Can I call blowing off the start of Ludum Dare to go camping last night research if I make a marshmallow roasting simulator?

As it’s already 9AM here it’s time to decide on a theme and start getting some work done. Zen garden: I choose you!

It’s a rake! Threw a quick model together in Silo 2. The playing field is now being generated and the rake is controllable with the arrow keys. The general idea is that the player will have to rake pretty lines into his/her zen garden, but rocks will periodically fall from the sky and ruin the design. I’ll use some metric (probably whether lines are continuous or not) to measure the “beautifullness” (ha) of the garden and impose a time limit in which the garden has to be returned to a particular level of “beauty” while constantly adjusting the design to accommodate new rocks.

Things are coming along nicely! I had some issues with CrazyBump deciding it didn’t like Windows 8, so I had to switch back and forth between the OSX laptop and my PC. Next up will be getting the angled textures in when you turn corners and then starting to drop some rocks and prototype some actual gameplay.

Angled raking is in, although the textures need some work! All the textures are currently placeholders anyway, so I’ll leave this to polish up later.

Who put those rocks in my garden? Grr…

No visual updates, but I’ve replaced the original keyboard controls with proper mouse controls. Much more intuitive!

Swapped out some placeholder art and added a bit of eye candy to help my motivation.

More graphics work, added different stone sizes, reworked mouse input to make it feel more responsive, fixed a tonne of bugs and lots of other behind the scenes work.

My wonderful fiance made bangers & mash with applewood smoked chicken sausage, so a brief celebration / break was necessary.

Nothing much to show. The game is mostly complete, I just need to finish the scoring mechanism and spend tomorrow polishing & tidying. Time for some sleep!

Slept in a little later than I meant to, but I’m back at it in a semi-refreshed state. 😀

The game is now winnable! The object of the game is to cover the entire board with one or more complete closed loops with your rake. I’m into polishing off little details with lots of time to spare. Since the last update I’ve added:

• the actual logic to detect when the board is in a winning state (the most complicated bit of the whole project)
• highlighting of completed loops
• many tweaks to the placement of the stones

There’s also some basic randomly generated music and a nice gong sound when you complete a puzzle. Recording sound effects is always my favorite part, as banging pots and pans is just.. fun!

All that’s left is the main menu and some sort of tutorial, then as much tweaking / polishing as I can cram in before the deadline.

Hope everyone else is having as much fun as I am!

Menu screen mostly complete. Almost there!

Last post before submission, I swear! In typical fashion, I’m feeling the need to polish until the last minute, but the game is 100% done now.

All of the major bugs are now squashed, help content is in place, graphics have been tweaked about as far as I want to take them, all sounds are in place with levels adjusted, etc.. and controls have been completely rewritten since my last update. I’m FINALLY happy enough with the controls to call this done.

Should be doing a final build + submit in the next hour or so with a little time to spare!

That’s all folks!

Just submitted the final build with half an hour to spare. There are lots of things I would have liked to have done, but I finished all the major items and am quite pleased on the whole.

You can play Zenbox online here or download it for Windows or OSX.

I’m a bit late, due to various outside obligations, but I’m finally sitting down to try to get some work done.

Luckily, I had already been kicking an idea around this week which fits perfectly with the theme and should be simple to implement. Which is GOOD, because not only am I starting a day late, but I’m delving into unknown territory and using pygame as my engine, to accomplish a secondary goal of practicing a bit of python this weekend.

Wish me luck!

The PyGame installer initially gave me an error message about requiring System Python 2.7, which is odd, as OSX includes a built in Python 2.7.X. After a bit of debugging, the solution was to install the latest Python 2.X from python.org: http://python.org/download/.

FYI, when trying to get pygame running under OSX, avoid the 32/64 bit bundle installer on python.org as it has some issues involving paths. I also had to delete and reinstall pygame after reinstalling python.

I now have a window and a simple game loop!

The delicious Russian Imperial Stout we’re enjoying may either be helping or hindering my progress, only time will tell.

Believe it or not, this is progress!

I’ve started making some actual project after being distracted by various things for most of the evening.

I know it doesn’t look like much, but there’s a real game here, I swear!

At this point I have logic to generate an arbitrary number of shapes of random sizes, in random positions which don’t ever overlap each other. One tricky bit was generating square which fit within a circle of a given radius so I can stick with circle collision for all shapes.

Some actual gameplay will come next, but that might have to wait until the morning. We’ll see how much longer I can stay awake!