FLOOD is slow but cool

Arrows +  Z

So i added some puddles to the mix. They will act as farms for you civilization. Also made some music for the background, but you can’t see that on the screenshot. What you can see is, that my game si cruising along at a comfortable speed of 30FPS.

Next I will do the color filter, that will make you see only your objects, all the opponents are going to be black. I didn’t really know how to do that effectively. Parthon suggested I do a bitwise AND filter. I will use that, but It will limit me to three colors for nations: red,green and blue. But it will give me more color freedom for certain objects. Thank you Parthon.

But first: lunch.

I’m throwing the towel…

For me, 48 hours compos are about having fun developing something, and I’m honestly not having fun developing my game…

Although I think the idea is sound and that it works (although not with keyboard controls, it should have mouse controls), I’m not having fun making it, and as such I’m calling it…

Should have gone with the RPG thingy…

So good luck everyone!

I’m starting to get a feel for where this game is going. I have NPCs working in game now, but I still have a lot of work to don on the graphics. I’m working my hardest to get the game design and goal working, and then I can come back and clean up the art towards the end!

Finally some progress. Level comes from a simple bitmap like this:

And turned into a voronoi thing (real-time) in the game:

I also got some simple physics and collisions working for the player.

After the movie yesterday, I decided to call it quits for the night… Woke up this morning, and implemented the stalagmites in the game…

Not feeling it, though… although the game is close to be feature complete (just need to add the ability to grab one object and use it, and the pushing of boulders), I’m not really feeling in the mood to finish it… Don’t know if I’m just being lazy, or if the game itself is failing to excite me, but I’m not sure if I’m staying in the compo much longer…

edit: after I was asked “why” —– yes, there’s some more fish food coming.

Well, its coming up on 4am and I have almost nothing to show for this LD. I spent far too much competition time on other things (soccer games, movies, drinking) and the time I DID spend so far I’ve wasted messing around with blender and ogre, tools I have almost zero familiarity with. I really wanted to make a 3D cave shmup, but it is simply outside my abilities to finish within the small amount of time left. I struggled for hours trying to get all sorts of other tools to work to get my cave from blender into ogre in a useful way, but ended up with nothing feasible.

I guess this just isn’t my LD. I neglected to start a time lapse, I’ve taken no food photos, and at this point there is about 15 hours to go and I have zero, count em, zero lines of code. Here is everything I have so far – a simple render of my cave system from the top down. It’s fairly dark (on purpose), so the image isn’t worth much by itself.

Map of the cave system

Not too bad, but not great either — still, I learned some things and had fun playing with nurbs, so even if I drop out it isn’t a total loss.

I finally finished my entry. If I get enough time, I may update it; but it’s polished and in a playable state right now. It’s also quite fun to see yourself die in horrible ways; even if you have the best weapon in the game (called “The Reaper +15″). You can find it in the submissions menu; http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/

Edit: There was a bug in the game in the Altar sequence. It’s fixed now.

Okay, last post before I switch computers and go and make some music.  Here I’ve added spikes and lava, and collectable reflector crates.  It’s possible to die now too, although there’s no fancy animation – it just decrements your life and puts you back to the start of the level.  I don’t know if I’ll have to time do anything more polished in that regard.

Still to do:

• Moving spiky balls.
• Fix the collision detection.
• The sky should get lighter as you light up more light boxes, plus it should be smooth, not stepped as it is right now.
• Make a proper level for it.
• Story screen.

There’s other things I’d like to do, but only if I have the time.

OK, the game detects when a row is selected and close enough to be removed.
Yet, it’s a damn bunch of bugs. I guess my setup is to complex, and 3D physics is not really suitable for this

Anyway, here’s an updated binary :

http://astrofra.com/posts/ld15/binary/

I forgot to post foodphotos of some snack and a pizza, but here’s something more interesting. My wife made a kalakukko, which is “fishcock” (edit: umm, cock as in rooster) in English as a direct translation. Kalakukko is a traditional Finnish food made by baking fish and pork inside rye dough and cooked in oven, and then left to poach with low heat for roughly 8 hours or so to make it softer.

I just woke up and now it’s back to work. I’m going to rush to inject some damn gameplay into this thing today so that it can at least be described as a game and not just a pile of shoddy cavern wall graphics =/

The other entries are looking amazing this time round! Ludum Dare never fails to surprise me. Every time, people go far beyond what I thought possible in 48 hours – whether it be graphically, technologically or even in terms of the gameplay or story itself. Once again, I can’t wait to get my hands on some of these entries!

Woke up again. This keeps happening.

Anyway, I don’t have much to show for yesterday. My code can draw animated tiles and tilemaps (scrolled) into a rectangle, but that’s about it. Oh, and maintain correct aspect ratio no matter what size it’s rendering at. Originally I wanted to support fullscreen, but apparently flash disables keyboard in fullscreen mode for some reason, so it’s not very useful unless I do a mouse-controlled game, which I probably won’t. You can still just plop the swf directly in the browser to fill the browser window though.

Also, I think I got an idea now. Don’t know if it’ll be good yet, but at least it’s something. Time to draw some gfx.

Breakfast is muesli with greek yogurt and honey, and a cup of tea.

Last night I went to bed concerned about the lack of progress I had made, however this morning I found I’m advancing quite quickly, so I guess I did make a lot of progress on the ‘scaffolding’ code after all. Or maybe I’m just less tired.

Also I made a (-n awful) piece of music for my game. It really sucks though so I might not leave it in.

Here’s a little graph depicting the hits to my LD survival guide..

(click for full size)

Not nearly as far along as I should be, but getting there. I’m definitely not going to have time for art tomorrow. I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping I’ll be able to get the gameplay done. In its current form:

Biggest wastes of time today: trying to figure out how to do inversed masking in Flash (to draw a black rectangle everywhere except where there is light), and tracking down a slight error in my matrix math that was throwing off all the scaling. Doh.

Ok, end of the day for me. I’m going to sleep. If I wake up around 8 or 9, I’ll have 11-12 hours left to work.

I’m probably not going to finish what I originally intended, but I’m having fun anyways. I’ll definitely continue this project after the compo is over.

As for the game, I’ve got movement down and am nearly finished with digging. Plus, I’ve got a terrible menu system. I’ve never done a mouse-based interface in a game before, and I’m not very good at it. Anyway, after digging, I think I need to start adding more units, so that I can add attacking. That, plus bughunting and packaging, may be all I can get done, though if I have time I’d love a random/procedural level generator. The enemy AI, assuming I even get that far, is going to be *very* primitive.

Goodnight!

I’ve added lightboxes and a UI (left to right: num lives, num lightboxes lit up, num reflectors available).  I’ve decided the aim of the game is to light up all the light boxes in the level, which will entail connecting lamps to boxes via reflectors, finding extra crates of reflectors, and avoiding any hazards along the way.  Eventually the sky will get lighter as you light up more lightboxes.

Morning LDers,  added board sounds, the begginings of a combo system, and I’m playing around with lighting so my lava pieces will look cool hopefully.

I've run out of onomatopoeia to type here, thats the real reason I added sound in this build =p

playable after the link:

(more…)