I came up with a decent idea pretty much straight away, but I will need to go pick up some booze. I’m very non-committal when it comes to contests and life in general. Being that the deadline is for completion, I gather there is no deadline for entering except the deadline for completion ?

And while pondering the booze just now, I just came up with an even better idea for a game. Maybe I should ponder about more potent drugs, if the thought of a beer can inspire such a great idea. I think my art skills might be my biggest hurdle. Given that I have been told I am a better artist after a few beers, I shall start at the liquor store as planned.

(ok, no one ever said i was a better artist after a few beers,  but sometimes I do color when I’m drunk)

Ok, having chosen my idea, I have descended into my game development bunker with enough liquor to last .. umm .. 2 days I’m thinking. I shall not emerge until the game has been completed or the beer runs dry. The location of the bunker is impossible to trace, so don’t even try finding it. Even this post could just be a plot to throw you off course.

I won’t say too much about the details about my game, because many simply don’t exist just yet. But I can tell you this much, I need to develop some flea AI. Luckily I’ve watched enough cartoons involving flea circuses, and have a good idea of what they should act like.

The bunker artwork has eaten up 15 minutes of my time, but it’s like warming up and stretching before you play basketball… It’s necessary to avoid pulling a hammy. Now it’s time to step inside the mind of a flea and become a flea.see you on the other side…

 

Treating each game like it's the end of the world

I have chosen an appropriate name for my game concept and run it past my marketing department. They say it’s a go, and they’d like me to stop talking to them as if they aren’t imaginary, cause it’s freaking them the hell out.

The game shall be called “Flea Bitten”, and it shall be infested with fleas. But not just any fleas mind you.

I can ask this next question, only because I feel completely safe and secure inside my game dev bunker.

What if…. a zombie had fleas ? We all understand that a zombie biting you results in enough zombie juice to turn you into a walking corpse. But I don’t think that the opposite has ever been explored, as human beings have evolved enough to realize that zombies don’t taste good.

But our little friends in the insect world, in my best estimations far from being educated by the likes of George Romero on the Zed. So… I’ll leave you with that for now…. well, because it’s really all I have right now!

Update from the bunker -- Game name chosen -- "Flea Bitten"

In an attempt to get a better idea of what the main characters in Flea Bitten would look like, I took a stab at drawing some conceptual artwork. The one on the left is a non-zombified flea. The one on a right is a zombified flea.

I wanted to spend adequate time ensuring they were distinguishable, and if you look “really” closely, they are. trust me on that.

I’m finding that this this game concept is truly making little use of my lack of artistic abilities thus far, which can only mean good things for the game.

1 beer down. I have a game concept, a name for the game, and conceptual artwork.

conceptual artwork - flea and zombified flea

This is my first ludum dare competition, so I’m not really sure what to expect. But I’ve watched enough reality TV show competitions to know that you need to be ruthless. Make them think your thinking one thing, and then be thinking exactly the opposite so you are always one step ahead.

Tell them they need a rebecca black soundtrack  or their clouds really need some work. They can’t stop singing friday and obsessing about clouds and you are off in the clear making a kick ass game. It’s a competition, and you gotta be in it to win it.

That’s why i’m in the bunker. Someone tells me to start fixing clouds and shit.. and I’m flipping them the bird and just writing better AI code while sipping a beer. Can’t rattle me.. this place is reinforced like a mother trucker.

Rattle the competition... make them doubt themselves!

After spending a fair amount of time slowing down other contestants, I continued to execute my gameplan by prototyping a flea. Since fleas are the central focus of the game, you have to go the extra mile in terms of visuals. I’m pretty happy with the results. Now it’s a matter of sitting back and letting them multiply..you can’t control these beasts.. f*** cockroaches, they eat crap off the floor.. fleas are all about taking your lifesource away..the blood. vampires of the insect world. doesn’t get any more evil than that.

flea prototype

You’ve seen one… but once you learn about the reproductive rate of a zombified flea.. you are going to begging for a slow ass zed in your nightmares. Takes a zombie forever just to walk across a yard, but by the time a zombie flea has bit you and jumped to the next victim.. there’s a dozen eggs laying around. I think the zombification like beefs up fertility. go figure. George Romero didn’t tell you about that shit, cause he knew you needed sleep.

I might eventually break out some 3d fleas after the competition. Just not sure the game engine can handle all the triangles i’d need to push these babies through the graphics pipeline!

prototyping a zombified flea takes patience. handled with care...

I faced my first major setback in being reprimanded for blatant trolling. Which is probably for the best, since it’s really hard to come up with ways to try and derail people’s development. But it was taking away time from my own work, so plan b is to just pray for ill will upon their development and spend roughly 45 minutes researching mind control via the demos i might produce. Apparently suggesting that a whale is too cute to be dangerous is blatant trolling. Ok.. i said some other stuff too that I’m not proud of… But i’m growing through this. I just was in a trolling phase this evening.

Ok, anyways I’ve also noticed there are far too many people making games to slow them all down. So I need to trust in the concept I have, as I believe that zombified fleas are worthy of a new genre altogther. I’m going to google that right now to make sure, but I’m gonna say my guess is that you can bank on that. yeah.. it’s all clear for this train to roll through town – google is clean — my post on here has the #1 page rank!!! — so that’s a good sign. Cutesy whales and overdone stuff is going to just get lost in google land.

Setting up my project now, and will go about creating a flea class that has teeth!

Blatant Trolling charges force plan b - prayer

Flea Class complete, let the magic begin.

I’ve completed the initial Flea class that uses tweens for the jumping, I just wanted to get something working quickly to help in visualizing where I’m heading. You start out with 5 in this little demo, but click on the screen to hatch some more.

Flea Bitten

While viewing the demo, if you feel an itching sensation, it’s probably best to seek medical attention cause you probably have fleas. This demo in no way is responsible for any flea populations in your home, it’s probably your friggin cat or dog.

Granted these fleas don’t look zombified just yet, but it’s because they haven’t chomped on a zombie yet. It’s amazing how much work you can get done when you refrain from blatant trolling.

I’ve had a few beers, ruffled a few feathers in the community, and now I have an actual starting point with a very minimalistic flea colony simulation.

I’m going to lay down and get some sleep, so I can resume game development survival in about 5-6 hours. You might be wondering if blood will be a part of this game.. you might be wondering if these zombified fleas will have the ability to gnaw through skulls. if you are, you would be wondering about the right things.

I guess the picture i have in my head at the moment is envisioning these fleas as the land/insect equivalent of a piranha. pack mentality. mayhem. relentless. and.. yet… sooooooo tiny.

But.. what good is a zombified colony of fleas without a leader i ask you ???

so.. i will leave you with that until the morrow. You all should probably sleep in and take a day off , you still have tons of time. Stupid contest anyways right. Go outside.. get some exercise. Or if you are the unhealthy type.. maybe you should spend some time testing your blood alcohol limits. For god’s sake.. don’t work too hard on this silly little contest.

It’s a little lonely down here in the game dev bunker sometimes. But, if you want the fruits that come along with makinge games like it’s the end of the world, you must strictly adhere to the concept of there being no one left but you and lots of radiation.

You have to want brains, if you are ever going to eat them.

I slept maybe a little longer than I’d have liked, but as I don’t have a time machine to correct things, I must just use it to motivate me to work harder.

So the agenda for today is fleas. I am very tempted to work on blood effects, since I will have tiny zombified fleas in search of brains. If you are gnawing through a human noggin, blood is going to happen.

But, first i think i need to focus on their motivation. If they never have a unquenchable thirst for brains, they will not likely become ravenous enough to make this game worthwhile for the gaming community. So I will first create a victim class, who will be a shape of little definition. I will place a boolean property in the class named “hasBrains”, and I will most assuredly make sure that the flea class is capable of knowing the status of said variable.

I am thinking to start that I will focus on just having them use proximity to a brain carrier to determine their likelyhood of attacking.

Now… fully rested, I am feeling confident that I can train fleas to like brains. There are so many things i thought about while drifting off to sleep last night. One being — should I go with sloped terrain ? or a tile engine ? I’m leaning towards sloped, but… but we shall see.

I’ve scoped out more of the competition today as well. My opinion is they seem far too comfortable to be successful in this environment. I like imagining them OUTSIDE this bunker in the radiation. I see pictures of food that’s nicely prepared and laid out on a table with napkins and silverware. This kind of imagery has no place in game development, you need hunger. You need whats at the end of the journey — that’s what you are fighting for. Beer is only allowed because it can help temper the pain of serious game development.

So keep eating your muffins and other baked goods i say. Keep taking a timeout to stir fry some healthy food. Keep on taking pictures of your spreads of various delectables. Have you ever seen a picture of shigeru miyamoto with a fork and knife in his hands or with crumbs on his shirt ??? cmon people. You guys are making zelda clones with a fork and spoon.. this man paved the way by resisting such things. So while you are churning out another zelda, this man is going delirious from hunger and coming up with another stellar concept for you to copy!!!

Ok, if I don’t stop here, I’ll most likely be blatantly trolling again in no time. — by the way, is it trolling if you post taunts in your own updates… as opposed to as a comment on someone elses post ? I should probably not risk it, but I’m so close to calling out some of these meal driven developers. waka – waka.

no forks.. no crumbs.. very slim. food doesn't drive this man!

I’ve created a victim class that has brains, and zombified the brains of my flea class. The result is fleas that seek out victims.

flea_bitten

yes, they are indeed in search of brains

You can use your left/right arrow keys to try and escape – but even though you might go off the screen — rest assured that even if you are off the visible screen, they are still chasing you through memory. You CANNOT escape. I made sure that you were only fast enough to “think” you could actually escape. There is no happy ending in this demo.

(disclaimer, if you end up using precious hours from your project time trying to prove me wrong by escaping these fleas and therefore become unable to finish your project — i am in no way responsible. But I am not saying that I am NOT putting forth that challenge to prove me wrong. )

I am not entirely happy with the flea movement in terms of jump velocity, and have added that as a TODO for once I have more of the gameplay logic done. This will have to do for now.

I believe my next goal will be to create some type of level. I am kind of thinking that slopes would be nice. I see alot of block stuff going on in these posts. I’m kind of thinking I don’t want these fleas to drown in the sea of platformer clones.

The more I think about this concept, the more I love it. Killing a single flea, is quite a trivial process. But infestation is not at all trivial to survive.

Part of the concept here is that you are playing the role of a zombie. You see, mankind is very well versed on surviving a zombie apocalypse given all the training they’ve gotten via zombie movies. So in this one, merely 4 days after 28 days, you are the only zombie left. I shall not reveal all the twists.. but I shall tell you that your “this”, is a single flea egg. How could such a microscopic little egg bring down the entire world as we know it ? That is a great question, and it truly deserves an answer.

Zombies tend to have a single-mindedness when it comes to their search for brains. In the animal kingdom it is much the same, as it’s often instinctual for them to attack in packs. What if… a telepathic zombie was able to communicate his wants/needs to his offspring ? What if a zombie took the time to hatch a tiny flea egg ? What if that baby flea thought the zombie was his “momma” ? what if they were family ? What if they wanted to join the Mafia ??? errr. ok, that last one is not a part of the story, but if i’ve been trying to work the mafia into this story somehow and sometimes i forget i axed that part.

Anyways. Enjoy this little flea zombified flea simulator with no blood. run you pansy.. run i say. cause there is no hope for you.

Zombified Flea AI development a success

Sloped terrain technology unleashed

When I laid my head down to rest last night, and shortly after my prayers for others to potentially choke on their baked goods — not die or anything, but maybe just a 48 hour coma with no long lasting debilitating effects — I pondered sloped or a tile based level. I have chosen sloped as I think it’ll be more visually appealing to see these little fleas attacking things trying to climb up a hill. So I spent some dev time creating a way to move along a sloped terrain. Works pretty good and I’m happy with it. I’m going to imagine I might have to do a little more work for a wider object to angle it right on the slope. Like a collapsed corpse for example.

You can check out the demo as it stands here :
flea_bitten_demo

sloped magic, and you are safe from the fleas for now...

You still can click to add fleas, and for the moment you are safe from the fleas as I have not taught them to traverse slopes just yet. So you are safe for now.

I’ve decided to take a slightly different approach in development to ensure i have SOMETHING by the end of the contest. Rather than design out 10 levels, I’m going to develop this as a single screen game for the moment. Focus on all the core gameplay elements/concepts within that range. Then if there is time at the end.. i can churn out more content and scrolling capabilities.

Next up is objects in flight — such as a bird maybe? What might happen if a bird flew low enough that a few fleas could jump on him ? what would happen if he took off and while in flight that bird was bitten and zombified as well ? How quickly could zombification spread under such circumstances? would a helicopter be safe ?

It still looks quite unassuming, but when you go see a magic show — does the magician just show you all the tricks right off the bat ?? hell no, that magic man has some shit up his sleeves. He gets you to look one way and next thing you know he’s sawing you in two and everyone is laughing.

Ok.. back to work. I think i need to go learn some magic tricks too!

Core gameplay mechanisms are getting closer to done -- fun begins shortly!

I spent a little time with the flea jumping, and although it’s still not exactly what I want, it’s getting closer. I think I want them to be just a little more frantic. But.. this will do for now.

here’s the latest demo :
Use left/right arrows to move, and click to add more fleas.
Flea Bitten Demo

I also got them to use the slopes, so you are no longer from them again. I added what look like little yellow cookies to you maybe – you ravenous developers with all your baked goods – but they are placeholder art for birds…planes.. and things that might be in the air. As you can see, if given the chance they will use them to propel themselves further into the air!

Fleas if given the chance will seek prey at higher altitudes

Now I am going to move on to the aiming/launching of your little friends. You might have thought that the dude you move around is looking to get away from these fleas. But quite to the contrary, his goal will to infest other things with his little friends. So the next update should have the ability to aim/launch fleas. I believe this is where the game will really start to take shape as I see it in my head.

I’m probably going to want a good 2-3 hours at the end to just focus on artwork. So my goal is to get as many gameplay mechanisms into the game tonight. Possibly a little bit of enemy ai. The introduction of breeding/eggs will have to wait for tomorrow.

I need more beer… I have 2 bottles left in the game dev bunker, and this is not a good thing. I can see it causing major damage to the project. I severely underestimated the amount of beer I could drink in this type of a situation.