And so I’m heading for the bed.

New in this build is improved ai for the little cretins known as monsters.

There is a lifebar as well. it recharges if you stay out of trouble.

You get points for killing monsters.

When you die you are returned to a screen which shows some score info.

If you press the middle mouse button, you push enemies backwards. nice for crowd control, but really overpowerd. I should add a cool-down to that “weapon”.

I want to add grenades and improve level design + spawn points, and also do some difficulty curve work, so that it gets harder and harder. Hope I get time for some of that tomorrow.

here’s the build (unity web player)

Yeah, naw.  I’m completely lacking in motivation today.  I think I’ll just enjoy a weekend for a change.  I’ve been so busy as of late, it’ll be nice to just relax and watch the compo happen magically before my eyes.

I suppose there’s always the chance I could “Towlr”, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Toodles.

Just an ugly progress shot before I get dragged off to lunch with some old lady that I think we’re only friends with because she got so excited over design of our business card.

This one is coming along a lot better than the last attempt besides one frustrating problem where Construct tried to help me by auto-hiding a canvas that had an X ordinate below a certain negative value–despite the fact that I was zooming in on that layer so it should still have been on-screen and therefore fucking VISIBLE.

It probably won’t be playable until fairly late, so I hope the gimmick turns out interesting enough to make up for the horrible graphics.

Progress going good, just optimized the speed of my game around tenfold, and decreased the levels filesize by a similar number.

lovely screenshot.

As you can see, 2 layers of cave (foreground and background) that can be switched ingame for awesome platforming.

Also, a neat motion blur, a stylish edge tracing, and a halfdecent overall look

Other not so obvious features include my very quick and very convenient mapeditor that I created to generate the maps, the fact that there are many screens such that as soon as the player goes off one edge, he starts on the other edge of the next screen.

Similarly, you don’t see how cool it is to go around stuff in a 2D platformer. I assure you, it is quite cool.

I was thinking in doing something rogue-like but now the game is shaping into a puzzle-game and it looks interesting (at least for me ). I got almost all mechanics written down and all it’s left is level design.

Here’s a screen of 3 enemies and their field of vision (in red). Since I’m no artist I think these tiles will be final ones.

space bar to switch which swarm you’re controlling, click to tell them where to move, wasd to pan camera

swarms automatically try and take cover behind cover that is touching the rectangle

75 percent chance that cover stops a bullet, unless swarm member is touching said cover

http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1251600370

Wrote a couple of song loops for the levels, and made some eyecandy for the surface area.

Also added a magnet item that can help maneuver the pellets.  I’m in a good place for one day of work, but am going to need work out some sort of win/lose mechanics and more engaging gameplay tomorrow morning.

After collision got working (last post) I implimented digging, and it works great animations and all.  After I got digging as done as it’ll get, I tried tackling cavern generation…and ended up with laggy strait tunnel generation.  This was another bummer because I spent so much time working on it trying to figure out a good algorythm, but it failed in the end.  I got a tiny bit a spriting done, and now I’ve turned off the screen recorder for the night and am not going to work on it anymore at the moment.  I’m going to sleep on the algorythm, and hope tomorrow will bring better luck with my not waisting my time with failedattempts.

I’m still working out the kinks in Box2D for Flash. But the concept is down I guess… I think tonight might be a long night.

I did some cover art as a break.

Inkscape is awesome.

ok Ok.. so they are still rather stick figure like.. BUT they switch comically between running and walking and change directions too.  You can watch a gameplay video of version 0.2 here.

At this point I’ve implemented 2 different enemies (bats & cavemen), 2 different weapons (stalactites & geysers), a combo system, tracking of stats like base level score, bonus score, and reporting back on a level over screen.

Many things still to do of course but my plan is still holding so far of trying to get the bulk of all implementation finished before generating levels and upgrading the graphics.

You can play version 2.0 here in your browser too.

My folks came over and I haven’t had much time in front of the computer since then.  We went swimming for awhile and then grilled some burgers.  The doofus I am, I forgot to take a picture of our picnic out in the back yard.  Burgers with bean salad and pork and beans.  Wow, did we have enough beans there?  Anyway, my mom had a few cake mixes that were getting close to expiring so she brought down a cake.

Cake!

So where am I in development… I’ve got a hero that moves around the map and collision detection works great against the walls.  I’m putting the finishing touches on the gem tile type and have begun the monsters.  I still need to do more tiles, but I think I can wait until I get enemies done.

Screenshot showing gems and the updated tiles. Player is left of the gems stash.

Most of the work is all behind the scenes, which I hope means that the rest of it will start to fall into place at a faster pace later.  Hopefully the next screen shot will show some monsters, even if their AI isn’t ready.

Ok, this is not a major update, I was asleep and then I had to fly to Illiamna and back, so I’m just picking things up again now.

Flash games on the web take the form of .swf files, which are streamed by their host. The flash player won’t normally play a frame of a flash movie until all the assets used by that frame have been loaded. Working in FlashDevelop/FlexSDK, you really don’t use frames much at all, everything is done from AS3 code, and the .swf which is created is a flash movie with 1 frame. Because you don’t want to show the player a white box until everything has been loaded, normally you add a pre-loader, which is small, and which allows the flash player to show something to the user while the rest of the assets are loaded.

Up till now, all of my projects have been wrapped either by the Mochi version control wrapper, or by Whirled’s wrapper. These include preloaders, so I’ve been able to totally ignore all aspects of preloading up unitl now. Unfortunately, as in my normal development flow I had set up my FD project as an ActionScript3 project. In order to get the FlexSDK to create a movie with more than 1 frame, so that that first frame can be implemented as a preloader, there are a few compiler options that need to be set. FD has a AS3+preloader template option, so I re-setup my project and away we went. (This really isn’t a big thing, but I lost 30 minutes because I didn’t know my tools).

Also in the line of I didn’t know my tools, if you hold shift while using the pencil, GiMP will draw a straight line!! Learning this alone made entering LD worth it to me.

Implemented a main menu and intro animation. Next up is building/support placement and a stress heat-map. That might take a little longer, so I figured I push what I have public.

Embedded flash versions here

-TF

This is my progress at the end of the first day – http://mattdev.com/cavernbat.zip.

Controls:

In the menu, up/down and enter.

In the game, press and hold ‘s’ to drop the bat down, and release it to make him hang from the ceiling again. ‘a’ and ‘d’ will alter his current angle. Escape to quit.

I’ve been working on this almost the entire day, and I’m reasonably pleased with where I’m up to. So far I’ve spent the majority of my time on the “art” – doing animations is tricky! The music took some time, too.

Screenshot:

Here’s my current to-do list, which is probably missing a load of things:

• Try out distance fields / metaballs for cave drawing
• Support for multiple levels
• Level selection screen?
• Level end points
• End game screen
• Things that shoot stuff at you
• Add more decoration to caverns

I haven’t quite figured out what the bat is going to be doing while moving from start to end points of caverns – picking up items (keys to unlock doors), maybe, or getting points for doing spins in the air, or something.

Anyway, I’ll deal with that tomorrow!

I am at the point where all the basic game play mechanics are implemented and the game is fully functional. I need to add sound and a start menu and probably create a few more graphics to make it a bit more polish. I haven’t quite got the increasing difficulty worked out yet, but that is just going to take a bit more playing. I was going to put what I have so far up, but I am going to hold off and wait until after I test it on my other computer and do a few release builds.

However, here is a current screenshot.

Well, it’s the end of day one now… haven’t worked on this a whole lot ( about five, maybe six hours in total?), to be honest, but I’m reasonably pleased with what I have so far!

There’s a funky maze like cavernous system to the east of the player in that screen shot… the building is a research centre, of which there’s another one in the caverns that you’ve to find to rescue the peoples in there before the moon destabalises. Rescue them by landing on the pad ( the thing in the middle sticking up like a sore thumb. )

Those red things are nasties ( there’s a few different types of nasties, and there’s a number of different attack paths they take as well ) which can be shot cause if they smash into you, you take some damage and eventually explode ( same with careening into the walls, which seeing as the ship’s currently a nippy little bugger, you’ll be doing a lot ).. luckily, the research centres will repair you a bit.

There’s 28 ( count ‘em! ) main cavernous screen types ( not all are in the demo just now! ), and plenty more derived from them – adding beastie spawn points, research stations, and all sorts.

Of the core gameplay, I’ve only really got the picking up of researchers to do, then it’s just implementing some fonts to track score, health, time and create some fiendish level designs and appropriate bleepy-bloops!

Current tech-demo is here: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/ld15/MoonsOfSubterrane.7z with cursor keys and “z” to fire. There’s GP2X-Wiz and Dingoo binaries, though they run a tad slow just now and I haven’t set the controls up properly yet. The linux binary is AMD64 compiled and the Win32 exe was compiled and tested on Windows 7.

Now for some sleep…

I completally forgot to write anything today, and my cameras broken, so ill do a quick summary:
9AM: Got up. Ate sandwich. Thought about game ideas.
10AM: Got idea.
10:15AM: Started Coding
10:20AM: Remembered I hate Perlin Noise
NOON: Went to a party
3PM: Played halo
5PM: Got home
6PM: Got Cave Generator working
7PM: Ate dinner(steak+mac and cheese)
7:30PM: Got the mine cart working
8:15PM: Its my BIRTHDAY! YAY! I got a 1TB HD!(it was the only thing on my list(i was so surprised!))
8:45PM: Gameplay is done, now to add graphics and interface
9:15PM: I wish opengl had font support

Heres a screenshot:

Prototype mine cart rolling through a cave

Er, ok! So I think I finally have an idea I like! Will start working from scratch tomorrow morning.

Some great looking entries here – can’t wait to play them all

Here’s a video of my game so far.

Gameplay Footage

I only need to implement enemy A.I. for the enemy squads to move around en mass and try and fight you. Once that’s done, it’s time for progression (skill tree, experience, levels), missions, graphics, sounds, and gameplay.

My game is coming along! It’s a game where you throw bikini babes into a pit that you have filled with traps. Also there are police. And umm guts everywhere? Core mechanics are in place, going to try and write some music now so I can spend all day tomorrow adding features and polish.

Is this screenshot busy enough? I'm not sure yet.

Well, stuff is happening. I’m pleased with my first day’s progress — I’ve hit most of the points I designed, and in that regard this has been a smashing success. Trouble is, the game as-is is neither as polished nor as fun (even to me) as what I like to turn in as a final compo entry. Good thing we’ve got another day, I suppose. I’m out, folks — going to hit the bed and work on some music until I pass out. If you’re feeling bored and/or charitable, check out my first day’s (TEMPORARY, SLIGHTLY BUGGY, UNREFINED, etc.) playable: Fallout Cavern.

’tis appreciated!