So I’ve got the background scrolling nicely, I’ve got the player’s ship moving about, and I’ve added random fungi generation (currently from a pool of 7):

I’m not too sure about the design of the player’s ship though.  I might change it if I have time after everything else.  Slightly concerned also that the fungi don’t stand out enough from the background.

Next step is to add collision detection with the fungi, then fungi scanning, and spores.

The fungi collision detection is in, and I’ve added spores and the weapon toadstools:

Next to add bullets for the toadstools to fire, and get them colliding with the fungi.  Also, I think I’m going to add drop shadows to the foreground objects to distinguish them from the background.

Dinner was a big bowl of cheesy tomato-y rice:

Tags: foodphoto

Okay, an update before I stop for today.  You can now scan the fungi (and win the game if you scan all the fungus types), and toadstools attached to your ship fire bullets and destroy fungi:

Things to do tomorrow:

• Music.
• SFX.
• Falling boulders.
• Shooter fungus?
• More fungi.
• Foreground drop shadows.
• Scanning progress bar.
• New ship.
• Title screen.

I’ve been up for about 2 1/2 hours now, and I’ve been doing the rest of my graphics.  Here’s a picture of some of the additional fungi:

Now I’m going to do the music and SFX while the paint dries, then scan everything in (after lunch?).

Forgot to take a picture of my breakfast, but it was just some weetabix.

Garden of Earthly Delights is fairly prominent in my head right now.

Tags: deskphoto

So I’ve added the music, the sound effects, the drop shadows, and I’ve done a new ship.  It’s getting there:

Among the things still to do are falling boulders when you kill enough fungi, various particle effects, and a tutorial or explanation screen.  I should have it done in plenty of time for the deadline.

Updates since the last post include boulders falling from the ceiling, fungi which shoot at you, various particle effects, and wee story/tutorial messages from your command base.  A picture:

I have a few more things left to do still.  With a bit of luck I’ll submit some time around 9 (GMT).  Dinner pic’s below the jump.

Just beans on toast and some Irn Bru.  Nothing fancy.

Tags: foodphoto

You can get The Lair of Fungal Wonder here.  Here’s the title screen:

I’ll upload Linux and OSX versions tomorrow.

The OSX and *NIX ports of The Lair of Fungal Wonder are up now (and amazingly required no edits to get them to compile on the other platforms – that must be the smoothest porting of a game I’ve made to date).

I’ve also uploaded my timelapse, so you can see me making the game.  The only slight hiccup is I made the music and SFX on my other computer, so during that part you’ll have to make do with watching the screensaver.  Also I didn’t think to point the webcam at my paper while I was doing the watercolours, so for that part all you see is me hunched over, occasionally looking up with a paint brush in my mouth.

I’ll do a post-mortem later.

Tags: timelapse

First, I thought it might be worth posting all the images I made for the game:

(I’ve hidden one image above the second ship to avoid spoilers)

This LD was pretty much a dream.  I’d already decided I was going to be using watercolours for the graphics (since I’ve been painting with them quite a bit lately), and then on seeing the theme I had an idea for a game that would really benefit visually, and tie into my current reading habits (again, Jeff Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen).  From there the whole thing went incredibly smoothly, with no major roadblocks.

What went well: The graphics, obv.  I’ve only just started to find my feet with watercolours, and they were perfect for this game.  I also really like how the game environment reacts to the player’s actions and starts fighting back if they start destroying the fungi.  That’s something I’d like to explore further.

What went not so well: The explosions when a fungus or the player dies.  They’re just rubbish.  I think the coloured particles are all wrong, and also I need to improve my particle generator; it’s just too simplistic as it is.  And while I think the music is basically perfect, the SFX are really clumsy.  They’re a mix of recorded and synthesized sounds, and they don’t really sit together.  I think I need to study foley techniques to get better at this sort of thing.  Also the endings are a bit perfunctory; I should have probably had some images or animations rather than the simple wipes accompanied by text.

Oh, and I’m not sure if I made it clear enough that there are essentially two styles of play: peaceful (scan all the fungi) and destructive (destroy all the fungi).  This was related to the whole business of the game environment reacting to your actions in a smooth manner, so it’s fairly benign until you start to poke it with a stick, at which point it becomes increasingly hostile.  i.e. the point where you collide with a spore and start destroying fungi is the point at which your mission goes bad, and it becomes all about survival rather than scientific research.

What I’m unsure about: The difficulty.  Judging difficulty’s always hard, and from the comments I’ve had so far it may be too difficult.  I’m not sure if anyone’s seen both endings yet?  But then my benchmark for difficulty in this kind of game is Hydorah, which I’m rubbish at, whereas I can easily beat my Lair.  So, yeah, I’m not sure.

The Future?: I might possibly do more with this setting.  Certainly the visual style is worth exploring some more.  And (perhaps because Vandermeer’s book currently has such a hold on me) the whole idea of basing an environment around fungi seems incredibly rich, and full of potential.  We’ll see.

Oh, and fwiw I’d definitely recommend other people try the watercolour route for this kind of competition.  I found it so easy to create graphics that looked good (and unique).  Just draw some simple shapes (pencil), then pick a couple of colours and let them blend together on the paper.  Really I spent more time waiting for the paint to dry (during which I got on with other things) than I did painting.

Tags: postmortem

Since a couple of issues with the random number generator conspired to make the game a little harder than it needed to be, I’ve done a post-compo version of the game.  The changes are:

• Altered fungi generation to always leave a gap for the player to get through.
• Altered fungi generation to ensure the full range of fungus types appear within a reasonable timeframe.
• Weighted weapon toadstools to appear mostly on the front of the ship.
• Added menu to the title screen.
• Added easy mode (less ship inertia, less frequent (and not intensifying) spores, less frequent boulders).

And I’ve also uploaded a couple of videos of me playing through the game (spoilers, obv.):

Peaceful playthrough

Destructive playthrough

They’re slightly jittery because I had a hard time finding a screen recorder that actually worked. Fraps, camstudio, and taksi were all far too slow; I wound up using gtk-record-my-desktop on Linux (which I have on a different partition on the same machine, so it’s not a hardware issue).

…in case I decide to join in anyway, here‘s my basecode (C++, GPL). Dependencies are: GLEW; libjpeg; freetype; libpng; portaudio; SDL; SDL_image; SDL_ttf; zlib. Other programs I might use are Inkscape, Paint Shop Pro and Tracktion.

Ech. Feeling distinctly grumpy this morning (I hate this kind of broad, all-encompassing theme – creativity thrives on constraints!). Anyway, I guess my game’s going to be a kind of black box (well, technically a multi-coloured, epileptic-flashing black box), with the player tasked with discovering how it works.

I will at least finally get to use my realtime audio synthesis code with this one. Expect to hear plenty of squelches and zaps.

So I spent most of the morning thinking up a name. I think it was worth it though: Explosive Transcendental Circulatory System.

Here’s a screenshot to go with it:

It’ll get slightly more interesting later.

I’ve now added giant sproingy pixels. You probably need to see it moving to get the full effect.

I also added a fuzzy border and hooked up my synthesizer code, so there’s now sound to accompany it. I think I might add some background drones too though, as it can get a little sparse if the player stops doing anything.

I seem to have somehow managed to get everything done in a single day bar the loading screen. Which is good, because working tomorrow means I won’t be able to get back to the game before about 4:30pm. This screenshot doesn’t really show anything new, but that’s because most of what I’ve done in the past few hours has been audio, or stuff I don’t really want to show to avoid ruining the surprise(s).

Funnily enough, I seem to have ended up with something I’m quite proud of, despite hating the theme with a passion.

Back from work, and the loading screen’s in and I’ve added a bit more polish to a couple of bits that needed it. A loading screen screenshot:

It’s looking like I might even have time to build the Linux and OSX versions before the deadline, which would be a first for me.

Get it here. There’s Windows, Linux and OSX builds. I forgot to do a timelapse this time, but I do have a plan… Also, I wanted to record a video of the game, but I can’t for the life of me find a screen recorder that actually works

…using advanced graphite reconstruction technology I was able to re-create it, exactly as it happened.

Don’t have much to say in the way of a post-mortem. I hated the theme, but liked what I did with it. The coding went remarkably smoothly and I was pretty much done by the end of Saturday. Which was just as well, as I had to work on Sunday.

Tags: timelapse

I’m about half-way through my game, so I thought I’d post something before I go to bed.

My idea was to make one of those games that’s incredibly ambitious and also thoroughly buggy and broken (e.g. Boiling Point). So I’m making a roguelike with as much stuff in it as I can possibly fit. In no particular order:

• Noise propagation.
• Avalanches.
• Full ecosystem (plants eaten by herbivores, which are eaten carnivores, omnivores eat everything).
• Dynamic weather.
• Predators track you (and other prey) by smell and noise.
• Floods.
• Hunger, thirst <- every creature in the game suffers from these. Some will change their behaviour as a result.
• Traps which the player can only see if they’re observant enough.
• Probably other stuff I’ve forgotten.

Basically I want to create something incredibly chaotic and broken, with most games ending within a couple of turns through no fault of the player. It’s also hideously ugly, and easily the most irritating game I’ve ever made, thanks to the deliberately corrupted graphics you can see in the above screenshot. Here’s what it looks like when they’re not corrupted:

Tags: screenshot