Hi!
Well several hours in and all I have to show so far is a crummy map that you can click on to select different countries. I’m using Java because my game is going to have a lot of GUI stuff going on and I like Java’s Swing library.
Here’s a fascinating screenshot:
Hmmmm. Well my game still looks exactly the same as the last screenshot. Not that I haven’t been working on the code underneath, mind. But here’s a nuke explosion sprite that I just finished:
I’m pretty proud of it 😀
Hopefully I’ll get some countries blowing up soon…
Ok well I foolishly decided to sleep last night so now I’m way behind! But here’s a screenshot of a nuclear war in progress:
Hopefully the chain reaction aspect of the game is becoming apparent now 😉
The animation gets a little jerky when there’s a lot being drawn at once – I’ll have to try and do something about that if I get time – but getting the damn gameplay in place on time is going to be hard enough at this rate.
Well I’ve got this thing to the stage where it does everything that I had planned out in my head at the start. The trouble is that I hadn’t fully thought through all of the rules of the game before I started and now I’m struggling to throw in rules here and there to try and warp it into something even remotely playable as a turn based strategy game.
Here’s a screenshot showing the player markers and some enemy icons. These indicate that the selected nation regards those nations as enemies.
I’m going to try and hack in some more rules in the next couple of hours or so but I’m not hoping for much at this stage. It works – its just not very fun to play.
I’m done. Final post here.
The game’s name is Catalyst, as the game revolves around triggering a nuclear war. There’s not much to it. Its very basic – just a 2-player human vs human mode. Not to mention the fact that the gameplay is very broken – its easy to get into stupid stalemate scenarios and so on and most of the time feels pointless. BUT the nuke explosions are pretty! Wahey!
The chain reaction part of the game is the way that missile attacks trigger off counter-attacks against other nations who then attack other nations etc etc.
Tools used:
Here’s my final screenshot:
And here’s a link to download the game, complete with source:
Tags: final
One last thing that I forgot to add to the “tools used” list: I used a nifty little program called JSmooth to generate the windows executable to start the JVM. It just acts as a nice wrapper for java programs so that they can be started with a simple exe. I think it also tells you where to download the runtime if it doesn’t detect it. Pretty damn handy really.
Good morning everyone. “Tower”, eh. Hmm. I’ve got two ideas in mind at the moment; the first is a simple platform game and the second is more of a strategic defend-the-tower kind of affair. I think for the sake of keeping it simple I’m going to have to go with the platformer.
My weapons of choice are:
and if I have time,
This was my incredible breakfast of porriage (made with water because somebody used the last of the milk)
Tags: foodphoto
This was my lunch a couple of hours ago:
An out-of-focus cheese and onion toastie!
There’s nothing to show with the game yet. I’ve been messing about trying to get a damn fullscreen window open. I may actually start making the game soon. I should probably have used a game library to save all this time *eyeroll*
Tags: foodphoto
First, stir fry:
As far as the game goes, I only have this screenshot to show:
Its a pretty much completely disfunctional tilemap and player sprite. You’ll notice the glaring pink instead of actual transparency, the missing rows of tiles on the right and bottom, and even the fps counter is wrong, seeing as the max should be 60. If this picture was moving you’d also see the player sprite move in the opposite direction to the left and right keys, with the same fixed graphic, while floating slowly down the screen like a feather and completely failing to collide with the floor on the way.
But as we all know, the best code always gets written at 3am, so I’m hoping I can still turn this thing around.
Well I’ve managed to get the platform movement working and incorporated a nifty pseudo-3d effect with the tilemap, but I have a lot of work to do tomorrow. I’m going to call it a day and get some rest as I can barely keep my eyes open right now! A people seem to have had the same idea as me – a rotating platform game based around a tower. I guess great minds think alike 
Golden toasted flakes of corn drenched in ice-cold milk!
The player can now actually get hurt on spikes and acid. I just realised how much like Lemmings Revolution this is starting to look… I’m going to have to think about doing some level building now.
Food earlier was mushroom soup:
Phew!
Gotta get this post written fast.. uh here goes.
My final screenshot:
And link to the zip:
Tags: final
Now that I’ve got the damn thing uploaded and tagged, I can write a bit more about it.
I managed to get a reasonable amount of level built, although I think some of the later parts may be questionable in their do-able-ness as I didn’t have a whole lot of time to test. Sadly I didn’t leave myself enough time to add sounds or music or even a proper ending really. If I find time to work on it some more afterwards those are definately highest on the to-do list. Some pickups and enemies would be good too. And some of the platform physics needs some tweaking.
All-in-all I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. While its very rough around the edges I had a lot of fun making it and it did turn out pretty much how I’d visualised it on saturday morning. In particular I’m quite proud of the title screen as its the first time I’ve really tried to paint in Gimp in that way.
There’s more I want to say about the game but I’m finding it hard to stay awake right now so it will have to wait until tomorrow.
Well done to all who entered – I can’t wait to start playing some of these 😀
I just realised that none of the traps are functional in my final entry – damn! I commented them out of the code at the last minute to test the final section of the game, and forgot to put them back in afterwards. Ugh, frustration.
Well, obviously it’ll be judged based on the no-trap version, but here’s a version with working traps anyway for anyone who wants to compare:
They actually make the game a hell of a lot more punishing, but that was how it was intended >:)
Well I think I’m loooong overdue a status update on my entry, so here I go with my first post for LD13.
Screenshot:
I’m using python and pyGame this time, with other tools of choice including the Eclipse IDE, Graphics Gale and GIMP.
I was hoping to get some kind of Grand-Theft-Auto-style engine working for my game, but I think I’ll have to pick up the pace if I’m going to get there. My game currently consists of a red car driving around in a fields full of red dots, with some questionable from-scratch-written physics. I hope to get some actual roads in there soon
Well I’m going to call it a day and pick things up again tomorrow. I’m way behind but I know exactly what I’ve got to get cracking on with tomorrow morning. Here’s a shot of the current version:
There are some pavement tiles now! The reason its taking so long is because I had a crazy idea to generate a tile-based city procedurally on the fly, so currently my time is taken up with getting that to work. Here’s one of the many debug image dumps I’ve made of the tile map:
Its actually just a snapshot of part of the map, which is technically infinite in size. Each pixel is a 4×4 block of tiles. As you can see, all I’m generating procedurally so far is the fact that there’s more pavement the closer to the centre of the city you get. There aren’t any roads yet (note to self: must actually get the damn ROADS in at some point…). The red and yellow pixels in a grid which you might just be able to make out – they’re marking the areas that the map is broken up into. The idea is that the game only needs to hold the player’s current area and the 8 surrounding areas in memory at the same time, allowing me to have an infinite map.
So, on tomorrow I’ve got my work cut out for me. Procedural roads… collisions… traffic?!… I may have to revise my plan if I’m going to get something finished on time.
By the way, the other entries are looking totally awesome. I can’t wait to play them all!
I’m giving up, I’m afraid. My game just wasn’t going anywhere. I’ll be writing a full post-mortem at some point in the near future, but it boils down to the fact that I bit off more than I could chew with the decision to try and create a city procedurally.
This is a shot of it in its final state:
Very much as it was this morning – just a car in a field full of random road segments and paving flags.
And here’s a download link in case anyone’s interested. Source included of course.
Oh well – I’ll keep it simple next time
Good morning! Well I guess this is a pretty late start even for us GMT’ers…
“Advancing Wall of Doom”?!
Last night when “Yo Dawg” was in the top 5, I started planning for the worst case scenario and actually came up with a pretty good idea for it – some kind of Warioware mini-game affair where our protagonist must race against the clock to make a game with a “Yo Dawg” theme and halfway through realises that he can make a game about making a game about making a game about…
But anyway, I sort of have an idea for the Advancing Wall theme. I’m about to start scribbling on paper and flesh out the design.
So, here are my weapons of choice this time around:
