So this week, as mentioned last time, i started adding some gameplay elements.

I started with a bit of enemy behavior. The floating spheres are now mines, that close in on your position once you get near them. I doubled their hitpoints so they need at least two hits to increase difficulty.
Also i added another enemy type: a beam turret. It aims at you and fire’s if you’re close enough. The aiming has a bit of inertia though, to make evasion possible.

Speaking of evasion: i realised the controls were rather quirky and not very fluid, so i decided to rewrite them and came up with a new control mechanic. Instead of your ship moving up and down you now pitch the nose in the desired direction.
This has two consequences:
Good: movement looks and feels smoother overall
Bad: Evasion is nigh impossible
So i added the [Shift] key to enhance the controls. Pressing it will now keep your current pitch locked (instead of automatically leveling it back to surface parallel) and you can roll up and down, or strafe, if you will.
This adds some nice depth into gameplay and allows some pretty neat dogfighting in this early stage of development already.

Furthermore i added item drops, just for the sake of implementing them. They currently serve no purpose, apart from a rewarding kching sound upon collection

AND you have a new gun! LAZOR BEAMZOR PZZZWWWWEEEEEEEEW

Now without further ado, i present to you: Funky Ship part 5!

I just submitted Haunted Hallway to the app store. Now I need to make a version for Kongregate for when the app releases. Here are a couple of screenshots:

I’ve made some steady progress since the last post a little over a week ago, but I still feel as though I am a little behind where I should be if I want to get this out by the end of October. Pretty much all the systems are functional and I’m spending most of my time additional enemies and random features to increase replayability.

Stuff Added

• Leveling Up
• Bosses every 10 levels
• Time Remaining Progress bar
• Labyrinth Levels (Floors 10 – 20)
• Several new enemies

Stuff to work on

• Adding more enemies
• Adding more bosses
• Come up with a level type for Floors 20-30 and 30-40
• Adding cool stuff for the player to randomly encounter
• Audio

Here a couple screen shots:

The UI is a little busy right now (There are 3 progress bars), but I’m having a hard time coming up with a layout that I like. I’ll probably end up sticking with something similar to what it is now.

I’ve decided to accept the October challenge by finishing my LD20 entry – the Clone Wolf. It’s a platformer where you simultaneously control multiple instances of a hero while fighting monsters.

In addition to the LD version, there’s a new display style (single-screen defense instead of side-scrolling), more content (complex bosses), tutorials, dialogues, a storyline and music (by a renowned Czech geek, who was awesome enough to let me use it just for a credit).

The game is made in flash (yay Flixel!), I’ll try to hit as many platforms and markets as I can.

Left on my TODO list: draw 5 level backgrounds, draw intro illustrations, fix a few bugs, create a trailer, make a few screenshots.

Box art:

I’m quite cautious about showing my games to other people, therefore I got to playtesting a little too late (just last weekend). After a short playtest it was evident, that without a tutorial, the game was confusing and unplayable. I sat down, rewrote the script, added more tutorial levels, redesigned a GUI.
Conlusion: even a short playtest session can reveal serious design flaws. Playtest, silly me! Playtest more!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLtoUfEw8XY&feature=channel_video_title

A few days ago I posted calling for entries into the 2012 IGF Pirate Kart compilation to be entered into the Independent Games Festival Main Competition! Now the Pirate Kart is all put together and uploaded!

319 games by over a hundred people! Quite a few Ludum Dare games are in it!

Thanks so much to everyone who contributed games and helped compile them! The process went much more smoothly than I ever would have expected it to!

Check it out! Play some crazy games! Maybe help seed the torrent!

So, here’s my level editor thing. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to set up the level entrances / exits / pathways throughout the level. Sort of some kind of cryptic code system. I’m not sure how complicated I want it to be. Depends on if I will have the level editing open to the general public or not.

That said, I think I want it to be editable by normal people. So I think I’ll probably pass on using those weird codes. But at least now I have those cool hex icons for no reason.

-Phil

Making game is living life inside life.
After work, the game maker reveals from the pain and his human fears become the rage of pixel enchantment… sigh :p

Below the game introduction of the level 2

It’s time to introduce you with the new toy that courier will have fun with in the crypts. The one and the only….”Burning Urn”!  <tan-tan-tan-tan-stshhh>

On your quest trough the crypts, you’ll find urns filled with oil. You can light them up and throw them trough the hallways. You can use it to scare lurking danger away or even burn it to ashes. Should you be scared of the darkness in the next room, throw one of these inside and you’ll know what’s there waiting for you.

“Burning Urn” spam is a bit of exaggeration, I know but it won’t be possible to throw those so quickly one after another…it won’t be wise anyway.

VERY, VERY IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE:

I have to do a full citation!
Please send me an e-mail to richard.blechinger@hotmail.com, include your FULL NAME, OR your FIRST NAME and the FIRST LETTER of your LAST NAME, i.e “Johnny M.”, if you want to be kept anonymous.

That’s it. Now you can read the rest of the article.

You have 2 weeks.

Post anything you know about “indie”, answers to common questions, opinions, and more, I can convert any data.

• Do you think you could live off your hobby?
  Your definition of “indie” vs. “AAA”,
  Post-Mortems,
  Success (or terrible failure),
  Which language you use,
  Which IDE you prefer,
  Indie-Magazines,
  Articles,
  Games (Windows, or Flash/HTML5/Java),
  Examples of random code snippets (Commented if possible, please)
  ANYTHING.

It doesn’t have to be all too technical, because my classmates aren’t exactly computing geniuses. (Some random commented code snippets are okay, though. Just for showing them what’s going on behind the scenes)

Also, if I meet any of you on IRC while I’m slacking, I may ask stuff :p

There you go, bombard me, LD-Community!

I’m in for the October Challenge! For serious this time. Last year I used the October challenge to try and finish Planet Minesweeper, which (if you’ve missed my previous posts about it) is basically Minesweeper, on a sphere. The idea actually came out of an incomplete mini-LD entry.

For various reasons, mostly due to the fact that it was barely more than a prototype at that time, I didn’t even come close to finishing.

The “ice planet” tileset, in the first beta.

I’ve been working on it a bit over the last year, but things kind of ground to a halt after a while. In addition, lots of (fun) drama like changing jobs and working on a screenplay and the project was effectively shelved.

But now I’ve come back to it with fresh determination, and have been working away in silence this month until I felt pretty confident that I’ll be able to finish it. That time has come. Last night I sent out the first beta to a few developer friends. If all goes well, I’ll do a wider beta in a week or so. Email me (joeld@tapnik.com) if you have an iPhone or iPad and you’re interested in joining the beta.

For the purposes of the October Challenge, I’m going to consider it “winning” if I upload an app store build by the end of the month, since there’s no way I could finish if I also had to include the wait time for the approval process.

Wish me luck!

Working hard on Constant Sail: Pirates & Traders for the October competition. It is a pirate game where you sail around a world and trade goods. It is multiplayer and web based with a big emphasis on PvP fighting.

As you can see, even though I am making this for the web, it is being formatted to also work well on smartphones.

It uses jQuery Mobile + Node.js + MongoDB

Hopefully I get it out in the next week and get someone to upgrade in time to qualify.

Posted here on google+

I started out with an good idea that became a great idea as i progressed, then discovered that the great idea was already an old idea and decided to put down that project. The feeling after that was that sure i can come up with great ideas but doing this idea right now felt more or less pointless. So for the past 5 days now i’ve been half-motivated and a tad annoyed at not having any of the other ideas go “yeah” in my head (Sorry everyone on IRC). I have been working on my LD21 game idea but it was a far bigger project that i didn’t feel like i could do justice in this short time so it was kinda half-hearted.

Anyhow a friend started brainstorming with me and something just clicked, got a really great idea and i’ll let you people know more as i make progress (Got about one week on my own schedule to finish now).

http://renesd.blogspot.com/2011/10/notes-on-chome-and-android.html

Also… beta testing intel app up apps.

…Is operational and online, and located here:

http://software.o-o.ro/urth-level-editor/

Lord Kitchener Wants You*

 To make levels!

But seriously, I’d appreciate feedback on the monster.

You can currently make and test levels and save them online. Loading other levels will become available in the next few days for testing purposes.

______________________

*Lord Kitchener doesn’t really want that, but I do

Did a bunch of work on itch over the weekend, I now have it close feature parity with the last time that I wrote it. Strangely enough, it seems to be at bug parity as well. Or maybe just some of the bugs.

Any who, I got this fine chunk of code running.

I added a few essential features that were missing from the last build. You can now delete ops, and the system saves and loads the project that you are working on.

I think that I just want to smooth out some of the bugs, get the turtle drawing tools (pen down, pen size, pen color, etc), and then I will be ready to submit. This is certainly going to be a rush, and I am going to release it in a bit of a rough state, but better to release then not.

On this long big weekend day, Ive done a lot of script tweaking. I have mentioned yesterday that i had this horrible glitch where as if the mouse was in the game screen, the game would lag. Fortunately today i fixed that issue! No more lag :):)

Iv modified the collision boxes of each item scarcely, eveling script has been tweaked, and other useless scripts have been cleaned out.

I didnt do much graphic editing today other than the leveling effect that occurs when you gain a lvl. Also the area healing spell is now 100% completed. With effects and hp adding pulse, this spell is finally finished!

At the top left corner of the game screen iv added a few icons that shows how much strength bonus you have and also the deffence bonus. By wearing full fire armor the deffence bonus gets to a 60, and the fire sword brings you up to a 30. Trust me these bonuses do make a difference lol.

The exp bar has been modified also, not much change on the physical graphics.

Bottom line? Sorry to say guys but today was just purely script related. And as an added bonus for you guys, ive added fully functioning teleports .

ONE LAST POINT BEFORE SNAPSHOTS! Sound is now being implemented for the game( Well its about gosh darn time). Ive spent one full hour today getting 3D sound to work. In other words, If you are close to a waterfall, the noise will be loud, if you are far away from the waterfall, the noise will be very low. If you are far enough there wont be any sound played . Ill put the script in the description for you to see. Its all about radians, Pythagoras , and a little know how on sound volume, pitch, and velocity editing.

Whats next?!: Adding more music and sound effects, Creating the Online Client Script!(Oh ya baby), more armor, enemies, blah blah blah…

Snapshot:

2 weeks ago I presented my project for the October Challenge: selling the first copy of my “multiplayer game making tool” CraftStudio, by the end of the month.

CraftStudio is built in C# using XNA and Lidgren. The client runs on Windows only (for now!). The server runs on pretty much any platform with Mono support.

People have been building & painting some dragon models to try and see if the modeling tools are good enough to build a complex model. And to see if we could do better than Notch . Here’s one of them:

A dragon model by @schouillette

So, what have I been up to code-wise?

• Spent a lot of time improving model editing. There are now transform handles which allow editing models by dragging stuff around. I had to go through lots of matrix & projection stuff, but it was worth it .
• There’s now an integrated news system in the client. It pulls news from the master server (which itself gets them from a SQLite database).
• Lots of improvements to the UI framework: smooth scrolling, text layout performance improvements, splitters to allow resizing panes, etc. The whole framework is available on Codeplex under the MIT license. Feel free to use it for your own projects!
• Mostly importantly, I’ve been working on map editing support for the better part of the last two weeks, and I just made a new release available. See for yourself:

An alien space ship map

Since I’m now working full time as an indie, I’ve also started working on setting up a company, but it looks like it will take some more time.

I have looked at payment processing platforms too. I’d love to go with Stripe.com which has awesome developer support and, it seems, a great team behind it. Sadly they won’t be available in my country (France) by the end of the month. I could go with PayPal but I’ve read multiple indie horror stories with selling unfinished products (Minecraft and Project Zomboid, to name a couple). If anyone has advice on this, I’d love to hear it!

Here, the second development video preview is out. You can see all the new additions that I’ve done since the last video preview. Why don’t you take a look? It will cost you less than a minute

Follow the development at my blog

Today ive made it possible to change between the following items: Boots,  Gauntlets, Helmet, Chestplate, Right-Hand Weapon, Left-Hand Weapon, Left-Hand Shield, Cape, Shoulder guards. This means that mixing and matching is now possible!! You can have a mix of fire armor, ice armor, normal clothes etc.

I removed the ranged, magic, warrior exp bars and replaced them with one big main lvl bar. This means that if you are lvl 5 in general by only using magic, your ranged will also be upgraded(Unfortunately i guess?).

New attack tabs are here! Oh yes they are! Complete with 4 skills: Power Strike, Revive, Heal Area, Heal single.

currently only the Heal area works. The rest of the specials will come later.

The boss stage is now finished! With lava flowing around the arena, and with neon floors this is the perfect place to put in my Giant Golem.

Non-visible updates:

Because the game now currently has 17,000 faces(Polygons), im worried that adding enemies will make the game lag, thus!! No worries! Since this is one big map, one big scene, one big world, the game will only load the area inwhich you are currently in. This reduces the amount of polygons significantly!

I say Blender Game Engine….BRING IT ON

Note: The overall world is finished! fewww, all thats left to do is to add more vegetation, rocks, decorations and then the world will be finished 100%.

Whats Next??: More Armor, working skill tabs, leveling sparks for when achieved lvl, enemy AI modification.

Glitches: If the mouse is in the Game window, the game lags. This is something i really need to find out how to fix, and fast. If this never gets fixed, just make sure you move your mouse outside the game window and it will run extremely smoothly .

Fixed Glitches: Cannot fall through walls

Snapshots: