last thing ii can remember is that i made a sprite shit bricks. literally. damn, i’m tired, and my body didn’t really like me drinking too much coke. hands are shaking

http://www.livestream.com/m2tmgaming

Watch me program/draw/get this done in real time.

Things have not being going that well for me. I had to rewrite my engine two times. The first time I tried synchronized grid-based movement for the characters. They would use a global variable to slide from cell to cell… but I couldn’t figure out a way to make queues and priorities work. Who would get first dibs on an empty cell? What if there was a really complex queue? Would they figure out a way to move out of the way? It also looked a bit strange with characters not being able to move into seemingly empty cells because someone had called dibs on them.

So I tried something a bit more analog, but made a mess of the code and there were big problems with getting stuck against tiles and not sliding against them properly. The maze is really tight so you need to be able to easily slip around corners.

Finally, I managed to write a huge chunk of code which slides the player around edges, e.g. if pressing against a wall the game will look for a gap nearby and walk the character towards it. I also added buckets which helps me with depth sorting (overlapping) and it will also make collisions easier to detect later. Some characters will be vulnerable from the back. Slimes are sort of omnidirectional though.

Early array fun. Druaga colors.
Mac screencaps being incredibly slow.
Rewrite. Buckets. Pause function for screencaps.

There’s a lot of work left, but perhaps I shouldn’t underestimate what I have finished so far. Regardless, it will be a busy day tomorrow.

Check out ma workspace bro FOR REAL!!

okay here’s where I’m at so far….

Still todo :
UI, Enemy AI, Food cart (The goal) , level design, story elements, tonnes basically, not slept yet and doesn’t look like I’m going to get much tonight!

I love LD xx!

they won’t stop chasing at me

This little bugger is “Sam”. He’ll be the little guy used as the main character for my game.

Hope ya’ll like him!

Well I’m calling it a day for day 1. Here’s a screenshot so far:

I’m going for some kind of vertical shooter involving a tank. But there’s not much in the way of gameplay in there yet. My hopes for getting a fully-playable game in place in half a day were maybe unrealistic.

I think if I’m going to fulfil my intention of having lots of tweaking and polishing time, I’m going to have to scale down my idea a bit. I’ll sleep on it and I should have a revised plan in the morning.

So after a night of sleep, and some annoying interruptions, I’ve been back to work. I thought I’d update with some screens of the progress I’ve been making. I guess it’s a bit late to turn back now, so the likelihood of me scrapping this and starting over again is very low.

It started with no tiles, then simply creating the same set of tiles over and over, then creating from a set of 2 types, then a few more, then I added in an epilepsy background and alpha to test, and that was all last night. Then this morning I started by updating the graphics, and then by adding in slimes and diamonds.

Making great progress, but there is still so much more to do! Good thing there’s still another 30 hours or so left.

Just finished a custom platform-oriented physics engine for JME after trying to get JBullet to work properly.  I’m seeing better framerates too (in the hundreds, versus in the tens with JBullet), at least with a reasonable amount of moving objects. When the movable objects and fixed platforms start reaching into hundreds the framerate drops, as I’m using a brute force search at the moment (O(n^2)).  Could be improved with some simple optimizations (don’t check collisions for stationary objects or objects that have fallen out of the map).  Probably I could have gotten JBullet to work too, but I’d rather spend the time implementing a simple solution I can understand and tweak, than reading manuals and debugging external frameworks.

Visually the game hasn’t changed much, except I added in lighting.  The spheres look positively yummy with a bit of shininess and lights from two directions.   I’m dedicating tomorrow to content creation and gameplay implementation.  The goal of the game will be simple, move from a spawnpoint to a goal-portal on each level, by jumping between floating platforms, and avoiding/fighting some kind of enemies.  If I have time I’ll add some companion for the player to protect / escort.

On the tuning side the my scalaprops library is turning out to be very practical, it allows tuning of game parameters interactively which will be a real timesaver when digging into the content creation.  It will need a bit of additional work to comfortably display all the settings though.

I was really ill for a while today. I haven’t done even close to enough. Oh well. I added some weapons, here’s one-

I’ll see what I can salvage here tomorrow.

I’m going to go sleep in an hour and a half, and I’m thinking I’ll probably call it quits for development tonight. Starting with not a single clue on what to do and getting to this point gives me hope I’ll actually finish by the end of the competition. Still using the programmer art and all but art is slated for tomorrow anyway.

You can't tell, but the rectangles are meant to be robots.

For now I’ll be hosting the prototype on my site at http://cirr.info/ld20/LD20.swf so you guys can prod it and poke it while I’m asleep. I’m aware there’s a ton of niggling little bugs and not much to do yet, but have faith! Greater things are in store! Oh, such greater things. Probably. Hopefully. I think. Erp.

EDIT: So apparently my site is down. Here’s an alternate link until it comes back up: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7124203/LD20.swf

So here’s another screen shot to show off…..well….it doesn’t look much different than the last but I have made good progress! So far I have finished:

• Humorous intro
• Graphics (for now)
• 5 of the boss attacks
• Particle effects and funny comments the planets blurt out when you hit them
• Squashed some bugs

What’s left is to add more depth to the game and more parts to the boss sequence.  I also need to add sound effects and create a UI and score. I hope you guys are doing well!

Cheers!

Working on the intro cutscene. The player is the little guy on the left.

There be strange red towers on that there island…

I wonder if there is any link to the red lightning that destroyed our ship lad…

It be Dangerous to go Alone! …

Dangerous Tower Island

What be that thing on the rock…

Hmm could just be just the thing to get our own back me thinks! ;0)

I’ve now created a dialog system for me to easily get animated messages outputted, and I also diverged a bit and made a spotlight system instead of just using a lighting sprite.

Rooms now properly transition from one to another now. This has taken far too long, but the results are pretty nice at least – time will tell whether I’ve wasted too much time on it or not.

Swoosh!

Next up I’m going to draw and add in the npcs.

LD20 mailman first movement in the city from Hamilton Lima on Vimeo.

now I can control the char and the camera follow it !!!
used the default character controller and a camera following script

there so many streets here to name … I think I will change plans !! the mailman now need to deliver letters from a cat to the other cats !! lol just need to find the cats in the city, and fight the zombies !!!

So here’s what the game looks like so far.

Not much, but I can start worrying about guns and enemies now.