Hobnox Audiotool

The audio tool is a fantastic way to make cool sounding music all from within your browser. Make 10 short loops and randomly loop through them for a simple background track. The tone matrix tool is particularly awesome.

ColorLovers Palettes

Sticking to a palette will improve the appearance of programmer art tenfold. The palettes are only of 5 colours so try finding two matching palettes to get a good range.

If you know any other handy sites like these, post them so we can all use them

I lied, I ended up making a game all tonight. Tomorrow is going to suck because I’ll have had no sleep. Oh well, so it goes. I made this one in Unity. I sort of sucks because I wasn’t able to spend any time balancing it (I spent about… 8 hours start to finish on this, including design). Still is a pretty nifty entry, I suppose. It’s even got 5 levels.

The idea is that you’re in a space ship and you’re trying to land on a planet, but your space ship is too heavy to do so without burning up. So, you’ve got to ram your ship against various obstacles in space in order to break pieces off and reduce your total weight. As you break parts off, your ship loses functionality. Breaking off your wings reduces your maneuverability, breaking off your antennae reduces your ability to see around you, and breaking off your cockpit actually kills you. If possible, you want to break off the body of the ship by ramming into something just as you pass it – once the cockpit is free.

Anyway, you can it for PC at:

http://www.otcsw.com/files/TooHeavyForReEntry-PC.zip

And for Mac at:

http://www.otcsw.com/files/TooHeavyForReEntry-Mac.zip

Screenshot:

This morning I realized that I had not really thought the gameplay through before jumping into the tech implementations, and as a result of that the game is now in a state where im not sure that I can save it. I’ll keep going today though, and hopefully i’ll get struck by some ideas that’ll help the game turning out as an actual game!

Anyways, here’s another progress shot:

Some additions since last night:

• Queue displaying whos turn it is
• Simple text fade-animation whenever a piece loses or gains units
• New icons for some of the pieces

Just finished the enemy code (pretty fast, as I expected, which is always nice)… Unfortunatly, I found a bug in the rendering system that almost drove me nuts (since it was hard to debug)…

Apparently, stuff was being drawn in the wrong order (which screwed up the shadows and the blood stains)… Apparently, the problem was the particle system flushing the sprite cache, but it was hard to track down (had to resort to Pix, to be sure I was doing everything in the correct order). This bug made me loose almost 2 hours…

Anyway, now that I’ve got enemies, I can probably think about gameflow code… And for that, I need to find a name and a background story for the game… I’d get started on the music, but my wife’s still sleeping after a night out with the girls…

Good morning sunshines. It’s time to code again. List of priorities is as follows:

1. Single/Multiplayer XML setting
2. ASSPLOSIONS (particle system)
3. Removal of walls on dying (assplosion related)
4. Start countdown
5. Camera fixes (still some problems when player can’t see why he died)
6. Sound
7. Speedup as you ride along wall of other player to catch up on him
8. Best out of 10 rounds highscore system
9. Death cam replays
10. Player names in XML
11. Networked multiplayer (as opposed to split screen that is now)
12. AI, if there will be enough time.

And here is some breakfast of champions:

My game already looks quite okay, now it’s finally time for some gameplay coding.

With coffee and some leftover pineapple slices!

Hey all.. I realized I had forgotten to post a lib I wanted to ask about using that is related to online high score ability in a flash game.  Would just want to know peoples thoughts about using it for this compo.. or other compos if deemed too late.

Link to mochi leaderboards api docs

Link to mochi api v3.0 (as2/as3)

Basically it’s just a 2 line call someone can drop into their flash project that enables online leaderboards via mochi.  You don’t have to use their ad network or anything but it would easily support the ability for people to see others scores in my game.

Anyway.. thoughts?  Too late for this time perhaps..? but what about future compos?  It isn’t really game code per se.. but it does give a game an advantage in that online leaderboards often lead to more competition with the score motivated players.

I probably should have aimed a bit higher – this one is a bit of a quickie, but between taking care of the baby and hosting some dinner guests, didn’t really have time.

DOWNLOAD (win32 bin + src)

alt download link

To compile, you need SDL, SDL_Image and GLee. Should compile as is on whatever without any odd compile options.

Here’s the help screen as the official screenshot:

I can’t upload the entry as part of this blog post (says “File type does not meet security guidelines. Try another.”), but here’s the download link from my temp server (same link as rc2 – in fact, it is rc2).

Slowly progressing I’ve got jumping almost done, and collision works much better now. I’ve got the scrolling thing working, so it actually is sidescrolling now. I reworked tilelogic a bit to make more sense and improved querying time of the tiles from linear to constant time which ofcourse is the usual way to do it. I did a graphic for the player, it looks cool. Up next are switches, advancing walls of doom, slopes, triggers and doors I also want to do the whole thing black and white i think, because my graphics skills suck and i don’t want to spend a lot of time on it; we’ll just see later.

I won’t bother you guys with more food for now, as i’m eating the same as yesterday. In a couple of hours i’ll post another update, and perhaps more food

Battled with a stupid bug for maybe an hour. Turned out I had written an asymmetrical comparison operator which crashed sort. I’m not so great at debuggin D yet, at first I didn’t get the debug info, and when I finally did and found a debugger, it wasn’t so helpful. Funnily enough, I ended up solving it with traditional writefln debugging instead, which just took a couple of minutes. Hmm..

Anyway, what I had done before the bug was adding attack towers, which charge up blobs of darkness and fire them at the butterflies.

It mostly just looks like chaos, becuse I just randomly place everything.

Hall of Choices is almost done. Only Party, Casino and Doctor doors left to implement.

My heatmap code was very slow in the Flash Virtual Machine on my ancient PowerPC Mac, so I optimized the hell out of it and now it is actually useful. Here is a demo. Green dots chase red dots, red dots chase yellow dots, and yellow dots chase green dots. The blue clouds you see are the heatmap representing proximity to the nearest green dot. (the red and yellow dots have their own heatmaps too, but you can’t see them)

wonderfl demo

The “advancing wall of doom” isn’t obvious yet, but hopefully it’ll make sense later. 

[ PLAY CURRENT BUILD IN BROWSER HERE ]

Well.. grabbed some sleep last night.  Just played my game this morning to see how I felt about it’s progress and direction.  Time to make the short list of goals that is so important in these compos to trying and pull off a playable and hopefully fun game in time.

I find a good trick to use is decide what makes the compo version versus what I’ll save for a post-compo version.  I’ve been pretty good about actually doing a post compo version lately that I’m not too worried that I’m using it as a fake crutch.  You can learn so much from a rapid prototype like this that it is still worth it to finish a reduced yet playable game for many reasons.

Anyway, knowing that some of my favorite features will likely still see the light of day makes me more willing to cut them for the compo version.

It is with that in mind that I am thinking about the following design decisions:

Compo Version Features:

1) One formation only of your fleet ships… the long and lean horizontal one.  This is because I am not sure if I’ll have time to code enough of what I want to justify the other formations right now.  I may have to focus on just making this a fun space avoider with the twist of having multiple lives / health built into the number of your fleet ships remaining as you fly along.  As long as 1 ship makes it you have been considered to win in that you’ve saved some of your race’s people.  The more ships you save the larger the score multiplier probably.

2) Probably not going to implement player ships fighting the enemy armada of doom.  I’m really trying to focus on not making this a shmup but rather sticking to the fact that these are light and nimble colony transport ships that are trying to get the hell away from their doomed planet / advancing wall of the enemy armada.

3) I think that since I have a simple but functional way to hand code in all the enemy ship placements and movement speeds I have the ability to build an exciting armada progression that will have some fun surprises and such along the way for the player to fly through.

4) I am worried that since these compos don’t afford much optimization time I may end up making a version that in order to look as cool as I want will likely suffer performance wise on slower computers.  I may have to go the route of a simple button to: “play high quality” and “play low quality” to turn down all the beam / particle effects I want to use.  I think that is a fine compo compromise.

Of the 16 hours remaining I fear I may have some domestic duties to attend to as well unfortunately… laundry and the ilk.

Oh well.. it’s crunch time here at LD so good luck everyone!

Well, at least I’m saying that to myself when I notice what’s the time after I woke up, went to shower and ate breakfast. Anyway, here’s a screenshot of the latest progress from last night before I went to sleep… too much stuff is still missing, even lots of the essentials. I feel I’m behind the schedule, although I don’t even have one except for the deadline. How typical.

This game is just about done – release candidate 2 (same download link as before)

New stuff: Sound and some particles. It’s surprising how big a difference couple particles make.

So I’ve had a good night’s rest and spent the morning adding sounds to the game.  I recorded them all myself so they’re a bit, um, ‘lo-fi’.  But I reckon that probably goes with the visual style.  I videoed myself while I was making them, so I might try and edit that into a video if I have time.

The new alpha’s at: http://www.niallmoody.com/downloads/ld14/DieYouStupidHurdlers-alpha2.zip I think the only things I’ve added since the last one are the sounds and the background music, but there might be more I’ve forgotten.

Next, traps!

I had a few hours of sleep and got back to work. I’ve now implemented player movement, gravity, collisions, etc., and just finished my class to handle animations.

Collisions caused me quite a bit of bother as I made a load of stupid mistakes (as usual), but they seem to be well and truly out of the way now.

I still need to pull the sprites I made over from my other computer so I won’t bother with a screenshot this time.

In this game you play

a small purple rectangle

who must eat the cake.

See file: pkeod_LD14_AWDCakeFactory.zip

Total time: ~ 3 hours. I started late, and had to cut it short. It’s not super easy, but there are some things that make it easier if you notice them. Enjoy!

My site: http://www.subsoap.com/

Still running behind schedule but I think I need some sleep. I finished a chunk of the bitmap artwork I’ll be using. Next task will be to implement my texture loader. The time pressure is on!

Note:

Tsunami (wave) = A.W.O.D. #1
Lava = A.W.O.D. #2

The above screenshot says it all. I wanted to have more enemies and bullets on screen for the picture, but they were gone before I could take it *grin* All the player’s abilities are now complete – after this I’ll be doing the level design.

http://haitaka.googlepages.com/WallGirlAlpha3.zip

Please test if you have the time and energy. I really do appreciate the feedback.

The controls are: any key to begin, then arrow keys to move, Z for firebolts, X for laser, Z+X for missiles. When the wall is up and running, C launches the super attack (which consumes the wall). When the wall is not up and running, C will expend one bomb to summon it. You have 3 bombs.

The circles that make up the wall will absorb same-coloured enemy bullets. If you move into the circle and shoot, it will reappear (after a brief period) as the colour of the shot you used.

Enemies who hit the wall are immediately killed, but the circle they hit will be pushed back towards you! If the circle is pushed back too far, there is a chance that it will disappear. After three circles are gone, the entire wall disintegrates. This is a good time to use the superweapon (before it disintegrates, that is).

Esc exits the game when you’re done (sorry, it still doesn’t return to title screen).

For troubleshooting, etc., please see my previous entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/04/18/wall-girl-all-player-weapons-complete/