Initially I was super excited about the theme selection because it was my favorite in the final round of voting. Then I spent the first 12 hours doodling in my custom sprite editor and sleeping. I woke up today and started fresh. I finished the level editor and most of the main artwork. After lunch, I will be starting on physics and collision. Still hazy about where the theme fits in, but it will get there eventually!

So I’ve decided to change the name of my game from the ‘virusdanger’ to ‘Out of the desert’.

There are three keys, and three sections of the screen to touch.  The characters will all be drawn with lines, and geometry made of lines: beziers, rectangles, triangles as well as circles.

Two pads, and my two laptops.  Paper, android, mac OSX, ubuntu 2010.10.

I used my trusty graph paper and my handy-dandy game design prototype toolbox to see if the game rules I came up with could be any fun.

In this image, the hearts represent pedestrians walking across the plaza. They are oriented in the direction they are going, a nice characteristic of heart tokens as opposed to circles or stars.

The star represents the person you need to deliver the package to. The package is represented by the red gem, which is held by one of the three couriers represented by the Mans. The barrels represent the agents trying to stop the couriers.

Playing with the game in this way, I realized there were questions that needed answering:

• If two pedestrians try to walk into the same empty tile, what should happen?
• Should pedestrians always try to go to the opposite wall they start on, or should they just go forward until they are forced to turn?
• Should shoving be a second phase after moving your couriers, or should it be a result of moving into an occupied tile?
• Should couriers be faster than agents? Than pedestrians? Slower?
• Would randomness involved in the creation of pedestrians (where they spawn, what type they are, etc) be enough to prevent making the game mathematically solvable and therefore boring?

And finally, what is in that package that seems to be so important to the agents in the first place? B-)

I played around with various solutions, and I was able to get a feel for what made the game more complex/confusing versus what made it simple and straightforward, especially from the player’s perspective. Part of the game is being able to quickly read the status of the board and making moves with predictable results, so complicated shoving mechanics might not serve my goals. For example, if you shove an eastbound pedestrian north into a westbound pedestrian, should the westbound pedestrian get pushed east by the eastbound pedestrian? And if the westbound pedestrian is shoved into an southbound pedestrian, and if your couriers can be shoved back, it means that the end result is the eastbound pedestrian is in the same position it started from! The chain of shoves can get windy and interesting, but maybe it would be more straightforward and intuitive to force all shoves in one direction, so a chain is really just moving all pedestrians in a line.

There is one day, 9 hours left in the compo. I don’t think I need to solve all of these problems. I can always play with them as the game is developed. I have enough to start breaking ground on the code. Let’s get to work!

Update madness

• pathfinding using AStar working
• zombie and hero fight!

My movement algorithm seems to be a bit… wrong. Its collision resolution code SHOULD put my little ugly character on TOP of the line, but, clearly, it is doing the wrong thing:
Math is usually so nice to me! Somehow, I forgot all my trig, all my algebra, and everything else when the theme was announced.

EDIT: Oh, you two-faced square root function! Giving me the root that hangs Mr. Smiley-yellow-1-minute-in-GIMP from his head.

Popped off to help a friend out, and only managed to come back 7 hours later. Oh well, I did sort of plan for this. Shouldn’t take too long to make.

Anyway, my game now has a working title, “A Portrait of my Curious World”, a game with a vaguely silly/surreal story.

And as for the element of “It’s too dangerous to go alone, take this”?

All in good time.

In the meantime, I’m almost finished my basic engine, after which adding new features will be a breeze. I’ve also figured out my art style (the protagonist is deliberately inconsistent with the rest of the world). See screenshot for details

Best of luck, O worthy opponents

So this is what I’ve got so far …

Now I need to figure out how it’s going to be a game I think the game might include “Blob Repellant” as the “Take this!” item

-Phil

P.S. I’ll be making a windows build of the game as well, since iOS games can’t really compete in the compo.

So, this isn’t particularly fun, and it is horribly buggy, but you can play the game now. I should have tried to get to this point quicker, but I guess that is the fun / challenge of making games, that it is unclear on how to execute on mechanics. There is a bug where you brick dropper can get stuck off the tower, so you just gotta refresh in that case.

Instructions:

Press Z to drop bricks.

Protect the HQ.

Go Play! (flash)

So, now that I have that, I can start working on everything else, and ideas are starting to really flow. Here are some things that I want to do:

• Tune the aggressiveness of the missiles. Right now most of them don’t even come close to hitting you HQ. There is also no difficulty ramp.
• Have the brick dropper need to refresh before you can drop another brick.
• Make more types of bricks that can be dropped, including offensive ones that will attack the missiles.
• Have a brick dropper on either side of your hq so that you can protect the sides. The brick dropper would either get the next brick in the completed queue, or it would wait until a brick finished constructing.
• More enemies (the UFO, and possibly ground troops)

Now, the question is, do I keep hammering away at this, or do I go watch Thor3d…

There be strange red towers on that there island…

It be Dangerous to go Alone! …

Dangerous Red tower Island

What be that thing on the rock…

Note: Overwriting previous projects so only the latest post is relevant.

First LD update on my first LD entry. Wooo…  Making decent progress.  About 3 hours in. Got the design nailed down. And have made some good progress on art. Time for breakfast.

Tools:

• FlashDevelop
• OgmoEditor
• Paint.Net

Libraries

• Flixel
• FlixelPowerTools

Got map loading and rendering working, with a little Cave Jimmy walking around. Those cave entrance things don’t go anywhere yet.

Also having a quick roll of Smarties as the clock nears noon. Here’s a shot of my desk, Smarties included:

My player now bumps and slides off walls:

Solid.

The rooms are being loaded from a crude text format as well, but at the moment they only know about tiles being either solid or empty.

Here is the first screenshot of what I am working on.

I am rather excited about my shotgun. It enables you to fly. :’D
Because of the rate of fire, the recoil of the weapon can send you flying.

Try it yourself at http://server.yspierings.nl/ld20/id0001/

Back to serious stuff.
I am not so happy about the progress I’ve made. I got stuck on the physics. My character kept stuttering somehow.
Luckily I was able to fix it and I am back on track.

Another update to “Against the Wall”. The scripts for creating the ledges and making the blocks pop out of the wall are pretty much done. There are two ways to do it. LMB makes the block pop all the way out/in from the wall. RMB lets you drag it slowly into or out of the wall to the degree that you choose. Also, I’ve baked some textures/normal maps and applied it to the block model. In addition, I’ve created some preset “chunks” that are 64×64 units in size. In Minecraft style, new chunks will be loaded as the player nears the end of the world.

Also, special black blocks will be added that cannot be moved. These blocks will house static elements such as cities and story related elements. The blue block in the pic below is the player’s current target, in the middle of the screen.

Few hours after starting, I have something to show:

Let’s see if I can get this guy to come alive.

Unimaginatively zelda-like, I’m going to have to come up with enemies and more puzzle mechanics and then more levels.. And better art if i have the time.

controls: arrows, z for switching through inventory, x for using item. Only one item can be found

http://medice.kapsi.fi/dangerous/

This will be my first LD, working on a strange and short hardly interactive story Should be interesting though.

I need to go eat something, so here have a sketch for the meantime.

Waiting

now its time to find some sounds …

So I’ve been spending some time looking at the combat screen and have looked at implementing a simple menu like system. Reminds me of some old school games I played back in the 90′s.

The menus respond to mouse clicks but I might implement some keyboard commands for those that don’t want to deal with a mouse (seeing as movement is done via wasd or arrow keys anyways).

Would anyone be interested in trying this out early and provide feedback if I get something a bit more playable?