Hello there, LD community and whoever else might read this!

I’m new around here, but not totally new to game development. Some might have heard of some Free game I’m messing around with every now and then, and maybe even seen some programming example of mine, involving a pig.

Anyway, after spending way too much time figuring out what tools to use, working on my new site, Olofson Arcade, and various other things, I’ve finally decided what to do, and (roughly) how.

[...]
So, some time ago, I decided that I’ll just wrap Kobo Deluxe up and finish it according to the original design goals: “An enhanced version of Akira Higuchi’s game XKobo.” Nothing more, nothing less. It’s a small, retro styled game for hardcore arcade fanatics, and that’s the way it should stay, modulo some easier skill levels for the occasional joystick wizard wannabe.

Now, what to do with all those ideas that had accumulated, all the unofficial experiments, all the neat graphics tricks that wouldn’t really work without OpenGL, and all that? But of course: A sequel!
[...]

Full story here.

David

Today I’m feeling like I want to share my unreadable code. (code is here )
Thats my main file where everything I do is put. Yeah, not everything is used in the code yet.

Haven’t done much today, fixed some stuff and thats all. I don’t think I’ll be doing much til after wednesday because I have to work on something for school.

Also today I came up with the best concept EVAR, you play a dude who wants to go to the moon, but just can’t jump all the way up to it, so he then go’s and beats up gravity so he can jump to it. I’m going to see if I can fit idea into next months mini LD or make it in my spare time.

So, I’ve been working on a Flash version of my LD11 game, Tiny Hawk.

At first I was planning on making a super fancy version, possibly with 3D graphics and overall a very different focus from the original. The original was really just a single-switch platformer where you got some score bonuses by chaining tricks together. I was thinking about making it more about the tricks instead. While planning this though, I realized it would have been a lot of work and I didn’t have a clear vision of the final product, so I decided to just port the original game to Flash instead.

Now, somewhere along the way I decided the original game wasn’t quite good enough, so I started changing things. I made the levels smaller. This enabled me to not have to put so much filler into the levels. Some of the original levels were half empty anyhow. With this smaller size, I can fill the level most of the time without repeating myself a lot. Another major thing I changed is I added momentum. This means that if the player avoids various things that slow him down, he can get through the levels much faster, and reach places unreachable at low speeds. Speed, of course is the new name of the game. Instead of a score, the player is timed on how fast he can beat the levels.

Well, that’s it for now. Just wanted to share some of my progress here also. I’m talking about the project more regularly on IRC though, also posting links to development builds. I won’t post those here since I’m trying to keep it under wraps until I get it sponsored.

Ok. I have finally decided on what game I am going to make, i have designed it, and everyhting else. other then made it. And, I also haven’t decided what platform to make it for? What would get the most sales? I am like a moderate intermediate user of python, but that is all, i want to be able to sell this. And school starts in 2 days, thats the other thing. ;P Might not be able to make this one if I can’t make the game.

Question: If anyone knows, how would I sell a game for Windows?

Today, after much faffing around I officially kick off my October Challenge game. After a long and heated debate between myself and an empty page in a notebook, I’ve decided to lower my sights considerably. I had intended to make a non-traditional tower defense game, I had two interesting aesthetics for this. One had the working title “In the Loop” and was centred around espionage networks intercepting information to stay relevant. The second was a hacker-orientated TD, where the towers are the various applications deployed in an effort to usurp control of the system.

Upon thinking about it, I realised that even though I have one of these ideas quite well fleshed out in design, to make it fun and interesting will take a hell of a lot of playtesting and iteration. So for this month I’m going to stick to tried and tested mechanics and make a traditional TD. The working title for this is “21 Days” since that is exactly how long I have to finish it and set it free.

My goals today are to get stand in creeps running around a tile-based map with quick and hacky A* directing them. Then get some grid-control and be able to plant towers (that do nothing yet). If I get this game polished up enough in the 21 days I might add a bit of meta-research, between levels you task scientists with researching technology dropped by creeps during the last mission, in order to develop more effective towers to help as the levels and creeps escalate. However, I’m going to focus on having a playable TD first.

Feature creep begone.

I’m developing in Flex/AS3 with Flashpunk. This is counter to my plans, as I had spent the better part of last week messing around in flixel. Flashpunk just seems that much more sensible, I can work far more quickly in it as I find its structure and usage much more intuitive, seems to me it was written more for programmers than flixel is.

Now, if I can resist the urge to play more Civilization I might actually achieve today’s targets….

Hi everyone, got the basic physics engine working. Took forever but now it’s finally somewhat stable ^_____^ It still explodes at random times but its fine for now haha. I got it to the point where you can drag the little physics entities around with your finger and fling em around the screen. Next thing to do is add blood and friction. Maybe I’ll make one of those tower defense games later using the physics code from this. Oh well, back to work now ^_____^

Now it has officially been a week since I started the project.  I must say I am pleased with the progress made so far, although things need to start moving along a little quicker.  I am still knee deep in the editor, although wow, has it come a long ways in a single week.  If I must say so, this is likely the best editor I’ve ever made.  It has almost complete undo/redo support.  I can’t say I am pleased with the code behind the editor.  Maintaining this will end up being a nightmare, I can feel it already.  A lot of copy/paste code segments for things like add/delete checkpoints / track nodes and other bits of information.

Since I last wrote a progress update, I have added the checkpoint system, which will be used to verify the car went around the track properly, and for timing the lap.  I’ve also added camera control to the editor, which involved making the engine support the mouse wheel for zooming in/out.  Also the track nodes now contain a width modifier, that can change the width of the track in a particular area.

Finally I’ve added a start grid tool, which can create evenly spaced grids for the starting position of the car.  Only 9 tasks remain on the editor and track environment and then I will be onto a new task.  I still don’t have a good name for the project so “TBR: The Best Racer” is sticking for now.  Or it could be Tim Beaudet’s Racer…

A current screenshot of the editor with a textured track, checkpoints and starting grid.

My current plan of attack is to add objects / sprites to liven up the environment.  Trees, haybales, cones, crowds and other common trackside objects would really liven the place up.  After that I need to implement saving/loading of the track, and a car/world editor to assist when I start making the actual gameplay.  More to come in the following days.  If I have a miracle session tonight, perhaps the editor will be completed?  Ahahaha…

Hey,

I’ve got my full blog here. But here’s a few screenies.

An optical illusion:

The result of awful code:

Anyway, the grisly details are at my blog, so check it out. The code sample is “unforgettable.”

-Phil

Not making much progress this weekend and the next two I’m going to be otherwise occupied, but I’ll do my best with whatever time I can get on weeknights…

Just thought I’d share this:

GAME DEVELUPMINTZ?!

Our cat doesn’t approve of my game development habit ! Other than that, nothing to see here…

*Edit: Fixed lolspeak…

Today was mostly full of bugs.
First I could’t get it to save on Boolean and an integer. This one feature that needs to be added, so I can’t avoid it.

Then I had this problem that made it not add 100 to the score. I fixed this by removing
score = 0;
I was annoyed that such a simple thing caused this.

I think there were some other bugs, but I can’t remember them right now.

I’m currently adding collision support right now. I also added the score/hiscore to the “gameplay view”. You can also shoot bullets now which is good. Also invert the game from black on white, to white on black.

Tomorrow I’ll finally add the enemy spawner and see what I need to add after that.

I don’t have pictures today, because I’m writing on my iPad. I was planing on recording a video….

A less lame day (11:30 AM)

I said on my day 3 post that I “hope I come back and do more work”… which I didn’t.

I got up early today (9 AM… which should make you wonder when “normal” is), and did some work. I’m ignoring IRC at the moment, so I can make a whole bunch of progress.

It says 'Behind' not Fehind... not that you would have thought otherwise

Been tweaking the code and rough editing interface to support multiple layers and a transformation matrix. Currently it’s limited to a single room, but neighboring room editing should be soon… hopefully today.

Back to work.

More Control (1:30 PM)

Now only displaying the layer info from the current layer.

You can't tell, but it's spinning and doing cool perspective depthy stuff

As you change layers, the camera zooms in. In game will work the same.

Fun fun.

Adjacent Room Drawing and Editing (2:30 PM)

Brown things in the background? Lets pretend those are some sort of pillar.

Camera Panning (7:15 PM)

After a 2 hour walk, dinner, and a some bugfixing (some editor alignment bugs), we now have some very basic Camera panning.

Two rooms. The one with the red tile markers is the one we are editing.

Just about done for the night. A little more minor tweaking, then movie time.

Building maps in all directions (7:40 PM)

I can now build maps in all directions.

That's where the staircase goes.

There seems to be a crash bug when I go to far (or at least there was earlier). I’ll tackle that tomorrow.

Overall, a good day.

Hi,

I have a webbuild of the Iphone game I’m working on. It’s pretty simple, but I’m getting close to my deadline and I could really use some feedback on what to focus on.

Play it here: http://garbos.itu.dk/explosivelove/game.html

I created a nice visual target, literally, to aim for. It took me a little bit of time to figure out how to visually display the target separate from the collision mesh. Including, a slow walk down a lane called Child-Parent Scripting Confusion. But, now it is functional.

October Challenge Progress 10/8

Next Action: Level Two
Total Hours To Date: 18.25

Contrasaurus: Defender of the American Dream

We’ve been working on Contrasaurus for some months now, and with the opportunity to partake in the October challenge we now have double the reason to push hard to wrap it up. The premise is your standard dino-action-thriller. You are summoned into the future to save America from the dark Communist forces that are amassing in Nicaragua. After completing the mission and receiving the highest honor a top-secret military dinosaur can receive a terrible truth is revealed. Finally you seek out those whom you depend on most, only to have your darkest suspicions confirmed.

The game is nearly complete. Although it’s been publicly available to anyone who knows the url for some time, we’re aiming for a real “launch” on Sunday. You’re all invited to the pre-launch, starting now, to help us find out any last minute issues and iron out any bugs. Please leave comments and let us know about any bugs or comments you have, we’ll really appreciate it!

The game is HTML5 based, so requires a modern browser to play. For best results I recommend Chrome. (Firefox “works”, but is generally unplayably slow, Safari and Opera may work as well.)

We added a donate button for now, though we’re not entirely sure of the best strategy to actually make money. Do we still win the challenge if we sell at least $1 but are still way in the red profit-wise?

Today I made it so if your ship went to the edge of the screen it will come out the other side. Other than that I’ve been working on the title screen.

Didn’t do much today, but this weekend I’l properly be coding for hours on end. I’m would like an proper running version by the end of the weekend for bug testing.

Thats the title screen so far.

So, here’s what it does/you can do:

• Procedurally generated dungeons
• Enemies with some AI and pathfinding
• Item collecting, storing, using, dropping and crafting
• save and load (not all data saved right now)
• Chests with items
• If you are killed, you lose your items, and must return to get them back

Kill enemies till you find the keyspell, that lets you get to the next level, and so on. also the only useful item you can get from crafting is a rare goop (combine goop and a keyspell) otherwise you get… something else

> this sentence is totally a link to the latest playable build <

This image included because I thought it was funny, so there

Well I think I’ll try to make something for the October challenge. My only possible chance of making a sale, I think, is to make an iPhone game, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Because my free time is sparse, I was thinking I’d port over a game I made for an 84-hour compo. That way, I can spend less time drawing and planning and more time just finding the bits about the game that were fun. Also in the interest of saving time, I might make this in Unity, although I hadn’t decided. If I don’t, I’ll just use the iPhone framework I already have and find some iPhone 2D physics library I can use – does anybody know any good ones?

I’m going to port over “A Lasting Impression.” You can find it here: http://www.javagaming.org/index.php/topic,19135.0.html

I think its main improvements will come from creating a challenge before the time limit is up. Currently, you can get kids angry when you take their bubble gum and they run around and knock things over, but that’s the only challenging bit at all. What I’d like to do is add in more things that can potentially mess up your stack of stuff if you don’t deal with them, like angry dogs, popping-up prairie dogs, gusts of wind, and the like. Plus, I think I will get rid of the whole items falling from the sky thing and replace it with every single item being added by something. As in, an airplane might fly by, and if you throw something at it then it crashes and explodes into debris you can use, balloons float by occasionally or are attached you kids (and you must pop them to get them to come down), etc. These sorts of things will make the game much more fun that it is, I think.

A week ago I announced my entry for PoV’s October Challenge, an old-school 4X space game (ala Master of Orion) for the iPad called Distant Star. I’ve made a fair amount of progress since that announcement; Distant Star has gone from a pile of half-finished tech and ideas to a rough playable prototype. Almost all the core features are in place: ship construction, exploration, colonization, combat. Of course, to be properly playable I needed a few basic AIs — at the moment, you can play against two simple, deterministic AI players, each with their own play style (one colonizes recklessly, while the other builds up small fleets and attempts to capture one system at a time).

Introducing some simple AI players helped point out all kinds of multiplayer bugs I’d introduced so far — turns out none of my fog of war code worked at all, and resource accumulation was completely borked. The first game I played the AI wiped me out almost instantly.

Things are not looking good for the red player...

Based on some early, vicious usability feedback I’ve made some subtle changes to the map interaction, restricting scrolling outside of the galaxy and highlighting fleets or systems when they were selected. I also played around with a real-time version of the game, but quickly realized that, while it made the early game much more pleasant, things got way too hectic once the AI acquired more than a handful of high-quality planets. They started building ships far faster than the player, especially if the player’s empire was quite spread out. Back to turn-based I went.

Can't. Keep. Up.

Up next: research management. Bring on the tech tree!

I’m still going along rather slowly, but I think I’ve made enough progress in the last couple of days to justify an update again . I failed to stick to the promise I made myself that I won’t add graphics until the gameplay is working, so here’s the much nicer 2nd screenshot:

Towns, Terrain, Basic Trade Goods, Basic Town Simulation, Basic Random Map Generation, Loading data from file - all working

Gameplay isn’t really happening yet, so the priority list of features to implement next are:

1. Airships (essential for gameplay)
2. Trade Interface (essential for gameplay)
3. Better Town Simulation (essential for sustainable gameplay)
4. Better Map Generation
5. Fog of War / Exploration

This project is probably more than I can do in a month, but I’ll be happy if I can manage about 60-80% completion, I can always still polish after October and then start selling it (it’s at least designed to have enough gameplay to be salable ) . Still having lots of fun with this project!

It was a real fight tonight getting the “Win” to be displayed nicely and in red. Took me a while to understand the relationship between the GUIText and a font material. Brother, sure wish I had figured it out faster.

Stacker Progress 10/7

On the business hat side of things I discovered that PayPal now has a microtransation option to their pricing structure and signed up. I have my reservations about the trustworthiness of PayPal after all the stories I’ve heard, but this will be my best option if I price Stacker at $1 like I was thinking.

Next Action: Some sort of visualization for the target area you are building the tower to.
Total Hours To Date: 15.75