Hello all,
This will be my first time entering the competition. I will be using Blender‘s game engine (with python and Bullet Physics). I’m hoping to keep it simple, finish an entry, and show off how great the Blender game engine can be for rapid game creation.
Good luck to all, I cannot wait to find out the theme and see what people come up with!
Tags: blender, bullet, First entry, first-timer, python
Well after a late night of brianstorming, and 7 hours of sleep, I’ve decided to set my sights on somthing a little more realistic for 48hrs.
Cavern Color Pellet Dispensor
Deep within the cavern things are hungry, but they are only hungry for pellets of certain colors.
As feed master of the cave system it is your job to make sure the pellets get to the right beast, by clicking to open trap doors and change the angle of platforms.
Each level features a different cave system and an increasing amount of colored pellets and beasts.
Maybe not the most creative idea, but I hope it will be fun and a well polished entry..
Wrote a couple of song loops for the levels, and made some eyecandy for the surface area.
Also added a magnet item that can help maneuver the pellets. I’m in a good place for one day of work, but am going to need work out some sort of win/lose mechanics and more engaging gameplay tomorrow morning.
The clock is ticking. I added some dump trucks, and monsters that eat the pellets. The monsters get hurt by the wrong colored pelets, if 3 monsters die, your game is over. They also get bonus points for consecutive pellets eaten.
There are a lot of items/features that I wanted to add in today, but with the deadline looming I’m going to settle for adding high scores and spend the rest of the time adding levels.
Tags: foodphoto
Download Cavern Pellet Eater Creatures!
Whew, what a marathon! I am totally brain dead. It’s amazing how much work goes in a small game project.
The amount of entries is mind boggling, I’m looking forward to playing as many as possible in the next week.
Good night all!
Deskphoto before and after:
This is my second LD and I’m ready to throw down. My goal is to place in a category, and sleep less. Last compo I scored #6 in audio so this time around I will spend some extra time writing songs. I also am planning on making a timelapse of my work.
I’ll be making my game with Blender 2.49 (go Blender!)
Other software I plan to use: Photoshop, Reason.
To get ready, I’ve been practicing on my midi keyboard and writing a python GUI class to help handle my interface objects in Blender (will post if i finish).
Ciao!
Well it looks like asteroids, nothing to explore yet. The plan is to fly around a random map making money by blowing things up and hunting for a finite amount of fuel.
I hope to have the AI make money and upgrade as well, but we will see how that goes.
This was my second LD48. I flip flopped with ideas the first night and settled on something rather generic that I hoped would be fun.
The idea was to make a space shooter set in a random starfield. You start with a shuttle and explore the universe making money, checking out planets, and battling other ships. Stations allow you to upgrade your ship and weapons.
What went wrong..
I never came up with a design doc, which would have helped me budget my time, and realize which features to work on first. At the end of the first 24 hours I realized I needed to limit the amount of objects in game by setting up a spacial hash. It took all morning sunday to do that, and if I had done that from the beginning I could have saved a lot of time.
Lack of content: I designed the game to make it easy to add new ships, weapons, and planet variations. Despite that, I only made 3 ships and 2 guns.
Cutting of features: Some features would have been easy to add and made gameplay more interesting:
What went right
Not spending too much time on the graphics. I consider myself more of an artist than a coder, limiting my art making time was hard but necessary in the end.
Guerrilla coding. My goal was to pound out features, as quickly and ugly as possible. Making this game was like surfing a massive tsunami of bad code, but since I was working non stop, I could actually remember what I was doing.
Rethinking the player controls: Originally you used the keyboard to rotate your ship. Adding mouse control for the rotation and turret aiming makes for a pleasant user experience, and gives you a needed advantage over the enemies.
Sticking to my guns: I got majorly overwhelmed by the amount of features that needed to be in place to make my idea playable. I refused to give up, and in the end came up with an actual game with more features than I had originally planned.
Music: I only spent a half hour playing music, but I came up with a very appropriate song for the game. It’s short, spacey, and really sets the mood.
What I Learned
Well I think it’s time I branched out from using Blender as my realtime engine. I love having my dev. environment be the same as my 3D modeling/sculpting/animating/texture painting tools, but I was discouraged with how my game is published (the .exe wasn’t displaying the font correctly and I ended up distributing the blend with a windows version of Blender)
I think I’m going to start working with Unity free engine. People here give it good reviews and it seems to import art assets from Blender very quickly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy-dLGBFMcw
Finally got my timelapse uploaded. I used chronolapse.
Now I’m going to start chipping away at playing all these great entries
Tags: exploration, ld16, timelapse
I’m making a MUD.
I’m pretty sure a telnet command line program is included in all OS’s.
I will be using Python 2.6, Twisted, and possibly some sort of python database module.
I will be hosting it on my home workstation, if anybody knows of a good dynamic ip tracking solution let me know, otherwise I might just write a script that updates a webpage every 15 minutes. (my ip seems to switch every 2 days or so, so not the biggest hurdle.)
Good luck to all!
24 hours worth of food purchased, guess I’m ready.
Well I think I’ve gotten the basic server set up, feel free to help test.
telnet: jplur.no-ip.org 5057
I found out that telnet is disabled in windows vista and 7, not hard to turn it on, but I’m looking into getting a web based client set up for added easiness.
No idea what kind of game it will be, but I’m going to zzzzzzzzzz and hope something comes to me.
ANSI colors are pretty limited, and I’m having trouble getting the ‘bright’ variations to display, but perhaps I’ll get some pity votes in the graphics category 😉
I’ve done some thinking with the gameplay. Islands will be traditional room based areas, where you can explore, fight things, find and bury treasure, get peppers.
Players will be able to buy boats that let them sail throughout the world by setting directions.
Hopefully I will have time to implement some sort of nautical combat and piracy.
Come test it out!
telnet jplur.no-ip.org 5057
Things are starting to come together. You can explore the (small) island, and find a few things to try to kill. You can also attack other players.
My goal for today is to add a few super simple rpg elements, maybe items you can pick up, then add in enough content to make it interesting.
Congratulations to all who entered!
Here’s my timelapse for the weekend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sytucXyhmyA
My finished entry is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1066
I’ll probably write a post-mortem this week.
Hopefully I’ll see some of you on the MUD.
Tags: timelapse
Hello friends! I’ve been waiting for this all summer and am supremely excited. I’ll be using the Blender game engine, python and my computer.
Here’s to making this the best LD ever!
Tags: motivation
