First LD!

Tools:

– Code: Lua

– Engine: LÖVE2D

– Graphics: Adobe CS5.5

– Sound: SFXR & Adobe Audition

This is my first LD, and I figured I would briefly talk about what I’ve been doing with my time.

I decided that this competition would be an opportunity to motivate myself to learn more about game programming. I’ve previously worked in Unity (only once for a college project), so I’m at least vaguely familiar with some game programming concepts. So, in the spirit of learning how to do this game programming thing, I decided to work in Löve2D, with no added libraries/external code. So far my time has been spent with:

• How to define maps
• Outputting tiled maps
• Collision detection
• Player movement
• Trying to make it look purdy

Yesterday was almost entirely me fiddling with collision detection. It works now, but I suspect it’s horribly inefficient, so my plan is to clean things up after LD is done. After all the hours spent fiddling with figuring out which tile is to the left or right of the player, I took a break from programming and decided to switch to art. So I went from my early test visuals:

First tileset

To something a little more fun:

Textures!

At this point I’m thinking I’ll probably not have much of actual gameplay before even the jam deadline, but I’m not too bothered by that. I’ve learned a lot in a few days and had crazy amounts of fun doing it

I’m in! This is my second attempt. Last go round was mostly a learning experience, and I spent 99% of my time fiddling with self-coded map tiling and collision in Love2D. This time around, I’m shooting to finish something:

Engine: Zoetrope (framework on top of Love2D – so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel)

Audio: SFXR/BFXR probably

Design: Adobe PS/Illustrator

IDE: Sublime Text 2

Fuel: As much coffee, pizza, and Pendulum as I can handle

Holy cow! I think I’m actually going to finish something for LD this time.

So the idea for my game is that you control a satellite / ship that orbits the planet, and your goal is to be all evil and use your laser to destroy targets on the planet. Some targets are simply important buildings/installations, but some other targets will launch attacks at you, like homing missiles or defense fighters, so you have to balance blowing up high point value targets, and destroying potential threats. I’m also hoping to work in some more mechanics like some upgrades or alternate weapons… who knows.

The red things are going to be missiles, and the white blocks are targets

So far, we’ve got a planet (yay), with randomly placed buildings. Currently, every single building fires homing missiles at you and there’s no real scoring setup yet either. Obviously graphics are placeholders. Today has been about MATH. OH GOD THE MATH.

I came across something interesting that I hadn’t considered today. Zoetrope is built on Löve2D, and uses a horizontally flipped plane for drawing – that is, the top of the screen is y = 0, the bottom of the screen is y = 600 (or whatever the height of the window is). Zoetrope rotations are also flipped like this. This means that a rotation of 45 degrees in Zoetrope is actually -45 degrees on the normal coordinate plane and that for calculating things involving angles (which I clearly have a lot of…) there are some issues with  cos/sin and negating numbers to correct for things being backwards.

I also think I’ve done more math today than I did throughout most of college.

Also!Here’s the most recent build. Left & Right arrows orbit the planet, and space fires ze laser:

Alright! My still unnamed game about lasering everything in sight is inching along. I’ve got missiles behaving correctly (ish?). I’d prefer to have them actually orbit the planet instead of being allowed to pass in front of it, but there’s not really time for that.

I also took a small break last night to work on a little bit of art, since I’d like to have something that looks mildly done when the deadline rolls around. It’s not the best ever, and I suspect I’ll go back and touch things up a fair bit, but the laser looks a lot better (and has some animation)! I also had a lot of fun putting in the flash back on the satellite when the laser fires:

On the gameplay front, I still have a few big things to fix:

• I need to add in some interface elements, such as the player’s health, and possibly tweak the amount of damage missiles do
• I wanted initially to include another kind of enemy defense, such as swarms of fighters or something, but that’s no longer feasible
• The collision with the laser beam is screwy. Buildings are destroyed correctly because I do a simple angle check instead of proper collision, but missiles are using Zoetrope’s built in collision… which i recently learned does not respect sprite rotation. So, I’ll be building custom collision so that the laser can destroy missiles
• Different building types. Some will be simple targets, incapable of attacking, and some will be missile silos which periodically fire missiles back at you

Here’s the current build