I completely forgot this was coming up and I’m taking the incredibly stupid decision to enter my first LD48 ever. No idea what I’m doing so this will be a complete disaster I’d wager – I’ve never made a game outside of messing around with GameMaker & RPG Maker some 12-13 years ago. That said, I’m an OK Java coder and composer (my art sucks) so we’ll see what we can do.

Engine: Slick Java2D library

Music: FruityLoops Studio trial version

Art: Probably Paint

Chances of success: Minimal to none

Eclipse/JDK/ADK/LibGDX/FL Studio/SFXR downloaded and installed so all that’s left to do is give you what I’ve heard is a tradition around these parts:

This is where the magic happens.

Good luck! Have fun! See you on the other side!

Tags: deskphoto, ld24, ld48

This is basically the theme I was both hoping for and not hoping for. Hoping for it because it was the one I had the most ideas for (some university material was very geared towards evolution) but not hoping for it as it presents the biggest danger of going completely overboard and creating something far too complicated.

We shall see, my friends.

Tags: ld24, ld48, thoughts

Can you guess what it is yet?

So far:

• Very happy with my idea (it’s an RPG with a pretty decent use of the theme)
• No idea if I can execute it – at least I’ve got some working collision detection code (even if it’s not pretty)
• Nervous. Very, very nervous.

Best tune of the hour: Ink Spots – Don’t Get Around Much Anymore

As you can see, there wasn’t much done on the front end this hour although I now have the evolutionary algorithm at a basic level for the weapons.

Yup, that’s what this game is about. You kill enemies and get to “mate” one of your swords with the enemy’s genome. You’ll need to keep a wide biodiversity within your swords as certain sword genomes will be utterly useless against some enemies (eg a fire sword will heal a fire enemy).

Mainly this hour I was taking steps to not being a disgusting person – grabbing a shower, having some cereal (Frosties obviously) and having a snuggle with the missus. Back to the grindstone in a bit.

As you can see, it’s actually starting to look like a basic game now. Made a very simple “Castle” tileset for my test dungeon and then made a .txt map file which I’m very crudely interpreting to add collision detection with the walls. I’m sure there’s better ways of doing the mapping but… nuts to it. Not got the time. GOTTA GO FAST (which, conversely, was going to be my idea if Abandoned had won out but the anti campaign was always going to be too strong).

At some point I need to go to the supermarket because I’m awful at prep. Still really want to get this in under the main comp but will fall into Jam if I need to.

Tags: collision detection, progress, screenshot

Only got sound effects into the game this hour which is pretty lousy. Moving into Modplug to do some music to break up the work.

Evidenced below:

Still, a (not-working) animated sprite and the starts of a bad General MIDI track this hour is more progress than making a doodle about procrastination.

Really struggling to keep going at the moment – got a lot of things that I just don’t really want to do.

Basically my innate procrastination is kicking in fierce.

Sort of. Been slacking quite a bit – had a 15-min nap, internet browsing, supermarket visit. That said, I now have an acceptable level switching system which is good.

Next up:

• Fix Level 2 to make enough room for the player character (turns out my collision detection requires 2-block hallways)
• Rewrite the render() method to render each level’s enemies individually
• Sort out combat properly – attack with spacebar rather than automatically winning
• Give dudes HP
• Design some levels
• Give it some… oh I dunno…

Ah, yes.

Either way, I’m pretty pleased because I really think I’m going to have a deliverable at the end of this. Heck, I wouldn’t be too sad to hand in what I have already and there’s still ~2/3 the time to go. This means I can happily say I’ve already met my only target.

[x] Make a game