Not being able to get to sleep is excellent for redesigning.  I’m now happy with the design for my game, and I even naïvely think I can finish it in time!

Design is:

Space-based sidescroller.  Player given the usual 4-way control of an unarmed ship.

Progress through an (absurdly unrealistically dense) asteroid field.  Asteroids are static and there is always a fairly large safe path through the field.

From behind the player, homing missiles fire!  They are fairly easy to avoid as they react quite slowly to your movements.  The missiles can be tricked into colliding with the asteroids.  Avoiding them provides a moderate challenge when combined with navigating the asteroid field.

Every X seconds, the missiles stop being launched and instead a gunboat flies through the game area.  The gunboat fires volleys of bullets in pretty patterns which the player needs to avoid.  The gunboat can be damaged and destroyed by luring missiles into it.

The trick to the design is that the safest way by far to deal with the missiles is to quickly trick them into hitting an asteroid so that they’re destroyed.  So if you want to damage the gunboat (for mega points) you’ll need to take the risk of keeping a gaggle of missiles alive.  Not only does that mean there’s more missiles trying to kill you, but keeping them all safe from asteroids can become quite a challenge.

Hopefully the end result is a game with dynamic difficulty that is determined by the player’s skill and willingness to take on risk.  A less skilled player can play through just dodging everything, whilst an expert would make sure every missile ends up hitting a gunboat.

Obligatory screenshot:

Yeah, this is real.  Java applet screenshot, with moving player and enemies, as close to from scratch as you could get.  The movement is not super fluid, but the graphics do NOT flicker, and the enemies collide with each other and pursue the player.  Now I just have to make it so you can pick them up and throw them at each other, shouldn’t be too bad to get something reasonably close to that.  The time lapse video of me making this is pretty cool, even if the game itself is simple, even building this with the time I really had available is no joke!

Here’s a playable preview of our Jam game.

It’s working and it’s almost fun. Just need to make some iterative improvements to the mechanics and aesthetics.

Use your laser cannons to push the balls around. Knock two balls into each other to destroy them and score points. You score more points for destroying faster moving balls.

At the start of the day I didn’t feel like I was making much progress, but now I think I’m getting somewhere. I’ve decided that the objective of the game is to survive as long as possible before the robots eventually kill you. My original idea was that the player would be able to take control of the robots (which would actually fit the theme better), but I’m too lazy to implement that .

My plan for tomorrow is to get up early, ingest lots of caffeine and sugar, and spend the rest of the time polishing up my game.

There is a playable version of my game available for download (requires Windows).

And now I’m off to bed.

Just want to show the latest screenie:

I’m gonna go chickens this time and hope you like it. You can roam around now, jump and stick to the ceiling when holding jump (Z). Click screenshot to play.

After I had one false start: the idea was just too complex to be feasible, I’m returning to square one and restarting everything. I already have an idea (a defense-like game) and think it will be feasible in 12 hours. Time to go coding.

Not very pretty at the moment!

But it exists! as does an End game screen with stats!

Yeah, I know. Right, since the last update, which happened to be a food one, these things have happened.
I have a name! I have core gameplay sussed! I have a better understanding of balance! I’ve made things more efficient! I’ve screwed around and made an awesome logo!

Woo! Yeah! So now, I’m adding some content, and such that my game is a Tower Defense game, I’m currently making waves. Yeah. *crickets chirp*

Really? You’re a terrible audience.

In other news, I got a new bike, as I got hit by a car last week!
http://s.wiggle.co.uk/images/gt%20aggressor%2007.jpg

YouTube: AlienSuperMegaBlaster 2010-08-22 13-54

Writing code in 10 min chucks whilst rocking baby and keeping other kids alive. Context switching hell keeps your velocity low

Staring to see the theme coming through “Enemies as Weapons”. As the aliens get killed they in turn become bullets/shrapnel that kills others.

The player will have limited amo, so goal is not to fire madly but hit the big guys that create more shrapnel.

That’s the theory…..

Still have 12 hours to go, so hopeful to have something to submit by then.

Player blob is in, with controls and basic collision detection. Enemy ‘attack’ logic is in, and they can be made to destroy each other (although they just disappear for now)

Unfortunately, the game is probably going to be much simpler than originally intended, with just one enemy type. I’m going to concentrate on making it a bit more playable (game progression, player death, etc), then decide whether there’s time to add another enemy type, or to add death/destruction effects for the enemy/player/rocks

I’ve started doing the pathfinding: this is going to be difficult, ive never done pathfinding before.

The following things have been finished:
KB / Mouse input
Loading textures
Layout of GUI
renderer set up pre-shader
Animation(VERY IMPORTANT)
Picking (logic laid out as psudocode and partially implemented)
Tileset Rendering (brute force right now, with lots of glVertex calls. Will refine once game logic is working)
Moving around of camera
Placeholder artwork (everything is [1][2][3][4][5] images in various colours)

The following things have not been finished:

Detection of game conditions such as game over
Pathfinding (this might be the end of me)
Any real art ( Looks like it’ll be programmer art, but im not going to touch artwork until the game is playable)
Objectives in game
Sound (This wont take long, thanks to the framework I started out with)
Spells ( this is a problem, you need to resurrect / consume / Discard monsters)
Attacking (some enemies shoot, others are melee)
Loading of levels from disk; right now they are all solid blocks of passable terrain with random tiles set on them.

I’m thinking I should go with a procedural level generator, which goes through the following sequence:

Create a grid of streets with larger gaps in random places
Line each street with small buildings
In the larger gaps, put an enemy base

Here is a screenshot:

It’s not actually as bad as it looks; if I can get the pathfinding working, I’m on the home stretch.

I’m Making cutscene’s!

I should probably be finishing the main game first, but that’s coming on pretty well too. I’ve done all the level design at least, and it’s all looking pretty good:

Just hoping I’ve got time to pull all the other pieces together before the deadline.

The gameplay is almost complete. Now I have 12 hours to cram in some sound and some content.

So I went for a walk to go get some taiyaki and think about what to do.  I’ve ended up spending so much time getting the basic useful classes I’ve been wanting for working with the canvas sorted that I totally don’t have time left to make what I was originally intending.  So while munching the aforementioned taiyaki (pictured below), I decided on the best course to take now.  I do like the game plan I had in mind and would like to keep pushing at it after the compo, but I also want to finish something for this, so the logical option: Branch the project.

Now it’s a matter of taking these last 13 or so hours, working with what I’ve made so far and making something fun, slightly flashy and not too tricky to code.  Not too much of an ask there.. right?

It doesn’t show in the end, but building a decent discussion tree is HARD. I had to write it down, and now… I’m selling my soul.

I wrote my first goto in the game logic.

I’m going where I can’t return. Wish me luck.

The game logic works now nicely now. It’ll just need the rest of the game graphics, sounds and more levels.

That’s it, my game is almost completed. Everything works as intended, I just need to do some tweaks and add more enemies!

It’s a simple shooting game where your health is the same as your energy, so you must shoot with care. Shooting is not the best attack, it can kill ball enemies with 5 shoots, but anything else will take 25 or more shoots! What you must do is use your “attractor” to grab debris, and then shoot them to other ships! (this is the only thing that has something to do with the theme, meh…)

Forget the cursor arrow, that’s PrtScr capturing it…

Anyway, you can actually play it <here>! Go and try it!

Is hard to get high scores! my average is 400. I need to change some things about damging and scoring, though.

Well adding features for my game idea and codding found a flaw with algorithm for collision detection I was using. Sadly some features were dependent on some features of that algorithm so quickly switching to other algorithm is not an option aether. So spending time for now reading about similar algorithms and thinking on how to fix it or write a different one with similar structure. Considering that 14 hours are left that probably means I am out of LD18 Epic fail on my part

Another day at the Cambridge bistro with a team of LDers working on projects. Not got my phone cable so no photos of the obligatory bacon sandwich. However I did just make this guy and I think he’s pretty special:

Also Terry whinged at me yesterday until I changed the name of the game from the pretentious: “What I would give for one more chance” to the much more senisble “Inside Job”. Spoil sport!