So, I guess it’s time I finally dip my hand into this competition.  I always crap out code and graphics like crazy, so I feel this’ll be a nice way to really show off my skills.

I’ve not done previous competitions of this style before, but I have made quite a few basic games.  All my work is available for free and open source on my github page, and for sure what’s being released here will be pushed to yet another github repository.

As for art, I’m thinking a simple pixel style since I don’t have my graphics tablet right now.  Pixel art is really easy to pump out when you just have a mouse.  More than likely I’ll use GIMP and just have it be PNG files.

Also, sadly I won’t be running any livestream for you people since I’m running all my work on linux, not in a virtual machine.  Linux is my day-to-day OS; it has been for the past 4 years.  I was hoping to use Python for this, but I don’t know of any good ways to make a nice cross-platform binary set, so I’ll just be using Java with Slick2D.  Should be good for me since it’ll help me get even more familiar with the Slick2D code for my current college project of creating a college simulator.  This also encourages me to finally get some convenience classes developed that’ll be useful for all my projects.  I made some really helpful stuff using AWT but when it comes to threading, stability, and input Slick2D is just a lot better than my AWT library, so I have to rebuild some concepts I had then for this.

Oh well, all I can do is hope everything goes well and fast.  Can’t wait to see what the theme is.

 

And for those interested, my github projects can be found at

https://github.com/nhydock and https://github.com/shipgamedev/

tl;dr

Name’s Nicholas Hydock

Lang: Java

Lib: Slick2D

Art: GIMP

I figured I’m just going to do something that’s been done many times before, and make a stealth assassin style game.  In essence, you’re a ninja, serving no man but himself, sick of the rule of the Shogunate.  You set out to kill them all, for the sake of becoming a legend through notoriety and for causing the spiraling decent of japan into its darkest hours.

I’ve decided for collision I’m going to be using JBox2D for really fast calculations since most of it all will just be simple shapes.  With JBox2D I can have easy to do jumping and bounce physics too.

As for graphics all I’ve been able to whip up has been the ninja graphic which is uber simple, but you can see that the graphical style I’m going for is kind of like McPixel

All the graphics will be insanely low res.  This will also help a lot with performance because it’ll be working with small number calculations only.  To get the game to look nice and be playable I’ll do a full upscale of the Display buffer.

 

I’ve also decided on a title: Satsugai Shogunate, or literally Shogunate Murder, but don’t trust me, I suck at japanese grammar.

I really should have been looking more into nice libraries before this.  Just now I found out about libGdx which looks rather nice than having to use Slick2D and Fizzy.  Also, I just had a good 11 hours of sleep so I haven’t gotten anywhere since 2 am.

One of the most annoying feelings of doing competitions like this is the feeling of “Is my project even good?  What makes it special or fun?  Should I just give up?”  I’m having that right now because mine is so inspired by other games that I’ve played.  As such I doubt I’ll get anything in terms of the creativity department.  On top of that it barely even fits the You Are The Villian theme, so where do I go from there?  I guess I should just focus on getting this stuff done instead of where I’m going to place.

So I while messing around with key input, I never actually fixed a jumping bug with my ninja, so if you repeatedly tapped space he’d fly around.  It kind of reminded my brother of the jetpack Dos games when I told him about it, which I thought was funny.  Then, I got the idea, something that’d just make this so obsurd that it’ll be fun.

I’m going to switch this game up entirely from an assassinate the Shogun to a horizontal space shooter where you’re a ninja in space, hired to sabotage the satellites of various global TV stations.

Got a star field to render nicely as well as a level progress bar.  Now all I need to do is get the dolphins and samurai to fly across the screen for you to shoot down.  It was also insanely satisfying to be able to put some Linear Algrebra that I learned this past semester to use to get the relative crosshair functioning nice and fast.

Got the enemies working somewhat.  Next up has to be weapons so I can take them out.  Once that’s in I need to implement taking out a Satellite boss to add a challenge.  I don’t know if I’ll have the time for implementing path following for complex enemy paths or complex bullet paths from the Satellite.

 

It’s rather late in the project and I’m just encountering quite the short coming for the libraries that I’m using.  Fizzy abstracts away quite a bit for the collision detection, plus there’s not a lot of documentation on it.  How my game currently works is the edges of the screen have static walls on them to prevent your player from going out of bounds.  Asteroids spawn off screen and pass through.  Currently the only way that works is if the asteroids are kinematic bodies.  The bullets were going to be dynamic, but because they spawn where the player is they could bounce into infinity and break the game if they were dynamic, plus they too would bounce off the walls if they would work anyway.  So I tried making them Kinematic because then they wouldn’t be effected by the player, but wait, the asteroids were Kinematic as well so the bullets and asteroids would never detect collision with each other.

I went and looked into a way to fix this, all I needed was a way to allow one-direction/side pass through for kinematic/dynamic collisions as well as a way to ignore certain dynamic/dynamic collisions.  Sadly, however, Fizzy blocked most of that kind of access, or so it seems, so I can’t get bullets working at all.  There’s only 7 hours left, and this problem is way too big of one that I want to solve, so I’m just going to post one last screenshot and bid this competition farewell.  It was a nice run

This "game" is an Evangelion "inspired" "fighter" called Get In The Robot. Having been detached from the power source, your giant robot only has 5 minutes worth of power to fight back as many other giant monsters as you can.

We spent this weekend learning more about Godot and testing the crap out of Godot 3 in the process in an attempt to make a game for LD39. There were plenty of breaking issues with the engine, with it frequently crashing every couple of minutes. Don't expect much because we sure as heck had no idea what we were doing for 90% of the process. Heck, I can't even really call it a game because there's nothing fun about it. You can move around like a tank and punch the enemy. More of just a tech demo. That said, I'm more than satisfied with what Godot helped me accomplish in only 48 real hrs of work.

All the 3D models were made and rigged entirely during the competition. This was more of a learning experience for both of us as we had a) never made a 3D game before b) never really used Godot before and c) haven't made anything in Blender in years. Overall, fun learning experience, and we want to turn this into a full doujin game!

So the theme selected ended up being the one I was inspired the most by! I've had an idea for combining 2 genres you wouldn't expect for about 5 years now and was really in the mood to finally put it together, it's like this was meant to happen. I probably would have gone ahead with it anyway even if it wasn't the theme just because I've been meaning to make this game happen for forever.

Looks like I'll be making a 1v1 Touge-themed Racing Deck-Building card game! I already spent the last 3 hours writing down everything I've had on my mind these few years, and whew I'm bad at designing card games. Thankfully my brother and 2 other friends are here to help me with play testing, balancing, and thinking of better scoring mechanics.

I know it's a bit hard to play test card games relying entirely on physical stuff, just because of the time it takes to make it, so I'm going to be building up a demo site to test it in. The HTML/JS stuff will be easy, I'll probably just make use of Vue or something to crap it out fast. What'll be fun is the multiplayer server, which I'll be writing in either Golang or async Python since I've been hooked on them and want to do more in 'em.

It's time to step on the gas gas gas

Working in Go might not have been the best thing for me because I'm just not used to the way of thinking, coming from a largely OOP history of engineering. Furthermore I've never written a card game system before, and going through with looking at no reference other than the language spec has been a test of my imagination. That said, I'm making somewhat decent progress I feel. I have much of the server backend set up and soon I'll be writing the bits that connect players and execute the game state. Also need to spend time relearning how to use Vue since it's been at least 6 months since I last touched front-end web development.

Will try to stay up all night so I can at least post a screenshot since I feel bad not having anything visual to show off yet.

In the final stretch and I don't even have anything visual to show. Things came out to be a bit harder to do by myself than I was expecting. Definitely if I plan on doing something I've never done before, I should have someone else to help me out. With how much time I've spent on the backend of the server, could definitely have used some help with putting together the client and visuals as I'm working out the API and state management on the server of the card game.

On the plus side, however, I now have a solid idea of how to structure functional multiplayer card games and I might use this base for building more in the future. There's no hope for me to finish in time for the compo, and since I have work tomorrow there's no way I can crank out anything else for the Jam. Thankfully, my friends are still hyped to play the game, so I can at least make something for them.

Code and gameplay spec are up on github and still in development, I'll be hosting something on heroku when I verify it can play a full game between 2 players, so look forward to that in the future. With enough interest and play testing I might look for ways to make a physical version.