So, I think I got a lot of the actual game logic I will have in the final competition entry done today. (more…)

Started working again. I have pretty much the game in shape, shame that I don’t have any idea yet about how to actually make this fun (in a reasonable time). So I guess I’ll keep changing stuff until something magically happens.

I’ve just made an ‘exit door’ for my game, which will be the goal. It feels good to have something concrete to aim towards, and hopefully I can get everything together and in place in time. I’m starting to feel much better about this game.

play it here (Flash): http://www.2bam.com/showcase/?game=FindingHer_LD16

Ok, got more conversations in, a bunch of graphical tweaks, 2 “songs” (2 more in the making…)

Got up about 8, and have now got the game to colour in the spaces the current player has already explored.  I also recoloured the background paper a bit – it’s still not perfect but it’s better than it was:

Next step is to add the victory/game over screen, then the Forage, Garrison and Wait buttons.

Not as cool as the one from doctor who, but I’m happy with it

also in this build I added the martian equiv of the Aurora australis, I couldn’t find any photos of it so lets pretend it looks like this. (we at least know its not the same as other aurorae in the solar system so I can do what I want really).

I plan to have other cool martian features like the dust geysers also found near southern mars during certain times of the year, though I dont know if I’ll have time to put them in.

anyway, the playable build is available if you view this whole post

(more…)

A game based inside the circulatory system. Sadly i may not complete it on time, but in that case i shall finish it of f soon after LD16. It’s been fun, i’ve learnt a whole bunch,  and i can’t wait for the next one :3

I surprised myself and actually got some code done. I have made a simple Editor where I can select, draw, draw randomly and clear. Scrolling isn’t done yet. The map might be 128×128, I don’t know yet.

I’m thinking of replacing the shadow ellipse with a selection ellipse for the enemies and items. Or, I can do several shadows which work for different sizes of things.

Overall, the environment is a bit noisy and hard to read, but that’s partly because I crammed so many different objects onto one screen.

Had cereal for breakfast, more chips and salsa for a midday snack and then a Subway sandwich and baked BBQ chips for dinner.

My wife then left to go baby our neice and nephew, so I got to play the music loud for a few hours.  When she got back, she surprised me with a nighttime snack.

A Wendy’s Frosty Float.  It was yummy.

As far as coding goes, I’m not sure I’ll be able to have the entry I wanted to have.  I spent a lot of time on stupid things, like math.  I do have a ship that moves by the arrow keys (just for testing, that won’t be in the final game) and a compass that reacts to the mouse-hover and click.  Next step would be to implement navigation, which includes setting a direction and an interval.  I also will be implementing fog-of-war because part of exploration is having to go somewhere in order to map it out.

I’m not using a traditional full-array to keep track of the tiles.  I’m using an image and I’m reading the map data from that image’s individual bit mapping.  I’m going to implement the fog-of-war using a similar method, with a second image that starts off with each pixel being off and they get turned on as you go.

Navigation is going to be direction and time based, so you’d pick one of the 16 directions on the compass and sail.  The ship is locked into the tile coordinate system to make things easier.

I fear there is way to much to do before the deadline tommorrow, so I’ll have to go with the essentials and just add on with whatever time I have left over.  I hope to have a real game to submit, and not just a demo.  I lost a lot of time trying to get my printer to print out a map so I could trace it, draw on it and scan it back in, but I ended up not even using that.  I just created a new map by myself and Photoshop instead.  The compass math stuff was a pain in the rear, though in the end pretty simple.  I always end up spending extra time trying to do whatever it is in an abtract way, which can either be a killer or a timesave, depending on if I end up using it for anything else.  For example, in the last compo, I spent extra time on the basic tile properties, which let me add new types of tiles in a matter of minutes later on.

Anyway, I think I’m done for the night. See you in the morning!

Dev Updates:
LD48 #16: Playable Demo (33 hours)
LD48 #16: Screenshots Batch #2
LD48 #16: Log 4
LD48 #16: Log 3

I’m a Ludum Dare newbie, and I’ve fallen victim to that total bastard, Father Time. I had too many ideas and I tried to implement them all, and it has put me in a terrible situation. I won’t be able to complete this game in the way that I previously wanted. Instead, I will have to cut the story short and leave the player with a cliff hanger. Hopefully the story will prove to be interesting enough to justify this decision. I plan to keep working on this game after LD16 is complete, but I intend to get it to a solid, presentable state by the deadline.

The HUD system took the most of my time, as I planned to implement a deep collection of menus and inventory screens. The foundation is there, I just don’t have time to put it all to use, unfortunately.

While planning for LD16, I tossed around a few ideas that involved my suggested theme, UNWANTED POWERS, and the EXPLORATION theme. There were also a few themes in the list that revolved around a post-apocalyptic scenario, so those have been floating around in my brain for a while. It seems as though I ended up going with a Wall-E meets Fallout type of experience where your goal is to scour the land and figure out what happened. It’s kind of rad, but isn’t very exciting at the moment. You just kind of… explore. There are no enemies at this point, and I’m not sure if I need them. The theme IS exploration, after all.

Also… I was hoping to record at least ONE song for this game, but I don’t see that happening.

Here’s a quick screenshot to prove that I actually have something.

Time sure flies when your eyes are burning.

My project is in a good finaling state with most elements complete. I’ve spent a few hours this evening on polish and tuning. Hell – I even fired up Garage Band to throw together a small audio track.

Tomorrow I’ll formalize the intro and ending and then it’s just remaining polish and bug fixing.

Screens from the Alpha Build.

a screenshot of my game so far

I thought I would make a explore the asteroid field game.

collision is working but all it does so far is show a BAM! image when you hit the asteroids so I need to work on that and an way to score points and a way to the show points I guess. So far I have amazed how much I got done. It helps having low standards I guess.

I got lots done today – if you walk to an unclaimed hill, you can now claim it!

The new title screen, with login text

The minimap! Unfinished

Roads, and Boboil

Plan for Day 3:

• Add ability to change your personal flag color
• Add ownership tooltips to the minimap
• Polish up the player sprite (he has a slightly off-pink pixel on his head there, and he’s kind of ugly in general…)
• Clean up the minimap and login screens, with clickable buttons

In the mean time, since it’s an MMO of sorts, register for it at http://www.platymuus.com/bin/ld16.php.

Happy coding!
- SpaceManiac

So, yeah, my complicated island adventure, just started to feel waaaay to much like work. I figured no modern LD can go without a towlr entry, so I’m providing one.

It really is coming out nicely. Once I’ve added SFX in and final touches I’ll have PoV add it to towlr.com and submit it as my final entry.

Let me tell you, dungeon exploration has NEVER been so TOWLR!
-Phil

Bedtime Progress

A few more steps closer, but it still isn’t fun.  I’m tired now, so off to bed.  Goodnight Ludum Dare.

I’m super happy with where my game is headed, so I don’t want to waste too much time here. Really there’s not much to show in screens but here’s what needs to be done:

- Finish weather system. The basic weather system is in place but needs additional work.
- Weather match system. So I can write events that tie to weather events.
- Crew match system. Is JUST done.
- Crew rule system. This is basically the “heart” of the game, but it depends on a lot of other things being in place first, which I only now attained. Basically, what happens is that as the voyage goes on the crew respond to each other, the conditions, etc. You can make choices as captain that will affect them positively or negatively. You can even put them in shackles, make them walk the plank, etc. The rule system has two parts, one is a match and the other is an event. The event says how to change crew members that match.
- Similar to the above, there needs to be a global event system. These might not be written with such streamlined rules as with the crew system, but will respond to crew state, etc.

After this each day cycle would go something like this:
- Sail onward!
- Update weather.
- Flash the global event rules.
- Flash crew rules.
- Update provisions.
- TURN!

So for instance, there might be a storm that happens during the event rules, that will set the “wet” state for crew members. Then we flash the crew rules and it says that any crew member who is wet is sad, and cold. As well, there is a crew rule that says any crew who is “wet” loses that tag (the rules happen in order but apply to all crew). Or maybe “wet1″ => “wet0″ => “” so they take two days to dry off. You get the idea.

Awesome!

The point of this game is that the mission should end in DISASTER. Hahaha. Amazing.

We’ll see how the next one goes, eh?

I’ve been having fun, I’ve learned a lot, but I don’t feel that the result is fun. So I’ve decided to spend tomorrow studying and working on bits of this game. It certainly won’t be fun in the end but I think it’s still worth spending some time on.

Goodnight.

While writing the Elite-style procedural planet/star system generator for my entry, I was messing around with random strings, trying to come up with a system that provided pronounceable planet/star names.

The algorithm which I have used is in fact the same one that was used in Elite and Frontier, and it occasionally spits out a real word, or happily the odd bit of profanity.

I was a little worried when it gave me “quitbed”, though. I think it’s beginning to become sentient.

http://ed.onlinewar.org/exploratorium/foulmouth.php

A screenshot complete with my terrible graphics!

Screenshot to the max!