Since last post… I first worked on creating a player character, including movement and collisions etc. It’s a tiny ninja, because everyone loves tiny stuff and ninjas.

Then I worked a little on weapons.

Then I helped people move four almost four hours. This helped the LD progress a lot.

Then I worked a little more on weapons. And added making holes to the dirt.

Here’s a screenshot showing the tiny ninja charging his first weapon, the digger only weapon.

I’ve got the lightbeams up and running, so yay!  There’s still a lot of stuff to do, but I think I’m going to leave it for tomorrow.  I reckon (I hope) I’ve got the hardest parts out of the way now (though the collision detection’s still not right), so hopefully tomorrow will go a bit easier…

Got a unit in, can draw him along with the squares he can move to. Need to add an actual interactive UI, so that the player can actually select a square to move to. Gonna go with mouse driven, rather than keyboard like I did in Operation Lambda.

A digger. He has a movement range!

Lunch was leftover pizza, kool-aid, and Loaded Potato Skin flavored chips. Yum!

Yum!

Alright– finally have my initial proof of concept demo up and available for any curious souls to try out.  It isn’t too exciting yet but it will show you the initial inklings of what I’m going for anyway.  It’s Flash so you can run it in your browser.

Basically this is a test level here with 4 stalactites, 3 steam geysers, and 6 flying bats.  I am enjoying the bat movement at this point.  Each time you play the game the cavern levels will have the same configuration of weapons for your use.  What will change is some slight variables on the initial speeds and directions of the enemies in the cavern.  The timer will likely be going away as now each cavern level has a limited number of weapons for you to use.  You use a cavern weapon by clicking on it with your mouse.

I hope to support interesting combos and other funny events perhaps to help your score and experience of the game.

Today my main goal is still to get all the behind the scenes engine working with my levels, get all the enemies moving correctly in the various levels, and finish coding all the weapon functions and effects.  That way tomorrow I can spend as much time as possible on bringing the graphics up to speed beyond the rapid primitives I’ve made everything here in.  My plan is to have the game be fun before spending anything more then the bare minimum on graphics because the game is what matters in the end to me.  Especially if I want to keep working on anything post-compo I’ll be far more motivated to improve graphics and polish if the actual game is fun! 

Controls:

Click on the bubbling steam geysers or the stalactites at the top of the cavern with your mouse to trigger them.  Steam geysers work like a short range shotgun at the moment so wait for the bats to be near.  Stalactites fall so you need to time them right with the bats movement.  100 points per bat.  Max score of current demo is 600 points…

looks like I’m working on a lighting engine and not so much a game,. just yet.

lighting is working!

I hope to fix that after dinner.   Well at least this lighting is working,. the cavern walls light up when struck by the light source,. and fade a tad slower than imediately,. a good effect.  I also added scrolling of the whole map,.  however perhaps its a bit too jerky,. well, it will do for now.  I really should work on some gameplay,. . .  but i think i will make some noodles   yumm,.

Ok here’s how it looks in-game, but there’s no animation yet.  Sloooow progress!

Hmm, I probably rushed this idea a bit too quickly.

Progress has been going incredibly slowly, not helped by my getting distracted a lot. Anyway, as can be seen below (well, I could have faked it, but if I had you’d be seeing this post much earlier) pressing space fires bullets randomly from the centre, and when they collide with the cave wall, cause a rock to fall. Finally!

Hurrah, falling rocks.

So, no dinosaurs, no player, and the rocks fall through the floor. Gah! Why are so many other people so far ahead? It’s demoralising… Though admittedly I haven’t spent that long on it, I guess.

I might as well take this opportunity to explain what I’m using for this: C++ with SDL, in the Code::Blocks IDE. GIMP for the graphics… and that’s about it.

I’ve been meaning to try out Adam Saltsman’s Flixel API for quite some time, but haven’t found the motivation until now. Spent the morning hammering out a shmup engine.

It obviously needs a lot of tweaking, but below is a link to my current build. Fly with the arrow keys, shoot with x. There aren’t any enemies yet, but you can knock down the stalactites, and destroy the stalagmites. Hitting the floor, the ceiling, or a stalagmite/stalactite destroys your ship. Restarting isn’t implemented yet.

http://realnoyb.googlepages.com/LD15.swf

I’ve made quite a bit of progress so far, but I have a ways to go yet. I just added collision detection and physics, but the real cool stuff is coming soon… Here’s a screenshot I took a while ago:

Lasagna and chocolate. What more could you want?

I had dinner plans. It was covered — I’d gone to the store yesterday and bought way more food than I could possibly eat in a weekend, all of it quick to prepare and full of game-inducing nutriment. And then my flatmates go and make lasagna. I mean, seriously? I have sandwiches to eat, folks. You’d think they’d keep that in mind.

Ahem.

Anyway, all is good — dinner was fantastic, and I solved a niggly little Python bug I was having. Word of caution: when switching back and forth between Ruby and Python, try to keep your head on straight as to which one you’re using. And what constitutes an error in which. My problem came down to my calling a method (in Python) that didn’t exist; in Ruby this is throws an error, but in Python it’s hunky-dory. Apparently. Gargh. I mean, I like the ‘not-an-error’ approach, but it really bit me this time.

So. About that update:

+17 hours.

You (the dude with the shovel) can dig out a fallout shelter, then dash above ground and bring back food and supplies to tide you over through nuclear winter. Graphics are terrible, which is really embarassing — but I don’t really know what I can do about that. Next up, audio, scoring, and some better pacing — the intensity doesn’t ramp up at all right now. Sadness.

I’ve been fiddling around with music and graphics all day, but I can’t seem to get my idea to come together. So I’m scrapping it! And starting something else right now! Er, don’t know exactly what, yet.

I was able to finish a beta for the day. It works; and better than what I expected!

http://trialofnight.googlepages.com/EternalSeekerBeta.zip

Time for a first progress report. Now this is going to be short.

Behold the amazing caverns.

Behold the greatnes of it all

I know, I know, you probably want to quit and start drinking in despair because, honestly, everything is going to look awful after this.

Or something. I don’t think I have any chance of finishing this if a keep at this at the same rate, but let’s try anyway… The point of the game is to build a cavern that the computer controlled blob cannot escape from, at least now it is. Don’t know tomorrow.

Mmm, leftovers

First day food

I am calling my game “Coffee Caverns”. I am not as far along as I was hoping to be, but I had some other things I had to take care of. I decided that instead of just creating temporary art, that I would take a break from coding and work on a few graphics that may be what I use in the final game. I almost have a working prototype, but I created a quick screen mockup to show off some of my idea.

The basic idea is you are in a cavern (maybe more than one time permitting), and you must collect coffee beans. Coffee beans will be falling from the ceiling along with rocks. If you get hit by a rock, game over! The game is really never ending but the longer you play the more coffee beans and rocks will appear and the higher the score you will get.

I haven’t created the player graphic yet, but will have that in within the next thirty minutes or so.

Overall, I think I am making decent progress. I am very confident I will have something for submission at the end of the contest.

After being excited about LD48 all week I’ve ended up starting on 8pm on Saturday night with 1day 7hours 25minutes remaining.

I’ve got an idea in my head / sketched on half an A5 page but unsure what tech/language to use yet.

I’ll be calling this a practice if I fail to get anything submittable done

My desk and some sugary foods to keep me going.

So far, I’ve got a little robot that runs around.

She has a gun, but it doesn’t do anything yet.

Here’s a picture:

She can run, but her gun doesn't work

I have decided to go with the idea of using more than one theme.

“Cavern” will be covered by the setting (Once the terrain is in place)

“Guns. Big Guns.” is apparent. Well, the gnomes will have bigger guns because they are bigger. My pigtailed android is actually quite tiny, but it doesn’t show because there’s nothing to compare her to at the moment.

Which seques into “Evil Gnomes”. These are the enemies. They are much bigger than you, and can step on you as well as shoot you. They are rather slow, though, and can’t fit into every space that you can. Their guns also aren’t terribly accurate. Well, that will be true once I actually make them.

“Kittens” is a secondary mechanic I’ll put in if there’s time. The kittens will be somewhat smaller than you, but able to attack the gnomes. Kinda like the security guards in Half Life.

That said, the environment… Might be hard-coded, but if it is I’ll place enemies (And kittens if I put them in) randomly.

If I have time, I want to generate them procedurally, where you have to kill all of the gnomes to move to the next level.

All that being said, it’s rather bare-bones now, but I’m aiming high.

———

One of the core mechanics that I’m using is an unusual relationship between the size of the player and the size of the enemies.

This creates an interesting effect, because the player must use their speed and wits to succeed. (Heck, even to survive!)

The idea of size has always fascinated me, I admit. Very large things have an air of power and… Even authority about them.

By contrast, very small things have a charm that I can’t resist. They have a quality of efficiency and grace.

The next upload will have baddies and working weapons, I promise.

If you want a completely up-to-date version, you can get a subversion snapshot at my GoogleCode site: http://code.google.com/p/pycron-ld48

Note that this will be updated fairly often as the project picks up steam.

So… Not a waste, but certainly not much.

Here’s to challenge, triumph, and learning from hardship.

—PyCron