I finished and submitted Little Worlds 4k perhaps three hours ago, but forgot to write a post here, so now I’m doing just that. The finished game is here. It’s not quite what I had in mind, but it will have to do for this contest. I’m hoping to polish the game and turn it into something worth-while for the Java4k contest.

Screenshot:

Cool. With 5 hours to go, I’ve completed the gameplay for my entry. It’s extremely basic – you just have to collect all the treasures from a giant labyrinth – but I’ve got my title screen and ending screens in there and everything. Here’s a screenshot demonstrating my line-of-sight stuff:

Now I need to get started replacing all the placeholder graphics. Ack! Then again, maybe I should just call the game “Title Screen”…

If I get all that done, I’ll add some sound effects and then think about extra polish. But at this point, I’m not going to be adding any more gameplay elements.

Woo, I have the basics of a roguelike, and I only started 5 hours ago.  Unfortunatly it is the very basics: There’s currently a bug that means you can’t walk around without the game crashing.  Hopefully I can implement picking up items by the time I have to stop, but probably not.  There’s always next year, I suppose.

Everything was going smoothly so I should have known it would all go wrong. I’ve been battling a SIGSEGV error where I can’t locate the problem. It’s the sort of situation that needs a sleep, and a fresh look in the morning… except it’s LD so I can’t do that. Bah.

Erm, yeah, maybe I will eventually sort this out, and then… I will nearly have a playable game! Maybe. Fun? Definitely not.

EDIT: Fixed it, and you know what? The problem was a distance away from the error – it was caused by the monsters not knowing where to move when they’re too near to the player. Bah! If I’d considered their AI earlier, I’d have saved a couple of hours, probably.

I have all of my wall tiles (The largest part of my assets) and the code to load and rotate them for use, as well. I have my world cell loader and ten world cells. Given that each world cell can be loaded rotated at any right angle (0, 90, 180, or 270), that means 40 potential world cells. With the 9×9 world cell grid I’ve got planned, that means 3240 possible game worlds. Yay exponential growth!

Each cell has a room that the game can use as the goal room, and that room will be treated as a normal room if the cell is not supposed to have the goal room. Each goal room only has one door, because that door is the tile you must touch to win the game. This means that there is only one room that the goal room can be reached from. That room has lots of hot dogs and no guards, and that will be the case whether the cell has the goal or not.

I (Should) only have to make the world object and enemy AI now. The rest is (Or should be) trivial.

I’m optimistic!

—Mr.Dude

Made it in time! Yay. And I even had to remove only 1 of the planned 13 areas.

view the entry

Yes Yes ! scrolling is working fine hehehehe now is review the plan to acomodate in 5 hours.

Don’t have time to colour, but yay, let’s get back to coding what I currently have into a fun game

I just lost too much time fiddling with Unity or making stupid textures in Photoshop and now I don’t really have a game. I knew this was going to happen. Maybe I’ll be able to get something playable before the deadline but I doubt it. Anyway, current screenshot:

Apologies for filename, I would have included the image in the page but it’s over 1.5mb big.

http://ed.onlinewar.org/exploratorium/holyshit.png

No sign of a game, or interaction. But on the plus side I now have a Procedurally Generated Galaxy with 6.2 million stars in.

Shame they’re all the same. Bloody stars, can’t trust any of them.

whooo

Click the image to go to the entry page!

Seeing as I expect to be somewhere over the Atlantic in about six hours I’m going to have to call this short and submit what I’ve got. Fortunately, what I’ve got is a reasonably complete (if somewhat slim) roguelike: …Deeper. Download it from the submission page and give it a go.

Hex Roguelike! Huzzah!

The game is a teensy bit lackluster, lacking several significant roguelike features. I’m pretty excited about the tech though — my goal for the weekend was to come up with a solid hex-based map and associated utilities that I can use in another project, and I think I’ve succeeded at that.

My game just got a HUGE graphic overhall. It’s still text-based and everything, but it is much more stylized and stuff. I also composed some music for it. If I make a complete story with an ending (which I think I will end up accomplishing) then I’ll make more than just a 30 second looping song. :p

ive finally added achievements and music, all that is left (on my current to-do list atleast) is the treasures and the game modifiers they unlock. after that, i’ll probably just work on graphics

also, a bunch of screenshots for your viewing pleasure!

the updated hub

5 achievements to find

you = win!

just one of the levels

a fancy title screen

Guess what? My new game I’m working on involves wheelchairs. Again. Perhaps I can keep this up and make more wheelchair related games in the future. However, the wheelchair here is futuristic, and in space! It’s also mind controlled by whoever is strapped into the thing. Epic win.

Screenie:

As I suspected, the choise to start from scratch (C++, DX9 etc) has taken a lot of time. I’ve simplified my idea as far as I basically can; now it’s just a tunnel runner. Mouse aims the movement and try not to hit wall for as long as possible. That’s it. Hopefully I can fine tune the difficulty curve to be pleasant, at least =). I also dropped most of my plans for post processing stuff. Did look into it but PC hardware sucks in that you need to take care of so many different HW combinations so that’s kinda holding me back. I did do what I could in simple pixel and vertex shaders. The intestinal runner looks now something like:

But oh well, I’m pretty sure this game won’t be anything super awesome but the goal is to at least finish it . Probably won’t bother with sounds. For a game like this, it’s not so much about sound effects than ambient sound and I’m no good at making sound stuff . (oh well, given the substance (you are exploring intestininal cavities), I can at least honestly say that the game is crap)

Oh righty!

5 hours to wrap it up… I think I can manage that.

I need to finish 2 little songs and some conversations.

Man just a few hours left and the fact of the matter is I might just make it. Just have to finish the levels, polish up the engine and get it on here and hope for the best. Sorry for not putting screenshots since I’m am power programming (yes that’s what I’ve called it) as fast as I can. See you guys at the finish!

Well, this Ludum Dare wasn’t that good for me.  The biggest problems are that I don’t have any skill in 3d modeling, I’m not used to unity yet,  and that I didn’t dedicate much of my weekend to making anything worth while.  This screen shot is old, but little has changed in the place it was taken since it was taken, so it’s all good.  A playable and explanation of what to do is available after the more.

(more…)

With 6.5 hours remaining I see no hope of finishing, much less ending up with a game that is fun.   Especially because I have a dinner party, so I can’t even use the full amount of time.  That’s my fault, I thought I could squeeze it in.  I’ll try to remember not to next time.  Maybe my idea was too big, but I also lost time because I was using a new technology (something I always do.)   So, I’m always building stuff from scratch and fighting with the tech’s esoteric unexpected differences (like HaXe switch statements not needing breaks, Uhggg.)  I was very happy with HaXe and think it is my new top choice for game making.  Now, I need to invest time building up a toolbox (toolkit) of code to use in the future.  I feel like I got further along than in past.  Even though my LD12 was an actual finished and fun game, I created way more functionality this time.  I think the planning and the hands-on prototype really help identify the tasks.  The hands-on prototype was a very interesting experience.  I am surprised by how hard it is to express a games rules.  I now desire a box full of game parts to play with in the future.  Not finishing is very unsatisfying,  but the silver lining is I learned a lot and that is really the whole point.

Thanks Ludum Dare! Special thanks to Mike Kasprzak (PoV)  Phil Hassey (philhassey)  Mike Hommel (Hamumu) and Seth Robinson (mrfun) for keeping the Ludum Dare gears running so smoothly.