More complete UI, skyship and islands. It’s getting there…

I haven’t been able to work on anything this morning. I am headed to New Hampshire in an hour or so and won’t be back until about 6 or 7pm ET. I don’t have to drive so I’m bringing my laptop along to try and continue working. At the very least, I am going to stick in victory conditions (very easy to do right now), and some kind of title screen and game over screen. At least it than it will be a somewhat complete prototype.

Here’s this morning’s breakfast, bacon, scrambled eggs, and New England coffee.

Well its seems I wont be able to fully complete something in less then 12h, but I’ve learned some valuable lessons for next time

- Use tools/API you are familiar with and check that you have a base code running before…

It seems I didn’t respect this at all, as I went with SDL (I’ve used it in the past on my Windows box for doing GP2X development, but never used it on OSX with Xcode, oops got many surprise there).  And didn’t have a base code running (well I was finally able to get sound running late yesterday and still no graphics pfff!).

- Make sure its not a monthly production week-end at work…

Well I knew about this, but since the last few month they were never got any problems so the guys doing the support never had to call me on week-end.  Of course guess what happen? Yup got a call at they were some several errors with processing data in the data base, so had to connect via VPN debug the crap .

- Verify the schedule for family events…

Well yesterday had 2 important family events in our family, first it was my wife birthday of 40 years old (an important year), 2nd we were also celebrating the 50 years old marriage of one of my uncle and aunt and came back late.

Here a little screenshot of what I did so far ahaha in the few time I got .

7-ish hours in, and nearing completion. Just some stylistic and gameplay tweaks to go. The music certainly isn’t my best work, but it sort of works as a minimalist-ish thing, I guess. Waffling over whether the kobold-speak in the text is charming or annoying.

Try it out here.

Hello, Skynet here, connecting your islands faster then you can say Terminate.

well, no real progress over here. at least i got this funny spritesheet to show

The music’s done.  It’s not quite what I was aiming for (I was going for a slightly eerie feel, but it’s more cheery than eerie), but it works fairly well.  I’ve also done a quick watercolour wash for the background to the cut-scenes (waiting for it to dry before I can scan it).  Lunch was pretty much the same as yesterday; Irn Bru, beans on toast, and ice cream:

Now I’ve got some cut-scenes to draw…

The clock thingy says 13 hours left, so I think I’m in decent shape. Unfortunately, I’m starting to feel the time pressure & starting to feel tired. I’d rather have one or the other…

Player can now place objects, and the Glompers and Kiwis interact correctly with them. Screenie:

Playable build here.

It’s kind of funny– I originally planned for the glompers to only be visible 1% of the time. So part of the game, was to figure out where they were and build defenses to keep them away from the kiwis. But unless I slow everything down, that just doesn’t matter.

The other problem I’m seeing is that the Glompers reproduce just way too fast. So, instead of having them spawn every time they eat a kiwi, I’m going to require them to eat a specific number of kiwis. (I’ll define as a constant, and tune as I work on other stuff). This -might- give the player a chance.

Another thing that might be better, would be to have the walls stop both Glompers and Kiwis. This would let the player create a preserve of kiwis.

ToDo:

-TF

I’m out of LD#17. Hate to do it, but I hit a massive wall with scripting in general. I’ve been reading up on unity script for the last couple of months and I thought I could wing it over the weekend … I was wrong!

However, thanks to a lot of help from rptb1, I managed to solve a lot of initial problems in the script and then even go on to actually debug my own script which was very rewarding.

Good luck to everyone else and thanks again rptb1 for all the help!

Ok, added collision. It’s really buggy but as much as can be done with just a polygon soup imported from Blender and no 3d engine. I also realized the external camera might not have been a good idea without an engine either… not that the camera glitches could make the game much worse

Anyway, the game ideas is, you are the blue guy who is an airship taxi driver and has to drive customers (the yellow guy) from island to island.

I’m pretty much done but I was thinking of adding more enemies and a boss (if you’re crazy enough to last that long). Anyways, here are some pics:

Title screen o’ doom!

Don’t let them hurt your island!

Lots of enemy chaos!

I’m working on making it look like these are little islands in the sea, still needs some waves.

Super Island Colonizer is COMPLETE!….

gameplay wize..

Now i’m going to see if i can get some sound into it before the deadline, and maybe pretty up the graphics a little bit..

but now…. time to relax for a bit and play some submittions.

I hope you all had/are having fun

It’s now time for bed, again, and all I’ve achieved since last night’s bedtime is adding a player object with the ability to jump from “island” to “island” (just pretend the white circles are islands, ‘kay?), and thus create rigid connections between the islands.

Which isn’t nothing. But it’s a lot less than I needed to get done if I wanted this to turn out like a proper game. The cause? I simply haven’t put enough time in today.

Here is a screenshot of me (the bluish streaky comety thing) jumping towards the final unconnected island, having knitted four of the islands into a nice solid triangle + one that’s just kind of hanging there. Reaching the unconnected island without hitting any of the red circles is the win condition. Or at least it will be, once I’ve added code to check for that.

It looks a little better in motion… but not a lot better.

Things I don’t have, and should:

• Game-y elements: Win condition, lose condition, lives counter, level progression
• Proper physics balancing. Notice how many of the circles are pressed up against the edge? That can make gameplay really annoying sometimes. I need to increase the force that pulls them back into the centre (or solve the issue in another way). But make the centre-pulling force too strong and everything bunches up, making the game impossible to play. And it needs to be able to cope with arbitrary numbers of circles, as that’s the level progression mechanic that I have in mind. Hmm, maybe I should remove the collision between circles, then it wouldn’t matter so much. Would make it look uglier though, especially if I make the graphics less abstract.
• Graphics that don’t suck rotten eggs.
• Sound. ANY sound.
• A public build. Need to remember to statically link the VC++ runtime so more people can run it.

None of this is terribly complicated, but I need sleep now and when I wake up I’ll probably only have about 3 hours to the deadline. 4 at a pinch. Sigh.

The worst part is that I don’t even care that much. So unmotivated. LD was supposed to solve that problem.

Just spend a solid 2 hours trying to remember my trig to make a compass to point the player towards theyre island, only to realize its always in the bottom left corner of the map, and so the compass pretty much just pointed south east, all the time. *facepalm*

Oh really?

Yeah really!

You can make you own little network of them, if that makes you happy. ’cause you know, it’s just a sandbox for now…

To Do:

• Game
• Pizza

I hope I can get some gameplay to go with the graphics…

I’ve got an awful lot to do, but I’m confident of having /something/ out the door before the deadline.

My todo list for today (in order of priority):

- Improve map paging

- Biome parser

- Entity definitions

- Implement efficient scrolling

- AI

- Interface (at the moment there isn’t one, beyond keyboard)

- Create own tileset (I’m using the stock Dwarf Fortress one just now)

- Resizeable canvas/curses UI

- Resource management (food, grog, plunder)

- Crew management

- Weather / Day-Night cycle

- Dynamic vector field for wind direction

- Lose condition

- Town/Battle mode (separate game mode from the main “high seas” game. more traditionally roguelike – may not make the cut, which would be a shame if ship-to-ship combat was just like trad roguelikes but with blue tiles)

- Procedurally generated content (maps, biomes, entities, markov chains for town and people names)

I would have taken pictures but I don’t have a good setup for that right now. Breakfast was bacon, turkey sausage patties, and a scrambled egg fried in the fat of the other two. Then a “Fiberful” fruit bar, and then my usual supplements(a multi, additional D, calcium, an Omega-3, and whey protein), followed by some green tea to wash it all down. This is food that makes me work well. Heavy carbs like beans+rice, potatoes or cereal just make me feel hazy, ill and unmotivated.