I’m finishing a few different endings for the game. Then the last “big” item, sounds. After that it should be good enough for submitting, even though I have not much good to say about the game itself. In accordance to the LD traditions, every “great” idea that was in my head at the start has been killed / shrunken down because a) there’s no time do it and b) I for the life of me can’t draw anything.

So here’s the end screen… yeah, not a pretty sight.

Went out to breakfast to our favorite place.  Had some eggs, hash browns, chicken apple sausage and biscuits and gravy.

Now I need to get down to business if I’m going to have anything to show for this weekend.  First up is navigation…..

Hello! Seems like we will get another bunch of awesome LD games this year too, great work everyone!

Here is a screenshot of the game after about 5 hours of coding (yes, I’m a slow starter )

This is a small planet made out of tiles, I’ll post more information about the actual game in future posts!

I started coding when there was around 12 hours left, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish the project in time for LD. The game is based on some of my old game ideas and got me really motivated so I’ll definitely finish it anyway though!

After a breakfast of tea and waffles I’ve realized that completing the original scope of the game with the time left is going to be impossible. In lieu of my original planned game I’m taking a small part of that and remaking that into a complete whole. Far less ambitious, but more plausible to complete within 9 hours.

Ohh what’s this? Let’s tractor it in.

It’s only a broken solar panel. Salvage is salvage I guess. Better go sell this stuff in.

Back through the wormhole we go!

SPACE HUB

Well that’s a rather pathetic haul. Better keep tractorin’…

I’ve done most of the gameplay mechanics. Next I’m going to populate the debris field with all the valuables that you can suck up.

just a few hours left, still some features I want to add.

Leaving Satisfactoria.

So my game isn’t playable yet, at all. There isn’t too much left until basic gameplay appears however, as much of the underlying stuff for colonizing systems has already been implemented, you just can’t activate the abilities yet. I need to make that pop up menu actually be able to do stuff, and then add a ton of gui stuff, and then the first playable version will be done. Currently, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish exploring for artifacts, researching new technologies, and the sun diver minigame. All are pretty freaking important, so it’s likely my game will end up being… not a game.

http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1260721774

Screenshot

So yeah here is first screen shot I am posting.You can see sun, two colonized planets, and 3 other planets that are not yet colonized + many moons

Progress

Unfortunately I am bit tired from long week + have many other things piled up from week so I had only some 8 hours to work on the idea… And it progresses very slowly   Also some technical parts of it gave me problems as I have pretty large maps that should be zoomed out/in a lot and still look well and do not lag… Ending up with pretty simple representation in vectors because of it. Also fog of war without lags took some time and looks very simplistic… Ahh… Anyways I almost finished minimalistic part and will probably switch to doing interface/start menu/game over/help screens soon.

Idea

As I wrote yesterday I went with space exploration theme based on my older idea for a game. It basically is based on single game mechanic of lunching rockets in a solar system with more or less real gravitation physics.

I picked this theme because it scales well and seemed as minimal part of it would not be that technically complicated. Well I was little bit wrong… Anyways at max this idea would give me kind of civilization+rocket physics combo. You have mother planet from which you can lunch satellites to find new planets and explore their environment and territories, then prepare colony ship for some territory on planet surface (say ocean or mountains or something) and start lunching probes trying to land them on the territory you want. When successful you lunch colony ship on the same trajectory, if you miss you loose the ship, if you hit you get new colony which you can then expand getting new lunch site + resources + experience etc etc. You can expand the idea in any direction like adding meteorites, aliens, etc…

And idea minimum would be some more casual game where you need in short period of time to colonize as many planets as possible without any resources/ship types/experience and level up complications. Well in the end I am going for this minimum Other things to do and damn how slow and unproductive I am this time Spending hours on some things worth 15 minutes…. Well at least I will have something playable this time.

Well back to work.

Still not much progress, but here is a screenshot:

The “fog of war” (light) is working quite nicely and I changed the gameplay a little: The player doesn’t need to colonize the islands, he just needs to find them.

About photos: Well, I made few photos (deskphoto, foodphoto, …) but for some reason when I plug my camera to my computer the camera shows the low battery sign and turns off automatically, but taking pictures works. Either there is something wrong with my camera or I need to charge all my batteries (and I’ve already tried four sets of batteries).

This is what happens when you don’t add delays in your generators. (If you can’t tell, there’s no interaction with asteroids and the player yet. :p)
And yeah, I added a cursor.

Well, at least I got level generator thing somewhat done. As I said, I have planned this stuff further and the implementation side is behind “schedule”… I’m starting to think that I’ll run out of time in any case if the goal is to get any interesting amount of gameplay mechanics done. I’ll still keep working as long as I’m having fun here, but I won’t submit an entry unless I get stuff working well enough.

Oh, and I spent too much time working on some stupid non-essential things (gameplay-wise), such as extracting tiles from an image and padding them and inserting into a different sized texture atlas, and then toying around with different drawing modes of sub-pixel accuracy (comparing normal and pre-mul blending and whatever), and then just throwing most of that experiment stuff away. Well, the atlas thing is still in place, but I could have totally done stuff without it as well, so it was still just extra effort for no real gain.

CMYKave

I made this in a few hours using Game Maker 7.

Explore the cave and try to find the ten different endings. Press enter to start again once you’ve found one.

CMYKave

Go

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=1511

Got some particle system lighting coming from the characters flare. All the darkness should give a nice dark atmosphere… and a sense of exploring the caverns.

A new source release here if you wanna have a look (requires python/pygame/numpy):
http://rene.f0o.com/~rene/stuff/exploratio-0.1.1.tar.gz

Or check it out with bzr…

bzr clone lp:exploratio

I didn’t think I’d get this far. The character can move around, collide with things, change stance/posture (def/off) and also collect treasure.

I only have 2 hrs until super tiredness assaults me, but hopefully I can make the enemies move, do a rudimentary combat system, some GUI cleanup.

Pronably no time for sound. My idea was that each tile when drawn has a small chance of making an ambient sound. This would make a huge on screen forest go fooosh, a grave yard wooo aaaaaauuh… I have no sounds for that though. Trivial to add the code though, I think.

Also, I only have the gameplay and editor mode now. Maybe a big non interactive splash screen is doable as a title screen, but I also need a game over and a victory screen (panties). For now I was thinking the game is over once all of the treasure bits have been collected.

Here we are, 6 hours has done me a lot of good. Actually I had a worse headache last night.

Time to work some magic, 9 hours remain or so which sounds like more than it is… This is my favorite or least favorite part of the competition because you have to cut features out if you want to finish. Heheh!

Thankfully, the fact I’ve done the code thinking on the home port made it easier than expected to create it.

On the home port, you can buy maps, repair, buy upgrades for your vessel, etc…

The economics part (the prices, etc) isn’t too well designed, but time is running scarce…

Next step on the list is to enable the player to move around the islands and to dig for treasure and the artifacts to break the curse…

Need to really hurry up, since in three hours my guild is raiding Icecrown and I want to be there… After that I’ll have only more 3 hours to work on this game, so that gives me a total of 6 hours of coding to make lots and lots of stuff! This will be close!

I ate a cold blooming onion for breakfast:

Onions! They're like garlic, but you can eat them directly!

I’ve also simplified the design of my game; Read the rest of the post for how and why.

(more…)

Well, I’m definitely not going to complete this game by the deadline. Oh well, it was worth a try.

So far you can run around and explode enemy crabs to bits, and collect treasure chests.