Getting there

As I head off to bed, I decided to finally revel what my project looks like.  I’m further along than I ever got with my last strategy game attempt, so this one might be playable before the deadline.

Island Airline Title Screen

Isand Ariline map screen

After a bit of Bug-fixing on the engine, i have now made the first four levels for my game, all of which are tutorials.

Screenie:

Bouncy!

After 3.14 days of work (2 learning how to use the game maker and 1.14 days of work on the game itself) it’s finally almost over! Just some few sprites and dialogue, and a little testing and it’ll be ready.

I can hardly believe it. It was my first game ever! My first real program other than a hello world. I’ll save the “thanks to everyone” for tomorrow, after I actually finish it, but it’s really been very fun!

No screenshot, but I’ve got the basic movement and predator/prey dynamic set up now in Version 0.3 of Invasive. (Available here)

Decided to stick with the name Glompers for the invasive species, and Kiwis for the endangered species. Starting with 5 Glompers, the Kiwis all get eaten in about a minute.

So far I’m not doing any real pathfinding at all… The kiwis are choosing a direction randomly each frame (and getting stuck in the SE corners of each island for some reason I haven’t figured out yet), and the Glompers move in one direction until they hit an edge, at which point they change direction. I may change the Kiwis to have the same movement schema as the Glompers…

I think I’m going to need something which the Kiwis can run into that makes them spawn. That can be a player placeable object in addition to the not-yet-implemented traps and walls. Otherwise I think the game will be over before the player has a chance to do anything.

On the plus side, my engine seems to be handling a couple thousand kiwis pretty well! Rather than using Gilbert’s collision detection, I added a map-sized blank bitmap to my Fauna class (which holds all the animals). Since I don’t actually add that bitmap to the stage at any time, it doesn’t seem to be dragging down my rendering performance very much. When the kiwis move, they plot their location on that map as a single pixel, and when the glompers move, they check to see if they’re on a pixel that has the kiwi color. The glompers thus only have to check the entire kiwi list if they’re definately in collision with at least one kiwi. This can probably be optimized further, but it seems good enough for now.

-TF

The AI in my game cannot do anything the player can’t. The player can do somethings (currently) that the computer player can’t. Yet the computer player wins every time.

Technically, the game is finished, but having a whole ‘nother day tomorrow means I’m going to pile on the bells and whistles.

Current features:
- A crazy hard AI that doesn’t cheat
- 2 different airship types (normal and big)
- 1 building (turret)
- A streamlined, friendly and fun strategic combat system inspired a bit by Euphoria
- Graphic weather effects [Needs optimization, it lowers FPS too much]
- Supersnazzy intro, game lost, and game won screens.
- Islands have varied and dynamic terrain (though not largely so)
Planned features:
- An easier AI setting
- Start a new game without restarting the application
- Help screen
- Proper pause screen
- Cargo airship for transportation of goods
- Gnat airship that’s cheap and weak, but requires no player control.
- Pirate ships who wander onto the map and loot the nearest island(s)
- Make weather changes impact gameplay somehow
- Repair Shop building to regenerate friendly airships’ health when stationed on the same island.
- Clinic building which generates a steady growth of population
- Music and sound effects
- Improve the visual appearance of turrrets.
- Randomly generated playfield layouts (currently there is only one island layout, though the locations of the starting points are random)

Not much progress since last… Going for breakfast now.

http://nutink.webs.com/islandofthemind.zip

What my game currently looks like. Here the adventurer stands in front of a table. The game is nowhere near finished quite yet, but I would like to know some things. The player can currently swim in the ocean, hunt fish, collect stones and twigs, build spears, and cook a meal. I plan for him to also forage in the forest and build a home. Is there anything else one can do on a deserted isle? Do we have any firsthand cast-aways that could provide us with some good information?

Oh god I’m so tired, have a demo, I’m going to bed.

and i am getting sleepy

So i’ve finished up for tonight, i’ve made two more islands and a system to travel between them

When you switch maps you lose all your items, and your progress is lost on the one you were on. your trees and ore also go down to zero, but you get to keep all your other resources.

to-do tomorrow:

• Pirates spawning at night
• Pirate Cave
• no traveling at night
• some way of winning
• menu and stuff
• particle effects

The pirate cave will be another map on it’s own, full of tiles like ladders, lights, and windows. which will be only attainable in there. my plan is that the game ends when you’ve cleared up the pirate cave (of pirates) and gotten enough wood to build a boat, then you’ll sail back home and stuff!

Goodnight!

square ship! circle walls that overlap horribly and that you can’t crash into yet! no sign of any islands or indeed gameplay yet! closes without any feedback when you pass the last checkpoint! closes sooner when you press ESC! probably crashes in loads of ways I haven’t thought of yet! get it at http://www.shockedfrog.com/misc/itr_test.zip ! JOY!

(sorry about all that. just excited to have actually got something kinda working, even if it’s taken me over a day to do 10 minutes of work.)

Islands!

Phew, after almost no work at all yesterday (family vacation) I’m now progressing. There might actually be a game in there somewhere. Got a nasty problem yesterday where the compiler wouldn’t let me compare a const std::string& with a string literal. Took almost half an hour to figure out that was not included.

Anyhow, you can move, chop trees, build boats, claim land and the AI can do most of that as well. It’s just not particularely smart about it

Quite a few impressive WIPs to be seen, hope y’all don’t forget the gameplay!

So I’m scrapping what I was doing and going in another direction. Much less ambitious, but it should be fun Here’s my background art:

-Phil

Things are moving right along. More game functionality has been completed, as well as sound effects and some handy graphics enhancements. I hope to get things nicely polished up tomorrow, but I’m pretty happy with how I’ve progressed so far.

Dinner is a pretty important meal too. Ludum Dare is a pretty intense process, so I needed something hearty:

Mmm, good.

I’m liking some of the other entries I’ve been seeing too. They look promising, and I’m looking forward to trying them out. But for now, I’m going to get some sleep.

I totally forgot about this competition until just now. I’ve still got 20 hours left, this is workable…

Is “The Floor Is Lava” taken as a title yet?

Across the broken floating islands of Norskar, a young woman sets out to become the most powerful Sky Viking!

Current controls:

WASD to move, space to jump.

Left-click to dig, right-click to build

1, 2, 3 to switch between stone, silver, and gold to build with.

ESC to get your mouse back.

http://ian.paradum.com/SkyVikingAlpha.html

Sorry I’m so late to join, but I wanted to make sure I got somewhere first I’m making this in Unity, and I’ve uploaded my first Unity webplayer version, so please try it out and let me know what you think! If you fall off you have to restart