was the smartest move… the characters really pop off the screen with the blue background vs. red.  My time lapse shows the heavy editing necessary to draw the animations, many of which I didn’t have time to implement. 

time lapse video

I’ll try to make a more serious effort this go-around in honor of Tron Legacy, which hopefully will help grow another generation of game developers the way that Tron did for my generation.

Idea done, Got a clean screenshot of progress on game itself. Have timelapse as well for the final, its sweet.

Basic gameplay done, now I’m working on setting the data/etc so that the game is winnable but not too easy.

I couldn’t help but do this early as I was struck by the inspiration and couldn’t let the idea get away from me before the contest “officially” started.  I made a few decisions early:  worst language i could use to make a game = javascript.  Worst interface = buttons only.   Worst genre = zork type games, with random results only, meaning nothing you pick matters.  I added even more frustration by making the actions you can pick totally arbitrary, generic, and meaningless, reducing it to just “do something”.  This game incorporates just about everything I hate about the games that I hate into one, with the exception of the game that has a lousy ending following a massive amount of gameplay.

http://devinmoore.com/worstgame.html

So I had about 3 hours to make a game from scratch, because of my crazy schedule.  After doing the keynote video with my old mac I thought I’d try an old mini D/A style game, because for one thing those games were tiny sized and should be doable pretty fast.  However, this still took a while and I was disappointed with the lack of cross-platform testing I got in (doesn’t work right on linux firefox, but works on windows firefox… wtf?  Anyhow, thanks for that Oracle.  Way to make java cross-platform compatible).  I was really happy with how the applet actually came together architecturally and how closely it matches what I wanted it to be.  Unfortunately there is one bug I found with the tornado, but I can fix that post-ld and I hope to make a suite of smallish survival games like this to help people play with the supposed “right thing to do” in various simplified survival scenarios.

A: Name of the game – pitdive

B: Description (140 chars) – dive into a never-ending pit of exploration.

C: One mockup image – see below

D: Definition of Done: (Example) 3 levels, 3 enemy types, 1 boss, music track, sfx

Done = 1 “unending” level, enemies, a boss,  weapons, sfx.

core: java applet, ascii, vertical downward scroll only when you’re “falling”, you fall until you land on something, all that is now working.  Looking real good! (for an ascii game that is)

Pitdive is looking really good… for an ascii game.  you can climb, dig out walls, falling scrolls from middle, even without any other features it is pretty compelling to mess around with at this point.

Pit dive is done in demo web mode:

http://www.devinmoore.com/pitdive/appletholder.html

It doesn’t have all the elements I initially wanted, but that’s mostly because the game took a turn in a more interesting direction once i started adding in stats.  I just thought it would be interesting to show the number of moves, digs, etc. and then I got inspired to make a score based on the total level of descent minus the amount of moves it took to get there.   This causes the game to move into way more strategy vs. just button mashing, which makes the game way more compelling.  If you blast to the end, you will have a crap score, probably a negative score.  I got as high as 150 or so trying pretty hard.  Bugs: don’t dig past the edges of the level… I didn’t finish handling this for the demo but I will fix it soon, as usual I am running low on time and I wanted to stop someplace sensible vs. having a bunch of buggy, half-implemented features.

This game is disturbing.  It is based on actual war stories I heard from my grandfather.  Could you make impossible choices in order to survive a real war?  I don’t have that much content yet, but as I can remember more by the deadline, I will add them.

The ending is deliberately anti-climactic, because the real victory is just to live and continue.

http://devinmoore.com/actualwar/devinswar.php

I am in LD 21.  I will be most likely using Java as noted in my video.

FYI, the riff I did in my video is from my new album “Tales of Arthur”.

I should be able to make something this time, I am hoping for a significantly cool game i.e. something that 1-up’s Dream Escape.

I figured this might be interesting to some people, to see how little time I project I will actually get to spend — hopefully this makes my entries make a little more sense.

1. design  Friday night max 2 hrs.  asset creation Saturday morning max 4 hrs.

2. asset creation / code development – saturday 11am-1pm, 3-5pm?

3. testing – either saturday 5-7pm and/or sunday morning 1-2 hrs.

4. release – saturday beta, sunday final for competition in morning.

Max total: design 2, development /asset creation 8, testing 4 = 14 hours.  Of course, this doesn’t count family time where I am thinking about what has to get done, just the actual max time I may be able to put hands to keyboard.

Tags: LD22

The theme is alone, so I’m not sure how closely this matches, but the folks in the chat can attest that i did this after the theme came out. It’s a side view cat vending machine with just one cat left in it. when you try to pick him up with the claw (claw game style), he moves around, making it really hard. Screenshots pending probably tomorrow.

Tags: LD22