Ok so as usual i spent way too much time tweaking how this draws and not actually making characters. My player is still an axis, and he can walk on water. Blah.

Ironically, I spent a while getting the “pixelated” edges to blend smoothly but not blur out to mush. And to top it all off, this is still tmp art. Why did I draw a tmp plant?? why?? I’d really like to get depth map shadows in here, but I don’t think there’s time for that, at least if I want to have any gameplay.

But I’m pretty happy with the drawing, it’s using 4x FSAA and 4x oversampled textures to get crisp yet blocky 16×16 tiles, epic overkill of graphic hardware.

and i am getting sleepy

Goodnight all… I have a player now (the monk is actually an NPC but still…)

I had to make a little mudpuddle for the spherepig, too.

Will see how far gameplay gets tommorow.

Not a whole lot changed visually:

But I’m a lot closer to having something actually playable. Still a few last details, and of course, content. Blah. I lost a few hours to a graphics bug, too, but that’s cleared up now.

One thing that I’m happy about is that it’s got music and sfx now. I realized I’d have to choose between having music, and probably not finishing the game, but I choose music, cause the last few LD games I didn’t have any music and I didn’t finish gameplay anyways. So there’s that. It’s not very good music, but it’s fun and self-indulgent and trippy.

This will probably be my last update until it’s done, so wish me luck.

BTW the game has a name now, it’s called “Galapagos”.

Well, I didn’t get as much gameplay as I hoped for, but I’m pretty happy with how much I got done considering the scope of the game.

The game is sort of playable, but unfortunately I didn’t have time for much content, or for monster combat or anything.

Fun contest, good theme, tho unfortunately I didn’t get to make much use of it. I can’t want to play everyone’s entries. Looks like we got a lot of killer games this time!

You can get my game here:

Galapagos (windows)

Or on the contest entry page. Enjoy!

Here’s a timelapse link for my LD17 entry.  Sorry no music on it.

GALAPAGOS TIMELAPSE

What went wrong? What worked? Full post-mortem writeup after the bump… including a SNEAK PEEK screenshot of the progress on the game!

The Plan My plan (which is pretty much my plan every time) is to get an idea and a minimal prototype working friday night, then build out the engine on saturday, leaving sunday for content. This plan failed. I didn’t even have a solid idea of what the game would be until halfway through Saturday. I really liked the theme, in fact it was a bit too helpful, I had a lot of trouble narrowing down my ideas. What went Right

• Art Style — One of my goals for the contest was to make my game have a distinctive art style, and that really worked out. In addition to making it stand out visually, I also chose a style that made the art a bit faster to create. Even so, I didn’t have a lot of time to make art but I think it looked as if I did.
• OGMO — Tried out the OGMO level editor for this compo. It’s great. Get’s a bit slow on large levels but if you keep it small it’s a great tool. The flexible ‘value’ system saved me a lot of coding.
• Music — Around midday Sunday I was faced with the choice of add some music and certainly not have time to finish the game, or don’t add music and still probably not finish. One of my goals this time was to do music, so I went for it. I think that not only did it add a lot to the game, it also helped mentally recharge me and allowed me to be even more productive Sunday afternoon.
• Tweakval — I used my tweakval code again, and it saved me hours of work, especially in tweaking the projection. Getting the “simple” ortho projection right was surprisingly tricky.

What Went Wrong

• Idea — I took way too long to decide on an idea. Even by Saturday night I had a good sense of the look/engine I wanted but only a vague idea of the gameplay. “roguelike” isn’t enough detail of a design. I should have sketched something out on paper on friday, and stuck to it.
• Not doing gameplay first. The key to success is first do player interaction, second do enemies, then work on map and world building. That way, if you run out of time, you still have something playable. But somehow I always seem to mess this up, probably because I have a lot more practice writing the map/world kind of code than gameplay code. It’s a vicious cycle. Next time, right?
• Blender — This didn’t really go “wrong” because in the end I was able to build my models but it took me like an hour to build a half-sphere (most of that was because I had specific ideas about the UV layout). Really I just need more practice, but it was a time sink.
• Basecode — I don’t really have a formal basecode, just a pile of snippets and functions from past LD’s and stuff. I spent a bit of time debugging some stupid graphics bugs and redoing basic stuff. Hopefully I’ll have time to clean up and simplify this before the next compo.

The Future of “Crater Galapagos”

Here’s a sneak peek of the current post-compo game. It will be a while before I release anything though:

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on the game, and I want to keep going with it. I think I’ll just keep working on it in the background, and at some point decide if I want to try and put it on the iphone or just release it as freeware on the desktop. I dunno.

Hey all! It’s not exactly a game but my first iPhone app has gone live in the app store. The Brainstormer is an idea generator for artists or writers or perhaps even game developers …. hehehehe

It’s kind of a simple little toy, but we ended up putting a lot of stuff in there by the end. It’s a lot of fun and was a good project to get me started with Obj-C and OpenGL-ES and stuff, and I find it pretty useful to generate ideas and stuff.

All the art and design was done by Andrew Bosley, the creator of the original brainstormer. You can check out Andrew’s site here. You can also try out the flash-based web version of the brainstormer on his site as well: linky.

App Store Link

Brainstormer Info Page

I haven’t tried this out for making game ideas, but it seems like it would be a good fit. Let me know if you try it.

So what’s next for me? Well, short term I’m working on getting a real blog set up so I can show up on the planet ludum. I’m also well underway on my NEXT project which is an actual game (a spin-off from one of my mini-LD ideas that I didn’t finish). More info and screenshots when they exist!

Thanks!

Joel (jovoc)

So I’ve got weekend blocked off in my schedule and am looking forward to the contest. I usually don’t have much of a basecode, I just pick bits of meat off the carcasses of my past entries, but I’m trying to organize my code a little bit this time.  Almost all my past compo entries can be found at my google code dump and my basecode is in the  subdirectory named luddite. It’s not all stuff I wrote myself, in fact it’s mostly stuff I got from other sources (all public domain or BSD or MIT licensed, of course) and adapted for my own use. A lot of this code is not well tested or flat out broken, so use with caution.

Anyways, I can’t wait. See you all this weekend, on the battlefield (or the jam-field, as they case may be).

Joel

Tags: montage

Not much to look at so far. But it’s starting to emerge.

I’ve been working on a new game design methodology that I call “PEWPEWPEW” (seriously). This will be my first game trying it, if it’s successful I’ll post about it. Kind of similar to Danc’s great description of the creative process at http://www.lostgarden.com/ It’s a different thing but it dovetails nicely with that.

Anyways, about the game. I was kind of thinking about doing more of an art game this time, but with the  “Enemies as Weapons” theme lends itself so well to platformers and shmups. And I’ve always wanted to make a more-or-less straighforward platformer, something fiendishly hard like megaman2. So that’s basically where I’m going with it. There is a bit of a twist with the enemies-as-weapons thing, but I’ll save it. Hint: it’s like a horadric cube that eats monsters instead of items.

Anyways, I think I’ll have some stiff competition with a platformer, plus there’s a lot of catchup I have to do to people using flixel and stuff (i still haven’t written the tilemap yet), but that’s OK, and if it works I’ll fold it into my basecode for next time.

I wasn’t super exited about the theme when it was announced, but it’s growing on me. Best of luck all, looks like a lot of fun stuff is showing up.

Well, I managed to have time during the chaos to make a little roast:

My game, however, is still pretty half-cooked. Here’s what it looks like at the moment:

Those guys stuck in the box at the top are just stuck there because they spawned there. They’re not really supposed to be there.

Anyways, I barely have any gameplay, my movement suck, and the graphics are all tmp. Making a platformer is harder than I thought.

It’s almost playable. Lots to do and time is running out…

I’m so not going to finish ….

Link to entry page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=34

Well, here it is. I wish it were as fun as it looked but it’s horribly incomplete, as usual. I’d keep working on it tomorrow for the jam except I have to go to work.

All code and assets were created within the 48 hours, but a last-minute crash bug in release mode that only happened outside of the IDE (yikes!) forced me to spend a couple of hours adding printfs to track it down to the new image loader i’m using. That’ll teach me to try new code for a compo (or at least to not wait until the last minute for a release build).

Was a lot of fun, and exhausting. Can’t wait to try some of the others. But first … sleep.

HINT: If you try it, you can press ‘1’ and ‘2’ to jump to some bonus levels that I made for testing.

Tags: final

Alright, I’m in for the October challenge. I’m going to try and finish up a game I started for miniLD back in February. I’ve been messing with it here and there but haven’t really sat down and crunched on it because of other projects like The Brainstormer App and Still Pond for iPhone.

Fittingly for the start of the month, I just to First Playable just today. So technically I have a month to polish and add features. It’s already strangely addicting, to me at least, so I take that as a good sign. I’ve got a lot of crazy stuff planned graphically and bells-and-whistles wise, and want do add stuff like GameCenter, but we’ll see how it goes.

My other goal for October is to try and get my blog going. I’ve got it sort of set up now but there’s some little annoyances that have kept me from posting. So I aim to fix those and post a lot of info about iPhone dev and opengl and stuff like that.

So where would you move next?

I’ve finished the basic gameplay and and starting to spruce up the graphics and doing fancy shader stuff. I’m planning on doing four different styles. Here’s concept art for three of them: a diagrammatic “lunar” style, a Chuck Close inspired “gas giant style”, and a stylized but somewhat realistic “jungle planet”.

This isn’t just a pure mockup, it’s a screenshot that I photoshopped to look like the shaders and stuff that I have in mind. The game looks pretty similar to the “lunar rocks” right now.

The first theme will be the default, and you’ll be able to unlock the others by playing. It shouldn’t be too hard to unlock all of them.

I’m also juggling some other projects so I’m not sure if this will be released by the end of the October challenge, but I’ll do my best.

Ok I’m really, really looking forward to this. Probably to an unhealthy degree.

My “basecode” can be found on my google code dump. The “luddite” directory is the basecode but I might pull bits and pieces from past entries, too. Other stuff I might use:

• SDL/OpenGL regardless of 2D/3D.
• For a 3d game, either prmath or PVRT
• For 3D assets I’ve been learning Blender and will put it to use.
• For 2D arts, photoshop, pixen or pro-motion. Perhaps alchemy paint. Or maybe traditional materials.
• For sound I’m going to try doing the sound design on my ipad with stuff like reactable, argon synth, jasuto, etc.. but might fall back to SFXR if time is tight. Also I might try recording my own sounds.
• Music will be a mix of iPad apps (Korg iMS20, SoundPrism, StepPolyArp, DopplerPad, Argon, Hammerhead, ThumbJam, etc..), guitar stuff (incl. YouRock MIDI) and GarageBand. And I might borrow some toy instruments from my toddler because they sound cool.
• For map editing, Ogmo is the awesome sauce. If I need a “shape based” map editor I’ll use my game from the “Caverns” contest.

That’s it. I’ve been really getting into doing music for ld48 the last few times, even though I kind of suck at it. If you’re at all interested in electronic music, you owe it to yourself to get an iPad, the scene is so awesome right now, it’s like you can get all the cool stuff you always wanted but everything costs $5-$10 in app form instead of hundreds in hardware form. It’s weird, it feels like the only time I actually have time to play around with music stuff these days is during these contests, which is kind of back-asswards because I really should be pretty time constrained. But whatever.

Last time I wasn’t able to submit my game by the deadline. A last minute crash bug that only showed up in release mode derailed the project. Luckily the Jam gave me a safety net and I was able to submit my game, but I’m going to try and really put an emphasis on testing and do regular release builds. Learn from my mistake: Do release builds and test releases often, don’t wait until the last hour.

Last time I played it a bit safe and went for a traditional platformer with a few twists, so this time I’m likely to do something a little more out there, I’ve been itching to make an “art game” but I’ll wait and see what the theme inspires.

The theme is quite a challenge for me. Too open ended. Also I have a problem with spending too much energy on building worlds and not enough on gameplay, so this really reinforces that.

So I’m still not entirely sure what I’m going to do gameplay-wise. But I’ve got the start of a landscape making thing going. We’ll see what happens, there’s still half the contest left..

Welcome to RGB Land! Enjoy scenic Perlin Valley, and enjoy hiking up Mt. Perlin, or the Fields of Perlinnor where a great battle was once fought.  (The Interior Ministry has promised us more noise types soon. Sure, I’ll believe it when i see it. I’m still waiting for vegetation they promised).

Whew.  Not a lot of progress since my company x-mas party was last night, and my daughter woke up early this morning, but I’ve got back to it. I’ve managed to add player movement and mouselook, which was easier than I expected, and some very primitive lighting. I also had to work up a really simple caching system for the landscape since it takes 1-2 minutes to generate one, and that’s pretty much a showstopper for iterative coding.

It probably won’t get to the stage of being a game, but maybe a nice tech demo. We’ll see. Hopefully it won’t look so much like garbage when I’m done.

Well I’m not submitting it because it’s nowhere near finished. I will submit a Jam version but probably won’t have much time to work on it.

It’s pretty broken but it’s got potential. Right now it’s kind of like a SFXR for terrains .. all of these were generated completely at random with no user input beyond a planet name that is used as a random seed.

Here’s some pretty planets: