I’m a relative novice, going through a “I want to be a great programmer” phase, and I’ll be entering Ludum Dare for the first time!

I have most experience (which isn’t very much) with C#/XNA, so naturally I’m choosing to do this project with Java/Slick2D! I’m in the process of warming up with Pong right now, to get to grips with the language and framework. It could be a complete flop, but what the hell – may as well give it a shot!

Java, Slick2D, Eclipse, Paint.NET, (unsure about sound).

This is a screenie of my progress.

Twin stick shooter, 1-2 (expandable to more) players.

Each player has a sort of ‘drifting’ movement, a la Asteroids, as do the circles in the background.

If you move over a coloured circle, you can right-click to ‘pick’ that colour. You then keep that colour (I call it the “powerColor”), and it’s displayed in the centre of your avatar (so far just a circle inside another circle). See the orange blob in the screenie above. You can see that I got it from the mix of the nearby red and green circles.

Each colour gives you a power-up. Right now, redness gives you a speed boost, proportional to how much red there is in your powerColor.

Next, I plan to implement powers for blueness and greenness. My idea at the moment is that blueness makes your shots stronger (I haven’t implemented shooting yet) and greenness slowly heals you over time. If you have a mix of all three then you get all three powers at once (so white is the Holy Grail, only found by mixing RGB from at least 3 bright circles). I’ll probably make your powerColour fade gradually to black, so you have to continually seek out the circles.

I’m enjoying everyone else’s progress updates – keep them coming!

Tags: java slick2d eclipse

If you didn’t see my original post, it’s basically a twin stick shooter where you can receive bonuses and power-ups from whatever colour you ‘pick’ from under you (with stacked bonuses if you get an R/G/B mix).

Ran into a few obstacles yesterday – struggled with Slick2D’s gamepad support and thought about making it single player only. That’s pretty much fixed now, so it should have a 1P or 2P option (a simple AI is already coded). To top it all off I quickly developed a bad cold! I considered sleeping and pulling out of LD48 but… I’m determined!

Still to do:

Sound, music, menu/title screen, add the ability to shoot on the 360 controller and check for connected controllers (not sure how to do this yet!), perhaps make the visual style more interesting if I have time.

Tags: java, slick2d

Done! I used SFXR for the sounds in the end – what a great little program!

It’s a twin stick shooter where the colour you are standing on gives you a bonus. You can get multiple bonuses by standing on a mix of R,G,B.

1-2 players: Mouse/KB vs Game Controller, or either control system versus (bad) AI.

Download it here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24981189/CW.jar (I couldn’t get the Web Start working unfortunately – wasted hours trying)

Tools:

Language / Framework: Java / Slick2D
IDE: Eclipse
Sound: SFXR

Instructions:

To run: Run CW.jar. It should work as a standalone file.

To begin, just press TAB to toggle 1 or 2 players. 1 player is versus a (bad) AI opponent. 2 players the recommended choice, but it is only suitable
when one is on the Mouse/KB and the other is on a game controller. Press SPACE to play with Mouse/KB or START to play with a controller.

Shoot the enemy! Get their health down to 0. A novel concept, I’m sure you’ll agree. The game is minimalistic since everything is made from code-
generated circles, with the exception of the in-game text.

WASD on the KB to move, or Left Stick on the controller. Shoot by clicking in the direction you want to shoot. You can hold the Left Mouse Button down
if you wish. The controller uses the Right Stick to shoot. You can ‘pick’ a colour from directly under you – just right click or press Button 1 (‘A’ on
the 360 controller). Each colour gives you a bonus, proportional to its brightness:

Red: Speed
Blue: Shot power
Green: Health regeneration

You can mix and match colours by moving over circles that overlap. For example, Purple will make you both fast AND powerful!

I hope you enjoy playing it.