I’m currently working on the levels, and trying to make the game harder as you progress up the building. I find making Fancy Footwork be even fancier is hard.

This is also the first screenshot to have cracks in the ledges. They of course, break on touch.

So, I have another playable build of my work in progress available.

Play it here in your favorite browser

It now has an enemy ship wave manager so I can build out the Wall of Doom(tm) that you must escape through to rescue the last of your race.

I also took a suggestion to map the fleet pattern echeleons to the Z/X/C/V keys.. four patterns in all.

Give it a whirl if you’d like as I’d love to hear any feedback.  I’m trying to get absolutely as much of the gameplay done before screwing around with any graphics this time.  I think it is actually progressing really well for once!

The game just ends right now when all the enemy ships go by.  Also.. if you lose all your ships you have to refresh your browser to continue!

Who knew drawing circles of circles in a circle could be so difficult?

I’m working on a puzzle game. In bold defiance of the “of Doom” fiat, I’m using the cheeriest colors I can think of. ^_^ Got a little behind because I had to take advantage of the amazing weather here and ride my bike, but now I think I’m on track.

Well, things seemed to get off a little worse than I hoped they would. I encountered an annoying lockup bug with SDL+GL. My fault for sure, but when I look at the sidebar and see 1 day and 6 hours to go, it’s a tad panicy.

Anyways, blue box.

Woo!

There might actually be a game in there somewhere. There are walls running up to you and you need to jump about and collect prizes. There’s probably a wall of doom (with spikes and innards and blood and maybe zombie pirate spiders), but it’ll never be visible i fear.

Anyhow, looks like gameplay is once more up to level design mostly. Urgh.

Still early days but it’s working with some performance issues, already!

Well, I have my idea. Advancing wall of doom? How about advancing brick 3d cube wall maze of doom! The wall would crush you, except there’s a hole in it. This hole leads into an intricate 3d maze. This maze is in sections, the exit of one leading to the entrance of another, and the maze gets tougher and tougher every time.

But keeping with the theme, it is an ever-advancing wall that you are navigating through. Instead of crushing you, this long rectangular maze is passing through an energy field that will vaporize you if you take too long.

That’s right. It’s an advancing 3d maze of doom that will vaporize you if you don’t move on to the next section in time.

So after deciding I could use blender, I set about learning what I needed to know. I figured I could make its game engine do most of the work for me, with python to generate the mazes. Not an easy feat for someone who’s never even completed a tutorial in the thing or completed anything in python to date.

First thing’s first, I set up wink and tested it out. Might as well have an easy way to screenshot.

Then I began looking up the rules.

Then I began my research…

Then, five hours later, frustrated and no closer to even starting the game than I was before, I began to think that maybe I should try PyOpenGL instead…

Hungry with no sleep, I go now to shower and head to work at wal-mart.

It may not look like much but It’s been a good day and it’s pretty much playable.   Lots of things to do tomorrow though, not least improve the graphics as it does look about as exciting as a crossword at the moment. Time for some rest now though.  Happy coding. See you all tomorrow.

GUI work done…

First alpha version (only one level, no restart, etc) can be downloaded here.

Just get to the exit, fetching the keys to open the doors. Exit doesn’t work yet, though…

Anyway, comments are appreciated…

Still to do:

- Functional exits

- Game story

- Gameflow code (menus, title, instructions, game over, end of game, etc)

- Enemies (most code is already present, so this is easy)

- Lava, water and spike tiles

- Level design

- Music and sound

For now, I have some friends over, gonna party a bit, but if I muster the courage, I’ll probably still return to coding today, hopefully I can finish a lot more of the gameplay code. Want to devote the maximum ammount of time for the level design (which was always lacking on my previous entries).

Spinich Rice Noodles, and last nights grilled cow leftovers,. poured the soup over the top,. pho mooooo!

My cube is now a toothy pacman-esque ‘character’  but he still has some funky awkward movements and no objects to interact with, except the blocks he hops around on,. .  thinking of forcing him to stay grid alighned so a total rewrite of the current conroles,. . perhaps I take a brake first and go outside!

Well, I have my idea, just gotta do it! Yummy lunch:

Well, it wasn’t awesome, but it was okay. More later!

I’ve been having some wierd performance related problems, but nothing too bad.

Here’s the 1st (early) screenshot:

I was originally planning on sketching out some basic designs for each of my main ideas, but I had a lot of fun making the one I started with that I decided that it was the game I was going to make.

As you can see, I had some snacks while working on this one: blue corn chips with garlic lover’s hummus.

And here’s a close-up of the initial design:

So the design of the game is fairly established now. It looks like the core mechanic is a food chain. There are different varieties of little creatures which occupy various niches. All would be well in the world, were it not for the sudden arrival of DOOM in the form of an explosively reproducing foreign species…

I was trying to get the first projectiles into the game, and ended up with a rather unexpected snowstorm instead:

http://i39.tinypic.com/1628ohy.png

Currently there are invaders (red-green) and one form of sessile predator (orangey) in the game. All life forms heal over time, and the invaders use this to their advantage by withdrawing outside their target’s firing range briefly if their health dips too low. There’s no player character yet.

http://i44.tinypic.com/2elfh52.png

The next thing to do is get some sort of plankton- or barnacle-esque life form into the system- something low level that doesn’t eat anything, and simply provides food for other organisms.

Right, all the gameplay’s basically there – now it’s just a matter of filling things out with sounds and traps.  So, here’s an alpha version (Windows only, I’m afraid): http://www.niallmoody.com/downloads/ld14/DieYouStupidHurdlers-alpha1.zip I’m really surprised by how well this thing’s gone so far.  Any comments would be most welcome

Also, what I had for dinner:

(cheese and tomato rice, plus Irn Bru)

http://willhostforfood.com/access.php?fileid=63191

Download there. Arrow keys to move, Z for sword, and X for magic.

When an up arrow appears over your head next to a castle, it means you can buy an upgrade. The big cross ups your HP, the sword raises your strength, the other cross thing raises max magic points and the square summons a guy to run into the wall in an attempt to slow it down. Magic uses your strength at long range, but has limmited ammo. Still work to do, but its playable as it is.

EDIT: Also, hot dogs for lunch after two hours of shoveling mulch.

What’s a Ludum Dare contest without a lunch? Off to eat my noodles!

Oh, and baldies can now throw double cans.

So, I “cleverly” avoided making a saving system with something that actually turned out becoming harder than just regular saving: Level passwords. Each level has it’s own password, and if you enter the password into the menu, it goes to that level. Seen it before, right? Well, I took it to the next level.

The next level would be file writing. After quitting each level, it will tell you the password of the level. Then, it asks you if you want to save that password onto password.txt. If you say yes, it will write the password of the current level to password.txt, otherwise it won’t. Then, in the password section of the menu that allows to to go to a level, it will show the default password as whatever it reads in password.txt. Thus, the password default is the most previously saved-at level. Convenient. Unfortunately, this took a huge chunk of development time – I’m still working on level 3.

Also, I ate a pizza slice for lunch. I don’t have a camera, so no pic.

Fortunately, I came up with some simple idea. So I started working on assets. This is what is done so far. I don’t think I will need more. Now onto basic engine.

Oh yes, I will mysteriously reveal my progress, in a very mysterious way. This way, you can all see what I’m up to, but not! Anyway, the gameplay is working pretty well now, and it’s not turning out too badly. There are still a few things I can add, but I’m pretty happy with the progress so far. Here’s a screenshot.