Sun’s gone down… switching from beer to whiskey. Think I have an economy system worked out, but since I don’t have a GUI in place, I can’t actually see the prices to know whether they make sense. Guess I know what my next task is!

Again lots of progress.. Now there actually are two types of boats, reds and greens and 2 goal areas on the right. If the boat hits the correct goal area, the goal flashes bright. Otherwise it will flash dark. There is also a spawn system which will spawn more and more boats. Also tweaked the fluid dynamics and boat moving. Now the boats stop if they would hit something and also they try to steer away from close-by islands. So the boats act a lot better gameplay -wise.

Testing the game, it’s kinda interesting how the mechanics work. If you close off a section completely, because there is little/no fluid flow there, the boats will move a lot more erratically (currently there is a minimum speed for their movement but not sure if there really needs to be). So you need to keep the fluid flowing in order to guide the boats.

Not much to go in order to have a fully functioning game, btw. Just counting the score and lives left, menu screens and some instructions.. Then there is the question of sounds and such. But feeling pretty positive over-all. I think I’ll stop development on this for tonight and continue tomorrow.

The API Reference for SDL.Net isn’t working.  I’ve googled like craZy and can’t find an alternate.  Anyone know where I can find an alternate?

Been programming for almost 24 hours now, and my game is still no closer to being a game. Time to move onto some kind of game logic now I think, I’ve left it too long – I don’t know what it will be, but I’ll make something work. Anyways, heres a new fangled screenshot – now with poor reception!

There is now a simili beginning of gameplay… The player places beacons all over the map, and the dudes within their areas of influence will be drawn to them.

Now we’re still far from actual game mechanics, or even winning condition.

Tiles I think are mostly done.

Lets see, graphic wise, I need some item parts, bushes, trees, and, uh, interface.

So, time to hit the random generators!

What’s this…? ANOTHER DEMO?! That’s so crazy!

After hours upon hours of struggling to come up with an idea that satisfied me, I decided to go with SAVORY SEA HOSS, a high seas adventure about a radical guy with radical intentions.  You deliver delicious goodness to castaways hungering for tastiness. The only catch is… Sea Hoss has terrible aim, and he’s been known to accidentally murder the very people he’s trying to save. KEEP YOUR MURDER PERCENTAGE DOWN AND YOUR SAVORY SAVIOR PERCENTAGE UP IN THIS GOOFY ISLAND-THEMED ROMP STARRING A PURPLE THING WITH AN ORANGE VEST.

All stupidity aside, the game looks kinda neat with the ‘squigglevision’ / Crayola art style I’ve chosen.

It’s also funny seeing starving castaways getting pegged in the head with hotdogs and falling into the ocean.

I MAY ACTUALLY FINISH ON TIME!

WITH MUSIC AND SOUND EFFECTS!

MAYBE!!!

Well, I did have some time to work on it. Not enough for me to think I could finish anything, so I’ve sort-of dawdled. But I’m learning how to use Flashpunk, anyway, so that’s handy.

Current build of my “game” is here. You can move with the arrow keys and… that’s it. Yeah. PRODUCTIVITY HIGH SCORE!!

So, I stayed up till about noon today working on this. Eventually I passed out, largely due to sheer exhaustion, and largely due to the fact that I was no longer capable of writing code, and all attempts at writing music came out as weird drones and the sounds of cats making love. This is unusual, given I have a much stronger musical background then anything.

The interesting thing about it, is after playing my game, the effects sleep dep had on my sanity where instantly apparent. Check out the screenshot.  You can actually watch me loose my mind from lack of sleep. The player sprite (the weird ethereal looking chick,) was the first bit of game art I did. After coding her movement, I decided I needed to add in enemys, and came up with the first game enemy, the weird shadow ghosts, at this point I was kind of tired, but the results are actually pretty neat. Im happy with them, despite them being kind of horrible from a pixel art standpoint (They are MADE of jaggys, nothing but jaggys… wtf?)

The point I wish to draw your attention to are the clouds. Sometime around 10 am I decided that this game needed some sort of bg (totally acurate, it did. Flying around a blue screen doesnt really convey much sense of motion.) That being said, look at the second one down from the top right, that cloud is made of squares. In my sleep addled brain, square clouds made perfect sense to me. Square. Friggin. Clouds.

The really funny bit, is they just may make it into the final build.

I also need to optimize so much code from last night its amazing.

I didn’t have any ideas when I saw the theme last night. This afternoon I decided on a little island-hopping platformer. So far I have a guy who can jump around and swim. I think it needs sharks.

So, alright, this is it for day #1 – its “space islands” aka asteroids something. Bascially this is going to be a RTS in which the player has to harverst ressources, build stuff and defend against some kind of aliens. I really dont know yet – the art is mostly temporary right now, except for the abstract icons, this is the style I really want to go for.

The green polygon is some kind of indicator for ressources, the blue icon is a mine/harvester, the red thingy is a factory, and the box is a storage

Here’s what I’ve done so far. It’s not playable yet, but the framework is in place. Saving/loading of maps and configuration. I think it’ll become a turn based strategy where you conquer territory and battle the ally over the territory? Maybe..

Who knows where this will go

I’ve been working on some the graphics. Not sure if I’ll have time to finish them. They’re pretty quick to make, but I have about half left, then I need to arrange onto sheets, load into the engine and make sure stuff animates properly.

The game mechanics are very simple, just a drifting blob which shoots on other drifting things. Not sure how long this game will take me to code. Tomorrow I might have to budget 6hrs for the code, 6hrs more for the art, 2hrs for tax declaration and 2hrs for surviving.

It’s approaching bedtime here. I’ll have to get up at 12 tomorrow… today.

The game is playable now, I have added new images and finished the basic gameplay. I want to upgrade some things like the movement using some physics engine maybe.

I have a new video of the game, the game has sounds but I recorded the video with the game muted.

Here are some of the assets of the game:

Well, I’ve been thinking about joining Ludum Dare for a while now, but because of my almost terrible game creation skills, i’ve resisted for a while.

But here I am! I’ll try to join the next ludum dare, but until then, good luck?

I’m going to start just now (it’s midnight here), after a full day of helping other people with computer-related problems. I still don’t have an idea, but one thing is for sure: ASCII.

I think I’ll do it with Python this time. I’d really like to upload something that gives at least a bit of fun

PSnake

Mmm, I’ve been working on scenery graphics. So far I’ve made a skybox with Vue 8 infinite (easy and looks nice) and textures for the terrain and for the tree I made with ngPlant (open source tree generator). Also I created a billboard for the grass using Cinema 4D’s hair module. For the water I also removed the default Unity textures that wouldn’t be allowed and made my own water bump map.

Still no gameplay, no models related to that hypothetical gameplay or anything important done.

Twisted provides a network reactor framework for Python that simplifies network programming down to implementing methods on a class that inherits from one of their base classes. You can have an arbitrary number of classes and instances of those classes managing the chatter with a particular connection.

My current problem with it is that it doesn’t seem to provide an API for adding more sources of events to be handled. Pygame is equally uncooperative in this regard. I can’t, for instance, tell a Twisted reactor to listen to another arbitrary file descriptor and how to handle it. Glib has “GSources” which encapsulate this notion, and are abstracted well enough for applications which have to poll for data readiness that is unrelated to a file descriptor. Rarely in a *NIX environment will you ever have such a thing, but platforms like MSWindows have a whole slew of data sources which you can’t select() on. (That may be out of date. It’s been a long time since I’ve done MSWindows API.)

The compromise I’ll have to make for LD17 is to use a timer-driven callback which pumps my Pygame event loop. The Twisted API for this is the callLater() reactor method which accepts a timeout and a callback function as arguments.

Anyone know anything better?