let’s try this thing

I’ve been contributing to the EGP for nearly a year at this point, posting all my games up on my dev journal. If I can do a game in a week, I can do a game in two days, right?

Right?

My development process is turning into a ridiculous mess of complexity for the sake of simplicity, but it currently includes:

• libogg and libvorbis
• zlib, libpng
• libfreetype
• fmod, used under its free license
• lua 5.1.4 or luajit2, depending on whether I prefer stability or speed
• libluabind
• boost
• libcurl, used mostly for error reporting
• SystemVersionCheck on OSX
• LuaGL + GLee
• A friend’s library called Glop that embeds half of the above, and acts like SDL only less awful
• And finally, my own library Glorp that ties everything together and makes it easy to use

Nobody, anywhere, is going to want to build my source code. I can already guarantee this.

I’ll probably be using SFXR for sound effects and some combination of pencil/paper/scanner/gimp for graphics. Game will be released on both Windows and OSX, with appropriate distribution packages for both.

I also plan to rock out.

I think I’ve been inspired by Desktop Dungeons and Settlers of Catan. Pseudorandomly generated islands, five different resources gathered from three different squares: a civilization’s attempts to ESCAPE ARMAGEDDON THROUGH MAGIC.

(ignore the debug graphics off on the right)

I bet you want to know what those buttons do, don’t you?

Well right now they outline themselves, and nothing more. I haven’t actually hooked up the game mechanics yet. That will happen tomorrow, hopefully eventually along with some less nasty art.

Oh man, finally. I thought I was done two hours ago and then my build system decided it hated me.

Game released! Check it out!

I went and wrote up a postmortem for Nieuwe Aarde, my turn-based strategy game, over on my main development journal.

Tags: LD17, post-mortem, postmortem

Oh yeah we’re supposed to mention if we plan to make a game, aren’t we? And talk about our tools a little?

Well I’m using my game framework that I’ve used for all my previous games. I may or may not be using my sidescroller library that I originally developed for those, or my terrible terrible level editor, or my level-based-game framework.

Who can say? I cannot!

What I can say: there will be a game in 49 hours. That is guaranteed. And with luck, it’ll even be good.

So here’s what I’ve got.

First, take Smash TV.

Now imagine you’re a dude who has a gun chassis. It’s not actually, like, a gun. It just has potential to be a gun. You could turn it into a gun, if you had parts for it, of course.

You also have a vacuum tube. It can suck up monsters. And turn them into gun parts! Random gun parts. Some monsters will have notifiers for what parts they’ll turn into, but if the parts you need aren’t around – like, say, you’re completely out of ammo – you might have to just suck up random monsters and pray. Sucking up a monster is going to be a bit difficult and leave you vulnerable, so if you have to suck up a bunch of monsters gambling, you’re in bad shape.

To make it worse, your gun degenerates over time. The various parts stop working as well, and eventually break entirely. You can’t use a broken gun so you’d better replace those parts before they fail completely, rather than after they fail completely.

Guns are currently made up of four different parts:

* Ammo – what you fire. Divided into three major categories, Bullet, Canister, and Energy. Ammo governs the behavior of your weapon – you might want to switch from Standard bullets to Penetrating bullets, for example, if you’re up against real big meaty monsters.
* Magazine – what stores the ammo. Also divided into those three categories. You can’t store ammo if you’re not using a magazine of the right type, and if you grab a new wrong-type magazine, all your ammo goes bye-bye. Magazines can also make your gun fall apart more quickly or less quickly, though of course the more conservative magazine types also have a lower ammo capacity.
* Feeds – what delivers ammo to the barrel. This changes how your gun behaves, from a standard medium-fire feed to a burst-fire feed, an ultra-burst shotgun-type feed, or a full gatling cannon feed.
* Barrel – what outputs ammo. This will affect how the projectile behaves when it leaves the barrel, including curved or homing shots, slow/fast shots, wide spread or narrow spread.

So it’s a frantic race to keep your gun working as well as possible while killing monsters with, let’s be honest, whatever you have handy.

Controls will be WASD for movement, mouse/clicking for aim and fire. That’s the plan. Let’s see if it works!