Just got back in from a tiring shift behind the bar

Tiny world? Not exactly sure what this theme entails, will think more after I grab some sleep.

Then I’ll have only a few hours to throw together a framework for this before shooting off again to work for 6pm until about 5am
I’ll then have 24 more hours to hopefully get something half decent that people will enjoy…

this is going to be a challenge indeed.

Got *something* up and running

I can’t think of an idea at the moment, but I’m pretty set on a 2D platformer or something of the sort

I’ve got a placeholder character moving left and right and added a cool (in my opinion) bit where the background moves if you hit a dead zone on the side of the screen (so you don’t go offscreen) similar to that of the 80s arcades.

Hopefully will manage a framework that I can make my game from within the next hour and a half as I need to get ready for work soon…

No small feat for me, seeing as I’m terribly susceptible to annoyingly futile errors that take me an age to figure out, and I’ve already hit a load of them!

I started off with a basic frame work with an “asteroids” style movement mechanic, where you rotate then fly forward at that angle. I changed this in preparation for a 2D arcade style beat’em up.

however when I thought about what kind of beat’em up I could do, I thought about white blood cells and their likening appearance to boxers. I then realised this fit great (if not overly literally) to the theme of a tiny world; the world of cells is pretty damn small!

and so I thought about making my game around you being a white blood cell, I then realised the best gameplay movement for this… was what I had previously, so I had to go back to that, albeit with the addition of my moving background.

I now have to go to work, but at least I have something

I also have a cheeky white blood cell placeholder:

Back from work.
Tired but I’ve got to push on and try to do what I want in almost half the time.
21 hours 45mins and counting…
I’m glad I’ve got some kind of framework and concept out the way so I can crack on with the implementation and gameplay.

I’ve managed to (with a hell load of hacking about) get a bacteria class with two types of bacteria (though only tested one atm)

The bacteria multiplies at a random rate

The aim of the game will ultimately be to extinguish the bacteria before your white blood cell dies (else you’ve failed your human!)

The moving camera (that I was so happy with earlier) was being a bane of my code for a while, because it messed up my collision detection. Fortunately I have managed to overcome it and the collision appears on track

Here’s a screenshot of the wbc with the first lot of bacteria:

I’m starting to hit it.

Tis always a challenge to get over it, but once you do, you can blitz ahead with almost anything.

suppose that works as a perk for managing to hold it together.

Still, amongst the madness, I’ve managed to get my two bacterium into the game, now to add a timer for some gameplay aspects

With a push in the right direction from my mate, I was able to get sounds to play in gosu

I was readying the excuse that the sound at a microscopic level would be inaudible to the human ear; I’m glad I don’t have to use that excuse!

The sounds are trivial, using a free sound source website, but they do the trick.

only 12 hours to go (giving time for “polish” / taking into account I’m probably going to pass out soon..)

the game’s coming along nicely, I’ve got some quick dirty algorithms to give the appearance of microscopic biology for the two different bacteria:

After a break from Ludum Dare #23, I’ve decided to try my hand at another.

I’ll see it as a nice come down as hours before the start I will have flung myself out of  a plane at 15,000 feet for the first time.

Hopefully I’ll survive it to tell the tale.

I do so love making games but it can be difficult to convince oneself to sit down and make a game. Comps like this are great for making you get of your arse and code.

Hope the theme’s a good one and that I’m able to come up with a decent little game from it.

Good look to all the participants and I hope you enjoy what ever I come out with.

EDIT:
should probably mention as most do,

I plan to use the Gosu 2D rendering engine as I did last time (http://www.libgosu.org/) as the framework for the game.

The audio isn’t great with this engine, depending on what the theme is and what game I decide to make, I may skip on the audio.

The art will be lovingly made in Microsoft Paint. If I have time I may DL Gimp for slightly prettier Programmer art!

Skully

It’s been a while, so first order of buisness is getting familiar with the Gosu engine again.

But while I do so I ofcourse cannot help, and should not help, but have the theme in the back of my mind. Thinking about it ever 10 seconds I suppose you could say…

Immediate thoughts on a game are a platformer (you have it to do) in which you must collect an item in a level within 10 seconds, with each level getting progressively more challenging.

However, given I skydived for the first time today, and it was awesome, I sort of want to do a skydiving game. Perhaps a minigame, or have the game be a collection of 10 second games?
For the skydiving I could have it that you must guess when 10 seconds has passed and pull the shoot, pulling too early will give a low score, but pulling too late will result in the shoot not opening.

Wish me luck, and I wish the same on my fellow competitors

Skully

Running into problems at the start doesn’t bode particularly well for the rest of the competition…

My previous Gosu project solution used MS VC 2008. Due to the fact 2010 is leagues better as an IDE, I wanted to upgrade to that.
However I ran into dreaded linker errors.

Porting the code I just wrote to 2008 apparently fixes said issues.

Given the time constraints, I think I’ll just bite the bullet. I’ll go for some chocolate and drink during the excessive build times.

I have however got “something” up and running. That is, I got a window to show using Gosu, I now just need to get an image on there.

Yay images are up. I started with my basic of all image test, MS paint created penis images. However I figured they might not be deemed appropriate for displaying here. So I changed them for placeholder art.

I’ve got input and image displaying working. I’ve also began splitting up the functionality into different classes to try to decrease the build time, which worked.

I’ve also added the inevitable states for my game, currently a main menu and the main game.

I also began creating a player class and realised it’d be smarter to create a base character class that I could then create an NPC class from should the need arise.

I am liking the mini game idea more and more.

(above) the main game as it currently is, exciting

(below) the menu screen with 0 functionality…

Not because of the 2 and half hours I’ve been working on this, but the fact I’ve been up since 7AM GMT and it’s now 4.40AM with skydiving thrown in the middle.

However, I’ve made surprisingly good progress so far, I’ve tested that I can have animated sprites (currently flipping between 1 to 8 as shown on the below image). It also uses, as many sprite based rendering engines do, magenta as the transparent colour, which I checked too. I additionally included the ability to alter the playback speeds of the animation, which may or may not come in handy later.

I’ve also built a vector3 class to use for my (most undoubtably) hacked physics for the games. The class has the ability to use the dot product and cross product, as well as normalise, get the magnitude and the squared magnitude. I’ve also got some overloaded operators so that I can += vectors and divide by a float. I’ll no doubt add more as I go on.

I’ve also begun work on a menu system to make it more intuitive when I add more functionality to the game interface.

I am pretty set on the whole mini game idea, I just need more ideas!
currently:
– Skydiving
– You jump out of the plane and you must pull your chute at 10 seconds. The closer you are to 10 seconds the better your score. However, if you pull it after 10 seconds, you’ll be too low and your chute won’t deploy!

– Treasure hunting
– You have 10 seconds to collect treasure. There are multiple levels (or maybe the single level will change) and get increasingly harder to get the treasure in time.

Finger Dance
– Dance mat game, but on the keyboard. So you have to press the right keys that show up. It gets faster every 10 seconds. I’m not totally sold on this idea though, not least because it requires music, and more so music with complimenting gameplay.

Only had about 5 hours sleep yet woke up feeling surprisingly fresh. Will undoubtedly crash out some point later, but for now I’m cracking on. I’ve got more functionality on my menu to select different games and highlight them. In the past I did this by writing out every possible selected menu (repeating the text but making one line highlighted). Fortunately, I’ve improved it to not be so wasteful.

I’ve also created the basis for the games. I’ve a base class that has pure virtual methods for the update and draw so that each inheriting game class will define it’s own update and draw. I’ve also got a delayed start so that I can display an intro (explaining what the game is and how to play) as well as an interface for passing the score to the menu (and through that UI) system

Well not had a post for a bit as I was hard at work making functionality for the multiple games.

I have a base class with bare functionality that can be called. I also moved a lot of code about trying to find the “nicest” methodology for the game. I mainly moved the selecting and creation of games from the application to the menu system. This is because not only was I passing values to the menu system from the game object via the application object, but I also wasn’t doing very much with the game object in the application, certainly nothing that couldn’t be done quicker in the menu system. It also means I now don’t need an array containing each game, I instead hold a pointer and create a game object of the selected type from the heap (and delete the allocated memory upon returning to the game)

This also make the game open up quicker (as before it created all the games before opening the window, which could lead to players thinking it’s broken. I’m also going to try to look into slapping on a cheeky “LOADING” screen/text so the player knows the game is doing something when loading up a level instead of simply crashing.

I’ve also replaced the keyboard dance idea with a different idea, one which I’ll save for release, I think it’s mildly amusing, if not cheekily immature.

I’m quite happy with the current speed of development as I (hopefully) have a good grounding for creating games on top of the framework. I guess I’ll find out later just how good it is. With only a day left, I’m not sure of my confidence in how many mini games I can put in.

Below is a screenshot of my skydiving mini game as it currently stands. The score, as described in an earlier post, is based on how close to 10 seconds you open your parachute. With a maximum of 10000 points (if you get 10 seconds dead on) it’s actually rather tricky to get a good score, I’m feeling pretty good about it. The score is currently linear to when you pull your cord but I’m considering making it exponential. It depends on what I do with the overall scoring system.

More placeholder art, looking leagues better

By playing said game.

It actually not bad for a 10 second game.

my current best is pulling my chute at 9.992 seconds which comes to a score of

I’ll be impressed if anyone can best that 😉

Getting close to finishing my skydiving mini game, will then find out how easily I can implement an additional minigame into the framework…

I’ve also now got it so the game remembers the best score, although this is only for as long as the application runs. I should have it saving to a text file by the time submission comes about, hopefully. Though it’s still fun as is.

When I saw there was still 1day+ a part of me felt like it was totally possible to finish my game to a standard I’d be happy with.
Now that I see “19 hours” I’m not so confident.

Having said that, my second mini game is coming along quite well. It’s certainly going to be a tight one.

Only had 5 hours sleep currently, trying to work out whether it’s worth going for a few more hours kip or to brave it til the end.

But I’ve only 16 left…

I’ve tidied up the menu slightly, lining up the UI and making the background prettier:

The game titles are meant to draw your curiosity so you’ll try them out.
I’m aiming for 3, hopefully more depending how it goes. Currently I’m sitting on 2 semi-complete mini games.

A sneak peak of the second game below. The basic concept is that you have to search rooms to find something within 10 seconds.

I’m reasonably happy with how two of my mini games have turned out. They’re short but sweet.

I kinda want to add clouds to the sky diving mini game, but with 10 hours left, I need to get this third one cracked out!

Fingers crossed.

Unfortunately, as value time creeps away, my third game has been a disaster. The collision and platforming just plane doesn’t work.
I think I’m going to make a last minute change to make it simpler but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish.

I’m pretty gutted as the game was beginning to take shape when I started finishing up the other mini games

And ready to collapse.

With 5 hours sleep total during the 48 hour competition as well as an exhausting skydive and other distractions. I am quite pleased with what I managed to come out with.

I set out to challenge myself with this compo. Having a couple of ideas for games based on the theme lead me to try and make a mini collection of games. Certainly for myself, it was no mean feat to create not only 3 separate mini games but also the framework that combines them.

I was pleased initially at the pace I had; I managed to get the basic gameplay for two of the games down by the start of the second day. Although I was working through the night on it. I’m also impressed I managed to work for so long none stop; besides grabbing food and relieving myself, I was working solid from about 11pm on Saturday to 1.20am on Monday. I am rather worn out after it all.

It was most fun, naturally, when everything was going well. However, as I stated in an earlier post, as soon as the timer passed the comfort of an additional day value being displayed, I realised I was short on time. I worked bloody hard trying to get my platformer to work. It took ages but I thought I managed to get my platforms to work, I had a system in place that would move them around dynamically when changing levels – it would’ve been cool. But I then quickly learnt that the platforms did not in fact work. With 3 hours left, I didn’t have enough time to work through it, let alone actually create the levels. I had to think fast.

I decided to alter the gameplay. The concept was the same: you have to collect an object within 10 seconds and they’ll get harder to get as you collect more. However, instead of a intricate set of platforms, the player will fly about using a jetpack (similar to the game helicopter, or more recently jetpack joyride) although with the ability to strafe. I also wanted to add in obstacles that stop you flying straight for the objects (and thus make it harder to collect within the time). Unfortunately the obstacles were one of the things I wasn’t able to implement in time.

I also really wanted to get some sounds in, no just because that’s a whole category I’ve thrown away, but also because I had an idea for some of the sounds that would’ve enhanced the humour of the game. I also wanted to do a more dedicated pass on the art, not just touching up the art I currently have, but also add more details. I’m a sucker for details, so it’s upsetting knowing where I could’ve improved upon it. The most blindingly obvious vacancy are the clouds in the skydiving game. It just looks so sparse.

On the plus side, I have had moments of genuine fun playing the games. Given the haste that it was created, I was happy that there’s some fun to be had with the final game that I made too. It’s a shame however that I also didn’t have time to implement the save feature. It’s simply the addition of reading/writing from/to a text file to remember the scores. Still, when playing through the different games the cross score feature is quite good.

At the end of it, I’m glad that I returned to do another Ludum Dare, it’s a great way to motivate yourself to actually do something and highlights that you can create something in a short span of time.