Just a heads-up, July Mini-LD (mini LD#11) is coming up next weekend (7/24 – 7/26). Expect a “classic” format, should be a nice warm-up for August LD.

The gameplay theme is “Sandbox”. Sandbox games are about exploration and unexpected interactions. They often focus on emergent gameplay rather than scripted events, and avoid explicit goals even going so far as to omit explicit win/loss conditions. Examples range from simulators like SimCity or “toys” like the creatures in Black & White, to the non-mission-based parts of open world games like GTA. Alternatively, you can take the theme literally, and make any sort of game about sand or boxes or boxes of sand. Or really, any other interpretation of the theme that you can dream up is perfectly valid.

In addition to the gameplay theme, in keeping with the classic LD format, there’s also an “aesthetic theme”. The aesthetic theme is Cute (or Anti-Cute). As always, the aesthetic theme is COMPLETELY OPTIONAL and you are free to ignore it.

• There’s no strict start/end times, just limit yourself to 48 hours over the weekend.
• All gameplay code, art and assets must be created by you during the 48 hour period.
• You may use any tools, engines or libraries you wish (unlike regular LD which has some restrictions on allowed tools).

That’s it!  Have fun!

Well, I’ve got some kind of iso map goodness going on. what’s next? critters I guess..

Spent most of the day today at the Berkeley Kite Festival, which was fun (and a great day for it), but wasn’t conducive to getting the game done. However, it’s progressing steadily…

That might not look like much more than there was last time, but in addition to making some improvements to the map code (I can actually handle decent sized maps now), there’s a lot of behind the scenes gameplay stuff. Oh, yeah, and there’s a player.

All of the other entries look really intriguing, I can’t wait to try them out.

Well, it’s not finished but it’s close enough to be interesting. We’ve got dinner plans so I’m out of time for this weekend.

It’s kind of a freeform fantasy RPG, inspired by  MrPiglet’s fauna entry with random critters, i used PixelRobots to generate random creatures and NPCs. You wander the land, adding to the landscape as you explore it. But right now NPC’s can’t do more than just join your party, and critters just get in your way.

Update: A release build is now available:

The Wanderer (700kb)

Tags: final, pixelrobots

I finally got around to doing something I had been thinking about for a while — dumping all of my ludumdare code on a hosting site somewhere. You can find all the ld48 (and a few related contests) that I’ve participated in at:

ld48jovoc at Google Code

This has a branch for the compo versions and the post-compo versions (the trunk) of each project. Most of these are unchanged or have only minor edits (such as moving from plib to prmath).

Right now the build system needs a lot of work. About half of them build on linux, and you will need to tweak the project files a bit to build any of them on windows. As soon as I sort that out, and fix a few other things, I’ll make a release with some prebuilt binaries. But trust me, it’s not worth trying to build any of these at this point.

Non of these are finished games, they are pretty unplayable and incomplete. My favorites are BadFood, Railroad Merchant, Crossroads and The Wanderer. Which, oddly enough, also happen to be the least complicated game designs. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

The other reason I did this was in preparation for the next LD48. With this set up, I can check in code as I go, providing a more or less “live” update of my progress.We’ll see how it goes.

Also, I lost the code for my LD3 “Hannibal’s Cannibal’s”, which was not a very good game, but if anyone has a copy of the old LD3 entries, please email me.

Alright, I’m in. I’ve got a case of iced coffee drinks and a clear schedule for the weekend. Looking forward to this.

Also, I learned a really neat trick today (just in time for LD) and thought I’d share. In an earlier post during the “advancing wall” contest, I mentioned my experiment with trying to tune the gameplay using automatically reloading config files. That didn’t really work out so well, it worked but it was too much of a pain to add each new value to the config file. I think I only had one or two in the end. Waste of time.

But… Ben Garney, who inspired the  approach in the first place, commented and pointed me to this thread which discusses a really neat way to handle this.

Click the image to expand to readable size.

Basically, everywhere you put a constant that you want to tune, you can instead use a macro like _TV( 4.2 ) instead. The _TV stands for tweakable value. In a release build it does nothing, but in a debug build, it checks if the source file changed and updates automagically.  You can see a simple example of usage in the screenshot, I’m editing and saving the values in the source, and the printfs in the console reflect the changes.

I just hacked this together so it’s probably a little flaky, it’s pretty much untested.  It should work on linux as well, if you’re using gcc 4.3 or above, but I haven’t tried it yet.  I’ve added this to my ld code dump, you just need the .h and .cpp file if you want to try it, or you can probably roll your own.

Yay I have a window with a blank screen. I’ll spare you the pointless screenshot. But in reality I’m not that far behind because I spent some time working on asset munging scripts.

Also, a reminder that I’m updating my code in google code as I go. You can watch my changelog or browse the code .  Right now “beneath” is the working title for my entry but that might change. I’ll check in far more frequently than I’ll will post.

Well I thought I had a simple idea but I neglected to consider how long it would take to throw together a “quick and dirty” level editor. So instead of getting anywhere with gameplay, I spent all day on the editor.

A small level in the "editor"

Anyways.. a least that’s working pretty well now. Now to try and add some actual gameplay to this thing.

Well, I finally have decent player movement and collision. Not sure how much I’m going to get done in the next four hours and change but hopefully will have something..

I’ve changed this from a platformer into a much simpler cave-flyer. There’s not much to do in the game yet.

Well, I spent way too much time on the level editor. I didn’t really have much of an idea anyways, it was going to be a platformer, but by Sunday morning I released I was running out of time and hadn’t started the gameplay, so I switched to yet another ubiquitious cave flyer. Anyways, it didn’t turn out.

Spaceship. In a cave.

On the plus side, I did end up with a nice (if rather barebones) level editor and a bunch of code that could be the basis for a shape-based 2D engine, if I ever feel like cleaning it up.

And I had a lot of fun! Thanks to everyone on IRC for keeping me distracted and amused.

O, Irony! I spent all weekend making a spiffy level editor and didn’t have time to make an actual level. However, afterwards I did manage to put a decent level together without any changes or bugs.

If you want to try it out, replace level.xml in my entry with this one:

level.zip (Biglevel)

There’s still nothing to collect or do, but it’s a nice challenge to see if you can make it to the chamber on the bottom right. And plus it looks way cooler than the testlevel that was included. This took about 90 minutes to make — less time than I spent trying to make new art this morning (that didn’t work and so the time was wasted). Sigh.

Remember, this level was made post contest, so don’t consider it in your judging (though you may consider levels that you make yourself, because the editor is part of the game, heheh). I don’t think it’s an issue though, there really isn’t any gameplay.

Only got started a few hours ago but couldn’t pass up the great theme.

I’m not starting entirely from scratch, as I’m using some code from my Hexplanet Demo , but it’s been public available for a while so that’s within the rules. However, I’m going to have to bend the contraints a little bit — I’m allowing myself to use blends of the colors a bit, and since I’m doing this for the iphone I can’t exactly hit the resolution or input contraints. Still I’ll try my best to stay within the spirit of the constraints given.

There’s no way I’m going to finish this today but at least I cam make a start of it…

So here’s a screenshot of my miniLD-16 inspired project. This is mostly just my hexplanet demo with a new tileset drawn from the miniLD palette. I don’t really like the stripey pattern (unexplored land), I need to do something about that.

Hex Moon

Most of the work here isn’t visible in the screenshot — I ported the hex demo to OpenGL ES, using proper VBO’s and shaders instead of the immediate mode crap it was doing before. This screenshot isn’t running on the iPhone, but it could be. This is running on linux using the PVR SDK in OGLES emulation mode. I’m finding it to be a quite nice SDK, btw, if you’re doing any iPhone graphics stuff and you’re not using it, you’re missing out.

This will probably be my last screenshot of this as a mini-LD entry, and I might not get a chance to work on it much in the next few months as I’m trying to ship a completely different iPhone project but I do hope to get back to this one, I think it will be a lot of fun and worth finishing.

Ok, so I only had about two hours to attempt this, so I tried to keep it as simple as possible.

It looks cool, but unfortunately all you can do is fall, there’s no collision or anything, and the scrolling is messed up.

However, I didn’t read the docs ahead of time and didn’t realize just how constrained the constraints were. My initial plan was to just use a large image with the whole map predrawn, and use getpixel for collision. But retro engine wouldn’t load large images, or allow getpixel, or blit a partial image. So I had to draw all the tiles. I don’t blame the engine — I just should have taken a closer look before i started, and I probably would have gone with something more putpixelly and less blitty.

On the bright side, it was a good excuse to play with TileStudio and I figured out how to get maps of it and into lua. And it was pretty much the first time I’ve played with lua in years.

Anyways, the whole mess is here:

falling.zip

But it’s not worth downloading, unless maybe you want to use the .tsd file for tile studio.

Still, overall, fun idea and i like the contraints. I wish I had the full weekend to work on this. Next month, I’ve got LD17 blocked off on the calendar, looking forward to that.

That’s what they actually call themselves. Torontonians.

Tags: motivation

Had a little list of stuff i needed to get ready before the weekend. Didn’t get to most of it but that’s ok…

I’ve got an older post about tips for LD48 Survival that I think is mostly still true. I’ve changed my option about 2D vs. 3D, I think the real key is to let your gameplay dictate 2D vs. 3D, not your tools or engine. I made plenty of LD games (like Glacier and Crossroads) that would have worked better as 2D, but I’ve made others (like the long lost TIE) that made good use of it. If you’re going 3D, don’t make a 2D board with a little bit of perspective, use that 3D for all it’s worth.

The one thing I did set up was my music kit. The iPhone is a fantastic music instrument with apps like DopplerPad, ThumbJam (is the bomb), EyDy Looper, etc.. I’ll use that along with my guitar, and trusty old Adrenaline effect processor, and other random noisemaking techniques. I’ll assemble it all with an older version of n-Track because I haven’t upgraded it in half a decade but it still works. I might throw in some Milkytracker if the style demands it. I’m a terrible musician but I have fun with it, so your ears can look forward to suffering at my expense. I’ve always run out of time to make music/sound for my game, this time I’m going to make it a priority.

This time, I picked 3 unusual goals (“finish a game” is sort of implied here) to push myself a little bit:

• Have music/sound for the game.
• Do something unusual with the setting (i.e. no dungeons, zombies, spaceships or other familiar tropes)
• Establish a distinct and personal visual style

The nice thing about these goals, other than the music, is that they are more about the decision making rather than adding work. We’ll see how it goes.

Looking forward to this a lot. I think every one of the themes on the final list would make for an awesome contest.

And for the record, the tools I’ll be using will be SDL, OpenGL, Pro-Motion, Photoshop, OGMO or TileStudio, Blender if 3D, maybe other stuff.

Good luck everybody!

Didn’t post desk earlier b/c I wasn’t at home…

Not much to look at yet but I’ve got something on the screen at least:

Slowed down a bit this time because I’m trying to use proper VBO’s instead of doing everything in immediate mode/display lists. I might try shaders, i dunno yet.

And I still have only a vague idea of the gameplay. Or rather, I have too many ideas, not sure what it will focus on.

As always, you can peek into the current state of the project code at my google code dump.

My game is starting to take shape… I have a player that I can move, even though he’s only drawn as an axis right now.

these are just temp art (i hope), my plan is to get the engine going tonight and then leave tommorow for content.

One nice thing is that I’m using the OGMO level editor, and it was very easy to make a layer for elevation and another layer for tiles.. so even though it wasn’t build with this kind of game in mind, it’s flexible enough to support it.

Still not 100% sure what the setting/theme will be… but the general idea is that gameplay will be some sort of narrative roguelike.