Good morning. Got a decent nights sleep so hopefully I can finish the game today :). As the game itself will be quite simple, I’m planning on getting the gameplay thing down fairly quickly, then focus on making it at least look pretty, if nothing else. I’m planning on heading the post processing route (with possibly deferred rendering). But we’ll see what The Time allows. Now it’s time to take the dog out and then start whipping out some code.

Wheem, just got DirectInput up and running, so I’m getting mouse input now.. Now to combine it with the tunnel renderer to form some sort of game class with interactivity =).

As I suspected, the choise to start from scratch (C++, DX9 etc) has taken a lot of time. I’ve simplified my idea as far as I basically can; now it’s just a tunnel runner. Mouse aims the movement and try not to hit wall for as long as possible. That’s it. Hopefully I can fine tune the difficulty curve to be pleasant, at least =). I also dropped most of my plans for post processing stuff. Did look into it but PC hardware sucks in that you need to take care of so many different HW combinations so that’s kinda holding me back. I did do what I could in simple pixel and vertex shaders. The intestinal runner looks now something like:

But oh well, I’m pretty sure this game won’t be anything super awesome but the goal is to at least finish it :). Probably won’t bother with sounds. For a game like this, it’s not so much about sound effects than ambient sound and I’m no good at making sound stuff :). (oh well, given the substance (you are exploring intestininal cavities), I can at least honestly say that the game is crap)

Hehey, I think the game is otherwise fairly feature complete.. Now it’s all up to if I want to make some bg sounds for it or no.. I think I’ll try something; let’s hope it won’t dealy the project over the deadline No new shots as that’s how the game looks =). It’s pretty darned simple =).

Huzzah, with over 1.5hr to go! So my Intestinal Cavity Explorer is now done. I even did some sounds in there.. Not sure if I should’ve, but at least it’s complete now..

Check the final version here.

Now off to eat.. (I almost forgot to eat on the last day; too focused Thanks all, was a fun compo, though I still think there were far better themes =).

Good morning everyone.. Just woke up and trying to get started.. “Islands” as a theme.. Not the worst of them all, but it will likely some time to figure out something original.. Also the tech is totally open. I’m somewhat tempted to go with .NET, F# and SlimDX. Meaning at most 3 people will try out the game, so it becomes more of a story + screenshot competition. Good luck everyone and have fun creating your entries!

Tags: LD17

I’ve been trying to get an idea.. The only thing that rolls in the mind is some sort of heightfield. No idea about what the game would be, though.. Better start coding and see what lies ahead. I think I’ll go the F#/SlimDX route. As part of preparing, just went to the store and bought 3 liters of Dr Pepper, pistachios, some candy and beef jerky (hot cajun flavor). Also ran a daily World of Warcraft heroic instance, just to set the mood.. =) Better warm up the compilers, then..

Tags: LD17

Got an idea, finally.. Been dabbling with F# and SlimDX in the mean time. I ported the simple SlimDX triangle example from C# to F#. Shortly thereafter I decided to ditch SlimDX completely; 3D just takes too much time to make properly. So I’m now working with F# and WinForms and normal .NET 3.5 runtime should be enough in the end. It will be interesting to see how well the game runs as I’m planning on doing some fluid dynamics and stuff..

Tags: LD17

Finally some progress.. My experience with F# has been relatively smooth and I’ve been making good progress. What I have up now is a fluid simulator and on top of the fluid I can drop “boats” (those dots in the image) and they will float with the fluid. The fluid simulation is a fast implementation of the Lattice Boltzmann Methods (LBM) and it seems to work relatively well here.

The goal of the game will be that there are 2 colors of boats, red and blue. The boats start from the left and the fluid will push them to the right. There will be 2 goal areas, one for red, one for blue. Any crashed boat or boat that enters the wrong goal area will substract one “life”. Lose too many and it’s game over. What the player does, is that the player can grow and shrink islands (so the obstacles in this image are only for testing the fluid dynamics). By growing the islands correctly, the player can the steer the boats to their destination.

This is the best idea I could come up with (spent hours in thinking) and I’m sure there will be tens of games like this in this LD17. Oh well, can’t win ’em all in originality..

Tags: LD17

More progress, yay! Now the islands can be painted and removed with the mouse (left button paints, right button removes). The fluids automatically adjust themselves to flow around the islands. Seems like the boats can still hit into them too easily, so I’ll have to fix that probably somehow.. One idea I had was to make the boats indestructible, but impose a time limit on how long they are alive. So if a player isolates the boats, they will still perish after some time. Would probably add more strategy as well so I think I’ll try that.

Also tweaked the fluid look a little better. The first image was from the fluid density, this one is from the fluid velocity. The whole system started acting a lot better once I added a bit of dampening in it. So far I’m quite happy with how well it works.

Next, colored boats and goal zones..

Tags: LD17

Again lots of progress.. Now there actually are two types of boats, reds and greens and 2 goal areas on the right. If the boat hits the correct goal area, the goal flashes bright. Otherwise it will flash dark. There is also a spawn system which will spawn more and more boats. Also tweaked the fluid dynamics and boat moving. Now the boats stop if they would hit something and also they try to steer away from close-by islands. So the boats act a lot better gameplay -wise.

Testing the game, it’s kinda interesting how the mechanics work. If you close off a section completely, because there is little/no fluid flow there, the boats will move a lot more erratically (currently there is a minimum speed for their movement but not sure if there really needs to be). So you need to keep the fluid flowing in order to guide the boats.

Not much to go in order to have a fully functioning game, btw. Just counting the score and lives left, menu screens and some instructions.. Then there is the question of sounds and such. But feeling pretty positive over-all. I think I’ll stop development on this for tonight and continue tomorrow.

Tags: LD17

Good “morning” all.. Had a decent nights sleep, sat around doing nothing, then went out and bought tons of more Beef Jerky and Dr Pepper. Going to fix something to eat and then try to finish the game. For some reasons the Sunday is always harder than the Saturday. But as I knew that beforehand, I tried to do as much as I could yesterday..

Just about done.. I think I’ll skip making any sounds/music this time (so the game should work well in office setting as well).. I added “bubbles” that flow with the stream (the little dots). They help to visualize the fluid behavior a lot. I added lives and scoring and also a startup menu screen (not shown here). The hiscore is saved to the registry. So I’m pretty much there, or really close.

I think I might spent a few moments seeing if I can optimize some of the rendering code. For example, the fluid bitmap is updated every frame. With Bitmap.SetPixel for every pixel. So things like that may be a bit of a performance overhead.. Not sure if I’ll bother but we’ll see. Then there’s the packaging and uploading to do.

Phew, finally made it. I know there’s still plenty of time left but felt better not to crunch too much this time. I’m relatively happy with how the game turned out. There was some initial friction with choosing the tools and idea but I think F# and fluid simulation both worked well together. The game requires only .NET 3.5 Framework and nothing else (the used F# libraries are linked into the exe).

See the entry here. See the my site for the project here.

Here’s a final screenshot:

Really tight on time as got guests visiting us this weekend and so. So I’ll probably try to make a “few hour” entry. Will mean I’ll probably go for C# and .NET 3.5 or something like that. I do like the theme at least a bit. Got some idea I’m comfortable I’d be able to whip up fairly fast.. Good luck everyone!

Progressing nicely.. Got my “characters” drawing and basic frame loop somewhat set up. If things keep up, I can keep to my schedule. The name of the game I’m working on is “Psi Keepers”. In the game there will be enemy units that move closely towards the player and shoot rarely. If the player gets hit by a bullet or hits an enemy, it’s game over. The player controls a single character that can move and use psi powers. Moving will be with the keyboard (WASD or arrows) and psi powers will be with the mouse. With the psi powers the player can capture one or more enemy units (a circular are which will be where the posession will happen). The captured units will move towards the mouse cursor and shoot rapidly. These bullets will not harm the player but will harm other non-controlled enemy units. So in essence, you use your awesome psi powers to make the enemies shoot each other. No idea how well this idea holds up, but lets see..

Got my game already up to a playable state. I simplified the concept a bit. Now all the enemies are suicide bombers, just wanting to bomb you. You can mind control a single enemy at a time and run that into another one and then both of them explode. Simple but feels like it somehow works (as there’s two things to do, keyboard for dodging into a good place and mouse for controlling the enemies). I’ll try to add the “extra stuff” now, such as a menu screen, saving hiscore and so on. At least I’ve completed then something =).

Finally got my entry ready and got it submitted. Even made some simple sounds with sfxr. The idea indeed was a bit simpler than initially I thought, but at least I got it done with all my extra time constraints.. Good luck to those of you still making your games!

See the entry here.

Bah, couldn’t sleep. Too hot. So decided to check out if LD is offering anything compelling. Not really liking the theme as all ideas that come to mind would require 15 people and a year or two. But perhaps I’ll figure something out.. Good luck everyone!

Good morning everyone!

Couldn’t sleep much as I was a bit scared on what the theme would be. Also I’m celebrating my birthday today (the Real Date is next monday) so that will pretty much eat up the whole LD time :). But still going to see if I can get something up. At least the theme is something I can live with. Plenty of ideas, though most of them would require an artist and some carefulness into getting the mood just right. As I probably have something like 3 hours to make something, gotta go a lot simpler.

Tech wise I’m planning on trying out Processing.js for the first time ever and it seems like the site is full of useful little code snippets which should allow me to get a game up & running in record time. Hopefully. 😀

Good luck everyone and remember to have fun!