Game Name: “Get That Fellow Out! ”
Genre: Homage to NES Battletoads speeder bike level
Platform: Android 2.2, Nexus S (would be pleasantly surprised if it worked on any other phone without crash-sploding)
Source and APK
http://1337.pro/Shared/LudumDare/
Woo, my first Ludum Dare was a blast
I really feel like I learned a lot about getting something designed and finished in a short time. I wasted waay too much time coming up with awesome ideas and class designs, and I spent a lot of time on stuff like thread safety and timer rollovers, since my day job is writing real time embedded software that doesn’t do a whole lot, but what it does has to be done completely perfectly under all circumstances. I think next time around I’ll be in the right mindset to just hammer out something functional as quickly as possible, so I have more time to focus on putting in more fun
(pro tip: It turns out that the Battletoads speeder bike level isn’t fun or difficult if there are no jumps involved)
http://1337.pro/Shared/LudumDare/LairDefense_v0.7z
I’m using the half functional game engine code from my last entry/attempted entries, hopefully that won’t disqualify me (although since I’m making the game for Android, there’s basically no chance I’ll win anyway, since it’s kind of a hassle to try the game on your phone/tablet even if you have one)
Done so far:
– Menu
– Story
– Sprites
– Rendering code
– Input handling code
Not done yet:
– Gameplay
– Victory conditions
Chances of completing on time:
LOW
Dammit, Java!! Why can you not override member variables??
I had to work on Saturday, and then spent the rest of Saturday playing video games instead of working on this one, because I somehow had the twisted idea that I’d be able to get this game up and running within 6 hours or so today
Actually I pretty good amount done
The plan was to make a tower defense-like game, where you can deploy units in whatever formation you want to protect your main character, while semi-intelligent enemies would advance from the left and attack whoever’s closest or whoever they could reach.
The challenge would be that you can’t actually create walls, so the idea would be to use heavily armored characters in the front to block as many attackers as possible without spending too much gold on the armored characters, and to put weaker ranged fighters in the back.
Here’s what I reused from the last Dare entry/attempts:
– Sprite-rendering engine using OpenGL ES 2.0 for Android
– App framework (‘Hello, World!’ type stuff)
– Touch-handling code
– Android/OpenGL text rendering code (renders text to an OpenGL buffer)
Here’s what I implemented today:
– Base class for fighting units
– Child class for your main guy who needs to be protected
– Child class for attacking units
– Sloppy workarounds for Java’s ridiculously stupid inheritance model
– Projectile parent class
– Melee attacking functionality
– Movement code (without clipping/pathing)
Remaining:
– Actual projectile functionality
– Building units (about a third done already)
– Displaying unit HP
– Displaying attack notification text that fades away
– Showing that a unit was attacked by flashing it or something
– Pathing/collision
– End game conditions
– Detecting unit death
Man, I wish I’d blown off going to work on Saturday and not played WoW afterward. I totally would have finished this rockin tower/formation defense type game on time
I guess that in retrospect I bent the rules a little by not explicitly posting the source for the game engine code I was planning to use ahead of time, though, so if I had somehow managed to win the contest I could have been disqualified.
Then again, anyone who completes a game is pretty much a winner!
Remaining:
– Actual projectile functionality
– Building units (about a third done already)
– Displaying unit HP (Feature Cut)
– Displaying attack notification text that fades away
– Showing that a unit was attacked by flashing it or something (Feature Cut)
– Pathing/collision (Feature Cut, clipping disabled)
– End game conditions
– Detecting unit death
+ Game Balance
We have a playable game on our hands!
http://1337.pro/Shared/LudumDare/LairDefense.apk
I played pretty fast and loose with memory allocation (since it’s Java, you never have to think about memory allocation, right??) and the code has comments such as this:
//This is what we in the industry call “Big ‘O’ of N squared
but it should work on just about any Android phone from the last year and a half (has it really been that long since my first finished Ludum Dare attempt? For that one, the same exact engine required a top of the line Nexus One)
Remaining:
– Actual projectile functionality
– Building units (about a third done already)
– Displaying unit HP (Feature Cut)
– Displaying attack notification text that fades away
– Showing that a unit was attacked by flashing it or something (Feature Cut)
– Pathing/collision (Feature Cut, clipping disabled)
– End game conditions
– Detecting unit death
+ Game Balance
Going to add in the rest of the basic gameplay elements and try to balance it a little, then update my submission
Beast!!