Hi from @Zapakitul, Romania.

This is the first time I enter a Ludum Dare challenge, and boy am I anxious. I earn my living working as a Game Designer for Gameloft (been doing so for a year), but since I got my job, I haven’t been able to finish any personal projects/games. Ludum Dare represents, a great opportunity to boost my moral, as well as a personal challenge, so I’ll be looking forward to it.

As for the tools I will be using, guess I’ll stick to what I know best:

Language: C++ with the aid of DarkGDK.

Audio library of choice: Irrklang.

3D Graphics: Milkshape3D

2D Graphics: Paint.NET.

Level editor: Mapscape.

My work station contains a Desktop Computer (development), and an old Acer Aspire 5050 laptop for debugging, and keeping in touch with everyone on IRC/Twitter. Honestly, all I want out of this challenge is to finish something in this short period of time, and as a newcomer to it, I’m a little worried. I’m happy to meet and “compete” with all of you.

Tags: C++, DarkGDK, Irrklang, newcomer, paint.net, Zapakitul, Zapaman

Less then 15 hours are left to go,
People are anxious but the theme is unknown,
And I swear to the powers that be,
That if Kittens are chosen, as our main quest,
I shall make a game featuring billions of kittens beaten to death!

Now that I took that off my shoulders, it’s time for the actual post. So, I said a few good 6 pages back that I’m in, and this is my first Ludum Dare. Got everything set up, both my pc’s and got me enough food to last for this 48 hours. My dev environment looks like this:

(Do not look at the milk and biscuits bowl hiding behind the laptop!!!)

And I’m going to be eating and drinking this pile of so-not-healthy-but-tasty-and-yummy garbage (5 pizza’s, 5 can’s of black coffee, 2 bottles of milk, allot of instant soup and 10 X 3-in-1 packs of coffee + sweets).

Also bought like 6 packs of cigars, because hey, less oxygen = more inspiration, right?

Anyway, I’m going to stream everything (including me sleeping like a wittle pwincess with my wittle hamster) on Livestream, so tune in if you wanna give feedback or plan on screwing around with my mind. I’ve also taken the liberty of sending my room mate and his fiance out of town for the weekend, for peace and quiet. Screenshoots are going to be uploaded hourly on my dropbox account, and spammed on twitter (I’m sure gonna loose allot of followers).

That’s about it. Can’t wait for the compo to start!

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto, livestream, Zapaman

Hi,

I wanted to post (declare) my base code for Ludum Dare. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, it contains a base Object class that does the following:

– Handles new objects;

– Stores the objects position and outputs them;

– Handles deletion of objects;

– Enables collision setup for the objects.

It requires DarkGDK and Sparky’s Collision library to work though.

Here‘s the VS2008 solution.

Tags: basecode, DarkGDK, Sparky, Zapaman

I’m also going to be livestreaming the entire process (this includes me sleeping on my keyboard and eating waffles). So if you want to give feedback, troll or just hang around with a couple of other peeps there right now, be sure to join.

Live stream: Zapaman on Livestream.com

Hourly screenshoots on twitter, using #ScreenshootSaturday!

It seems that 12 hours have passed since the compo started. It’s time to look back on what I have accomplished in this 12 hours.

I’m going to start with a small description of what is going on in the game:

The game takes place in a vritual environment (tron-like grids). Both the player and his enemies are virtual bots, living in cyber space. The player’s goal is to collect the “Intelligence” briefcase, and send it to the drop off zone. You win points by scoring touchdowns (dropping the Intelligence in the designated area), you loose points if you get killed.

The enemies (baddies as I like to call them) are not hostile towards you at first, but become so when you steal their precious briefcase. In order to reach the drop zone, the player must push (while carrying the briefcase) through the enemy lines. Once the touchdown occurs, the briefcase is reset to it’s original position.

Think of it as a Top-Down Shooter meets Team Fortress 2 and American Football. Up till know I have the following things working:

• Player controls
• Collision and Gravity
• Enemy spawning and a shitty AI that starts to follow you when you pick up the briefcase
• Dropping and picking up the briefcase
• Player bullets (enemy bullets to be added soon)

Here’s a rough concept of the playing field:

Here’s a Screenshot:

What do you guys think?

Tags: Progress Report, Touchdown, Zapaman

Previous post here.

I’m back with a new post. 16 hours have passed since I started working on the game, and things are looking bright (hope it’s not cause I have industrial quantities of coffee in me right now). I managed to implement a basic AI system for the baddies, and I’m building upon it. Since  my last progress reported the following changes have been made:

– In order to focus more on the scoring mechanics and gameplay, the player can no longer shoot at the enemies. Instead he must dodge, run, jump and avoid the entire swarm of baddies that charge gun-first towards him.

– Enemies now feature two AI mode: Idle and Hostile! If the player hasn’t pick up the Briefcase, the baddies will run around the arena, acting cute and minding their own business. When the player steals the briefcase and heads towards the Touchdown Area, the enemies enter the Hostile mode, which has them engage the player.  Right now I’m working on splitting the enemies in two groups: Attackers and Defenders. Attackers are the baddies that charge towards the player, while Defenders maintain their position near the Touchdown Area firing at the player, defending that position.

– Got the HUD to work, both the HealthBar and the “Special” bar.

– Collision detection between the baddies! Now they bump into each other, turn around and mind their own business. (Only in Idle mode).

– I suck at 3D modeling and graphics, but I’m doing what I can. Right now I’ve added the Player and Baddies models (who are subject to change if I will have enough time left), which look like a low-poly cell-shaded version of R2D2 from Star Wars.

Here are a couple of new screen shots, and a video showcasing the Idle-ing robots.

Tags: 16 hours, Progress Report, Touchdown, Zapaman

Previous post here.

Ok, 20 hours have passed like a breeze. I’ve kept myself busy, coding and doing my best to create 3D models that can be identified with ease! Got most of the Core Mechanics working quite well. I now need to polish them and focus on Level Design and media (textures, models, music). This is a full list of features that have been added today:

• Collision
• Player and Camera controls (1st person, 3rd person, top-down – although top-down is what I am going to use)
• Bullet handling for the Enemies
• Enemy AI. There are two types of enemies, Attackers and Defenders. The Attackers will engage the Player gun-first, while defenders will rush towards the TouchDown zone, in order to defend it.
• Switching between levels.
• HUD (Health Bar, Special Bar/Stamina Bar)

I’m happy with my progress today, managed to do most of the things that I had planed. Gonna take a quick nap (2-3h maximum) and then I’m back to adding the rest of the features, and polishing the game.

As a bonus, here’s my Timelapse video. Hope you guys like it.

Tags: day 1, timelapse, Touchdown, Zapaman

Previous post here.

My entry for LD22 has been completed and uploaded. Tomorrow I’ll make a full Post Mortem containing a Game Design Document, and my thoughts on what went right, wrong and what could have been done to improve it further. For now, all I can say is the following:

1. I’m proud of my entry. During the past 48 hours the game has gone through allot of design changes. What first started as an FPS, soon became a morph between a Top-down shooter with a capture the flag (briefcase) mode, with American Football elements (such as Touchdown). Only during my second day did I realize that the game was by no mean fun when chased down by an entire team. Writing AI for the team mates was a no-no due to the short amount of time left, so I scraped the basic mechanics and came up with a new one.
2. I’m happy with the current gameplay mechanic. Using a defensive weapon for offense is something not many games tackled, or at least no any that I know off. In this prototype I tackled two ways of using the shield, one in which the player acts a bulldozer, pushing his enemies into pits, and another where the shield is used to deflect bullets towards his attackers.
3. I’m not much of an artist but I feel that the current art style is decent.
4. I’m happy with the amount of features this game contains (although not all are used now). In just 48 hours I managed to integrate a TDS camera (with an alternate FPS version, currently locked), collision, AI (when the prototype was meant as a Capture the Flag game, I implemented two types of behaviour for the enemies: Attackers and defenders. The Attackers charged towards the player if he was near them, while defenders rushed to the touch down zone, forming a human/robot shield) and basic physics.

As I said before, a Post Mortem will arrive soon, in which I will explain how I have arrived to this current gameplay mechanics, what I had to scrap and why. Till then, I’ll leave you guys with today’s Timelapse, and a bunch of screenshoots.

• Screenshot 1 (Main Menu)
• Screenshot 2 (Asian Mode)
• Screenshot 3 (Normal Mode)

Download Cyber Shield.

Tags: Cyber Shield, Progress Report, screenshots, Zapaman

Quit my job, moved into my parrents basement (till I find a new suitable apartment), looking forward to go indie, full time. This being said, I have no excuse to not be in this round. Missed LD23 due to the crunch time brought by the need to release NOVA3, and I felt bad! With any bit of luck I can use the LD24 game as my first, crappy-ish :D, debut game. Good luck everyone, and may thy pixels and voxels, vertexes and computer specs turn out to be just as awesome as you want them to be!

Going to use the following tools:

• LOVE2D
• Lua Development Tools
• GIMP (+_ paint.NET)
• Ubuntu 12.04 and a virtualized Windows 7 (for paint.NET)
• SFXr

P.s. had no idea how to name the post, so I went with “that”!

Edit: Forgot to mention: Not sure about livestreaming, but drop me a line @zapakitul on Twitter or G+ , if you are up for a Hangout!

Tags: in, indie, LD 48, meh

So, here’s my progress report for the game, as it is right now! Decided to call it Genetics-Pop, because you spend most of the time making a row of 3 cells of the same type, in order to mutate the organism! Each successful mutation awards the player a few extra seconds and points, which can be spent on bombs (bombs mutate a 3×3 square).

Each level requires a certain number of cells to be “mutated” in order to be completed! After each level, the organism, at the bottom of the screen “acquires” a new limb/feature. The game is lost when the timer reaches 0, or when there are too many (not sure how many now) active cells on the screen.

That’s it for now!

Tags: 15h in, Evo-freaking-lution, Genetics Pop, Progress Report

Because I’m about to Jam.

And just like any printer, I have prepared my ink cartridges ( props go to @ThomasNoppers for the color palette), got a fresh new batch of dark, sublimely beautiful, paper, a brand new USBase-code and my driver is powered by MOAI SDK. Most of my ink will be consumed by drawings made in Paint.NET.

So yeah, cheers to a new Ludumdare and to all you guys.

Tags: jam, Printer, Zapaman

Well, I was really not wishing for minimalistic to be voted as a theme for this Ludumdare but, well, C’est la vie. The way I see it, I can take one of the following routes:

• Minimal Graphics: Monochrome or simple geometric figures
• Minimal Gameplay: small set of goals and interaction options
• Have a character named “Malistic, Mini Malistic”

I decided to go with option number two and design a small “strategy game” with little to no interaction during game play. The basic idea is this: The player has a certain number of points at his disposal. By spending those points he can buy and deploy troops on the battlefield at the start of the game: Infantry, Rocketers, Tanks and Anti-infantry Vehicles. He must assess the situation and, based on the amount of points as his disposal, choose the best possible line-up. After he places his units and clicks start they will proceed to search for the enemy on the map.  At this point, the player will only be able to mark certain locations as important (and thus, a few units nearby will go towards that location) or drop Health Packs (to aid his units).  Here’s a screenshot featuring the current progress:

Minimal Interaction Warfare

That’s about it for now. I’m actually curious to where I can take this game.

Tags: game, Interaction, minimal, strategy

Minimal Interaction Warfare

When I first started MIW the goal was simple: A 2D war fighting game in which the player placed his troops, issued orders and sat back to follow the outcome. I guess I can say I succeeded as my entry featured all the above. The down falls? No sound, over powered player units and little-to-no-polish. That’s why I decided to release a second, post-jam, version with a simple Main Menu, more maps and balanced gameplay. The game still has no sound effects and music because, well… um, I have little-to-no talent in that area and I wanted to keep things in the spirit of Ludumdare where all the assets are created by me. Maybe in another version, when things settle down (I still have to release another Pimps vs Vampires version this week, and I also have some freelancing work to attend).

Gameplay

The first thing a player must do, when the game starts, is to deploy his units. He has 1300 points which he can exchange for Soldiers and Tanks. Both unit types can be placed on the lower part of the screen (2 rows). After deploying all of his units the player can assign orders to each one (move to position X and defend or move to position and engage/attack). He can also skip this phase and start the simulation (in the post-ludumdare version orders can also be issued by pausing the game mid-play). Player and enemy units clash somewhere in the middle of the map. The game can be won by either defeating all the enemy units or by successfully sending 3 units on the opponent’s starting rows.

Graphics

I’m happy with the way I handled the creation of assets. I decided to go with 16×16 (that I upscaled to 32×32 in the game), each sprite having no more then 4 colors. They all turned out well enough, units were distinguishable and you could tell what each tile on the map represented. For the post-jam version I created 2 more versions of the map tiles for Autumn and Winter maps. All in all, I handled this part well (by my standards)

Programming

I decided to stick with LUA for this Jam but I changed just about all the tools that I used in previous jams. The framework I used was MOAI SDK (for which I wrote a basic wrapper) and my IDE was Sublime 2. Coding started out well but halfway through I started hacking things together, which as always, turned everything into a mess. I have more nested if statements in game.lua then your average pop singer amount of twitter followers.

If I were to summarize everything in “Good” and “Bad” things would look like this:

The good

• Assets
• I finished what I set up to create
• Good choice of language and tools

The bad

• No sound effects and music
• Didn’t get to add a navigation menu
• Underpowered AI and units

The ugly

• My code.

That’s about it. I look forward to the next edition of Ludumdare and other gamejams that might be thrown my way. You can download the post-jam version of MIW here or, alternatively, you can check out the version made in 48 hours. If you took part in the jam then feel free to also rate it

P.s. I’m Open Sourcing the code under CC-3.0 for non-commercial use. The assets are available under CC-3.0 SA  and the .pdn (Paint dotNet) file can be downloaded from OpenGameArt. Feel free to fork the project on github and alter it. Going to try and work on MIW during my spare time, to add new units, fix bugs and improve code readability.

[ Re-posted from my personal blog ]

I decided to take part in this Mini LD as a reply to a challenge issued by an ex-coworker of mine on twitter. The goal was to develop a game for the jam in just one weekend as opposed to 7Days. I’m already past the 48h mark, but my challenger forfeited so I guess it’s either a nil-nil or I win by default. Anyway, my game for this Mini-LD is called MINI WARS, as a token to a great turn-based strategy game that I love, Advance Wars (GBA and NDS).

This is how the game looks at this point. I wanted to go with a Gameboy Advance / Gameboy classic feel combined with UI elements of the Nintendo DS. All the graphics, except for the portrait and level indicator (arrow in screen 2) have been drawn by me on Friday, with some updates during the weekend.

Gameplay:

• Turn based
• 3 types of units: Infantry, Tanks and Mechs (rock-paper-scissors)
• Terrain matters: Buildings and Trees raise defense, water lowers it and bases (square buildings with a flag) restore HP each turn.
• Each unit has 16 action points. Movement costs 4 AP / TILE while shooting requires 8 AP.

Here’s a video I uploaded a few minutes ago to youtube:

Note that the AI is as dumb as a sack of puppies. Reason is that I broke the pathfinding code near the 48h mark when I updated my Grid class and had little to no time to rewrite it with many other stuff left unfinished. Probably, after the jam, I’ll re-write the entire thing from ground up and port it to Android in order to check the market (free-to-play, no IAP).

What left? Options menu, about and In-Game-Menu, + two more levels. The game is designed for 480×320 resolution, but can be upscaled from the Options Menu.

Developed using MoaiSDK and LUA (+ some C++ for some edits to the HOST – lua player).

Tags: Advance Wars, Mini Wars, turn-based, Zapaman

The Game:

Fantasy Warrior Manager is a 2D tile-based game, designed around the limitations of a NDS screen, in which the player assumes the role of a Tribe Leader. He must train and provide food for his warriors, in order to make them stronger. Every week a cosmic event takes place and merges the worlds of the game into one, and a battle between tribes take place. The goal of the game is to get your population to survive for one month (in-game time).

Technical (Self-imposed limitations):

• 256×384 resolution
• 16×16 tiles (for the backgrounds and characters) and 16×32 / 32×16 / 32×32 for the actual buildings

Challenges:

• work around the small resolution
• establish a way to visually differentiate between units
• find a way to represent armies of units on a screen that can only display 16 tiles on the X axis and 24 on the Y
• create a non-intrusive UI that can work on a small screen-space
• design a fun AI to give the player a run for his “money”
• do all of this in <48h

Progress Report:

• 4 hours into the challenge: I only made some mock-ups of the game’s art style and ui. Now that I know what direction I want to take, I can start coding. Here are two FAKE screenshots:

Tags: Fantasy Warrior Manager, Worlds, Zapaman

Copulus is a 2D God Game in which you have to help your subjects populate their little world. In order to achieve this you need to balance their need for social interaction (and copulation) with the need to survive. I decided to try and stream line the “god game” mechanics and let the player focus on only a few tasks, as opposed to regular god games where you have to manage many different needs (housing, hunger, peril, happiness, loyalty, security, etc). In order for your population to survive and expand you only need to make sure they are feed, safe and can interact with each other. I even took this approach a bit further and merged survival/peril with hunger satisfaction. Before I go into the, regular, What went Right, What went Wrong topic I would like to present my approach for this entry:

Limitations breed creativity

Before the theme was announced I already established how far I can stretch things. I know from previous experiences how hard it is to stay on track of the initial design and how many features end up being thrown away in order to finish “something” before the time runs out. So for this edition of Ludumdare, I’d like to say I came prepared. Here are my, self-imposed, limitations:

• 256×384 resolution (upscaled to 512×768)
• must involve some kind of an AI
• must be tile based.

Three rules in total. Three rules that, once the theme was announced, helped me establish a clear goal. For example, the small resolution and tile-based approach helped me establish the art style, level and user interface design. Working on a 256×384 screen I could only fit 8 / 12 tiles (32×32) on the screen, or 16/24  tiles at 16×16 pixels each.  The AI requirement weighted in favor of the strategy genre and, it’s subclass, the god game genre.

From here on, I went with the entire map being confined to a single screen (in order to have a good view of your population, and not have to hunt for them everywhere). This also affected my User Interface Design and Experience, since It had to take as little screen space as possible. Little screen space for UI implied having only a handful of buttons during game play which, combined with the god-game thematic, had me limit what tasks the player could focus on. A small amount of tasks for the player to perform required me to streamline the entire “god game” approach and make it as minimalistic as possible (the soul experience as I like to refer to it). You can see how things developed further on.

What went right

• Using a WIKI to plan ahead. Features, classes, how the AI should perform, etc [click here for a screenshot of the wiki].
• Not stretching further than I can and imposing strict limits.
• Making fake-screenshots(mockups) before beginning development so I can plan my interaction approach.
• Using tools and frameworks that I was familiar with.
• Selecting a limited color palette to work with.
• The UI only interaction means that I can also port the game to tablets.
• Using “procedural” generation to save time (from level design) and focus on other areas.
• Nailed the risk-reward motif due to Wolves acting as a source of food but also damage to the units.

What went wrong

• My innate lack of knowledge when it comes to composing and/or generating appropriate sound effects.
• Having to remove the “convergence” scene. After winning a level, the player was supposed to reach a new world with his highest level followers and watch them fight off the inhabitants. I regret removing because it would have had a better tie in with this jam’s theme. Further more, I had a system which allowed the player to revisit worlds that have been previously populated, to see how they are doing.
• The game’s balance is a bit off. Level progression of your followers vs level progression of the wolves is tipped in favor of your followers for the first few levels. A few wolf summons in and you can only take them on if you have a high level character that survived.
• Social interactions are only represented by heart animations on individuals, but it’s hard to tell who “copulated” with whom. More so, a death of a birth of an individual is represented by their respective sprite disappearing from the game.
• Health, hunger and level indicators are way to small and crammed into a unit’s sprite.
• The tutorial is just a image and does not convey all the information needed.

Conclusion

I feel that with each Ludumdare event I partake in I can quantify my progress as a Designer. My first entry required the player to quit the game in order to restart the level and featured only mechanics but no clear goal (also no Ui of any kind). In my last LD (7DRTS) attempt I finally had a entry with no missing UI options and a clear navigation path. You can see where I’m going with this. But all in all, I’m glad that with each submission I end up acquiring new knowledge. As far as limitations go I believe that it’s better to know what you should not do as opposed to not knowing what to do. Hopefully my next LD submission will blow this one out of the water.

You can play and rate the game here. Linux, Mac and, hopefully, Android coming tonight. I’ve also uploaded it to itch.io and, in the weekend, will release a post-compo version that has sound and the features that were cut off.

Tags: Copulus, god game, Limitations, weight lifting, Zapaman