Wow, I’ve got the gameplay part totally finished. It’s not the most fun thing in the world but it’s pretty fun if you like word games like I do. I’m having fun playing it even with nonexisting graphics. I think the creature creation part, while not strictly having any effect on gameplay, will make it a lot more interesting.

The top screen above is the gameplay screen. You have five “slots” to save your creatures in, in the final game these will look like sci-fi jar things (like the futurama heads). That’s the yellow words at the top. When you are stuck, or think you’re at a good branching point that you might want to get back to, you can save your creature in one of the slots. Once all five slots are full, the game is over.

The lower screen is the “history” screen and it shows the evolution of the word over the course of the game. So far, that’s my favorite part. Hopefully I’ll be able to make interesting creatures and put little thumbnails of them on here.

The scoring system is also pretty interesting. I borrowed if from “BuyWords”, it does a nice job rewarding longer words.

It’s nearing the halfway point, and I still have a ton to do, but I think this is the most playable I’ve ever had something at this stage.

 

Ok, I’m off to get some sleep. I didn’t get as far as I’d wanted to on the creature generator.

He looks pretty good, but unfortunately they all look exactly like this, except with different color schemes. And there’s a bug so the color scheme keeps changing when it shouldn’t.

So anyways, I’ve got a lot ahead of me tomorrow.

Well it’s getting there. The little creatures are kinda cute.

Still needs a LOT of polish, and much more variety in the creatures. I’m starting to panic.

I’ve made this mistake before, but I never learn. I waited until the last minute to make a release build and ended up with a crash. I had to take out the bubbles which is a shame because they looked pretty cool.  But anyways, it’s submitted. Not nearly as complete as I’d like but it’s something.

Mac build is up, I’ll make a windows build soon.

Here’s my gameplay video and postmortem for “EvoWord”. I had a great time, and I think this entry, though not without it’s share of problems, turned out really well. I’m definitely getting better at making complete, if not yet very polished, entries.

Unfortunately youtube squashed the video so it’s a little stretched, apologies.

 

Evoword Gameplay Video

What Went Right

• Time Management – Yep, I can finally put this one in the “went right” column. I certainly didn’t have enough time, but for once I feel like I budgeted it well and if I had spent more time in any one area others would have been even worse.
• Waiting for a good idea – I had some ideas initially but I wasn’t sure about them, but I thought it through and waited until I had an idea that felt both realistic and fun. I’m really glad I didn’t just go with my first idea, in retrospect they seem pretty ridiculous.
• Making a game that I want to play – I really like word games, even capturing the gameplay video above there are long stretches where I got absorbed in the gameplay. Thankfully I’ve edited most of those out.
• Gameplay first – I had the basic game working with just floating letters and no graphics at all before I started on anything graphical. That’s always been difficult for me to do, but this time I stuck to it and I think it paid off.

What went wrong:

• Overcomplicating the creature evolution algorithm. My initial algorithm seemed simple enough on paper, but as I got to coding it it kept revealing itself as too complicated. The final creatures don’t have nearly enough variety (only size and color scheme, really) . I think I could have gotten further if I started with the simplest thing that could possibly work, and then building on that.
• Testing and Release Builds – I waited until the last hour to try a release build, and it crashed. Because of this I was unable to include the cool floating bubbles. There are also a handful of small bugs that I could have fixed if I had stopped and took breaks for testing every so often. I’ve made this mistake a few times, maybe this time it will sink in.
• Overcomplicated the graphics – I had big plans for the graphics, including blender sculpt mode and normal maps and a shader that wasn’t terrible. I wasted a bit of time on those things, but not too bad, I fell back on the simple creature soon enough. However, those few hours of experimentation would have been better put to gameplay.
• Clarity – It’s obvious to me how to play because I wrote it, but it’s not at all obvious to a player, especially with no tutorial or instructions. In the future, making sure the user is aware of what they can do at every step is going to be my top priority. Even so, this was more discoverable than a lot of my previous entries so I’m getting better at this.
• glBindFramebufferEXT() – I spent over an hour trying to debug my thumbnail rendering code, thinking it was something complicated wrong, when really I just forgot to bind the framebuffers again after the first draw. Always go back and recheck the simple stuff, verify your assumptions and make sure your code is actually doing what you think.

Anyways this was a lot of fun, and I hope I’ll get a chance to go back and add more depth to the creature evolution code and tune the gameplay a bit to somehow eliminate the long stretches of waiting for the right letters. This was a lot of fun, as always!

Jovoc

Hey now that the October challenge is upon us, I thought I would share the story of the my October challenge from last year.

I started on “Planet Minesweeper” way back in February 2010, for a Mini-LD that I never finished. Over the next few months I poked at the code a little but every so often but didn’t really do much with it. Then for the 2010 October challenge I resolved to finish the game. As you can see, it hadn’t progressed very much past the first prototype.

Unfortunately my strategy for Oct. 2010 was to “Add a bunch of stuff to the game” to complete my vision. I literally had a Campaign mode planned! I wrote a script for the cutscenes. Cutscenes! For a minesweeper game! How insanely stupid is that? YEAH I KNOW!

So, needless to say, I didn’t finish the game. It crawled back into hibernation. Not to say that I didn’t work on it, but I just kept messing with it instead of going towards a focused goal. Fast-forward to October Challenge 2011. By this point I had a bunch of cool artwork, awesome musics from HyperDuck Sound Works, and the game itself was totally playable. It just wasn’t finished.

I was determined to finish it. This time I would adopt a new strategy. That strategy was “DON’T ADD FEATURES JUST FINISH IT”. This served me well and I worked my butt off.

Unfortunately, I failed again. I did not make a dollar in October 2011.

But all was not lost! I rode the momentum that the October challenge and kept going. I switched to a new strategy, “CUT EVERYTHING YOU CAN”. Working through the next month, and in early December 2012, the game was finished. After a week or so waiting for apple to approve it, it went live in time for the holiday season.

So did I make a dollar? I did. I made just over $1000 so far! That’s almost as good as Minecraft, right?

And the momentum continues. Last week I knocked out an update to support the new iPhone 5 screen, we’ll see if that makes a difference with the hordes of new iPhone 5 owners. I’m also playing with the idea of releasing a free version so people who like ads and stuff can play it.

So even though I failed (twice!) with this October challenge, I ultimately finished a game and  released it and made a few dollars.

So, TLDR i would say here’s what I’ve learned from these Octobers:

• If you’re trying to finish something, CUT CUT CUT features. You can always save them for an update.
• Don’t have a campaign mode.
• Stop adding stuff. Prove your game works first, then add stuff to it.

Anyways, if you want to support the game you can buy it on the App Store or just Like the Planet Minesweeper Facebook page . I really appreciate it. UPDATE: Sigh! The drama continues. I just found a bug in the new update with the iPad version that can leave some users stuck on the Game Over screen, even if you quit and restart the app. I’ve already submitted a fix to the app store and it’s awaiting apple’s approval. So if you’re using an iPad, hold off until the next version is approved.. And good luck everyone with the October Challenge 2012!

 

I’ve been enjoying the “Game Goal” theme posts, such as this one, and this one. The idea is you just write a context-free list of the player’s goals in your games. Perhaps it will reveal interesting patterns, or buried insights of your own psyche. So here goes my list:

• Defend your city from Godzilla
• Build a highway connecting ice floes
• Beseige or defend a base using elephants
• Collect the best combination of sicknesses
• Explore/conquer a fantasy world by playing a dice game (buttonmen variant)
• As kudzu, strive to completely cover various objects
• control bugzappers to zap bugs in an orderly fashion
• Add cowbell to all songs (guitar hero variant)
• expand/defend a moonbase with a connected network of units (moonbase commander clone)
• Connect locations by building words, crossword style
• Save ice-age species from extinction by an oncoming glacier
•  Fly your spaceship through a cave
• Explore a series of islands to reach the site of an alien crash landing
• fight through a robotic underworld (mega-man clone/variant)
• obtain a sword in a voxelized world (zelda clone)
• as a dinosaur, try and outrun an oncoming asteroid
• clear mines on a planet
• grow a world by gathering followers
• arrange fish heads and pumpkins into useful combinations
• Collect and buy/sell trinkets to earn enough to leave a planet
• cut and paste headlines to make new and better headlines
• rearrange words (DNA) to make better creatures

Ok, so a couple of themes jump out. A lot of my games are about building and exploring, but not really “sim style”, more like having a protagonist who builds/explores. I do like base building games, and I think there would be a lot more of them if these weren’t all compo games, since I’ve learned to avoid them because of time limits. But even my word games have building/exploring elements. There are some “escape” goals but really knowing those game designs they are really exploration games in disguise.

Which makes a lot of sense. Exploration games are always my favorite to play, and even when they are not specifically exploration mechanics I often focus on that part of them. When Ultima Online came out I was in the beta, and I spent a lot of time just hiking around the huge landscape. At least until highway robbers became too prevalent. I spent more time in “Black & White” exploring the island than training my creature. I played WoW until I had visited all the lands, and then I kind of lost interest. Some of my most ambitious unproduced game ideas are pure exploration games, like a procedural photography game and a realistic orienteering simulator.

Hm. So that’s interesting. I guess I’m going to stop putting of trying “Proteus” and give that a shot.

I’m in! Super excited about this one and I’ve blocked off the whole weekend on my schedule. Should be a fun challenge. Can’t wait.

Here’s my desk photo, along with one from LD13 a few years ago. Can you spot the differences? That’s right, I’m using a macbook now! Seriously, it’s pretty amazing how time passes so quick.

 

Anyways, this time I’m trying something different. I’m going to use Google’s DartLang and try to make a web-playable thinggy for the first time ever. Dart seems to have good support for webgl and canvas2d, and the performance is pretty good. It even supports mouse-capture if you’re running in chrome and it compiles down to javascript so you don’t need any special plugins or whatnot.

 

Anyways, I actually tried using it tonight and it was pretty encouraging. In just about a half-hour I was able to get pixelly things drawing on the screen which is a pretty decent hello world experience. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m optimistic. Other tools:

• good ol photoshop
• blender if I do any 3D stuff
• iPad apps + garageband for music (I just got a ukelele so maybe that)
• darteditor for coding
• espresso for html/css editing

Good luck everybody!

 

 

 

 

 

So, I’m making a game where you’re an evil villain like from a bond film, and you are trying to build your secret lair in a volcanic island. You’ll get points for luring agents into your lair and taunting them with your plans, or disposing of them in stupidly elaborate ways. It’s not the most original idea in the world, probably a third of the entries will be some kind of take on this, but I’ve always wanted to write this game and when the theme came up I couldn’t resist.

 

Off to a good start. I have a level background drawing and a minimap thinggy that you can scroll. So far Dartlang has been pretty nice, the only weirdnesses that have come up have been idiosyncrasies of the underlying html/javascript world which dart can’t do much about.

The best part is that I can upload playable builds for the first time ever. This is kind of a new thing for me.  Check it out:

Playable version here.

Not much there now, but I’ll try to keep this updated as the contest progresses.

Slow progress, but it’s still moving along. I’ve got map data loading now and am just about ready to start the gameplay proper.

 

Check out the online version here:

LD25_Villian

But still there’s not much to do but scroll the map.

 

Well, it’s sort of playable but not really since you have to know what to do and you can do lots of things that break the game. It also looks terrible and everything is still temp placeholder. It’s not turning out too good this time. But I’m having fun with it and learning a new language so that’s ok.

It’s uploaded at the same link as my last post, but I’m not going to link it because it’s pretty confusing and broken right now. Hopefully I’ll be able to clean it up tomorrow and get it at least playable even it’s not the most fun thing ever.

 

Well, I got something playable at least. However, it’s not fun. It doesn’t even approach fun. But with the limited time left I could either keep beating this dead horse, or work on sound and graphics. So I’m going with graphics and music. Here’s the latest playable if you want to try it:

LD25 Evil Lair

All right! Off to go polish this turd.

 

Ok, the game at least looks decent now, but it’s still not very interesting. I even added a nifty bg (it’s rain on the metal case of my bbq grill outside). It’s almost more of a challenge right now to figure out how to lose. And also I spent a whole lot of time working on the scrolling minimap yesterday and realized today that it’s not useful, so most of the map is just blank space. It’s still pretty cool though I think.

Anyways now I have like 2.5 hours left to see if I can tweak the gameplay and make it fun. Or at least add a little more interaction, it’s totally stupid that this is animating right now since most of the time the screen is not moving.

Here’s the link if you want to play:

Evil Lair LD25

If you have ANY ideas of how to make this fun please let me know thru twitter or a comment…

 

All right! My game is submitted. At the last minute I added a simple betting mechanic and that makes it a little bit more fun. I even had time to throw in a little goat.

Check it out!

Evil Lair Entry Page

Yeah! I’m totally excited about this one, I should have the whole weekend to work with only minor interruption. I’m going to be using my minibasecode again, you can find it in my ld48jovoc code dump under the minibasecode subdirectory. Nothing fancy, just helpers to load textures and shaders and set up the screen.

• language: c++ with SDL and OpenGL
• graphics: probably blender, photoshop
• music/sfx: garageband, ipad stuff

And for the record, I think potato would be a fantastic theme.

Good luck everyone!

Off to a very slow start, but at least I have a player and something of a world now. Not sure how much focused time I’ll have this weekend, I think I was being a bit optimistic before, but with any luck I’ll get something done.

 

 

Got a simple scene exporter from Blender! woo. Ok, so maybe I’m a little bit behind schedule, but it’s my own fault for doing this more or less from scratch. There’s still hope of finishing, since my game idea pretty much just involves walking around with a bunch of blocks, so I’m actually not too far from the capabilities I need. I just hope I have time to do some non-crappy lighting.

 

starting to look like a game

I ran out of time, so I guess I’m in the jam now. I probably won’t get very much further than this since I have to work tomorrow, so I’ll just wrap it up and submit tonight.

 

My original idea morphed a little bit into a “Minimal RPG” sort of thing. It’s not as fun as it looks.

Things are going a little slower than I’d like, mostly since I’m new to SpriteKit, but it seems to be working and I have a good impression of it so far.

Lots more to do before it’s really playable but I’m not panicking yet..