I’ve been playing around with game development since I first taught myself to program on an obsolete TI-99/A I bought at a yard sale in grade school. However, I never seem to get anything done. Hopefully a concrete deadline and some initial direction will give me the push I need to (approximately) complete something.
I meant to get this post done sometime during the week, I also hoped to have my base code in somewhat better shape. Oh well.
I’d better get going…
So, I’ve got some placeholder art and a seed of an idea. Also, I’ve learned my engine requires way to much boilerplate to get anything done. I guess I’ll have to work on that.
This is just a bug, but the effect looked cool, so I decided to save a screenshot for posterity:
I figured out a way to make my game use two button controls, so now I’m doing both themes. I’ve got a much better idea of how the actual mechanics will work now and have started to make some strides towards implementing them. Along the way, I’ve discovered more shortcomings in my engine, particularly in the area of dynamic object allocation.
Music to Code By: Epic Trance at Digitally Imported
It may not look much different, but things have changed a lot under the hood. Now there are falling acorns, and the gnome runs around picking them up. You can change the acorn he’s going after (the shiny one) by pressing a button (one of our two). I wish I had a decent workflow setup to put up a GIF so you could watch him run around and the acorns fall, but I’m loath to divert too much energy from the main task at hand.
So now I’ve got two buttons. As explained before, button one changes which acorn our gnomish hero is pursuing (by rotating clockwise). Button two now plants a tree (provided you’ve got any acorns). Yes, I’m aware that acorns grow into oaks, not pines. (Although, pine cones are something I plan to add if I’ve got time.) The tree art needs replacing and I plan to implement different ages of tree to really get into the growing theme.
Next up, squirrels. Then it’ll actually be a game and not just a tree farm.
Winter? Actually this is a bug that’s triggered when your plant too many trees and exceed the size of the sprite buffer. The next tree you plant will crash the game.
As promised, squirrels are in and are after your acorns. Only about a third of their mechanics are implemented, but it’s a good start.
With just over twenty hours left, I’ve been coding for fifteen hours straight with only one break, so I’m gonna unwind for a bit. (I may or may not hack some more before bed.)
Honestly, I’d hoped to be at this point last night, so I’d have all day today for just polish (and possibly sound, which probably isn’t going to happen at this point). I’ve got a few meta things to do, like help and title screens and high score tracking, but it’s a fully playable (if somewhat awful looking) game. The only graphics still completely placeholder is the squirrel, which has no shading or animation.
There are still a few gameplay tweaks I want to implement, but they’re not critical and I could live without them if necessary.
Since my last update, I’ve implemented damage from getting hit by squirrels, points for gathering acorns and planting trees, acorns as health, and death. Also a proper pause screen and the base framework for adding additional screens (such as title, help, and high scores).
Music to Code By: Man in Black at Pandora
It’s done. Well, done-ish. There where things that I never got around too. Like:
But it’s still functionally complete. I had the choice to spend my last hour on better squirrel graphics or other stuff. After doing some research and discovering that a decent looking squirrel walk cycle’d require a least four frames (the game was hard coded for two) and that neither of my exiting frames would work, I gave up on that. It’s a good thing too, as while implementing high scores and a few other things, I discovered and fixed some bugs.
I really wish I’d have gotten my release cycle setup before the compo. It took me almost the entire submission hour to get the binary and source uploaded. My README is pretty rough, but I realized while I was writing it, that I was running out of time. Whew. Kinda glad this is over.
So I think I’ll give it a second go. Last time I used C and my custom game engine (Kawaii Engine). This time I’ll do something faster:
This time I hope to actually produce Windows packages (Un*xen (including OS X) should work from the source release). I really hope that using a language more suitable to rapid prototyping will allow me to produce a better game this time.
Tags: LD35
I’m all set and ready to go again. Totally prepped:
Making some progress. I decided to do a point and click adventure (I’ve never written one of those before). I sketched up one of the four walls of the room. Then I had to hack mouse support into my engine; luckily, that wasn’t as much work as it sounds like. I’m thinking it’s gonna be an “escape the room” type adventure, but maybe I’ll come up with an interesting twist to add.
Music to Code to: Third Day Christmas at Pandora
I’ve made solid progress on my point and click adventure.
I’ve been steadily updating git and uploading work-in-progress packages to ‘https://karatorian.org/2016/ld37/‘ the latest is ‘ld37-20161210133846.tar.xz‘
If you’ve got python and pygame installed, feel free to check it out.