Passion fruit and shredded wheat. Trying to bounce back from last night’s junk food.

This probably looks like exotic baby vomit if you've never had a passion fruit before.

Well, after some work, I’ve got good platform physics, two well drawn levels, and cool lighting.

I’m now essentially done with this scene. I expect there to be three more significant areas in the game before it’s done. I’m fairly certain that 9 hours is enough time to do this given I don’t suddenly crack from getting so little sleep the past few days ^^;

You can download this most recent build here.

It may not be Giga, but it has Pocky for backup.

I’ve made a fair bit of progress since my last update, I’ve got some nice new graphics and alot of the engine stuff sorted. All I need to do now is make the bones pick-upable and add lives and it’s pretty much a game. I’m going to try and add enemies, since it’s a bit easy without them and some type of barrel that creates a huge explosion if it gets blown up would be cool too. Unforunately I slept horribly last night and it’s starting to catch up with me now. But I’ll soldier through and try to finish in time.

As you can see from the screenshot, there’s now naturally forming  spaces in the rock. I’d like to round these off so they look abit more natural though, not a priority at the moment though. There’s also a little archeologist sprite and some bones scattered about.. probably should have screenshotted the dynamite and it exploding, but too late now. You might notice a few graphical glitches (texture seam near the bottom, dark curves left on the background by the explosion that aren’t solid). I hope to be able to get these fixed up, but I don’t think they’re too major right now.

I got tired of trying to fix screen wrap, so I decided to just put an odd, unkown stone with a lot of shades of grey and black. I can’t help getting the feeling I have seen that stone somewhere, but oh well. I did not intend it to look like exactly like that stone, I might change it. Now for a major upgrade in the world of generation I am working on: Transfer all ores to different sprites instead of 1 sprite, and make the ORE detect the collision, not the player.

Still got lots of stuff todo, but Im happy with the graphics so far. Next up: Loot!

Click here to try!

Discover19

Post your scores. Mine is 85721 – developer failing at his own game = good sign.

W/Up: Jump
S/Down: Slide
A/Left: Play random beeps

To Do:
- fix glitch: run off a platform and jump again in midair
- fix platform generation done
- Score done
- Discoveries (new abilities – in the final version you won’t be able to slide from the start) half strikethrough – basics there, jsut need to enable it
- an ending player runs off screen, now for outro

if enough time is left
- online Highscore
- some little eyecandy (like platforms coloring when stepping on them)
- boss

Now, off to dinnnnnnerrrrr

I wish i didn’t mess around with me graphics since now i don’t have time to make audio for the game. The game is still missing its ending and requires more tweaking. I’ll try to get this finished soon as possible since i have a flight to catch tomorrow morning haha!

Right, I’ve just polished it a bit and entered it into the compo! I just needed need change some text sizes and that. It could do with a bit more work but I’ve running out of time, I’m going home for Xmas tomorrow and have got to pack up my stuff and that.

I finished my first level… It took me a day and a half, and I’m hoping to be able to do it twice in 9 hours, with much more complex stuff….. I’ve done all the graphics I’l need, got some sounds and an epic first battle/level. I also have a idea for an ending, which… well. Its an amazing ending lets just say.

-bear

So, Ludum Dare 19 is ending in less than ten hours. My game isn’t even close to being finished. I attempted to use this LD as a way to learn PushButton Engine. I feel like what I’ve learned is that PBE is documented poorly and is hard to learn. The current version has no tilemap support, which is quite disappointing as I was trying to make a platformer. I was able to grab code from a development version of PBE though for displaying tilemaps though, but I had a lot of trouble trying to make the tilemap work with the collision detection. The way I was able to make it work was to generate Box2D collision polygons for each tile, but using Box2D physics for a platformer like mine proved to be awkward as my character would get stuck on tile corners and bump off walls, which made wall jumping difficult. PBE does also have its own collision system that does not use Box2D, but I was not able to figure out how to make it work with the tilemap due to lack of documentation.

The one final approach for physics and collision detection I’m yet to try is to ditch Box2D physics, but just utilize its collision detection system, and write my own physics. It’s the final glimmer of hope for PBE, but it’s an uphill battle at this point.

Sorry for the spam but I have a working build for you all to try. I really do need people from any platform to try this because I am pretty sure it will work on windows but not so sure with mac or linux. Edit: Also, no music in this version and it still needs some polish.

Here’s an image of the lighting to entice you:

I’ll give you this in two flavours, the first is a RAR, you will need python 2.5-2.7 and pygame 1.8.1 to run.

ZIP: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11377079/Ludum%20Dare/Space.rar

Or you can have a Windows only .exe:

EXE: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11377079/Ludum%20Dare/dist.rar

As always, extract and then run either game.py or game.exe.

There is going to be errors so if you find any put them in the comments. I’m expecting python errors (if any of you python guru’s know any fixes that would be helpful – specially with the cross platform stuff). Other things I am expecting is missing .DLL errors and other weirder shit, so just report. I can’t even promise this thing will boot-up.

I finished the smashed rock feature, but here comes a newly discovered bug.

Diagonal mining = Not mining anything but spawning rock, so guess what we have here?

I’ll just skip this bug, as this is nearly impossible to fix unless I make rock appear diagonally, but that would be a lot of work. If I finish the other bugs a bit before this contest finishes, I might fix it.

I am currently working on the screen wrapping, but for now, here’s a picture of another WIP feature I’m doing on the side. This makes mining limited so stone won’t appear where the player mined =)

To finish this feature I’ll need to make the player be on top of the broken stone to make it look better.

Having done nothing yesterday (thing got in the way, like Doodle God and various other activities), I have today a few hours ago decided to actually do something. It won’t be a very long or serious game, given that I only have maybe 8 hours in total, but it might be interesting.

The idea is you walk around and discover new things. Which sounds extremely generic, but I don’t want to spoil it too much. The guy walking around is Mr Head, which some of you might know from Mr Head and the Cow Drowning, a mini LD game from some time back. Anyway, here’s a screenshot of the current progress.

It pretty much got the look of the game down as it is. Dunno about sounds yet.

All is finished! *jazz hands*

Went a different way with the multiplayer in the end but still should be good fun.

Had to use some colour in the game even though I didn’t want to but the grid layout was difficult to read.

Now just a load of testing to make sure everything works fine and no game crashes etc.

Actually I made the whole gameplay a bit more stable and now I will start with designing some levels. It will be for sure not so easy to explain the whole gameplay as somehow the game turns out to be not that easy. I think a playable tutorial would be best…Here a screenshot with new models and background. (That are small discovery-shuttles inside that particles..hardly to see (at the moment)  )

I decided that a discovery theme should hold surprises, even for the game creator. So I decided my game levels would be procedurally generated mazes with randomly spawning artefacts inside them. I just finished my maze generator, and I’m surprised that it worked given the 400 line spaghetti code the it runs on.

This much closer to something that can be called a game!