It’s my first time, but don’t be gentle on me. I’ve been meaning to do this for a few years now.

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I’ll be using the excellent HTML5 arcade-style library Akihabara, which I just happened to have started to learn a few days ago before realizing LD started today.

Code will be hosted on github.

• Graphics: The Gimp
• Sound: sfxr/keyboard synth/ZynAddSubFX
• ?Music: keyboard/ZynAddSubFX (maybe)

I’ll also be taking screenshots at regular intervals to compose into a time-lapse video later on.

Tags: introduction

Do you like space?

Because I decided to work on what I’m calling a space-roguelike. The easiest way to describe it is Star Control 2’s real-time combat/flight meets Desktop Dungeons’s simplicity/brevity.

Here are some early/non-final progress shots from recently to give you an idea:

Here are some older screenshots.

Well. I knew this was too ambitious for the 48 Hour compo, so I’m hoping to have something playable for the Jam. Wish me luck (I haven’t slept much the last few days…)!

Tags: jam, progress, roguelike, space

(This is a cross-post from my devlog on tumblr.)

Ludum Dare 23 is over and my game has been submitted. It was a crazy 3 days of … crazy, and the most fun I’ve ever had making a game.

However, I wasn’t really done with my game. I had something playable, but I felt like I could actually make a feature-complete space-exploration game out of it.

So I decided to continue working on it.

Thus begins the devlog of the “final” version of μniverse.

If you’re here, I’ll assume you have already played the pre-alpha or Game-Jam version of the game and are familiar with what it is. If not, or if you want a refresher, check out the About the Game page to get a run-down of what μniverse is and will hopefully become.

Unfortunately, right now I’m in the process of cleaning up and organizing the codebase (one giant CoffeeScript file), so I won’t have much exciting stuff to report until I’m happy with that, but in the meantime, if you think this might be a game that catches your fancy, you should +follow me here on tumblr, or twitter, or github.

Tags: devlog, muniverse, post-compo, post-jam, space, space game

(This is a cross-post from my devlog on tumblr.)

This is a concept image for a procedurally-generated gas-giant-like planet in the game.

Right now, planets are rendered as a single circle filled with a radial gradient that is offset from its center. This is pretty effective for giving the illusion of a sphere, but it’s a boring non-textured sphere.

Currently what I’d need to add to the game would be an extra layer or two of inverted radial gradients for “atmosphere effects” (the blue lighting) and an overlay texture that is either canned or also procedurally-generated. When I figure out how to do this I’ll make a technical post explaining my technique.

Oh and yeah, I realize that the lighting is unrealistic — gas giants have clouds that align perpendicular to their axis of rotation, which corresponds to their axis of orbit around their star. Unless the axis of the planet got thrown off bigtime — which does occasionally happen with planets like Uranus — it doesn’t really make sense. Our camera would have to have been rotated, too.

That reminds me; while I wont be going to great lengths to make the game universe realistic, I’ll try to keep them somewhat-correct. More on that later.”/>

This is a concept image for a procedurally-generated gas-giant-like planet in the game. You probably see this dude over on the left right now, too, but I wanted to talk briefly about it.

Right now, planets are rendered as a single circle filled with a radial gradient that is offset from its center. This is pretty effective for giving the illusion of a sphere, but it’s a boring non-textured sphere.

Currently what I’d need to add to the game would be an extra layer or two of inverted radial gradients for “atmosphere effects” (the blue lighting) and an overlay texture that is either canned or also procedurally-generated. When I figure out how to do this I’ll make a technical post explaining my technique.

Oh and yeah, I realize that the lighting is unrealistic — gas giants have clouds that align perpendicular to their axis of rotation, which corresponds to their axis of orbit around their star. Unless the axis of the planet got thrown off bigtime — which does occasionally happen with planets like Uranus — it doesn’t really make sense. Our camera would have to have been rotated, too.

That reminds me; while I wont be going to great lengths to make the game universe realistic, I’ll try to keep them somewhat-correct. More on that later.

Tags: concept, graphics, image, muniverse, procedural generation, space

(This is a cross-post from my post-compo devlog.)

Yes, there will be puns. I apologize for nothing.

The most recent addition to the game was the heads-up-display for your ship in flight mode. It’s a subtle addition but it’s the sort of thing that makes it feel like, yanno, a game. I’m happy to say that it doesn’t act as a big distraction or take away from any “immersiveness” that the game might (accidentally) already have.

Right now, the only info the player needs to see are their shield levels. The way I chose to display this was an unassuming, white vertical bar. When you take damage, the bar shrinks accordingly. The important bit is that it does so in an animated fashion — any time the bar is shrinking, the ‘S’ (label for ‘shields’) shakes proportional to the amount the bar is moving.

Once your shields are below a critical threshold, the bar turns red, and the ‘S’ continues to shake along with the bar until your shields are repaired. I usually hate UI-nags but I make an exception for imminent death.

What isn’t pictured is that the camera also shakes whenever you take damage. The reason for this is two-fold: 1) This helps indicate that you took damage, but it also 2) can disorient you, much like it would happen if you were at the controls and a burst of plasma breaches your hull.

Along the same line, I’m considering having your craft be propelled by the shots as well, but I’m afraid that might be too jarring for the average player. Maybe in a sort of “expert mode”. 😉

Tags: devlog, game design, game development, gamedev, hud, muniverse, space, space game

(This is a cross-post from my post-compo devlog.)

I’ve been playing around with different ways to fake the atmosphere of a planet in a 2D canvas context.

That’s interactive, by the way, so mess around with it (Chrome/Chromium is recommended!). Clicking on/around the planet changes the “angle” of light. You can get some pretty nifty looking results. I made this to determine what were reasonable parameter-ranges to use to generate plausible-looking planets.

The way I get the sort of “volumetric” look for the atmosphere is really simple: I just stack many semi-opaque layers of the same gradient-filled-circle over the planet, each one having a radius slightly bigger than the previous.

I actually threw this together using with a JSFiddle which you can view/hack here.

Of course, I still need to figure out how to combine this with a surface/cloud texture (procedurally generated or otherwise…).

Tags: canvas, html5, javascript, muniverse, procedural generation, space

I’m in. These are probably the things I will use to make my game, whatever it turns out to be. I love these things.

HTML5

ImpactJS

Vim

Coffeescript

node.js

github

The GIMP

sfxr

SunVox (Music)

Dutifully contributing to the site’s inevitable lag.

The operative tools in this picture are Sriracha and Beer. Unfortunately, I’m fresh out of Sriracha.

Some things that will be running around in the game (they wont just bounce up and down in place…):

This is you:

So, I submitted my joke game as soon as the submission form was open, without realizing you can’t submit more than one game, or remove/replace your game entry. I lost the game.

minimalism => optimization => assembly lines

That was my train of thought.

My game is about designing an efficient assembly line. Inspired by Bart Bonte’s “Factory Balls” but with a spatial aspect. Clearly I’m utilizing the knowledge I gained while making FLOG — there are many similarities.

Unfortunately I’m an idiot and didn’t realize you can’t submit multiple games, so my joke-game submission probably shouldn’t have happened. I removed the links and screenshot from my entry to hopefully prevent joke-votes.

There are many utilities and various formats for bitmap fonts. Which do you prefer?

To start things off, my favorite is ImpactJS’s purely-image-based format, for its simplicity: http://impactjs.com/documentation/class-reference/font

Want a dump of all the current Ludum Dare 27 entry data (URLs, screenshots, thumbnails, description text, format types) in JSON format?

HERE YOU GO!

(This isn’t the first time I’ve done this.)

Happy parsing!