So I’ve inked the map and scanned it in:

…and I think I’m going to try and use watercolours to colour it.  I’ve not used watercolours in ages, so this may turn out to be a bad idea (test colours after the cut).

The large blue green blob at the bottom right is probably going to be the sea, with the grey-ish one in the middle being the land.

If it all goes wrong, I at least have the plain inked map on my computer as a backup.

I’ve got a title screen now.  I’m not entirely happy with how the watercolour turned out, but it’ll have to do.  There’s going to be clouds obscuring part of it, which will hopefully make things look a bit more interesting.

Lunch below the cut:

Nothing special, just beans on toast and some Irn Bru.  You can see my Scottish Fairy Tales book though, which maybe gives you an idea of what I’m going for with the game.

Fiddled with my particle generator to get some clouds that more or less work the way I want them to.  I should probably start making the actual game part of the game now.  I seem to have spent most of the time so far getting the title screen right…

I don’t have a whole lot to show game-wise, so the next few posts are going to be about my dinner!

After years of making pizzas and never being entirely happy with the results, I finally perfected my recipe a couple of months ago.  It starts with dough:

That’s ~100g plain flour*, half a sachet of yeast, and some lukewarm water.  This is after I’ve kneaded it for ~20mins, and it’s currently sitting on top of my radiator, hopefully rising.  I’ll come back to it in an hour or so, once I’ve done yesterday’s dishes and started the sauce going.

* – A lot of people will tell you to use strong (type-00) flour, but I could never get it to work right.  The dough would always kind of ‘crack’ in an odd way, and it didn’t taste as good.  Plain flour’s the way to go, if you ask me.

So, here’s the dough having risen (and then fallen a bit when I removed the bowl’s cover:

And after the cut, you can see it stretched out, and the sauce bubbling away on the hob.

Here’s the sauce:

That’s half a red onion, half a tin of tomatoes, a pinch of sugar, a pinch of mixed herbs, and (the secret ingredient) a touch of white wine vinegar.  Pizzas cook so quickly the next post will probably be after I’ve eaten it (and watched Dr. Who), but there will be more pictures.

Ooh, Dr. Who was good.  I was worried since the previous episode was terrible, and I really couldn’t see the point in bringing back the angels, but that was up there with the first two episodes of the season.

Anyway, here’s how the pizza turned out:

The dough didn’t turn out as airy as I was hoping, but it was still pretty good.  Another picture and some more details after the cut (I realise no-one’s interested in the intricacies of my pizza recipe but, well, I’m proud of it).

I use the pre-grated kind of mozzarella, because the stuff that comes in a ball is always too watery for my taste, leaving a soggy pizza.  Also, it should be obvious, but you need a hot oven to cook pizza properly, so turn it up as high as it will go.  My own oven’s probably not quite hot enough, but if I pre-heat it and stick the pizza right at the top it does a decent job.  Finally, I usually cook the base on its own for a bit before I add the sauce and cheese.  Here’s a picture after it’s had some time to rise:

Right, I’ll stop talking about pizza now and get back to my game.

I think I’m probably going to call it a night.  Here’s what I have so far:

Note the authentic hebridean clothing of brightly coloured pointy hats 😉

The basic gameplay is there, and you can win (or lose) the game, but the cut-scenes don’t have any pictures, and the gameplay feels a bit lacking.  I think I need to add randomised pickups that help you out (a faster boat, hints about which islanders know the way the enchanted isles).  I’ve still got to do the music too, though that hopefully won’t be too hard.  The whole game’s inspired by rockettothesky’s Medea (e.g.), so I’m going to try for a similar feel.

I’m awake.  I’m pretty happy with yesterday’s progress, but there’s still a lot to be done.  Here’s my todo list:

• Clicking an islander shows you how long it will take to get there, gives you an embark button.
• Music.
• Rough paper background for cut-scenes (maybe a watercolour wash?).
• Cut-scene pictures.
• Randomised pickups.
• Days should tick by faster (the game’s too easy as it is).
• Tutorial hints.
• Button to tell you which islanders know the way to the enchanted isles, at the cost of some of your time.

I just realised I haven’t really explained the game yet.  The aim is to find your way to the enchanted isles (i.e. the lost Hebrides of the title) in the West within 7 days.  To do that you have to find 3 islanders who know the way, but travelling to the islanders takes up time, so you have to try and judge your journey.

I’m going to start with the coding tasks today, as they should go fastest, and the game kind of needs them since it isn’t much fun at the moment.  I plan on getting them done by 11am, then taking about 1 1/2 hours to make the music, followed by lunch.  That’ll leave me the rest of the day to get the cut-scene pictures done, which are the part I’m least confident about.

So I’ve added the extra UI elements I talked about in the previous post.  Islanders who *you know* know the way to the enchanted isles have a yellow glow, and there’s a ‘divine’ button to point you to such islanders (at the cost of some of your time).  I think it’s a more interesting game now, though I suspect there’s still not a huge amount of replay value.  Barring the tutorial hints, I actually got all the coding done which I had planned to get done, so I’m going to start on the music now.

The music’s done.  It’s not quite what I was aiming for (I was going for a slightly eerie feel, but it’s more cheery than eerie), but it works fairly well.  I’ve also done a quick watercolour wash for the background to the cut-scenes (waiting for it to dry before I can scan it).  Lunch was pretty much the same as yesterday; Irn Bru, beans on toast, and ice cream:

Now I’ve got some cut-scenes to draw…

The first cut scene of the game.  It’s not amazing, but I think it’ll do.

Changed my mind, decided the cut-scenes needed colour:

Still not entirely happy with them, but it’s too late to do anything now.  Just the tutorial hints and the decision on whether to randomise the islanders’ colours left to go.

I did some last minute tinkering with the difficulty, and added some basic tutorial hints (displayed on your first play).  Getting the difficulty right was hard, and I suspect I may have gone too far towards the hard end of the scale.  But then these kind of games tend to rely on frequent deaths as part of their replayability.  I’m interested in what kind of comments I’ll get.

There are 5 endings by the way; 3 bad, 1 good, and 1 very good but rare.

LD entry link.

After the jump, a final food photo:

As usual, my eating hasn’t been particularly healthy this weekend, so I decided to finish off with a big fruit salad.  That’s Melon, Grapes, Apple, Raspberries, Banana, and Raspberry Coulis (looking bizarrely like ketchup in that photo; it’s 3 parts raspberry to 1 part caster sugar, blended).

Tags: final, foodphoto

Doing this now, because the longer I leave it, the less chance I’ll ever write it up.

I’ve uploaded OSX and Linux/source code versions.  These ones have the stupid bug where you could click on buoys before you’d found them fixed (thanks TFernando ), but I left the Windows version as it is, since that’s how I submitted it, and it’s not a huge bug.

Timelapse is here.  I’m afraid it’s missing the music making though, since I did that on a different computer and forgot to record a corresponding timelapse.  Post mortem after the jump:

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, though having made the map first, I don’t think the rest of the game really lives up to its watery-coloury beauty.  This was my 4th Ludum Dare, and I think I’ve found my feet now; the 1st one I started off really excited and enthusiastic, but the final slog to get the game finished really took it out of me; the 2nd one was the exact opposite – I hated the theme but got really excited towards the end.  This one was much calmer – I never really felt under pressure, and the whole thing went pretty much to plan.  I wasn’t too happy with the theme though – Islands (like Caverns and Exploration) is too expansive, imo.  Creativity is stimulated most when it’s working within constraints, and as a theme, Islands isn’t much of a constraint.

Anyway, the game:

What went well:

• The map, the clouds.  Really pleased with how these turned out.  I couldn’t have produced a better effect had I been given a month to work on them.
• Also, the font.  Credit goes to a Mr. William Boyd.  I found the font at dafont.com.  A good font makes all the difference.  Oh, actually, I didn’t break the rule of only using your own assets, did I?  I wouldn’t really expect many people to make their own fonts for Ludum Dare.

What went wrong:

• I think the game may be a little too obtuse.  If you’ve played Weird Worlds etc. you’ll know what to expect (minus the space battles), but I don’t think the game really makes clear that you’re supposed to die frequently and start over.  Certainly, even if you win on your first play-through, you’ll miss clues and stories(?) due to the random number generator only picking a handful of the possible options.
• Is it fun?  I suspect it’s possibly a bit too random to really be much fun to play.  In Weird Worlds you get into battles and have various strategies to maximise your potential gains, but there aren’t really many strategies in The Lost Hebrides (though the ‘divine’ button is there for a reason…).  Also, it’s the kind of game whose replayability would probably benefit from a score, but that would kind of work against the story/setting.  To be honest though, I was more interested in creating an atmosphere this time than making a really well-designed game.
• The cut-scenes.  I’m not happy with the way these turned out.  I don’t think they can remotely hold their own against the main map (map = kind of elegant; cut-scenes = clumsy children’s picture book).  It’s the black lines as much as anything, plus I don’t think I really used the watercolours to their fullest potential.

What could be improved:

• The writing.  There are parts of this I really like “She will return a thousand years old…” (though I stole that line), and I do like the main (folklore-ish) story, but a lot of it’s a bit clunky and could do with some editing.

Where the inspiration came from:

• Like I’ve said, rockettothesky‘s Medea album was a huge influence while I was making the game, and my aim was to make a game that had a similar atmosphere.  Also, the islander who tells you “She will return a thousand years old…” is quoting from a couple of songs on the album.
• Scottish folklore.  I have a slight obsession with creating games that reflect where I’m from, and this is probably the closest I’ve come to creating a properly Scottish game.  It seems to me that most games don’t really reference their geographical roots, instead choosing to engage solely with the kind of internet digital monoculture that we’re all part of now.  This game was an attempt to emulate the kind of storytelling you hear in Scottish fairy tales, stories that reference fairies and enchantment, and places like Land-under-Waves which can only be reached by certain paths.
• Weird Worlds/Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, natch.  I love these games.  Short play times, high replayability, not quite a roguelike…

I’ll finish with a picture of everything I drew/inked/painted for the game (barring the clouds, which are hiding under the watercolour pad.  There’s a bit of a spoiler if you’ve not won the game yet:

Tags: postmortem, timelapse

I’ve fixed some bugs with my entry.  So far it seems people only noticed the clicking bug (caused by the code I use to start the game in fullscreen at your native resolution, with black bars if your monitor’s not 16:10 – it was working before the compo, then I stupidly broke it during).  Other bugs fixed include the text rendering as black boxes on OSX, and it crashing straight away on my intel graphics netbook.

I consider these game breaking, and have updated my entry’s links accordingly.  If you want to see the original versions, here they are:

Windows – OSX – Linux/source code

Also, thanks for the comments guys   I pretty much agree – visually it’s my strongest LD entry to date, but gameplay-wise it’s just too random, with no real opportunity for the player to turn it to their advantage.

I’ll be entering again, using my usual C++ template code.  I’ve slightly updated it since the LD17, and it now has configurable key mappings, in addition to: image loading; 2d drawing via OpenGL; basic GUI framework; audio via portaudio; a simplistic polyphonic synthesizer; and truetype font rendering.  And it’s cross-platform, so I’ll be doing Windows, Linux and OSX versions of my game.

My dependencies are: GLEW; libjpeg; freetype; libpng; portaudio; SDL; SDL_image; SDL_ttf; zlib.

And I’ll probably be using some combination of Inkscape, Paint Shop Pro and Tracktion for my various audiovisual needs.

Template code here, GPL licensed.

This looks fun, here’s mine:

Tags: montage

…and gutted that Double Zombie Rainbow didn’t win, but the themes I want never win.

Anyway, having set my alarm to 3am so I could check the theme (I seem to get more interesting ideas when I’m only half-awake) and go straight back to sleep, I have my idea.  I’m currently reading Jeff Vandermeer’s ‘City of Saints and Madmen’, and obviously have fungus on the brain.  So the game’s going to be a kind of ambient sidescrolling shooter/non-shooter.  It’s set in this long cave that’s full of fungi, and the player’s job is to scan all the different types.  The catch being that the cave is also full of floating spores, and whenever the player collides with one, a toadstool grows on the hull of their ship.  A toadstool which shoots bullets.  Which destroy fungi.  And then the more fungi you accidentally destroy, the more the cave starts to fight back, with boulders falling from the ceiling, spores which kill you if you touch them, etc.  There’ll be two endings depending on how successful you were at dodging spores.

My plan of attack goes as follows:

Day 1:

• Do the graphics for the ship, cave, rocks, spores, bullets, 5 or 6 fungi (I’ll be doing the graphics as watercolours).
• Code as much of the game as possible.

Day 2:

• Do the music.
• Paint as many fungi as possible while still leaving time to…
• …finish the coding.

And I’ll finish with a picture of my desk and my breakfast (porridge with honey and a little cinnamon; being still half-asleep I accidentally made twice as much as I intended):

So I’ve decided on a name, and I’ve got my background rocks into the game (though they don’t scroll yet). I give you  The Lair of Fungal Wonder:

I think the lower foreground is a bit too similar to the background, but that’ll probably be less of a problem once I add the fungi and the background rocks start moving parallax-ly.

A ready to bake baguette with my own special pizza sauce and some cheddar.  Mmm…

Going on, the next step is to get the background scrolling, then I’ll add the player’s ship and start adding fungi.  Hopefully by the end of the day I’ll have the scanning and spore->weapon mechanics in and can spend tomorrow finessing things.

Tags: foodphoto