Now has movement and bg. Also just made lunch! :9

There’s 14 hours left and i still have a lot of work to do! (I overslept >.<)

LETS ROCK.

Ludum Dare 18 Compo ends in 14 hours, 12 minutes, 26 seconds

Okay so I’ve got less than 15 hours left to get this done and I’m sure about half of that will be slept sleeping tomorrow morning but I at least have the enemies spawning now and following various paths and such. I’m pretty happy with how it’s going now. This is the latest screenshot.

Oats and Tinned apples - Breakfast of champs v1.1

So yesterday I had to go into work, losing me a good 8 hours and I slept a good 11 hours waking myself up by passing gas loudly … but hey! It did the job!

I’ve got a FPS controller running around with a gun that launches gameobjects, a big placeholder boss and a sentry gun which tracks and shoots at the player.

Things to do today:

• Give the player a hoover that can suck up the turrets, turning them into ammunition.
• Give the player an ability to spawn turrets
• Make a big boss dude and give him a rather lovely health bar
• Make art and sound assets for everyone involved
• Menus

My body’s cranky from missed gym time and eating poorly, but I can fix that 14 hours from now. My brain is energized, and I had some pretty weird dreams relating to the compo… but lets not get into those.

This morning I’m reevaluating what I can get done. I think I was (once again) slightly optimistic with my feature set, so I’m going to cut a few things that wouldn’t add much to gameplay but would be heavy in development time, leaving me more time to work on graphics/sound/music for the rest.

DON’T GIVE UP!

You still have 14 hours! Even starting from scratch you can still produce something for the compo! If you really need more time, just submit to the jam instead, problem solved! You’ve still got time to make something awesome, take advantage of it!

Good news: we have a player!

Bad news: collision detection is pretty crappy ATM.

Really bad news: The VDP emulation isn’t quite up to scratch (you can see when you walk up a hill)

Have a look if you want: http://pubacc.wilcox-tech.com/~greaser/stuff/ld18/gm-d005.jar

I’ve got something packaged enough to be able to upload it. It’s still in progress, but a lot of the basics are there. There aren’t any real world consequences, so you won’t die, even though you’re losing lives. I’m a benevolent god, after all! Game after the bump.

You may notice some very obvious bugs. I’m sure these will reassure you as to the quality of my code. Known bugs include:

• Getting cat to moonwalk backwards.
• Cat cloning, you naughty evil professor you.
• Zombies moving weirdly compared to you and reality. D’oh.
• Immortal cats.

If you notice any more, let me know, please!

Edit: Oh. It might be nice to know the controls, huh. Left/Right or a/d for movement, and spacebar for pacifist-attack. Simple, huh.

Ran into performance problems – one of my procedural animated boxes is fast enough, but a hundred of them slows the machine to 10 fps.  Even if I turn off animation.  Which is pretty bad news, as I was planning to do the terrain from these or similar ones, and a 10×10 square terrain is pretty minimal.

I’ll see if using vertex buffer objects instead of direct rendering will speed things up, if not I may drop to the Jam and write my own lightweight scala scenegraph on top of LWJGL instead of using Sgine, or maybe just redesign my terrain approach.

My entry is on gihub if anyone is interested, it also contains a detailed development journal (sorry about the lack of line wrapping, github doesn’t seem to do it automatically for text files).

Overall I fear I spent too much time on nice procedural models and too little on actual game mechanics..

TOAST

Good morning Ludum Dare. I had one bite of my toast before I snapped out of it and realized I NEED A PICTURE OF MY FOOD!

Made my coffee.  Opened the window blinds. Eating my toast.

Got 5 hours of sleep again last night and am trying to stay both calm and pumped for the next 15 hours that remain. My game will hopefully change and improve a lot over this day.

FLASH GAME HIGHSCORES TUTORIAL

One thing I wanted to post about that I remembered last night as I finished dropping in online highscores into my Flash game was that with such a large and new crop of LDers here there may be a few that use Flash and haven’t got an easy highscores option to encourage some friendly competition on their score based game.

Well have no fear! One option is to check out a tutorial I made here a year ago about how to drop MochiMedia global highscores into your game. You don’t have to use their wrapper or ads or anything–you can use just their highscore widget.

You can check out my tutorial here and feel free to ask any questions that may come up if you are using Flixel or FlashPunk I know people here have used it with those though sometimes you have to adapt my tutorial a bit I think.

Plus you can see how they work in my current LD entry here.

I’ve written a pretty extravagant event system with dialogue boxes, world objects, other characters to interact with and trainers that catch you to battle. Also done map switching.

I’m done with most of the real game writing code, it’s world building and content making from here on out.

Well, I’ve spent the last 32 hours staring at the walls trying not to vomit, being ill. LAMEEEEEEEEE!

So I’m out. I feel good enough today to be able to sit up and type and things, but I figure I’m pretty screwed if I want to try and enter something, so its going to be laying back, chilling out, and soup for me!

Since my game is pretty much finished i was triying to pull up something hearable with SFXR and Fruity loops with no results, i definately suck at making music (specially 8-bits music)
Aaanyway, im posting some screenies of my entry now, the game, as i said is pretty much finished, ill use the rest of the day to eat ice cream and poolish what i got so far:

Yeaah, you can rotate the world! yay!

Who says hearths are harmless?

Yummy

Woke up, had breakfast (dang, forgot to take a photo) and got back to work… won’t have much time today to work on this (unfortunately, my mind is full of ideas for this game!), so I’ll have to make time count…

Working on main game logic (intro->main menu->level->level->game over->main menu, that sort of things)… Hope I have time to make a small cutscene like in my Exploration game… That was really cool… if not, I’ll do text and static images, which work aswell… probably will do static images today and cutscene tomorrow for the jam…

Anyway:

Gems give mana, health or wall-strenght… going to draw the game over screen when the enemies grab the ring (there’s 7 rings, and none of them can be caught, those are the levels).

Then, to make the level time thing to allow the player to go to the next level, and main menu… after that, design the 7 levels (only have one so far), add some instructions and music/sound… Lots of work still ahead and about 6 hours to work on this total…

Time to ead food stuff! It’s mainly leftovers from yesterday, and a couple of sandwiches.

Progress is relatively good. Refactored the throwing code so it’s now a bit more generic. And now I also have boxes! I will change it so zombies can throw stuff as well, in an atempt to increase difficulty.

I also tried to do some Agile inspired stuff, like what GBGames does… I, uhm, have a bunch of “stickers” on the screen. I add some when I get an idea or see something that needs to be fixed, and I remove stickers that’s fixed/implemented. I could do this with a pencil and some paper, but this feels much more Agile, even if one could discuss that.

I’m still streaming at livestream.com/depstv is anyone wants to take a look. It can be a bit laggy because I’m doing 101 things on this little macbook. It holds up amusingly well.

I <3 my macbook.

So having quite a late breakfast this morning, I woke up hours ago but I had to do a load of housework so got that sorted now I can get back onto working (although I did a little earlier as well)

Yummy bowl of fruit and yoghurt again, although only raspberries and blueberries today, didn’t feel like a peach as well, maybe I’ll have one later

Here’s to some good hours of work

http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1282471204

no art yet but it’s sort of working??? gotta make puzzles now i guess

oh whoops the circle bot doesn’t kill yet

done with flixel and flan (my first flixel attempt! thx for the tutorial http://wiki.github.com/AdamAtomic/flixel/seifer-tims-tutorial#intro)

In order to help Dr. Destruction create the ultimate weapon, you must get a high score on a series of minigames.

As of now, the only minigame is memory, lets hope I can come up with at least 3 by the end of the day.

Last night I took a 2 hour nap, which somehow turned into a 9 hour sleep fest, basically the same mistake I made last compo.

Also want to shout out to DrPetter for the awesome Sculptris:

Some fun and exciting stuff going on here — I’m anxious to play the final entries!

Spent nearly half of the past day developing an editor that I’m not going to use. Impact on the game is that there will be only one enemy type and multiplayer is going to be confusing.

To make my game eligible for competition, I need to complete a game mechanic that will involve writing a physics engine and a depth-first rasterer. Once I finish those (hopefully without too many bugs), I have way too many things to work on.

Not really sure how much I’m going to finish before the deadline.

Alright… here goes!

Oh man, I’m pumped for tomorrow. Seriously, I haven’t had this much fun making a game in a LONG time, I can’t wait to show you guys the finished product. You have no idea how glad I am that I decided to stick with this. Thanks to that one guy who made me feel guilty! (I’m too lazy to check what his name was otherwise I would mention it BUT HEY he knows who he is)

Anyway, at this point I’m pretty hesitant to show screenshots because I’m afraid of spoiling things, but I’m in a good mood so what the hey.

The second dungeon of three. See those big ghosts? You can’t kill them unless you upgrade your snake whip to level 2 … and they kill you in one hit. Still wondering if that was a good idea lol

Anyway, good luck to the rest of you guys!

As I went to bed last night I had almost given up because all of the issued I had with the gameplay. I couldn’t make it fun.

But after a good nights sleep I knew what didn’t work and had some new ideas, so now I’m up to speed again.