So I’ve been tackling the Plaza, which was originally planned to be a simple representation of the play area grid.

It also keeps track of each Entity running around. I keep Pedestrians, Couriers, and EnemyAgents in separate containers, and there is a single VIP (the goal) as well. All Entities have position, orientation, and a string that represents how to draw them.

Here’s how they differ:

Pedestrians also have a preferred turning direction. When they run into an occupied space, they try to turn in their preferred turning direction first. If that space is also occupied, then they try the other direction. If that space is also occupied, then they remain in their original orientation and stand still that turn. To illustrate, a Pedestrian with an affinity to turning left is facing to the right. In trying to move forward he finds that the tile is occupied by another Entity. So he tries to move up (turning left from his right-facing orientation) first before trying to move down.

Couriers can carry a package. There are plans to only allow one package in the game, so only one Courier will actually have the package at a time.

EnemyAgents have nothing special about them except that they cannot be shoved. If an Entity tries to shove into an EnemyAgent, the action won’t happen. Likewise if a chain of shoves results in an attempt to shove an EnemyAgent, the shoves won’t happen.

VIPs do not move, so they don’t have an orientation. They just stand in one place, waiting for the package to be delivered.

I’ve been wondering if I should have an explicit representation of the Package itself, but I’m getting sleepy and exhausted, so I figured it would be best not to make decisions like this until I’m awake enough to think them through.

Once I get these new objects rendering, I think the next task is to create some instances of Couriers and get them moving about the play area according to player input.

There are 21.5 hours left in the compo. I figure I’ll wake up with 13-14 hours left to go. Wee!

It’s 6am here, I’ve been up for 24 so far and I have a hardcore intention of dragging along until sometime this evening to get the most out of the time I have.

About half the art is hitting a semi-decent retro style (FlxEmitter for the win!!!99!). I’m actually positively surprised with the animation quality on the few animations.

At this point the todo list is (unfolds napkin):

• The spear item. Collisions seem to be wonky when doing free-form rotations.
• Collisions in general. The hitboxes of zombies are very large and a bit counter-productive.
• Zombie types. There are four and they just need to exhibit proper movement.
• Point system (… I’m thinking “how many different items did you manage to work it with?”)
• Enter/exit cutscenes would be nice to add a bit of flavour.
• Art assets (polishes, improvements and actuals)
• Items (moar items!). The base class is flexible enough to have a relatively easy time of extending to some new uses.

A shoutouted poll, before last: what were the most ludicrous items you recall being proffered throughout your gaming career? Magic, talking swords with an aversion to the number 8, assortments of wines and spirits to “improve your sprirituality” or something even worse?

Finally, I’m impressed with the progress I’ve been able to make myself, but it’s easy to see the veterans at work. They talk of finishing engines and systems within mere hours and constructing what seems like monolithic designs within atomic time frames whilst still maintaining an art level unlike any I’ve seen this side of 6 am. I’ll be pleased if I just submit

It’s been many hours since my last update.  I haven’t slept in that time, and I’m far from my peak programming performance right now… but I’m still making progress.  I could actually show an underwhelming screen shot at this point, but I’d like to get just a little further before I do that, so that I’ve got a bit more substance.  Basically this update is just to show that I’m still alive and chugging along!  I promise my next post will have much more content, one way or another!

As someone asked me, here is a small demo (most gameplay elements are not included here).

test it (controls : ARROW keys)

Here’s the timelapse of the first 12 hours of me working on my submission:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfF85klAcsw

My game is about a robot who must embark on an epic journey to defeat the evil Lord Souza (Mr. Souza was my freshman physics teacher and he asked me to make him the main villain in my next game the other day.) The journey will be far too dangerous to go alone, so his cowardly friend gives him a pickle to help fight off the minions.

Finally, something that actually feels like it could be a game! Now to give it an actual point.

In-game screenshot with weapons and shields!

Instead of just saying SCREW IT, IT WON’T WORK, I decided to mess around for nearly 3 hours trying to create a specific death animation/scenario for the enemies.

What a waste. Now I’m behind schedule AND I can’t make it the way I wanted to.

PRO TIP: If it can’t be figured out in 30 minutes, simplify it and move on! NO TIME TO WASTE!

BACK TO WORK!

Zombies, check.  Monkeys, check. Robots, check.  Ninja, check!

I finally got collisions/navigation working between objects and tiles, and colored and backed my sprites.  The ninja runs up and hides behind any other creature within 100 px (white circles).  The robots, move in straight lines, the monkeys circle, and the zombies randomly wander around.

On the code side, I still need a way to save and load levels so I can start stitching the world together.  On the art side, I need to animate the zombies, monkeys, robots, and ninja.  I’d also like to put together some fun comic-frames to introduce the story, but I’m pretty slow when it comes to that kind of thing… so we’ll see.

Rest well LD20ers.  Tomorrow is the

So far here’s what I have. (click for video)

You can check out the rest of the videos here – http://www.vimeo.com/visionsofafar/videos

There is no way you could escape.

Yeah, I know. We were LIED TO at preschool. Childhood: destroyed.

My idea: You are a nurse at a hospital for solo adventurers. It’s dangerous to go alone, but they went anyway, so now they’re sick. Each one has a different illness, represented by a different colour. In true homeopathy style (hey, it is a fantasy universe), to cure an illness of a particular colour you must make a potion of that colour, by mixing primary colours together.

Since potion colours are caused by pigments (SCIENCE!), a subtractive colour scheme is called for – namely, CMY. I wanted to use Red-Yellow-Blue, but it doesn’t actually work in practice. Sadness.

Here’s what I have so far: Playable Demo (requires Unity Web Player)

What do you reckon - graphics award is in the bag, yeah?

Click boxes to go there. You can visit the grey box to pick up a (weirdly-spherical) flask, and then visit the cyan, yellow, and magenta boxes to fill it with colours. Colours mix together quasi-correctly (I cheated and scaled them, so that one of the CMY channels is always at 100%, to make mixed colours look more vibrant).

The other rectangle thing will be a bed, eventually.

Playable Demo (requires Unity Web Player)

To-do list:

• Patients with semi-randomly-coloured diseases
• Patients have a sickness bar that starts at 50% and fills up over time.
• Using a correctly-coloured potion on a patient will decrease the sickness bar. The closer the pigment, the bigger the decrease. Completely wrong potions will INcrease sickness.
• Patients die when sickness bar is full
• Patients survive (disappear and +1 score) when sickness falls to zero
• Clicking queues up movement orders. Right-clicking clears the queue.
• Tables to put WIP flasks down on.
• Graphics
• Sound
• Animations?
• High score list?

Oh boy. Less posting more coding.

I ironed out some MORE bugs in the movement system (that thing is killing me – I think it’s pretty good right now though. Still, I think, something in the area of 100% of the bugs that I’ve had to kill have come from the movement system!), and wrote a little utility to make levels for my game. Now, I really just have to slap a façade on it, and I’ll have… a thing. Oh, and I need to make more levels, and more interesting levels. I’ve got *plenty* of time though. I guess.

Despite spending like 6hrs rebuilding my machine, we’ve still managed to make progress. GunHack is coming together..

• Multiple levels of the dungeon
• Mouse driven “HazMan”
• Enemies starting to come together
• 3D level assets and 2D sprites
• 

I’ve been really stuck since hearing the theme. So I pushed myself to start building a space game I’ve had in mind for weeks now.

I can steer the ship, and fire bullets. The planet rotates in 3D and any bullets that strike it will leave damaged marks on it. Smashing into the planet is currently bad.

It’s cross platform Java and Android, and it runs fast on my android test device.

The only link to the theme is that a disembodied voice says “Take this!” and powers up your shield for you.

Now what? I have no idea. Do you fight the planet, or defend it. I’m stumped!

I am going to finish, I am going to finish, I am going to finish…

Bugs? I wonder what’s wrong in this picture? Probably last update tonight with a thunderstorm on the way.

Tiny tiny bugs.

Probably just screwed myself over, but I decided to add in that you can switch between moving just the boy or just the sheep with a press of a button. Now I have never attempted this before but since I already have all of the movement script all written out I hope it will go smoothly. So far, I have it so the boy is the first character you can move, but by just hitting 1 on the keyboard you can switch so that the sheep can move. The problem I am having at the moment is when I switch to the sheep both characters move. I’m sure it’s an easy fix but I’m blind to it right now from sleep deprivation and an overload of caffeine.

Other than that the boy moves on his own and is ready for his big adventure, with or without sheep.

To Do’s:
- Create first platform and item to retrieve.
- Create second platform and item to retrieve and first encounter.
- Create third platform and item to retrieve and big baddy.
- Tell that wizard what for.
- Art, art, art. Music, music, music.

Never Go Alone is coming along very nicely, I’ve got rooms rendering, and supposedly the maze generates but I need to make it render the current room instead of a stock default room. I’ve fixed up the sword swing physics so it’s much easier to kill enemies. I’m told it runs ok for other people as well, so that’s encouraging.

So far the only monster is still Slimes. Any suggestions? Currently, I’m thinking skeleton archers, zombies, and bats.

You have like an Event every 4 months and it had to be this weekend!! The weekend I first hear about Lodum Dare.. And I found it when there’s only 23 hours left !!

I don’t want to wait until August to participate!! I’ll try to get something for tomorrow!!!!

Started making more progress on the art for my “take this to not feel alone” game, two more buildings, and a few character sprites.

Still heavily WIP, but it’s getting there kinda. I’m tempted to cut back the shading on the buildings even more, but sort of like the contrast between simple foreground stuff and more detailed background stuff.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

UPDATE: see http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/04/30/more-pixels/