Food and desk picture at the same time!

… hmm.. maybe I should get some groceries real quick

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

Time to start working on some code, but not with a tasty little meal

minestrone soup, sourdough bread toast, and Hansens creamy root beer

I’m not sure where my digital camera is, so I’m using my crappy webcam

Tags: foodphoto, root beer, soup

I think i’m going to do this competition. No, like really this time. I’ve yet to complete an LD48, though I have about 3 half-games sitting around from previous competitions . Thing is, I’ve been programming a lot due to my job, but almost entirely in Perl, so I’m all rusty with Python/Pygame, C++/DirectX or C#/XNA which are my typical choices for a game.

Does anyone have experience making a game in perl? It’s not a very common use for the language, and I really haven’t heard of any mature game/graphic libraries for it.  If I don’t find anything better I’ll probably just use the SDL bindings . It’d be nice if these was something similar to PyGame available though.

Tags: perl

Drifting in the Stellar Winds

(working title) I’ve decided in a game that is essentially, way too complex for someone who hasn’t made any working games recently. The basics are: -Top Down 2D: Simpleish topdown 2d movement, 4 directions with a giant seamless map loaded in the background –Space Exploration: You are in a smallish space ship powered by solar sails . -Persistent Endless Universe: The ‘map’ is procedurally generated on my server and streamed to the flash client. The universe limits are essentially limitless as any time a player approaches the existing ‘end’ of the map, it will generate new data for that area. -Psuedo Physics: simplified game physics basing ship speed off of ‘solar winds’ and gravitational pulls. Certain solar bodies like different star types, black holes etc will have different and potentially deadly affects on the ship -Planet Exploration: All planets that are generated will have different environmental variables. Once that the player is able to approach will generate their own procedural based data that the player can explore via small landing craft. Exploring will be 2d topdown and streamed as well. -Planet Interaction: ideas for what the player can find on a planet -primitive life forms -resources (fuel, alien artifacts, food, tradeable resources) -civilized non space-faring life forms ( limited interaction available) -environmental hazards -empire building? (at some point allow players to build their own settlements) -AI Civilizations: Randomly generated civilizations with their own ships, planets and space stations. Will react to player differently with various options for trading, missions, diplomacy and aggression, and various technology levels
The game portion will not have an actual objective. The player data can be saved to the server, so it is essentially a single player online game, with the potential of adding mmo support. You can however upgrade your ship and your technology, collect map data (allowing faster access with the ability to bookmark areas), increase reputation with alien civilizations and also collect warp points.
Since this is a 48 hour game competition, I’m aiming for an extremely simplified version of the above. Art assets are going to be tough for me, so maybe just a handful of different classes of planets,stars and other solar bodies. A very small tech tree and ship part list, and maybe two civilizations with variable personalities. Within 24 hours I want playable streaming map support for both space and individual planets

TimeLapse Running
I got timelapse running with Chronolapse about an hour before the comp and will capture cam and screenshots all weekend!

Drifting in the Stellar Winds
Infinite space + planet exploration

Screens with ripped art that will be replaced!


Current playable copy:

Currently Title->Menu->Game states . Game has a player class that runs around the map, and a random starfield in the background. It scrolls, I’m happy. Using flixel made that a headache since apparently FlxSprite has no Sprite elements, so I couldn’t make one when I want to manipulate pixels, but instead had to make a sprite and a custom render function that blits it over. Otherwise Flash would blit real Sprites over any Flixel objects every time the screen updates. fun.

Next up is getting the starfield to generate new data whenever approaching the current boundry, to remove borders completely. The starfield is just cosmetic so it will be constantly random and not persistent .

Pixel Stars

Explore the endless supply of pixelated stars at Clicky Clicky
*currently there is a bug where if you go to negative coordinates, your endless supply of stars ends*

Spent pretty much all day working on what comes down to a fairly simple server app. Planets and solar bodies are persistent and tracked on the server in a database. Flash periodically requests a map refresh from the server and creates the necessary sprites. If you go in a positive direction it works fairly well. When you go to a coordinate where the server does not have any stars, it generates somes, saves them and returns them, thus endless until either the client or server crashes.

I wanted to be working on the planetary exploration by this point,grr. Wasted 3 hours fighting with Python/AppEngine before just making a Perl script. Haven’t slept, so 24 hours at my desk trying to code.

So I didn’t get an actual game submitted this time, but I put in all the effort I could. Slept 3 hours since Friday morning, only break I took was to go to the store.. I like the concept and design for my game and am going to pursue it. Even if I rip the flash code to hell and back, I successfully prototyped an ‘infinitely’ (based on optimized server resources) persistent universe streaming through a flash client with mmo style multiplayer.

Play Live

I also am psuedo calculating the total gravity wells of all nearby planets and using it as propulsion. I’m pretty sure it’s not physically accurate, but didn’t have time to total up the force vectors of 100’s of fake planetary bodies myself. So it makes you move, worsk for me. I’m sure a little tweaking would make it more fun being able to fly around navigating by slingshotting around big planets.

For my first flash game ever it’s not too bad. If I go for a rewrite I might drop Flixel completely. Writing the crappy text input because Flixel completely seperated any event handlers from the game logic.. yea, shitttyyy. FlxSprite has no sprite elements, that was another fun one. What’s the point of using a graphics library, when you have to write pixel by pixel to the buffer to get around it..
On the other hand, there are several ways I could have used Flixels structure better. It seems really designed around using the tilemap class, which I didn’t touch.

I have a partial timelapse I’ll upload soon. I’m pretty sure it was responsible for the two blue screens of death I had this weekend though

The game I submitted to the contest (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=28) wasn’t a game in the sense that you could like.. do anything. Objectives? nah. Plot? nah. What I did was essentially a tech demo- flash space exploration mmo. except more than a couple people turned my crappy vps into a flaming heap, but theoretically it was an mmo . Well, anyone that likes the idea of a cross between Elite and Eve Online, I’m continuing work on it and just finished a large rewrite of the backend:

I am currently aiming at getting something more playable in for TIGSource’s Assemblee contest by the 10th (all the art/music I’m using is generated earlier from their users). I just finished a full rewrite so that everything runs of Python/Django on Google AppEngine . Added bonus- game accounts can attach to google authentication

Play at http://play.drifting.thegup.com

Currently the appengine framework is pretty much complete with datastore models for players,stars,planets,civilizations and npcs. I’m still tweaking the galaxy generation process but will be moving on to solar systems soon, along with multiplayer chat and pilot profiles, and some more ui options .

The game plan is to make it into kind of a multiplayer Elite – civilizations are generated along with the galaxies including homeworlds, npc ships and npc space stations you can interact with. You represent whatever civilization you choose and can later switch civs based on a reputation system. War against other civs and plunder, go freelance pirate, or do missions they give. There will be a limited resource you can use to claim new planets in the name of your civilization and either set up defenses or mining bases.
Each sector will be generated when a neighboring sector is first discovered.. ie a player enters sector 10,10 – the 3 neighboring sectors that haven’t been generated would then be created. There will be randomly placed wormholes or warp gates as well to connect to either other solar systems in the same sector or other sectors, to make exploring less linear.
Eventually I want to make planets explorable as well. They will be procedurally generated with a unique seed combined with the physical traits described by the ACRETE algorithm when generating them. I was looking at Away3D for making planet exploration a separate flash app

Congratulations to everyone who entered LD, there were some great and amusing entries

I thought I’d like to make a Road Rash clone, cause that game was awesome. I was going to style it like road rash 3 and do everything fake 3d style. I wasn’t sure how to do the road in fake 3d though.
Then I remembered Away3D, a 3D engine for Flash I was looking at before and decided to give it a try. It’s a pretty complete engine, but Flash performance is still not the greatest so I can’t use all the pretty things like ‘shaders’ or ‘correct z-order rendering’ or really most anything that makes doing a 3d game worthwhile.

I did get a kind of demo for how it might go though at
http://thegup.com/samples/flashy/lolbike.html
I also had to learn 3d modeling so my bike is kinda.. jaggy. And the textures didn’t load propery in MilkShape.

which leads me to maybe making a tron clone .. simple if any textures..

If I can get billboards working and scaling right then I might actually be able to make a game

Figured I’d post my setup cause all the cool kids are doing it

core2duo with dual monitors and win7
msi wind netbook with win7. using synergy to make it function like 3 displays, typically just use the netbook for chat/irc/email and performance testing

I’m probably going to settle on Flash for easily getting something running. Going to try FlashPunk instead of Flixel because it sounds a little more better organized.

Tags: deskphoto, workstation

Not sure if this is just me, but the IRC server is not letting me join any chat rooms. At first I got the message that my IP was blocked, so I setup AuthServ and it not authenticates and lets me send pm’s, but whenever I try to join a room it doesn’t do anything. Anyone got any ideas what’s going on? No error messages or anything, it just ignores my /join commands but I’m still connected and authenticated. I can try Meebo if all else fails but I really prefer to stay with Pidgin

Also I’m definitely intending to join in next weekend, though I’m rusty. Going to use this as an excuse to try something with WebGL

I used to have an awesome dual screen setup, but since I moved to Costa Rica I had to switch to a laptop for mobility. So my work area is.. not as cool. However I got some tasty snacks to keep me going!

the local store doesn’t have mountain dew, so I settled for some awesome green tea stuff.

There should be a separate page just for “I’m In” posts so they don’t flood the front page but you can still see who’s entering and doing what. Here’s mine:

Going to do an online something:
Server: Node.js on AWS
Client: Flash and JS (for hooking to social apis and some misc stuff)
Tools: FlashBuilder, Away3d Or Flixel (depending on pixel art or 3d game), and PyxelEdit/Paint/Photoshop

I was going to do this with a team but the other people dropped so I guess it’s another solo attempt. I’m going to use as code base a server/engine I started for reddits BaconJam – at http://github.com/Mocker/DarkLord . I’m working on adding Facebook,Google api’s to the engine so that I can do something that *optionally* integrates with them. I know people don’t like to be forced to login through facebook to play a game so it will definitely just be optional – ie if you use facebook put your contacts on a friend list.

After finishing struggling with Adobe Security Policies and forgetting to open my firewall, my client/server app is now live and running.
http://ld24.thegup.com

Right now it’s just a user registration/login. Nothing to register except make a username and password, and then it’ll log you in when you enter it and move you to the currently blank next screen.

Next step is integrating Box2D to test out my actual gameplay idea than throwing some menus in and figuring out how to track it all. For now though time to sleep a bit.

Announcing my work on the October challenge, I was slammed with work last week (and the next couple days as well really) but going to go ahead and start putting a bunch of time into getting this working. I am reworking an old game in order to sell, I’ll have to recode everything from scratch but it’s a semi-basic top down arcade style space combat game so not particularly complicated.

(original title screen)

I am building it in Flash so I can cross-compile to web, android, iOS . I particularly would like to see how to make a good iPad version even though I don’t have an iPad. I would like to include multiplayer co-op games but since I’m starting this kinda late to get to market I think I’ll release a single player version first. For the single player version I’ll probably release a free version with a few ‘campaigns’ and a $1 version with a couple more extensive ones. For the more advanced multiplayer capable I want to release I’d like to do paid unlocks so you can customize your ship and create your own campaigns.

In a couple days when I can really dive into this more I’m going to setup a dev blog

Our team decided on a space adventure game in HTML5

You will explore a zombified moon base, maybe have some puzzle like aspects and randomized floor layouts. We are livestreaming our development and chatting at

We are livestreaming and chatting at http://www.twitch.tv/irishwilly/new and will be on all weekend switching between different people on the team.

Online games are my passion so even though it’s a bit ridiculous for a 48hour jam, I’m going to see how far I can get with an online fantasy rpg/sandbox game. I’ll be entering as a jam since I can’t even art and want to focus on the server and game, so will throw together a bunch of placeholder art from OGA and such.

The game will run with javascript/phaser and connect to a Node server via websockets.

Each player will have their own randomized small ‘world’ to start in to explore, kill baddies, collect loot and build a basic base with basic and probably idiotic npcs(2d top down style). The world will have various portals pop up that allow them to visit other small areas or ocassionaly other players worlds.

I’m livestreaming at : http://http://www.twitch.tv/irishwilly
Keeping code updated in github at : https://github.com/Mocker/LD30
And will have a copy of the game (sometime later tonight maybe): at http://ld30.gup.io

Since I’m focusing mostly on coding there won’t be any pretty drawing going on but if anyone wants to stop by and say hi please do

snowmen invade

Had to scratch most of my ideas because of the theme but taking the chance to make a game based off a really cool JS script for generating hex planets (http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-generation). Doing a very simplified RTS where you control a snowman army with the goal to conquer and freeze the world.

Currently getting destroyed by my rusty 3d math skills..

Will be streaming while I work at Twitch.tv/irishwilly

I don’t really have much in the way of plans or anything so I suppose this post is just tradition.

I’ll be participating solo. I would normally prefer to use Unity or Unreal for this but my desktop is having issues so I’ll be doing something more simple with html5 or webgl on my laptop. Likely try something online/multiplayer with websockets cause that is kinda my thing

None of the posts have really caught my attention, I’ll try to brainstorm a bit today during work for each of the finals.

I am a fan of procedural generation and like excuses to play around. Every month /r/proceduralgeneration runs a new challenge, this month is Procedural Weapons ( https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/4wubjy/monthly_challenge_9_august_2016_procedural_weapons/ ) . This could be a good way to play with something for that challenge and incorporate into a game although tying it to some of these things could be tricky.