Archive for August, 2009
Breakfast / Screenshot
It’s raining terribly outside – I was going to go down to the local awesome coffee shop and get strawberry crepes..but I settled for cereal.

and I also have my first screenshot! …of a sprite floating in mid-air. I have to admit I’ve mostly been working on ideas about how to use a heightmap in a 2d game and what will actually make the game fun. Maybe I can manage…both?!

A literal interpretation of “Caverns”
Just playing with ideas, but I think I know where I’m going now. Here’s the inside of a cavern. Can’t get more literal than that. Now, about that gameplay…

In a cavern, in a canyon...
Oh dear.
Not sure if I’m going to finish anything playable at this rate.

Eventually there will be creatures in the caves.
Getting started
I had a bit of a late start but I am getting into the swing of things. I decided to go with Visual Studio\C++\SDL.
I have my idea and sort of a plan and now it is time to get a prototype going to try out my idea. Will describe it more once I have a screenshot or something more to show.
Candle, post-pre-prototype
This game I am make
Is very difficult.
I have found a somewhat satisfactory method of doing the melting
Which is an important thing to do
but the alpha blending, she does not blend.
Very annoying.
However, one of the major technical hurdles has been crossed, albeit in a manner that some might consider crappy.

This version is shiny and melty. These traits are preferable.
The shiny boy, he melts the ice. He is very hot but not in sexual way.
Now I have a thing I can show you, I tell you a little about what I want this project to be. Red box is boy; I know he does not look like boy, but you understand. Red box is walking in snow when big rock fall out of sky. He fall asleep, as most young boys do when hit with big rock. When he is awakening, he is on rock (is different rock) in bottom of big ice cave. This is unusual, but not as unusual as that he seems to be more immolated than is common in a boy of his age. So okay, this rock it set him on fire. For all that he feels pretty good. But he is stuck in bottom of ice cave, and in order to get out he has to climb on ice. Ice and fire are not super big buddies, so he has troubles you see. This is the plot at the beginning. Some things happen later, but this is not important now. Is difficult enough to make ice melt, you see.
I can hold very hot objects!
Good morning.


If it isn’t obvious, you can now pick up items. The light bulb lights up the area around you. Pretty useless, but still fun. 30 seconds after picking it up, the light bulb will burn out.
Yes, I did take those screenshots at different times, if you noticed the coin count.
Caverns update, just sat down (1d11h20m to go)
I did some more work after last night’s post. I worked on the tile map classes and scanned in my sketches, then created a couple image files to load in the tile map. First shot, blammo, it displayed the map perfect on the screen. I did a little tweaking of the map size so that it would take up more real estate on the screen and was left with this:

First screenshot of my caverns themed game
Not much to see, but the designs are all mine. They’re loaded from a text file with some level metadata and the grid layout. The space on the right will be the status area. The graphcis are not text, like my Kroz inspiration, so they will get better than what I have above.
My work this morning will consist of making more sprites for the tiles, and of course, the hero dude. After that, I’ll work on moving him around.
DiggR: First playable draft
Saturday, August 29th, 2009 8:39 amJayIsGames, Cavern+Exploration, Progress
Well I remembered that JayIsGames is running another casual game desing competition with theme Explore. It is only for browser-based platforms so it may not be of interest to everyone but to some it will.
(more…)
Jumping, collisions… RAMPS!
Pancakes and Eggses
- This post is also in list format.
- Things I have done since last post:
- Cook breakfast
- Take foodphoto
- Eat breakfast
- What I had for breakfast:
- Fried Eggs
- Pancakes with:
- Butter
- Honey
- Here is a picture:

- It looks:
- Delicious
- It was:
- Delicious
Kara Toprak – Coding Starts
Some sleep and breakfast is out of the way now

Coding starts at 8.15 am Sat.
More content, an idea
Since I didn’t have any solid ideas for the game, I continued working on the rendering of the map…
Added holes, water and lava to it… These are not procedurally generated… So, the current “level design” system is to generate a base cave, and then add by hand stuff like the water, lava and holes (according to the gameplay).
Wondering how I can animate the lava and water… wanted to do some UV animation, but without shaders I have no idea how to do it (in D3D).. just added an up and down movement to the meshes, just to make it a bit more dynamic.
Anyway, I got a concept for a game…
A robot is sent into the caves, to provide rock samples or something… but the player (which is a scientist) kind of skimmed on the project, and the robot is plain dumb, and not intelligent as supposed… So, he has to help it collect the samples, by use of another robot (one that can’t get the rock samples itself). This robot is controlled by the player, and the player has to make him pickup objects, etc to help the other one gather the samples…
Might work…
It’s easy to fly…
…just don’t hit the ground! So far our hungry hero/monster flies around and can make a puke-animation, behind the game-window is the sucky level with the even more sucky level-format
I might make some touchups here and there, but otherwise that graphics probably is final. If you don’t like it I’m going to send evil kittens to haunt you…



Those very dramatic shots of my last candy means that I don’t have anything left, and it’s time to shop for food. I’m going to curse my refrigerator for being empty and then go shopping. In the last shot there is a little sketch about how stuff work in my game – enjoy
Lunch

Bacon & Brie Ciabatta, plus a handful of pecans, carrot cake, and apple juice.
Oh man, I love food. It’s a good thing I actually have this thing in front of me, because the sight of it makes me hungry. So, progress on the life front — but what about the game? I present a screenshot:

+7 hours.
You can move, dig, and scroll around. But it’s a start, anyway. Nothing technically challenging or interesting going on here, folks — I’m afraid I’m just not that kind of LDer. Sad day.
Nice glass of red!
Well man can't live on..er well!
Well minor progress have basic level map drawn in art package just need to convert to image and then tilemap, but that will involve code!
Still messing with rendering code…

Ambient Occlusion?
Still no gameplay whatsoever, but some very basic level editing, and sort-of per-vertex ambient occlusion, which works fairly well…
First Screenshot
I has procedurally generated caverns!

It’s not perfect but it’ll do the job for now.






