Hopefully I can resist the call of feature creep.

Platform: Windows

Libraries:

• Ogre3D
• CEGUI
• OpenAL

Tools:

• Visual c++ Express
• Blender
• Photoshop CS3

Tags: intro

GoblinHome is about a tribe of goblins that are trying to make a new home in a cavern, but they need to make the cavern safe to live in by killing all the cave denizens(currently just blue trolls) and also ward off attacks from adventurers.

It looks like I won’t get the adventurers or the home building in on time but I should be able to get the goblins and trolls to battle which can result in either winning or losing and will therefore constitute a game.

First the bugfix release:
GoblinHome 1.0.1 bugfix release

This was my first Ludum Dare and I’mhooked. Last weekend was really fun trying to get a game completed on time. I didn’t get the game I originally envisioned done but I got a good start for it and it does have a winning and losing condition so it is a game.

The good:

Time – I was able to schedule the core game first to result in something playable, even if I didn’t get all that I wanted done.

Blender – It was my first time using blender’s texture painting mode. I was able to make the troll’s texture in blender much faster than I was able to make the goblin’s texture in photoshop. It works very well.

The bad and what I will do better next time:

Blender – It’s been a few months since I modeled something and I forgot a bunch of the myraid of hotkeys and functions and spent time looking them up.

Art – It took 6 hours to make the goblin and 2 hours for the troll based on the goblin. I probably could have used my time better for features by making worse models. Part of this is probably also because I forgot my blender commands.

Photoshop – Photoshop stopped responding to my tablet’s pressure sensitivity right before I created the title and conclusion screens, which was a pain to figure out.

Group selection and health bars – I’ve been getting a lot of comments on these. When it came down to the end I had the choice of group selection, health bars, or a selection indicator for the currently selected goblin. The selection indicator won out as the most needed. The others were next on the list!

Framework – I didn’t have one so I spent a good chunk of saturday writing code to glue ogre, cegui and ois together and make a basic blank screen app. Next time I should make a framework to use to skip some of that.

The crash – There was a crash that took a while to track down that I did not see while developing. If you were to click on the goblin’s selection circle it would crash with a null pointer error. This has been fixed in the bugfix release. The bugfix release also fixed a rather nasty memory leak in the pathfinding which I originally thought was the crash bug but wasn’t.

48 hours later, Dragon Genetics is finished. Dragon Genetics teaches the principles of genetic inheritence including dominant/recessive genes, epistasis, and  sex-linked genes. It uses a browser-like window to explain concepts and the player can click on links to get more information on a word. The player gets a set of missions to breed specific dragons by choosing the parents.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-13/?action=preview&uid=1128

The game was written in C++ with Ogre and CEGUI. I found the new version of CEGUI nice since it’s able to embed widgets in strings which is what I used to make the information browser. For content I used Photoshop and Blender. Most of the gui graphics are a CEGUI default. Also this is my second Ludum Dare (First Mini) and also the second time Photoshop has refused to work correctly during a Ludum Dare. I think it may have been a memory issue this time though since it stopped crashing on startup after I closed the visual studio with CEGUI source and an extra blender window I had open…

I will be entering using C++, Ogre, CEGUI and OgreOggSound if I get around to using sound. I have a framework (well more like a collection of helper classes) based on the needs of my previous LD entries located here (Just the headers and libs). It requires Ogre, CEGUI and OgreOggSound and is a bit rough and messy right now.

I’m making some sort of dungeon exploring game. I have a randomly-generating dungeon now and it is explorable. Now I need to populate it with something to make it more interesting to explore.

I was meaning to have the player go in and explore the tomb to find the skeleton leaders and defeat them, but I ended up spending too much time texturing the skeleton to build a proper battle system. It ended up being a game about a thief who runs around the tomb grabbing treasure, but then I didn’t have enough time to give the player a way to escape the tomb. So now it’s about a suicidal thief who runs around a tomb grabbing treasure.

Voting Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=1128

I’m writing a sea trading game where the player trades goods between islands and tries to bring back a requested amount of a specific trade good to his home base as well as avoid pirate attacks. I currently have the boat able to sail around the map and visit various towns and a rudimentary trade screen. 10 hours left!

I’m writing the game using Silverlight and the WriteableBitmapEx class to allow blitting.

I managed to finish Voyage of the Queen.

I decided to try something 2D this time rather than my usual 3d to get something a bit more cerebral and less action.  It was written in silverlight which made it really easy to make nice GUI screens but I was doing low level blitting to do the boat sailing graphics. I had more plans for this game such as gaining crew, having more events other than pirates and upgrading the ship but the tile engine took more time than I thought and I didn’t really get around to the actual gameplay until Sunday. It was a little scary at the end because I had a really obtuse error message (Thanks Microsoft) that resulted in crashing at the trade and ship cargo screens about an hour before finish but I managed to fix it in time.

My compo entry is here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1128

I thought this would be helpful since there is no in-game tutorial and the game may be a bit complex. The compo page for the game is here.

General Tips

The queen will randomly select a trade good to retrieve for the quest. If she asks you to get 5000 gold coins then reload. You will need to visit around 100 islands to finish and you will get bored.  Bananas might also get tedious (around 26 islands) if you are in a hurry to vote.

More after the jump.

The Trade Window

In the trade window, the arrow buttons show how the trading boxes link together. The player’s trade goods go from the left list to the upper middle trading box and the trader’s goods go from the right list to the lower middle trading box.To transfer items between the boxes,  first click on an item and then click the corresponding arrow connecting the two boxes.

Below the middle trading boxes is how much extra profit the trader is making on the trade. He will not accept less than 0% profit so you need to get it out of the negative. There are currently no effects for giving him extra profit or attempting to trade him negative profit too often so try to make his profit as small as possible while still remaining above 0%.

Another tip for making trade easier is to hold down shift while clicking the arrows. This will transfer items 10 at a time making large trades and trades involving coins quicker.

Towns and Tribes

There are two different types of islands to trade with, some inhabited by tribes and some inhabited by towns. These two types trade different sets of complimentary goods. In general, tribes will pay a greater price for goods made in a town and vice versa. The only goods that do not follow this rule are wood, cannons, swords and coins. Good trade goods to buy from tribes are wood, silks, bananas and beaver pelts. Good trade goods to buy from towns are spices and jugs of rum. The value of goods fluctuates depending on which island you are trading at. One tribe might pay more for your spices, for example, than the tribe on the island across the way. Conversely the two tribes might sell their goods at different prices.

Wood

Wood was originally going to be used for repairing your ship but that was cut for time. Right now, both towns sell wood but it’s only a good deal to buy it from tribes and sell to towns since towns value it at a higher price.

Gold Coins

Gold coins  are worthless to the tribes so it’s pointless to trade them there. What they are good for is making change for more exact trades with towns people. Gold coins are worth 1 value at every town so it’s not possible to make a bad trade with them (unless you trade them to the previously mentioned tribes). For example, if you find yourself 7 value short of a trade with the tribe you would have to re-allocate your traded goods or add more goods giving the tribe more profit, but with a town you can just add 7 coins to the pile and it will be even. Conversely if the town is making 7 value profit you can add 7 coins on their side and the deal will be even.

Cannons and Swords

Cannons are very expensive and tend to sell to tribes at a worse rate than to towns, between two towns you may get a good profit but where they shine is pirate protection. In a pirate battle, first the number of cannons is checked. If you have more cannons than the pirates you sink the pirates and win. It is the only way to get out of a pirate battle without losing any cargo. If the pirates win the cannon battle they then board you and then the count of swords is compared. If you have more swords the pirates leave with 25% of your cargo, otherwise they steal it all. Swords can be a reasonable item to trade as the fluctuation between values at different islands can be considerable, but tribes won’t pay that much more in general than towns for them.

Am I Getting a Good Price?

If you are curious what the base value of the items in your cargo screen are, press the I key while not in a dialog. It will list all of your items and their base values. You will also see the total value of your cargo and your quest here.

Help! I was attacked by pirates and lost all my stuff

Hit Q to return to the queen’s island, then talk to her and press the resupply button. She will give you the original set of goods (200 coins, 10 rum, 1 cannon, 2 swords) that you started with. I think the penalty for pirate attacks might be a little harsh right now so be sure to keep your cannon number up. The pirates will bring more cannons the higher your cargo value is on the “I” screen. It is good to have at least one cannon for every 5000 value of trade goods you carry.

I Finished the Quest but I Don’t Remember Where the Queen was

Hit Q to return to the queen and turn in your cargo.

Here are my previous Ludum Dare Games

I’m most likely going back to my 3D roots for this compo. I will use C++ with Ogre, CEGUI and OIS. I will be using my framework that was used in LD16 which is here.

Tags: montage

Freshly cleaned! I could barely see the bottom of the second monitor before because of the pile of books…

Tags: deskphoto

I stupidly decided to update my Ogre installation and have had hordes of problems getting CEGUI to compile with the new Ogre so while compiling over and over I worked on graphics.

This is the heroine of the game. She is on a quest to become a lich and uses the bones of her enemies to make skeleton pets to help her on her quest.

This is a rendering from Blender because right now all the “gameplay” I have is the title screen I made before I tried to update ogre. This may end up running till Monday and be a Jam game =\

Finally got past my compiling issues and got stuff on the screen. The sound library wouldn’t cooperate so I’ll probably have to submit with no sound, though this is looking like it will run out of time for the compo anyway

More a mage than a witch but there’s now combat!

The player now has a skeleton companion and clicking him will let the player control him with the mage on AI. The peasants seem way too weak now.

Still lots more to do so this will end up being a jam game. Maybe I’ll have time to fix the sound library compilation or find a new sound library.

I will be using C++ with Ogre, CEGUI and OgreOggSound (If I can get sound in), and my framework. Photoshop and Blender will be used for assets.

This is my messy/buggy framework (I always seem to find a bug to fix in it every project I make)

I will be using C++ with Ogre. Assets will be made with Blender and Photoshop.

This will be my first LD since LD18 so I hope to finish something this time, and get sound in which I have never managed before.

Tags: blender, C++, ogre

I haven’t participated since LD#18 so I figured I should join in for the 10th anniversary. I’ll be going with Silverlight this time, and some basecode that I haven’t touched 2010, other than updating it to Silverlight 4 tonight and making sure my test project worked. So this’ll be interesting.

This is my basecode , basically an empty silverlight app and a library with some tile classes that build on top of this library: http://writeablebitmapex.codeplex.com/

I’m planning on taking part in LD this time, having skipped the last one because I didn’t like my idea much. I first thought I’d  use silverlight again, but still not many people have silverlight 5 and silverlight 4 has a lot of limits. My husband, Spridios on LD, clued me in to JSIL which can convert C# to javascript and has XNA support, so I spent some time converting my tile engine over to JSIL compatible C#. There are a bunch of inconsistencies and things not supported in JSIL’s implementation of C# but it works well for what’s implemented.

Language:

• C#/XNA
• Javascript

Libraries:

• My Simple Tile Engine and XNA Framework
• JSIL – To convert the C#/XNA code to javascript.

Tools:

• Photoshop for graphics
• Tiled possibly if I need complicated maps
• OpenMPT for music
• Audacity