Well I actually don’t have much time this weekend and I didn’t plan at all in participating. Needless to say, it’s my first LD, but maybe I can still put something together, who knows? 😀

On top of this all I’m not in my comfy apartment with my nice setup, but instead I’m just here with my notebook and waaaay too slow mouse, but I bet it’s still a somewhat better setup than many others have.

I’ll be mainly using C++ and SFML, additionally I’ll get back to Box2D if my simple physics stuff is starting to eat away too much time and for the base code I might partially use some of my SmallGameEngine.
I actually more or less left Visual Studio due to their bad support of C++11, although they’ve now already released an update with some more features and simply put it has still one of the best and most powerful debuggers, which could get very, very handy and the code parsing is often also quite nice. So yes I’ll be using Visual Studio 2012 (although the new “design” really sucks).
For graphics I’ll probably play around with all sorts of stuff, mostly because I’m really bad at it and like some features of editor X better than how it’s done in editor Y.
I’m not even sure if there will be time for audio stuff, but if so, I’ll most certain use sfxr, since it gives you nice sound effects very quickly!

Let’s see how this ride will end!

So I’ve slept a bit, since I’m in the UTC+1 timezone and didn’t wanted to wait till 3 am. At 5 or 6 am I quickly looked on my phone what the theme would be and went back to bed. I know, I know, one should not sleep during a LD, specially if time is short.
Anyways gotten up, compiled SFML and started programming. At the moment there is only the basic system ready to go, with a small StateManager for IntroState, MenuState and GameState, but that’s the fun and easy part, the more difficult one is still ahead with 1 d and 15 h left. Luckily I think to have found the cause of the constant crashes of VS 2012, it was a plugin that should replace the ugly and colorless icons; deactivated it and haven’t had a crash since then.

For the game idea I’m not 100% certain if I’ll go with a platformer game, where you’re the villain stealing all the nice Christmas presents or if I should keep thinking about something more innovative…

Anyways will be back later, hopefully with some art/screenshot/whatever. 😀

So here am I again, after too many hours of not too much productive work… Mostly spend on drawing my tiles, which still look quite bad. Why can’t I just be a good artist next to being a programmer? Anyways here enjoy:

\o/

I’m currently trying to get the collision system working. The white rectangle will in the future also get a texture which should represent the player, but I guess it will take a while till everything is there. Also I know already that I’ll be failing hard at creating some character. I mean my tiles are already not too nice and then I should go and make a nice character?

I hope you get what I’m kind of copying/referencing with my tiles. 😉

— Back to work or something like that…

I went into the competition, because I’ve always wanted to do one, but I saw it only a few hours before it started and wasn’t prepared for it at all. So I’ve been busy the whole Sunday and don’t see a chance in finishing simple half of what I’ve had in mind with in 6 h.

But I’m not really sad/depressed/down/etc. for multiple reasons:

• I already kind of knew, that I won’t have the time to finish it.
• I had quite fun while writing the base code.
• I’ve seen some weaknesses of mine and will try to improve them in the future.
• I had a great weekend apart from doing only one half of the LD.

Congrats to everyone who already finished or will finish their game and happy voting!

Tags: unsuccessful

A long time ago I’ve tried to participate but due to time constraints I never finished the game. The next few Ludum Dares were always on a bad date, but surprisingly this weekend it looks like that I’ve the whole weekend for myself!

As usual I’ll be using C++ and SFML. But since starting from scratch can be quite time consuming I’ll be cooking up some SmallGameFramework before the Compo starts and then during the Jam build on top of that. Join me while I’m streaming the whole process of building the SmallGameFramework: YouTube Live Stream

My main tools for now will be:

• CLion – First time actually using it!
• CMake
• MinGW-w64 compiler

From time to time, I’ll certainly make use of:

• Notepad++
• PhotoFiltre  7

In addition to SFML, I might make use of:

• Thor

If you want to stay in touch with my adventure, make sure to checkout:

• Twitter: @DarkCisum
• YouTube: MyGateNet
• Twitch: eXpl0it3r
• GitHub: eXpl0it3r
• Blog: http://dev.my-gate.net/

Tags: C++, CMake, sfml

The compo has started and surprisingly the theme has turned out to be rather interesting: “An Unconventional Weapon”

Unfortunately my SmallGameFramework didn’t fully make it in time for LD32, but lets “make games and not engines” and maybe I’ll get the chance to refactor out some stuff.

All I need now is an idea that uses the theme in some way and I’ll have to decide on a genre. For now however it means to take a nap and look at things with fresh eyes!

Tags: compo, sleep

After some good and long-ish sleep I’m back at it again. Here’s a picture of my workspace:

Regarding ideas, I’m still a bit on the fence about it. One of the things that came to my mind which seemed reasonably interesting was to use music as an unconventional weapon. However in which way that should be implemented is still unclear. I guess, I’ll think about it more over lunch.

Tags: lunch, music, photo, workspace

Come and watch me do silly things, ehrm I mean develop my Ludum Dare entry!

Tags: livestream, youtube

After a few difficulties and “hard” math problems, I finally got the synth working and it plays perfect sine ways at any frequency you want:

Challenge: At what frequency does the sound above play? 😉

I’m now going to implement the other wave forms: saw-tooth, triangle, square

Wish me luck!

Tags: sinus, sound, synth

Yes, I’m still alive! What an achievement or so… 😀

After the last post I’ve wasted a lot of time figuring out how to get a basic triangle wave form only to realize after an hour or two, that a triangle wave form is just the absolute value of the saw-tooth wave form… At least it didn’t take me very long to understand that the square wave form is just the sign of the normal sine wave form.

After having spent so much time on this audio bit, I finally go over to start some magic with tiles and here’s the result:

Uhm yes, very boring and hurts too much if you look at it for too long, but one has to start somewhere, right? 😉

Also it amazes me that I’ve been streaming for the past 9.5h!

Tags: livestream, tiles, waveforms

I feel, I’ve made quite a bit of progression over the past few hours. Sure others might have been more productive, but it really doesn’t matter. 😀

The collision system seems to work fine so far. It’s the most simplest collision system ever where you just move from one tile to another. I’ll first go with this and if there’s enough time (*joke joke*) I might change things around a bit – or if the game play feels really dull.

Anyways my big achievement for this evening I think was some fancy pixel art. I’m not really good at art, but so far it doesn’t even look that horrible.

I used an older version of Aseprite, back when it was still free. It seems like a great software and $10 is really not much, however since I don’t intent to create a lot of pixel art in the future, I currently don’t see why I should buy it. 😉

I already look forward to creating more frames tomorrow for the different actions!

After 12.5 hours of non-stop streaming I’m going to get some sleep. 24h left, stay tuned and see you tomorrow!

Tags: 12.5h, ASEPRITE, blinking, pixelart, sleep

While doing other stuff in the morning I’ve spent some time at noon to setup my webcam, so that you can actually see me in the live stream. I think it adds a lot more personality to a stream and makes the boring wall of code often a bit more interesting. While using the built-in webcam of my notebook was very easy when I actually streamed from my notebook, it’s a whole other story when we talk about streaming from my new and shiny desktop PC while still using my notebook’s webcam.

Luckily technology is awesome and can help us out here – though I’ve to say that it’s a shame that there aren’t a lot more free solutions to certain things. Like a lot of the protocols are open and anyone could potentially implement them and there often are quite a few applications that can work kind of with it, but regarding usability, most application that are really simple and great cost money.

Anyways lets get back to the awesomeness. First I tried the video streaming that is built into VLC and it kind of worked, but it had odd glitches and hit the limits of my notebooks CPU. So I thought why not stream the webcam feed with Open Broadcaster Software, and so I did. However since OBS only supports the RTMP protocol, I had to setup an RTMP server on my desktop. Luckily Google is still a thing and I found the MonaServer in no time.

So here’s the final streaming setup:

Just come and see for yourself:

Tags: livestream, MonaServer, OBS, technology, VLC, webcam

I just posted a summary of the whole event on my development blog and but wanted to post my conclusion here as well.

Having a somewhat finished framework ready to go really help a lot in the development since I could immediately jump in and didn’t have to bother with a lot of the boilerplate code. I really hope to get this small framework a bit expanded so things will end up even easier and less hack-ish to code, because while writing a framework you can take your time to design things properly, I did not have that time during the Compo which ended up in a lot of code repetition.

While nobody will watch someone code or sit around for hours on end, I still like to stream stuff, because it kind of forces me to keep working on it and not start some video game or randomly browse the internet. In addition to that it gives some nice conversations from time to time and you feel less as a solo developer. I just hope to get a better solution for the webcam, since I feel webcams make streams a lot more interesting.

It took a lot of time, but in the end it was really nice to have something finished and ready to be voted on.

See you next round, maybe?

Tags: conclusion, post-compo, post-mortem, tips

It’s been five Ludum Dare Jams with SynthGuitar since I last participated and here we are again. I made sure that the weekend is free to focus all the time on Ludum Dare. Let’s begin!

The chosen topic is: One room

As per usual the first idea that pops into my head is some platformer, but as the past has proven, making a platformer from scratch in the given time frame is quite tricky, especially since I’ve never implemented a fully working platformer. Not putting the idea right off, but maybe there are more interesting things to go after.

The plan right now is to first get some sleep and in the morning brainstorm a bit in what ways “room” can be interpreted and how far one can stretch the definition of “one”.

Here’s a cute dog picture just because dogs are awesome!

Get in touch with me on Twitter.
Don’t miss the streams on Twitch and Livecoding.tv tomorrow!

Tags: brainstorming, dogs, livecoding, platformer, theme, twitch, twitter

Here’s a list of things I’m be using for the 37th Ludum Dare Jam! I’ll make sure to keep updating this list during the jam.

Libraries

• SFML – Simple and Fast Multimedia Library
• Thor – Extends SFML in some ways
• JSON for Modern C++ – Awesome library to read JSON files
• SmallGameFramework – My small base framework

Programming Tools

• C++ – The language
• CLion – JetBrains’ C++ IDE
• CMake – Meta build system
• MinGW-w64 – Compiler

Audio Tools

• Bfxr – Sound effects generator
• REAPER – Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)
• cgMusic – Music generator
• Synth1 – Free VST synthesizer

Image Tools

• PhotoFiltre – Free and simple image editing tool

Other Tools

• cmder – Awesome command line replacement
• Git – The version control system

Streaming Tools

• OBS Studio – Streaming software
• Nginx – Streaming proxy
• StreamPro.io – Twitch overlay
• DroidCam – Capturing the Android camera feed

Tags: C++, magic, nginx, OBS, sfml, sfxr, technology, tools

Browsing through all the blog posts on Ludum Dare makes me realize just how slow I am at creating anything useful. Sure, I haven’t picked the easiest path with creating a game from scratch (except my SmallGameFramework) in C++. At the same time it can be motivational to see what other people have already done.

I’ve been streaming on Twitch and Livecoding.tv for the past 6h and all I can show right now is a moving sprite and even with that, the movement isn’t really where I want it to be. Additionally I think the movement code needs to be changed again, because when I have a collision system in place, I’ll have to be able to influence the movement, but maybe there’s another way around it.

My current idea is to have some sort of a puzzle game – not very original – where you have to solve some puzzles to leave the room. Currently I have no idea how I’ll get the art done, but I know some people that might be able to help out. But first I need to actually get some sort of game running, otherwise there’s no point in creating art for it.

One thing on my ToDo list for the next few hours is to also quickly go out and grab some supplies, with tomorrow being Sunday and only a few stores are open.

Let’s go into the next round of productivity!

Tags: C++, frustration, Livecodgin, sfml, streaming, twitch

So after I didn’t get anything really done yesterday, I decided to skip streaming and started thinking about a different idea that I’ve since been working on. Not fully sure how it will end up, but I at least feel better about this plan than I felt during the hours and hours of stream where I didn’t progress at all.

I’ll make sure to report back once I feel more comfortable that this idea is actually doable. For now, back to “art” creation.

Tags: art, changing, distraction, secret, stream

I actually wanted to write more blog posts, but then I invested all the time into actually finishing the game, which I think was the better way to go. That being said, I brought the game to a finished stage and made a release for the Ludum Dare Jam submission.

Ludum Dare Jam: Submission / Windows Binary / Source Code

If you have seen any parts of the livestream you might be a bit surprised, but as mentioned in the previous post, I changed things around and went with a point-and-click puzzle game. One of the main issues I have when building a game is that I’m really bad at creating any kind of usable art. And when I get something somewhat nice looking, it will have taken me multiple hours.

By now I don’t even really remember how I got the idea, but I suddenly thought of taking pictures of my own room and “stylizing” them to look kind of pixel-art like. The additional advantage of moving around some furniture was that I could also clean up parts of my room. The end result has a wide range. Some screens look a lot like drawn pixel art, while others still contain a lot of detail. I find it amazing how a few pixels aligned properly already make things recognizable. One thing I probably should have tried, is to reduce the used color palette. That way I’d have managed to drop quite a bit of information detail, possibly making it seem more drawn rather than a photo.

The game is now finished, but it’s very short and I still have some ideas in my head what puzzles I could add, but even more importantly how I could make it work better code-wise. A lot of the game is really just defined in one JSON file and I think, I could expand that one even more, allowing for really quick expanding of the game work and puzzles. We’ll see when I get the time.

I hope you’ll enjoy playing my game and don’t forget to rate my game!

Tags: finished, game, one room, pixel art, point-and-click, postmortem, puzzle

I've participated in a handful of jams by now and it has always been a lot of fun. Generally I've approached jams always by just opening my IDE of choice and hacking away some C++ code with SFML. More often than not, this lead to having no clear vision of what I actually want to achieve, which again lead to missing code structures and thus poor code quality. Plus since I spend pretty much all the time on coding, I didn't have time to put some more work into the programmer art and music.

For LD #39 I'm trying a different approach by starting out more with the art and sound part, making a clear plan for the coding side. The risk here is that the coding part does require a lot of time and since it's more in the second half/near the end, I might not making it. But at least I'll hopefully have some nice screenshots of programmer art stuff to show.

So far I've done some brain storming around the term power.

As usual the first ideas all involved some platformer and collecting things. I really don't know why my brain is so wired for all these platformer ideas, then again I do really like playing some neat platformer.
But after some thinking I decided to go with top down 2D puzzle/exploring gaming. For some reason the ROBOT games series came to my mind. I've played those games for many, many hours even if I never really understood all the mechanics.

Since I'm a big sci-fi fan, I decided to put the game into space and so far decided on some layout of two bands of 2x5 rooms and an additional 3x3 room for the generator/engine. Here are my initial notes for it.

Now the overall goal is to collect fusion pallets from around the space station to power the fusion generator in the center of the station. But to get there you also have to collect some key cards to open doors and fight some form of mobs. Your suit acts as shield and makes you move faster, but it relies on energy as well, so every now and then you'll have to collect some additional power cells or recharge you at one of the few charging stations.

For inspirational purposes and to maybe get some feel for the color palettes and how things might shape, I've quickly put together a small mood board.

The next steps will be to create most of the tile images and design different rooms. So far I've picked out various tools to help me achieve this. Some of which are quite new to me, while I'm more familiar with others.

Image tools

• paint.net
• Pyxel Edit
• Tilemancer
• Tiled
• Photofiltre

Sound tools

• Bfxr
• REAPER

Dev tools

• Visual Studio 2017
• Notepad++

Utilities

• Cmder
• ChronoLapse
• 7zip

Libraries

• SFML
• Thor
• Selba Ward
• tmxlite
• JSON for Modern C++

I'll update things as I go.

As usual when I don't reserve the weekend, I'll end up being busy with family stuff, so I didn't get to really invest much time into it. But as mentioned the time I did have, I at least invested into art and not the programming.

The best part however is that I got to learn Pyxel Edit. I've got it not long ago with some Humble Bundle and been meaning to try it out. After watch some short video tutorials I got the hang of it. The tiling feature is just awesome and while I only did a short animation, it certainly felt solid.

I've also sat down and create two short tracks. It could be better, but I feel they are good enough for some game jam music. :wink:

https://soundcloud.com/darkcisum/track-01-ludum-dare-39

https://soundcloud.com/darkcisum/track-02-ludum-dare-39

Even though the jam itself is still on going, I unfortunately have other things to take care of and thus won't be able to finish the game. Maybe I'll use the assets or similar at one point. Having gotten used to Pyxel Edit quite a bit, I'm thinking about creating some small library to read the exported formats for future uses.