I don’t know if I’ll have much free time during the weekend but I will try to make my first LD entry

After many lost hours on Saturday I’ve finally started working on something.

I’m calling it Lighthouse Keeper (pretty shitty name) and guess what it’s about?

Yeah, you are on an island and you are the lighthouse keeper. You must collect fuel (wood+oil) so the lighthouse can work during the night. I’m thinking of doing it time based (the fuel collecting part) and depending on how much fuel you can get the lighthouse will work the whole night or maybe not and ships will crash and it will be terrible.

After some hours I got some basic isometric tiles rendering (it’s my first time doing some isometric).

Reworked the entire isometric tile system because I wasn’t doing it right. Added player walk animation.

Now I’m working on some art and then probably gonna get some sleep.

I have some trees now, wolfs that walk around and a lighthouse.

Stuff that needs to be done:

• Placing trees around the island, might do it randomly.
• Make it so you are not Jesus (aka: cant walk on water).
• Display the total fuel count.
• Some kind of game ending screen and title screen.
• Make atleast a sound for chopping trees.
• Make wolfs attack you and wonder around.

Hopefully I can finish what’s left.

Arrow keys to move around.
 A to harvest wood/oil from trees.
 S to punch wolves in the face.

Link to source: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12350369/ld/Lighthouse%20Keeper%20src.rar

Link to game: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12350369/ld/Lighthouse%20Keeper.rar

You must survive the wolves and collect enough fuel (> 150) so the lighthouse can work at night.

Hey, heres the timelapse for my game. I’ll probably write a postmortem later today or maybe tomorrow.

Tags: timelapse

Here goes a postmortem for my first LD game, Lighthouse Keeper. I started working on the game on Saturday afternoon and finished almost on the deadline.

This was a great experience even if my game didn’t turn out great

What went right:

• Managed to submit a game, even if it’s horrible, buggy and way too hard.
• The art is ok in general terms (for programmer art!), atleast better than stuff I’ve done before.
• Using stuff I’ve worked with previously: C++, SDL, OpenGL.
• Simplifying my original idea so I could finish in time.

What went wrong:

• The game ended up being too hard. Should probably tune the wolves and player attack damage and/or add more lives to the player. Actually you started with 5 hearts but decided to drop to 3 just before submitting the game.
• You can walk on water! Didn’t have enough time and decided to work on other stuff instead of adding collision detection for staying on the island.
• I spent too much time trying to figure out isometric tiles when I could have just render a rotated quad for the island (pretty much did this to save time).
• The code is horrible, there’s repeated stuff and it’s messy. This is because I just started coding right away with no planning or thinking before.

Tags: postmortem