This trance music has increased my productivity ten-fold: http://www.philosomatika.com/

So I’ve got a Super Metroid-style map system and a simple platformer engine running in Game Maker.  The map system lets me have rooms of any rectangular dimensions fit together in any pattern and lets the player transition correctly from room to room.

Still no clue where I’m going with this, but it seems to be going somewhere!  Screenshots as soon as I have something worth looking at (it’s all just colorful boxes right now).

About 10 hours have passed since I officially started coding. Well the screenshot isn’t that impressive and I still have to cut some features and hope I’ll finish in time.

Today I concentrated on gameplay features. You can move your circle around and attack the enemy (that other circle). All I need to do is to add more circles and the game is finished
Well, there is a lot more to do and the circles are going to replaced with real graphics, still working on those. It’s gonna be a busy day tommorrow.

Cavern Tycoon Screenshot 003

Here’s how the game’s shaping up at the moment. I’m say I’m about halfway done with being “feature complete.” I just have myriad bugs to work out, is all.

As an aside, I just want to say that Construct is great. I could never program this by myself–never. Even though Construct is finnicky sometimes (all the times ), it’s still a great program, and it’s absolutely free. Muchas gracias, Scirra.

Presenting the driller, the stupid robot with a simple behavior: always hovers in the direction he’s facing until he faces an obstacle (for now, everything is an obstacle, later lava/water/holes will be lethal), then he tries to run right… if he can’t, he’ll turn left… if he can’t, he’ll walk backwards…

I got the driller to move around, with the camera focused on him (with some controls for zoom and rotation):

Now, to model and add the helper robot…

Breakfast was store-brand golden grahams, cranberry juice, and a bit of leftover blackberry cobbler.

Changed the dirt image a bit, gave it some friends: Walls and floors:

dirt.png

wall.png

floor.png

Now to get a level rendered and up on the screen!

14 hours into the contest and only about 15 lines of code. No graphics, no audio, no nothing. The stress is kinda high right now, but I’m trying to remember it’s a fun contest, not too serious. I do have my concept… actually two… so I still need to decide between the two My goal is to decide between the two, and have the game running at least enough for a screenshot by 6 tonight, when the gf’s coming over for a while.

I have the groundwork in place to start building off of. I am hoping to have a prototype of the game play within the next couple of hours. My plan is to get the basic mechanics up and working with placeholders for graphics and than get the game play polished up and add the graphics in once this is for the most part done.

Right now I am in need of some lunch and to catch up on what others are working on.

Some graphics included.

The problem is that some sharp angles stay, and if I want to remove them, the number of combinations gets big. And i’m a bit lazy to draw + code them all. Next, FOOD.

Next next, sprites for the digger and the bad guys and the gems and the rocks. And stuff.

Hey,

So .. here’s the latest .. whatever.  I’ve got a black screen with some white dots on it.  The black means it is in a dark cave.

Try to contain your excitement.

-Phil

Making some good progress at the moment. The main problem is the room and zone detection.

Once thats done I’ll move onto connections then I can slab the exploration and combat in.

Also planning to use marching squares style pass to clean things up. Though TBH I quite like the roughness.

Progress but room detection is broken

My pot pie has finally finished cooking.  Luckily I had a few CheezIts so I didn’t collapse before it was ready:

After this hot meal on a dreary rainy day here south of Boston it’ll be back to work on the Angry Caverns.

The collision detection’s pretty ropey, but you can now zoom your little robot about the place like a proper platformer.  Next step is to get the screen to scroll as you move about the level.  Then it’s onto the beams of light themselves…

I’m LD, and I win the fight!

After I showered, shaved, and got dressed, it was time to get down to business. Before any new code gets written, I had to make sure my ideas had a chance of being fun. First stop, paper prototypes!

Here’s a close up of the first pass:

I drew some walls, and I placed a few tokens down to represent minerals, the tank, and the driver. Actually, my initial pass didn’t even have walls really, but moving the tank with the driver, then moving the driver to the minerals to collect them, and then moving the minerals to the tank wasn’t very interesting by itself.

The walls made it more interesting because now the tank can’t move past them.

After a bit, I had a more fleshed out design:

Now I have a concept of monsters, their lairs, movable boulders, and selectively destructible floors.

Hmm…now that I’ve written it out, it sounds like I’m making something that might be too ambitious for this weekend.

Oh, well. Onward!

After hours of stuggling with getting flash to do what I want and some adventures in bugfixing, I now have the ability to display animated tiles and tilemaps in a clipped rectangle! Which is nice. Now I just need to make the actual game. If only I had a good idea for something doable in 48 hours. I guess I’ll just keep working and see if something turns up.

I also sampled some homemade bacon ice cream that a flatmate decided to make. This was an interesting experience. Not pleasant, but not as unpleasant as one might expect either.

Still not sure what the game will be, though…

Ah, I had a reasonable sleep, now to work again

I tried to come up with some very cave-like gameplay, but it all seemed rather dreary. It seems to me that caverns is goign to be mroe of a setting than a gameplay mechanic.

Anyways, 2D platformer. I have 2 superimposed such that the player is interacting with only the frontmost at any given time. Pressing spacebar will instantly reverse the order of the two caves, creating hopefully interesting gameplay.

Making it pretty is tomorrow’s work. Storyline is unneeded.

Oh, and check out the awesome realtime value sliders and the restart button that reloads all scripts and restarts the game, pretty convenient if you ask me.

aha, the char is moving around with the light folowing =)

After having lunch (I didn’t take photos, but it was fish, cheese and a salad) I re-did the cavern image, since I had to drop the first version. This time I draw the cavern in two layers, texturized them with the previous cavern background and then drawing lines to achieve a ‘hand-drawn’ effect. You can see the full picture here.

About coding stuff, I did the game states transitions with fading, and also a parallax scrolling background. I like how it’s looking!

Parallax scrolling background

I forgot to grab my photos of my camera for dinner last night, so here it is:

Friday Dinner - Turkey breast, corn and french bread.

And here’s this morning’s simple breakfast:

Saturday Breakfast - Honey and Oat cereal

I think I’m going to get some toast too….  I’ll post my desk photo later on

6 hours of development so far and progress continues on my game…  thought I’d post a few early screenshots.  I’m working to get the first playable level done so I can continue messing with making the mechanics fun.  Doing bare minimum art as the lumpy bats will testify to:

Stalactites, Geysers, and Bats now spawn.  The bats have a funny animation right now which I think will make them enjoyable to watch flap around as you try to eliminate them.

Rough working main menu too.

Well, I’m stalling out on productivity right now because I am starving.  I have a chicken pot pie in the oven cooking but it won’t be ready for another 30 minutes so I’m powering on best I can.

I’m really trying to focus on getting the earlier playable and fun parts of this game coded.  Building out primitive menu systems and game framework logic so that I won’t have to mess with it later.  I have implemented the timing bar, level counters, and scoring widgets.  My hope is that once I get the basic ‘level format’ working I can do 5 rough levels with very basic art today.  Then tomorrow can be spent on improving the art and adding music and sound.