My first #ld48 – I’m going to be making a 2D game in Canvas, I’ve already completed a massively multiplayer WebGL + NodeJS game and I’m feeling like I can achieve anything right now.

Next Friday, I’ll be buying a weekend’s supply of pizza, coffee and fresh fruit, kicking open a Google Hangout or something similar and solo bro-gramming my way to something that will hopefully be complete.

I’m spending the next two weeks learning about the 2D side of development after doing all the 3D stuff in the browser I need to find out what the canvas limitations are, but with squares and rectangles – anything is possible.

I didn’t get started until about 18:00 today, so it doesn’t upset me too much that I haven’t gotten as far as I’d like.

I didn’t bother with a theme, other than “draw the first thing that comes to mind and build a game with it”, I drew a jumbo jet so I decided to fly with it.

This is written with vanilla HTML5 Canvas and Javascript, although I’m building up some common libs that I’ll release as OSS next week and probably consume in the actual challenge if nobody minds too much.

The aim of this game is to fly the aircraft around using the mouse (or touch I guess), it has some vague physics (so stalling when you get high etc) and collect the stars while avoiding the pigeons.

Well that’s the plan anyway, it’s 2AM and the physics are ropy and I’m not yet collecting any stars and there are no pigeons. I feel I should throw all the game mechanics in and deal with polishing the physics and graphics tomorrow. I’ve learned a few things with this exercise already that I’ll be using in the real deal next weekend – chiefly:

• Get all the game-play in by the end of Saturday night
• Spend Sunday polishing
• Don’t spend Friday and Saturday polishing
• Buy food before beginning, and get some sleep the week before – not starting until 18:00 will be dumb 😉

I spent the past hour making sure I had some sort of deployment strategy sorted, I’m glad I did that now rather than next weekend. I guess next weekend I’ll start off with that bit and deploy continuously through the weekend.

Game can  be found here: http://planethinking.heroku.com/

Still to be done today before I’m considered “complete”

• Tweak the physics so they’re ‘fun’ (the hardest bit)
• Add sounds (should be easy)
• Add some emitters (easy enough, may do some off-screen WebGL stuff for this with canvas fallbacks)
• Make the game progressively harder (easy enough)

Okay, so I didn’t quite finish the warm-up game, shortly after writing my last post I decided I was tired and decided to play Oblivion for 10 hours instead.

BUT, at least my Canvas library worked – (can be found here: https://github.com/robashton/layers )

I’ll be using that this weekend, and in the spirit of everybody else, this is my list of stuff.

• I’ll be coding in Javascript with HTML5 canvas and perhaps some WebGL for particles and some effects (if my library works)
• I’ll be using gedit on my Gnome’s up Ubuntu install
• I might try and make it work on mobile devices for an extra challenge
• I’ll try to do screen-caps as I do it using that tool on the site
• I’ll be starting at 3am Saturday morning my time, I reserve the right to be a grumpy arse all weekend
• I might take Monday off work, as finishing at 3am Monday morning won’t make for a happy work day 😉
• I’ll be cutting down on coffee this week to make sure I’m able to get some sleep on Friday night – sad face.

Tags: motivation

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2011 at 7:12 am and is filed under LD #22. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Nearly every hack day I’ve ever been to, deployment always gets left until the last minute, and then goes hilariously wrong.

Not this time.

I’ve set up a git repo at https://github.com/robashton/ld48_22 and I’ve created a heroku app at http://ld22-ashton.heroku.com/ and made sure everything is round-tripping correctly.

Of course, an idea would be good right about now…

Oh well, I’ve got a time-lapse running so I’ll be able to capture the game being made once I finally have some sort of idea.

I’ve spent the past few hours watching the sun rise (I’m in Belgium) over a snowy railway line, drinking coffee and contemplating what it means to be alone.

I’ve got a game concept, and yeah – it’s a platformer, I get the feeling those are popular – hopefully I’ll be able to enact something to make it feel good by the end of the day.

Where I am? Well you can see for yourself, I’m continually deploying to my Heroku instance here:

http://ld22-ashton.heroku.com/ (Warning, spins the CPU a bit as I’m not mitigating that yet)

So that’s level loading, level creation, basic player physics and controls sorted out. Not bad really, I’m pleased with that progress. Now I’m going to step back and do the following:

• make sure I can write a script to tell the story I want to tell,
• sort out a splash screen, loading, and basic application life-cycle
• write the story from beginning to end
• Make sure the game has a logical beginning, middle and end
• Tweak tweak tweak, polish, real  graphics and real sounds

Oh man,

So I’ve had a nap and written a bit more code, this is my status

• make sure I can write a script to tell the story I want to tell,
• sort out a splash screen, loading, and basic application life-cycle
• add NPCs
• add environment objects
• write the story from beginning to end
• Make sure the game has a logical beginning, middle and end
• Tweak tweak tweak, polish, real  graphics and real sounds

All the mechanics appear to be functional (or at least as much as they need to be), obviously it looks awful but I’m not going to touch look and feel and sounds until tomorrow evening (about 8 hours before the deadline).

As you can see, it’s going to be a story about friendship, the ‘alone’ theme is covered by the plot :-). If I can get the plot done – that middle task of “write the story from  beginning to end” is looking quite daunting – I need to complete that in the next six hours or at least get close. I don’t mind if the game is only 5 minutes long, but it needs to make sense and actually work for those five minutes!!

• Sleep since competition start: 1 hour
• Coffee count: 4
• Orange juice count: 6
• Food so far: Cereal, bacon + eggs with toasted baguette, an apple

I’m getting to the point where I’m able to script, script and script – which bodes well for completion of the main plot and game to the point where I can do a full run-through by the time I go to sleep tonight.

That’s good news, as it means I’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep (hah, who am I kidding?) before I make real textures, add real sounds and tweak things like physics so the game is a bit more playable.

Quite pleased by how how this works, got a script in the Gimp which exports a large image as a tileset which I can then use in the game. Clearly I’ll replace the black lines with some more effective hand-drawn scenery once the game is done (not that that will improve very much given I can’t draw for toffee)

The game is likely to only last a minute or so, which may even turn out to be a good thing if it means more people will complete it

• Sleep since competition start: 1 hour
• Coffee count: 7
• Orange juice: 2 litres
• Food so far: Cereal, bacon + eggs with toasted baguette, 2 apples, half a pack of tasteless biscuits

Yikes,

So I slept for about10 hours.

That was kind of an accident, but I guess I’m totally up and rearing to go now.

• I’ve added bullets,
• I’ve added enemies
• I’ve drawn the map in its completeness (at least structurally, still no art)
• I’ve done most of the plot, just need to do the final 20 seconds of it

• Making some “real” art, or at least better than what I currently have
• sound effects
• music (if I have time)
• alternative ending
• kittens
• particles

Okay okay.

I’m getting excited now.

The game now runs from beginning to end, the plot works properly, I’ve added particles and player death (and checkpoints – there is no gameover – that would suck on a small game like this).

Now it’s just polishing polishing polishing.

Time to put some proper textures in for the scenery, make everything look better, and add noises!!!!!!!!!!

*pumped*

There is no stopping me – now onto the scenery!!

Wow.

I’m getting tired now, there are 6 hours remaining and in it I’d like to achieve the following:

• Sounds
• Music
• Images that have ‘states’ so I can show which way the player is looking
• Stick the loading sequence in a background worker or at least yield some control to the UI thread
• Player health bar
• Boss health bar
• Kitten
• Alternate ending
• Pre-load assets

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7112

Or just go straight to the game if you want http://ld22-ashton.heroku.com/

This is the most complete game I’ve ever worked on, and sure – it has wrinkles around the edges, but it is my game – I made it and I’m dead chuffed with how far I managed to push it.

It has MUSIC, it has SOUNDS, it has GRAPHICS, it has a PLOT, it has a KITTEN.

The Kitten holds the key, will you find the kitten?

Time-lapse coming soon, just as soon as I work out how to make it.

Entry found here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7112

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp_nxjhx6yY

Yo,

I am in, and I will be doing my entry in HTML/JS fo-shiz.

I will likely be using https://github.com/robashton/swallow for my assets, and I will be throwing up another small OSS library for doing camera/scaling in a pixel-independent manner this week, (extracted from a game I’m working on).

If anybody wants to come to my house in Belgium on Friday and hang around until the very end of all this, then they’re completely welcome (not a game-jam effort, just working solo , together). It’s more fun with company.

LET’S DO THIS

I’ve been maintaining radio silence for a few reasons

• I want to concentrate on writing the game
• If I’m not concentrating on writing the game, I want to be eating or watching DVDs
• I’m trying to relax

I’ve probably spent about half of the weekend working on Ludum Dare, and the other half watching Star Trek and stuffing my face

I’m creating an HTML5 Canvas game, and focusing on effects and having a little bit of fun (with a bit of an obvious bullet-hell type thing)

It looks pretty cool, and given I have 12 hours to complete it I’m fairly confident that with MOAR effects and MOAR power-ups this could actually be a fun game to play.

http://tinyprotector.herokuapp.com/

I need to do some tweaking, but if anybody wants to do a play test and see if this damned thing is working – please do!!

So I’m the Villain? I’m currently sat on a train on the way to a gathering in Reading where they’ll be working on a jam and I’ll be doing a solo effort in about.. err 30 hours.

I think I’m going to write a clone of “Centipede”, the classic game from ye olde, only you get to control the Centipede and avoid being shot at whilst picking up all the gardens flowers and vegetables.

I’ll be using ImpactJS to get me ahead of things, and probably SpriteMe on the iPad to create my assets.

Wish me luck!

Time flies when you’re sat on a train, I’ve now made it to a friend’s house and am sat in a chair writing some code.

A few hours in and I have a centipede, and a deployment plan and a server and the basic gameplay of centipede vs defence unit vs bullets done

Not very sexy I know, I’ll do all the graphics tomorrow once I have all the bits put into this. I’m quite enjoying using an engine for a change – makes things a lot less stressful for this sort of compo.

It’s currently deployed to http://centipede2013.herokuapp.com and I am pushing there pretty regularly, give it a go!