I finished writing my game at least, and it doesn’t crash. Yay! Art time is NOW!

Announcement: The game now has a title: “Alien Abduction of Aliens.”

I’m having some issued with applet loading resources and such, but other than that – it’s getting there!

Please let me know if you have any issues, some people have reported not being able to play it (some issues with chrome specifically).

Play it here (Java Applet)

First playable build. Still no sound, and hardly any game content, but just putting it out there:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10116881/Project_Cerebrum.zip

Although I’m participating in the jam, so I have an extra day, and a team, working late is no exception. Today, however, I am especially tired, so I need some caffeine reinforcements.

My lovely pink cup of reinforcement caffeine.

You can get The Lair of Fungal Wonder here.  Here’s the title screen:

I’ll upload Linux and OSX versions tomorrow.

It is getting late here in Germany, and I slowly come to the realization that this compo was no success for me… well kind of:

As much as I liked the theme in the beginning it turned out to be harder than I thought: I considered it to be easy as it made me think of games like Mega Man and Kirby, which I absolutely love. However — as already noted in one of my first posts –, these are per se not really suited to be made in 48 hours as they encompass (relatively) complex mechanics and lots of content. Unfortunately I couldn’t get my thinking outside this box during the compo and so I started to implement basic platforming mechanics. To cut a long story short: I failed; vomit is running out of my eyes while looking over my collision code and trying to find that nasty Heisen-bug.

So hereby I officially give up on it and get some sleep (didn’t go so well for the last two days ). But I don’t want to leave without saying again: Despite all the failures I had the most fun just trying to code something in a looong time. I even learned a thing or two. To close this post, here are some points to improve upon next time (of course I will participate in the next compo!):

• Do more planning (starting right now )
• Think outside the “genre-box” and design more “bottom-up”
• Be a more effective programmer (making a platformer can’t actually be that hard or is it?! I have seen a few cool screenshots of some here on the blog, so it has to be possible! )
• Don’t be hung over the first day…
• More community involvement meaning more blog posts (I’m especially sorry for the lack of screenshots…), try out that IRC-thingy, comment on stuff, etc. but on the other hand…
• Procrastinate less.

Good luck to the rest of you; I’m looking forward to playing some of those actually finished games.

See you all next time, hopefully!

Main menu and instructions are done…

Instructions are quite tricky to get right, since the game has quite “strange” mechanics… probably would be easier with a tutorial that would introduce the mechanics and units one by one… this way it might be a bit overwhelming, but no time for anything better…

The game has an interface issue, because it’s sometimes hard to understand exactly what’s going on, what unit is attacking which unit, etc, but that’s also due to my meagre drawing skills…

Anyway, still loads of stuff to do:

- End-of-game screen (when you overcome the 7 levels)
- 7 levels
- (something I just remembered) Initial gems inside the keep to help the player
- Sound effects
- Music

Be back in a while with some more stuff… the clock is ticking… less than 6 hours to go…

Yes, it’s true.  I’m dropping out of the contest, due to schedule conflicts.

So close, too!  Here’s what I had cooking:

At this point, we’re about 60% into feature completion – the enemies, bullets and level progression still remain, but they’d have been doable within about four hours, I think.

I will definitely complete it in time for the jam, though, where everyone will forget about it among the many much more visually appealing Flash and Unity titles.

What was supposed to happen:

Contrived Storyline:

It’s the year 21XX, and after a war with robots, environmental ruin and famine, the remaining humans are being hunted down and purged by the machines.  The title refers to the fact that the protagonist is the last living human in his village, and they have, in fact, come for him/her.

Legend has it that, somewhere away from town and across the desert where the machines won’t venture, due to the risk of overheating, is the last remaining enclave of human civilization, and they’re looking to bolster their numbers and launch one last counteroffensive.  The protagonist, having few other options, has decided to cast his lot in with them, and must escape the robot sentries that are patrolling his/her ruined village.

The robots are impervious to attack by anything our unnamed hero has access to, but can be damaged by each other, and in fact, our hero can use this to their advantage by teasing the sentries to entice them to fire their phaser, then ducking.  Because the sentries’ head-mounted turrets cannot aim up or down, it is possible to trick sentries into killing one another, thus increasing the chances of escape.

The humans have erected force field machines in places that can severely damage inorganic material, and the toxic atmosphere can react with human skin such that it takes on some of the characteristics of metal, such that touching the force field could be fatal for humans, too, but fortunately, in the chaos of the raid on the ruined city, human nutrient capsules were strewn about, and eating these should sufficiently protect the hero from the negative side effects of the force fields.

Gameplay:

Get to the exit any way you can, including, but not limited to, tricking the robots into shooting each other.  Any touch from a robot or its phaser bolt is instantly fatal, and you’ll be forced to restart the level.

The exit is locked until you’ve collected a certain number of chits, at which time, it’ll visually change from red to white.

Things learned:

1. starting from scratch with no basecode: adds a LOT of time pressure, but very doable (if you don’t care about good coding practices, comments, readability or maintainability) and oddly, kind of fun.
2. the accuracy of a homebrew platformer engine varies inversely with proximity to the deadline.
3. don’t eat a big plate of brisket, it will make you sleepy (well, duh!).
4. faking greyscale in 16-bit colour is a bad idea (greenish cast in some parts of the display).
5. Allegro 4.x, DirectDraw overlays in a window and Aero don’t mix (apparently – I don’t have Win7 myself, so I’m basing this on reports from IRC)

I’ll post another playable before leaving for the ice rink.

Finally got past my compiling issues and got stuff on the screen. The sound library wouldn’t cooperate so I’ll probably have to submit with no sound, though this is looking like it will run out of time for the compo anyway

It’s as finished as it’s going to get. I’m reasonably happy with the end result – as it didn’t go so smoothly this time – going isometric was a bit trickier than I’d anticipated… Download it here

So less time for the gameplay itself – but maybe that wasn’t a bad thing, as keeping the game simple forced me to be a bit more creative with the level design. And although the game is short, just a few small levels, the last couple should present a reasonable challenge

Really bummed, I only ended up getting about 5 hours to work on my game this weekend. I might switch to jam formation and try to finish something late tonight, we’ll see.

I’m pretty proud of the pixeling I did for my ltitle army dude guy, and that took up most of my time (being a programmer, the pixels do not come easily.)

I did start to put together quality beginnings of a JavaScript/Canvas engine – Screen, Buffer, Joystick, Sprite, Animation, and Loader classes. You can march the little dude around.

You can check out my progress at github:

http://github.com/newobj/ludumdare/tree/master/ld18/

Bonjour!

I have a level now. It’s not a pretty sight, but I’m not going to make it any prettier

Oh god my eyes.. my eeeeeeyes!

Also I have some music in my game now. By game I mean the intro and title screen, since the game screen itself will have no music or sounds, since I don’t have time to do either

My focus now is to create 5-ish fun levels. Then my game will be done.

I’d really expected to be bricking it by now, with tonnes of vital an unstarted, let alone unfinished work still to do.

Thankfully I seem to have judged the scope of my game fairly well, there’s still hours to go, and I’ve already moved firmly onto polishing rather than producing.

Just put a simple particle system in, and it’s working wonders, really adds a lot of movement and drama.

I’ve also written some music that I’m only mildly unhappy with, which for me is pretty spectacular.

Oh and I took half an hour out to cook some Cheesy Oat Bread (it’s like a cross between scones and cheese twists, but with bacon). It doesn’t look especially spectacular, but I promise you, it’s amazing.

After all that cheery optimism I can just tell something is about to go badly wrong, urk..

I’m currently rather worried about rare bugs, number of features still to do, and whether the game is any fun. But I think it makes nice screenshots.

I’m considering removing the shooting element, and forcing the player to collide with enemies to convert them to slaves instead. I think with the enemy’s bullets pushing you back, it’ll add an interesting bit of challenge to that element. I’ll be sad about throwing out all of yesterday’s aiming code.

It’s done. Not finished… but I better get sleep.

http://allefant.com/zombies_by_allefant.zip

I was just wondering, are we allowed to include music we haven’t made ourselves if we explicity state that it isn’t ours and is just to make the game a little more interesting? I only ask because I have no musical talent and I’d like to put some background music in.

Meanwhile, game development is going well. Just finishing touches now, but I’m getting very tired already. I’m sure I’ll finish in time though. Here’s a screenshot of my neato title art:

So I was moving along, getting stuff done, real happy-like with my progress, and then I suddenly realized in horror that I’ve just created scenarios that break all of my current game logic.  These scenarios are a necessary part of the central game mechanic.

I don’t if I’ll finish in time.

Oh, and here’s the Github page for the project for anyone interested.

http://github.com/acdimalev/acdimalev-competition-ludumdare18

The final crunch is always so crazy .

I’m finally making some sprites for my game. I’m making everything a bit soft and organic. I think I’ll use three frames for everything, and make creatures wobble a bit. Here’s a picture of me drawing the first few objects..

.

My concept is pretty simple, there are whispers coming through dimensional gates and attacking a city. In order to save the city you must power the shield generators (bottom right) by throwing whispers at it via a grappling hook. Every generator that is powered up is also attached to one or more additional gates and the more generators powering a gate, the faster the whispers are. When the grappling hook gets the Whisper, it starts rotating around the city and you have to time when to release it.

Well the implementation is not going as planned partially due to learning pygame at the same time instead of going with something I’m more familiar with and also a bit of procrastination. Hopefully I’ll have some time to finish it up but it’s not looking likely.

…I sure have been neglecting my community duties.

To make up for it, I give you “completed” gameplay. <linky>
You’ll need the VC++2010 redistrobutable to run it. Hopefully nothing else…

The aim of the game is to trick to enemies into killing themselves and each other.
If the enemy sees you he will move towards you and start firing, if you run out of his sight he will continue to move towards your last known location. While out of sight you can hold down space which will use some of your IP (illusion points) to turn you into a rock, the enemy will ignore this rock but if they walk into you or you get hit by a stray bullet, you still take damage.

The three circle in the top right are your available illusions. Clicking any one will stop the player being able to move, but will allow you to spawn one of your illusions where the cursor is pointing.

The top illusion is the cheapest and most basic. It makes a ghost-like clone of yourself. If the enemy sees this clone of you it will be tricked and begin firing at it. The bullets however will go straight through and hit whatever is behind the illusion, hopefully another enemy.

The middle illusion is a trick tile. It can make any tile look like a ground tile. For example, using it on the bottomless pit tiles (the black ones – I wouldn’t stand on them if I were you) will trick the enemy to think they are walkable, causing him to plumet to his death. Walls cannot be turned into other tiles (because it caused bugs with the pathfinding =P).

The third illusion is an upgraded decoy, these cause any bullet they are hit by to be reflected back towards their attacker (with a slight random offset). This is most expensive as it’s pretty much a guaranteed win.

If you select an illusion but decide you don’t want to cast it, simply right click to cancel and keep running.

Next on my todo list:

1. Loading enemy positions from file.
2. Level select screen.
3. Actual sprites…
4. General polishy goodness.

Enjoy!