made some more progress. added a few terrible images i drew and made a basic map reading from a text file. thinking i’m going to quit soon… we’ll see.

so… has anyone else started out trying to write clean, object oriented code, only to have 95% of it end up in main.cpp as spaghetti code?

So after hitting a few dumb coding blocks here and there due to forgetting my originally far more scaled down plans, I found that I had actually done some doodles for planning. And as a master of planning, the majority of my plan for the actual level of the game is “fill in later”. This bodes well. In fact this entire plan just smells like a recipe for success. Oh well.

So much for "take this".

This is going to come back to haunt me tomorrow.

Still, getting there. Should have most of the code done by the end of tonight.

Thought about the theme a lot. Honest, I did. Eventually I had an idea of having an AI companion with you (as it’s dangerous to go alone), which was more or less like walking a dog. Dog is interested in some things you don’t like (like stopping to sniff at things) and would fight for you (you, on the other hand, couldn’t fight). So you’d have to drag the dog kicking and screaming along across some bits. But that’s about it. Some basic game mechanics (things that attract / detract the dog), but the actual game idea was missing.

I toyed around with the code a bit, but I really wasn’t feeling too hot about the whole thing, so I threw the towel early on, and went to watch megamind instead.

A couple hours ago I got an idea for a joke, and built it very quickly. It’s such a stupid joke that I won’t be submitting it as an entry, but here it is for your (questionable) enjoyment. Win32 binaries only. The game freezes when you reach the joke, so don’t be surprised.

Working on cleaning up the visuals and getting something presentable. The mechanics are turning out quite nicely so far and I’ve integrated Ogmo into the mix.

I spent about 2 hours working on some movement code for my game. It’s totally wrong. I blame math again. I guess I better fix it. At least I have some code to save.

Hangedman: Well, no, no, don’t take that wrong. I’m not done. Not giving up. Maybe giving out.

<Laughter offscreen>

Hangedman: I built the main game structure in an hour and a half last night, but then sleep all night and work all day has cost me a remarkable amount of time. But the game is practically playable. A few graphics here, a few arrays there, a bit of panicked music <Chuckles offscreen> and we’ll give it a go.

Hangedman: But I will persevere, even if I have to sacrifice my personal life to do it. What little there is.

<Laughter offscreen>

Hangedman: Keep on truckin’, all you great people being greatly sleep-deprived in your great time zones. I’ll give you a bit more music to carry on. It’s the incomparable Parov Stelar, with the kickin’ Libella Swing. Hope you like it.

<Applause, fade to music>

I’ve created a victim class that has brains, and zombified the brains of my flea class. The result is fleas that seek out victims.

flea_bitten

yes, they are indeed in search of brains

You can use your left/right arrow keys to try and escape – but even though you might go off the screen — rest assured that even if you are off the visible screen, they are still chasing you through memory. You CANNOT escape. I made sure that you were only fast enough to “think” you could actually escape. There is no happy ending in this demo.

(disclaimer, if you end up using precious hours from your project time trying to prove me wrong by escaping these fleas and therefore become unable to finish your project — i am in no way responsible. But I am not saying that I am NOT putting forth that challenge to prove me wrong. )

I am not entirely happy with the flea movement in terms of jump velocity, and have added that as a TODO for once I have more of the gameplay logic done. This will have to do for now.

I believe my next goal will be to create some type of level. I am kind of thinking that slopes would be nice. I see alot of block stuff going on in these posts. I’m kind of thinking I don’t want these fleas to drown in the sea of platformer clones.

The more I think about this concept, the more I love it. Killing a single flea, is quite a trivial process. But infestation is not at all trivial to survive.

Part of the concept here is that you are playing the role of a zombie. You see, mankind is very well versed on surviving a zombie apocalypse given all the training they’ve gotten via zombie movies. So in this one, merely 4 days after 28 days, you are the only zombie left. I shall not reveal all the twists.. but I shall tell you that your “this”, is a single flea egg. How could such a microscopic little egg bring down the entire world as we know it ? That is a great question, and it truly deserves an answer.

Zombies tend to have a single-mindedness when it comes to their search for brains. In the animal kingdom it is much the same, as it’s often instinctual for them to attack in packs. What if… a telepathic zombie was able to communicate his wants/needs to his offspring ? What if a zombie took the time to hatch a tiny flea egg ? What if that baby flea thought the zombie was his “momma” ? what if they were family ? What if they wanted to join the Mafia ??? errr. ok, that last one is not a part of the story, but if i’ve been trying to work the mafia into this story somehow and sometimes i forget i axed that part.

Anyways. Enjoy this little flea zombified flea simulator with no blood. run you pansy.. run i say. cause there is no hope for you.

Zombified Flea AI development a success

Well I’m into it pretty good now. I have to stop doing the frilly stuff before I have an actual game though. As you can see below I took the time to paint both of my robot models – hopefully that won’t come back and bite me.  I’ll be offline for a bit as I am hosting a dinner party – I’ll be back around 8:30 EST for more fun.

I keep confusing myself regarding the flight direction and world orientation… adding landmarks for reference, but it might be hard to get this playable without dropping into chase cam. Maybe there’s a chance for some novel control switch-ups though. I’m thinking point-the-mouse steering rather than keys for roll and tilt of the vehicle. That would add a global sense of overview for the player, without keeping track of exactly how the plane is turned. Not sure it would be flexible enough for what I want though. I’ll try something else first. It’s not actually supposed to be an airplane, so screen-space directional input might work out as more intuitive, if the camera follows along to some degree.

The engine is entirely done (I hope), with support for scripted cutscenes and automatic level loading.

Now it’s just time to pump out a bunch of levels, tie it together and hope it’s fun.

I’m worried about how long it’ll take for me to upload the final product on my extremely slow bandwidth. Might have to plan for a couple hours of upload time…

All 5 levels are now playable, we have HUD showing magic item cooldown and cloning limit, CLICK TO PLAY:

My TODO list keeps on shrinking:

Things going pretty smoothly, I’m gonna grab some dinner and then on to title screen and cutscenes, then some sounds and music

Yes, these are the final graphics for the game. Deal with it.

Okay, so Love2D doesn’t have a good collision system except for whats in their ‘ten-ton hammer’ physics kit. So, I am trying to use a 3rd party addon called Hardon Collider. Seems like it will be easy to use if I can get it working…

Here’s a screenie of current progress… Just a map for now

Finished working on the main character and did a blender rendering of what it should like

Well… except for the shadows which are kind of expensive for mobile devices.. and also the cellshading… and probably the diffuse shading will be a little bit different… and probably everything else as well… :p

Anyone else experience one or more of these moments so far? I sure have. xD

That I’m not finishing again. I’ll see how far I get with this platformer tonight. But otherwise, not finishing. Not even Jamming. Again.

This last hours don’t show much improvement visually:

But below the hood, I’ve done tons of stuff, mainly a Lua-based scripting system capable of driving cutscenes and other game events! Really proud of it, since it can really makes the code cleaner and handling of the lifespan of objects easier…

The old man in the screenshot appears in a cloud of smoke and will give the object needed for the current level… Just need to add the talking component, which shouldn’t be too hard…

Problem is that I’m running short on time (30 hours to go, but I won’t work that whole time, since I have to rest a bit for work next week… )…

Task list:

• Framework working
• Loading a level data (from a DDS image)
• Rendering the level (3d generated from the level data)
• Drawing the character
• Rendering character
• Design levels/items so I know what to implement
• Spawn points
• Bind spawn points to scripting events
• Draw “old man” and do speech system (seems like a polish thing, but it’s kind of important…)
• Give and take objects to the player (through scripting)
• Spawn creatures and give them rudimentary AI (also through scripts)
• ….

A 48 hour compo is not the best time to learn all the vagaries of an expansive language.  Maybe I’ll be up for C# next LD.  Let’s give javascript a try instead!

Every day you wake up and have a day before you where you have to meet new personalities and befriend them.

Added some cars too, hoping my brain stays together.

(yes, there’s several bigbreasted women in there)

Here you go:

Screenshot features:

• World map

• Small bitmap in a separate window, from which map is loaded. Yes, I’m using bitmap for world map, too.

• Some poor fellows that are later to become prey of evil monsters. They currently just walk around randomly, but don’t walk through walls. They spawn at the magenta zone on the world map.

• Complete absence of animation whatsoever. Also, mobs don’t walk but instantly teleport to the adjacent tile. Smooth movement will be added soon.

• Shoddy programmer art

• Complete absence of gameplay