I was faily stumped for ideas in this one, ‘Build the level you play’ . The only ideas that I could come up with were Tower Defense style or maybe a netstorm clone. Several people encouraged me to do the netstorm thing, so I had a go. I used BlitzMax for it, This enabled me to make a nice ‘just the exe’ version that just works.

All up, I think I did quite well. I didn’t have time for a proper enemy, so I just added a tower defense style neverending wave of aliens. Instead of the Netstorm style resource collection, I made the ground itself produce energy. This made quite a nice playable element where you made pipes to make the energy flow to the right places. Unfortunately people had absoluetly no idea how to play the game. Unless you’ve played netstorm a bit, it seems there aren’t enough clues as to what the hell you should be doing.

After the Compo, I put together this shot to give people a clue as to what they should be doing

I didn’t make much in the way of post-compo changes to this game. I played with the engergy flow a bit just for fun, I think that’s about all.

Post-compo version is available here

Tags: Cannons, final, glowy things, netstorm, pipes., UFOs

I tried thinking out of the box and failed miserably.

The theme was growth, I thought of the idea of crystal growth and pretty much made an incomprehensible game with crystals in it. Hardly anyone figured out how to play the sodding thing. The final insult was that I ran out of time so you could build yourself an army but had no-one to fight.

The bright side was I was quite pleased with the overall look and User interface. It’s a basic RTS engine with minimap and group selection, resource collection etc.

Some of the development was stalled due to me not knowing how to debug. I wrote the game In Blitz max, having downloaded the demo version on the thursday before the compo. I didn’t figure out how the debugger worked (or even that it had one) until sunday.

Tags: bugs, Crystals, fail, final, growth, slugs, unfinished

I was quite pleased with how this one worked out, The game only has three levels and I was quite worried that the last level might be impossible. As time was running out on the clock I was trying to figure out if it could be done, I finally got a single ninja home and went “that’s it! ship it!”.

playing post compo I actually managed to figure out how to get all of the ninja home on that level by using a few tricks.

I also liked the look of Teeny Tiny Ninja. I got the stars idea from a previous Bluescrn entry. Adding a bunch of stars does indeed liven up the look of things. Also The ninja home came out surprisingly well for programmer art. I thought the sound worked well too, but the scores the game got suggested I was in the minority. when a ninja goes ‘Hut!’ every time he jumps it’s cool, but people found it less so when there were a couple of hundred Ninja doing it, serves themselves right for picking swarms as the theme I say.

The game used a homebrew physics engine made during the 48 hours. this worked quite nicely, Ninja were all implemented as tiny triangles

See. There was no Line to object collision detection so it was possible for Ninja to get stuck on corners by impailing themselves on a point and having their triangle points go either side. There were alsdo a few other little quirks that caused th ninja to get stuck. The solution worked brilliantly. I checked to see if a ninja hadn’t moved for a while and if so just added a huge random vector to its movement. A lot of people took this to be an intentional behaviour because it looked very ninja like. sometimes a ninja would jump to a wall or point and stick there for a bit then jump away again.

Once again the controls were a bit unintuitive. But I thought the use of a mousewheel worked well.

Download the game

Tags: final, ninja

Proof I have real trouble coming up with good game names.

This game was a quick one. A week before a LD we had a warmup, put in 12 hours during the weekend. The theme was vectors and a subtheme of chains.

I was quite pleased with how this worked out in a lot of ways. The rendering was with a little 2d OpenGL style setup where I implemented pushmatrix, popmatrix, scale,rotate,multmatrix,LoadIdentiy, setcolor and line. All of the glowy effects were done by a two layer drawing system, A blur buffer of high saturation drawing and a overlay of bright low saturation. The persistance came from averaging neighbouring pixels in the blur buffer and subtracting a bit. I did that part with a wee MMX routine.

Most of all, the thing that pleased me about this game is how fun it is. It’s a bit hard but I think there’s potential for a great full game in this idea. I build a linux version and had it running on my arcade cabinet for ages, that was great fun.

I guess the only sad part about this on is that if I had have done this for a genuine LD48 I would have used the extra time to make something even better.

The final game isn’t entirely my own work though. I slapped a mod file onto the game for music. Livens it up quite a bit.

Download the game

Tags: final, glowy bits, Vectors

This is my room. I took this before another LD48, but it hsn’t changed much, Just more mess now.

Here we go.   I’ve started.

Wayhaaaay a final submission.

It’s flash so just go play it now at

http://screamingduck.com/Cruft/BoomShakalaka.html

source is here

Yay done!

Tags: bombs, final, glowy bits, sfxr

Wayhaaaay a final submission.

It’s flash so just go play it now at

http://screamingduck.com/Cruft/BoomShakalaka.html

source is here

Yay done!

Tags: bombs, final, glowy bits, sfxr

I tried writing a post up in this thing but It kept on trying to eat it so I put my post-mortem here

Tags: postmortem

I tried writing a post up in this thing but It kept on trying to eat it so I put my post-mortem here

Tags: postmortem

I made this a while back which may be of use to some, and I may use it myself depending on what the theme comes out as.

http://screamingduck.fileburst.com/Cruft/FrameBatch.zip

Something for Flash,  Takes a bunch of frames and stores them as a jpeg for colour and png for alpha.  then breaks the fremes up into seperate BitmapData object on load.

I didn’t do any frame animation in Boomshakalaka, because it seemed to be fairly tricky to get animations into flash.  If  need them this time then maybe this will help.

For instant gratification Go an play it here

It definitely have a wall of doom feel to it.  So much so that I haven’t completed it myself yet.  I _think_ it’s doable.

I wonder how this editor will screw up today….

Tags: final

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 4:50 pm and is filed under LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’m probably using a new library this time.   It’s not terribly full featured at the moment but what it does have is a simple way to get a nice Fullscreen framebuffer on the OLPC-XO.   I figure If I can write a halfway decent Game during the Ludum Dare then it can be added to the XO’s repertoire.

The source for the library is in here along with a small test program I wrote last week to give it a try.

http://screamingduck.com/Cruft/doodle.tar.gz

I’ll probably be be adding things to the library right up to and most likely during competition time.  If anyone else wants to give the lib a go (Yes, It’s pascal) get in touch and I’ll make sure you’re up to date with the code.

This is how simple a program can be using the Lib.

program demo;
 
 uses
 Drawing,simple16;
 
 var
 pic : tPicture;
 
 procedure Load;
 begin
 ScreenMode(640,480);
 pic := tPicture.loadFromFile('Frog.png');
 end;
 
 var
 X : Single = 320.0;
 Y : Single = 200.0;
 dy : Single =0.0;
 dx : Single =0.0;
 
 procedure Update(ticks : integer);
 begin
 X:=X+dx;
 Y:=Y+dy;
 dx:=dx+ random()*0.2-0.1;
 dy:=dy+ random()*0.2-0.1;
 dx*=0.99;
 dy*=0.99;
 end;
 
 procedure Draw;
 var
 i:integer;
 begin
 ClearScreen;
 DrawImage(pic,X,Y);
 end;
 
 begin
 Run(@load,@update,@draw);
 end.
 

The run procedure calls the Load update and Draw functions at the appropriate times, giving a picture that does an inertial drunkards walk around the screen.

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Level 4

Level 5

It’s actually a lot harder than it looks.   You have to make sure they can be passed.  level 5 took a lot of tweaking.