My room!

Tags: deskphoto

Copied from my Dev Blog

So eventually you’re going to have to put in moving/walking/talking elements of various varieties in most any game. Maybe they are lemmings. Maybe they are AI controlled bot opponents in an FPS. Or maybe they are soldiers in an RTS, or enemies in a hack and slash. In any case it’s daunting to add these gameplay elements because the behaviour will ultimately require so much tweaking and experimentation. Where do you start?

Carefully creating a system for managing/handling such creatures is… somewhat uninspiring work. And worse, what kind of result do you get? Did you end up forgetting some crucial detail, or do you get a very complex, neural-net-enhanced AI that just acts stoopid? Good luck!

When you see your little guys moving around, only then do you start to see what practical changes you can make to their behaviour. It doesn’t mean you can’t have larger scale frameworks in place, it’s just that even with these frameworks (e.g., pathfinding) it’s not too obvious how to code the heuristics until you are into.

This brings me to my Golden Rule of Adding Moving Gameplay Elements:

First, just add something that stands still and you can zap.

Of course, “zap” might stand for anything. Maybe zap means clicking an RTS unit. Or talking to an NPC. But your first implementation should not worry about movement or anything. It should just create the actual unit, place it. You can start to work out your enemy placement/spawning system at this point, or start to think about how they will behave. But either way, what you really need before you can get started on any practical level is to get it placed. And in order to do that most easily, just forget everything else that will have to go into it for the time being.

I would do well to remember this in the future. This way of thinking avoids me spending all kinds of time mulling over millions of options without anything to start experimenting with. With a purely dumb element placed, purely dumbly, I am able to start the kind of wheedling experimentation neccesary to make it work.

Tags: AI, bots, enemies

I picked a game to do. It’s been a long time since I made an LD entry. The games I’ve done before are:

– Floateye (this was for an allegro speed game compo though)

– Miracle Bees

– Demonic Farmer GABO

– Something else I forget what?

I started another LD game once before, too. It was based around four ladies at tea-time, and I drew some great graphics. Then I quit making it! Haha…

Okay, it’s time to get started. I will remake the game that sticks in my mind most, the one I think about often, that I reminisce over. I’m not telling what it is, but the remake/cover will be incredible and include the shooting sword from LoZ.

THAT IS ALL.

Tags: LoZ

This is a remake of Hairy Chestival. It’s about a lawnmower who has to mow the hair off of Burt Reynolds Island. It’s not really done, but, you can run around, grab swords and heart containers, kill pylons, and die. Ahem. One day I’ll finish an entry on time!

I’m going to take and put together the actual quest for this game, since there’s not much to it. Then I’ll upload that version…

Download for linux

Tags: final, hairy chestival, harry's questival, LoZ

Windows Version: mazeoftowlr.zip

Linux Version: mazeoftowlr_linux.zip

Source: mazeoftowlr_src.zip

Tags: towlr evil

It’s got basic graphics, sound, and lua interface stuff, as well as some handy things like random number generation, file load/save, fonts, matrix math and a few other odds and sodds. But it’s a major hodge-podge!

Notably missing is any kind of physics, but that doesn’t matter… This is just enough (well, plus a bit) to let me write my game in LUA with custom rendering stuff in C++, which is what I want.

http://kittylambda.com/ldkit

Good luck everyone!

Here is a game, it’s a narrative about a man who has lost something, and is trying to replace it.

Download for Linux

Download for Windows

Download Source Code

Drive down the highway, taking stops along the way. Arrows are all
you need for driving, and use spacebar for story sequences.

You get points for:

1- travelling KM
2- passing cars
3- bonuses

The game is (should be) winnable, I haven’t won it yet but everything
is in place. I’ll have to try it tomorrow just to make sure.

No sound effects, only one type of vehicle, and some other ideas
that I had for it didn’t make it in, but overall I’m quite happy.

Enjoy!

PS: If you’ve got the song “Night Cruising” by Fishmans, that would be
an excellent soundtrack.

Tags: final

Heya! I’ve updated my Final entry to include a Windows download (this is a direct port, NO changes or bugfixes so it’s part of the final compo version) and I will put up the source code too. Meanwhile, here is a timelapse video of me making it:

Night Cruising Timelapse on YouTube

Tags: timelapse night cruising

Hooray for me, I’ve managed to finangle myself an extended vacation in Hong Kong. Anyhow I’m going to try and enter this Ludum Dare, though I’m going to be in Macau for the first 12h or so of the compo.

The last few LD48’s I’ve used a basic, minimalist C++ engine and coded the game in LUA. This time I’m going to just code the whole thing in C++, I guess just for a change more than anything. So it’ll be C++, OpenGL, and SDL.

My Special Ludum Dare Goal: Include at least sound effects into this one! I’ve never managed to get SFX/music into an LD48 before, triple shame shame shame on me. Ptoiee fireflower spit spiky ball at my butt!

Hooray, I’m going to do my Ludum Dare thingie. I was in a place called Macau and now I’m back in Hong Kong feeling like the luckiest/awesomest person alive, doing the 48 hours game development competition in such a cool city on such a great extended vacation.

Tags: Add new tag

Here she is, coming nicely (?) along? As per usual I’m wasting all my time on graphics up front, so that I won’t have enough time to actually finish/finetune the game.

There are buildings you can destroy, traps that make you grow, and a lovely pink background. Destruction of buildings is a little less than exciting, however….

Here she is!

This is a very exciting and very… pink… game. I’m really proud of what I put together!

Download for Windows

Tags: final

LETS GET NAKED!

I might do it with flixel. Oh, yeeaaaaaaaaaaah…Or else imma use my same thing imma use in spring, 2LDs ago: http://kittylambda.com/labyrinth (it’s hidden somewhere within the labyrinth…)

Also please watch my latest game dev video blog:

END OF SPAM.

Here’s my plan!

– I’m going to a hockey game with my dad, so I’ll be a few hours late starting.

– Going to call my wife from the hockey game and she’ll tell me what the theme is. So I can think about it at the game! #1 SON!

– But after that I’ve got the whole weekend blocked off and have extra cans of spray deodorant.

– Pizza pops, mac&cheeze, sidekicks for food, with some mana from heaven (AKA STOVETOP STUFFING) for added class.

– If twilight wins, I’m going to make a game based only on information from the trailer, since that’s all I’ve seen.

– If it doesn’t win, I’m going to make a combo twilight-themed entry with the real theme.

See you suckas on the other side!

Here we are! What I’ve done so far:

– Thought about what I want to do (at hockey game last night)
– Created a design document (after I got home)
– Slept (too long but not long enough)
– Made love to flixel (today)
– Got a Screenshot!

Unlike previous competitions, this time I know exactly what I’m doing from the start; I’ve put together a design document which is something I haven’t done before. I’m excited to see how this turns out.

Yes, I'm making a sailing-ship adventure.

Progress update!

– ate a sammich
– ate some lovely croissants that wife made (ate 4, plus some jam and margarine)
– lots of game logic in place, whew!

Here’s a screenie showing the crew system.

Hopefully I didn't go too far with this...

Hopefully the crew system I envisioned isn’t too complicated. I’m going to be simplifying things on the “cargo” side, to compensate for the added complexity I’ve got with crew members.

Clarification on the earlier screenshot. The world map was taken from Wikipedia, and won’t be used in-game. Actually, you don’t even HAVE a map; you just set a course. However the game in effort to be slightly realistic will track your course on the map, so if you change course after three days the distances/times will be about right. So the map is actually just for my debugging purposes. La la la!

I’m super happy with where my game is headed, so I don’t want to waste too much time here. Really there’s not much to show in screens but here’s what needs to be done:

– Finish weather system. The basic weather system is in place but needs additional work.
– Weather match system. So I can write events that tie to weather events.
– Crew match system. Is JUST done.
– Crew rule system. This is basically the “heart” of the game, but it depends on a lot of other things being in place first, which I only now attained. Basically, what happens is that as the voyage goes on the crew respond to each other, the conditions, etc. You can make choices as captain that will affect them positively or negatively. You can even put them in shackles, make them walk the plank, etc. The rule system has two parts, one is a match and the other is an event. The event says how to change crew members that match.
– Similar to the above, there needs to be a global event system. These might not be written with such streamlined rules as with the crew system, but will respond to crew state, etc.

After this each day cycle would go something like this:
– Sail onward!
– Update weather.
– Flash the global event rules.
– Flash crew rules.
– Update provisions.
– TURN!

So for instance, there might be a storm that happens during the event rules, that will set the “wet” state for crew members. Then we flash the crew rules and it says that any crew member who is wet is sad, and cold. As well, there is a crew rule that says any crew who is “wet” loses that tag (the rules happen in order but apply to all crew). Or maybe “wet1” => “wet0” => “” so they take two days to dry off. You get the idea.

Awesome!

The point of this game is that the mission should end in DISASTER. Hahaha. Amazing.

Well, the rule system for crew is working, I still need to work out the rule system for the weather because it doesn’t appear to be working.

What’s left:
– dynamic weather (a snap, actually!)
– fix rule system for weather, seems to be broken
– make sure rule system works for crew intelligence, etc.
– add “camping” play state NIX IT
– add “shore leave” logic NIX IT
– sell ship and retire at lisboa
– return to england and get a score
– death conditions
– some nice graphics for weather, etc.
– descriptions for the berths, camps
– sound effects, music? why is this always last for me? =)

Quite a bit I guess, but the game is really working well! I’ll probably nix it. I have some nice ideas for making good weather graphics, would work well with sound effects there. At this point I should nix the shore leave, provisioning, and camping stuff.

Whew, I’m too tired to think!

Here we are, 6 hours has done me a lot of good. Actually I had a worse headache last night.

Time to work some magic, 9 hours remain or so which sounds like more than it is… This is my favorite or least favorite part of the competition because you have to cut features out if you want to finish. Heheh!