Now that I think about it, I actually messed around with the source after the compo – the aliens were commented out in preparation for improvements to the strategy side of the gameplay. It shouldn’t be too hard to uncomment the relevant lines.

My compo page with the download link

In the end I turned it into a gratuitous battle in space – basically RTS meets 4X. Managed to squeeze it in just in time – the ZIP was up just a minute before the deadline, and the screenshots/description came after.

I might have added too many alien ships…

It might look as though the graphics took up a lot of time, but really those were easy. The tough bit was the ship AI, UI and fine details – things like how the ships bank when they turn. I tend to get hung up on crap like that.

GBIS.zip

- It controls almost exactly like your standard 3D RTS – mousewheel to zoom, mouse on screen borders to pan, click, drag or double-click to select, right-click to move or attack.

- Spacebar pauses; you can issue orders while paused.

- To colonize planets, you need to build a colony ship, move it to the little circle above the target planet, and then click the colonize button (lower left). The button only appears when you have only the colony ship, and nothing else, selected. It takes awhile to colonize the planet.

- You can build ships from planets, provided you have enough money. The other 3 resources, sadly, do nothing – I forgot to put special-resource costs in the ship data. Sorry, no build queue.

- The aliens should show up before too long, or you can go look for them if you are so inclined.

- Yes, the framerate is awful in big battles. Didn’t have time to optimize it, plus I added too many missiles, explosions and other stuff.

- There is no end. Close the window when you’re done.

- Edit: Lol, I tested it and found a couple of major bugs. One, the alien “attack” results in the aliens doing a happy dance (working as intended!). Two, under certain circumstances you can see the aliens even when they’re very far away. But, for the most part, it works (apart from the framerate issues).

I have no time and I must scream.

Since there’s no more time and I just managed to get combat working, I shall attempt to turn the game into the mother of all gratuitous battles in space and go for the theme “Unwinnable War” as a bonus.

We’ll see whether that works.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it… will have to pull an all-nighter just to have a shot at it. Haven’t even started on the combat engine.

Here’s the star map. The ?’s are unexplored planets which will be revealed when the player’s ships get close enough. I am rather chuffed about how you can zoom seamlessly from a close-up of the ships to this map.

No new pics since the last update. I’m now rethinking my design.

The original design was very much along the lines of Sins of a Solar Empire mixed with a more traditional RTS and a dash of MOO (special planets). At this point, though, I’m really not confident of pulling off an enemy AI in the time I have left, and it was kind of going off-theme. So here’s the new plan – a dash of SAIS, a pinch of Sins, a smidgen of Star Control, and a liberal sprinkling of MOO2:

- The player is on a mission to this star cluster to find the Relics of the Ancestors. When you bring them together, something is supposed to happen.

- The player can colonize planets with a colony ship. I may remove the idea of building up the planets. Possibly the number of cities on the planet merely increases over time, leading to faster production and more income?

- The relics can be found by exploring the star cluster and conducting archaeological digs on planets with Ancestor ruins. First you must colonize those planets.

- Some planets are defended by hostile giant creatures (Space Crystal, anyone?). Those planets usually have good stuff and/or a relic.

- The player’s steps are dogged by these nasty aliens who drop out of a pocket dimension now and then. They will start arriving when the player reaches a certain level of power. The alien attacks come in waves which get stronger over time.

- Normally, each wave will contain a Virus Bomb – a special alien ship. If allowed to reach a player-owned planet and re-enter the atmosphere unmolested, the bomb will destroy all life on the planet, returning it to an uncolonized state.

- I may raise the stakes by turning the Virus Bomb into a Planet Buster that not only destroys all life but turns the planet into a molten wasteland – it can still be re-colonized but will produce no income.

- The aliens may also have other tricks up their slimy sleeves…

Will be going off to church in about an hour – good to clear my head. When I get back I shall have to go quite frankly nuts.

Been working pretty much nonstop (other than meals) since the beginning of the compo, and this is all I have:

A colony ship and 2 fighter escorts strike out to colonize a barren planet.

Right now I have basic unit selection and movement, as well as the resource model. I don’t yet have a way to produce more units – by right, I should be able to click on the planet and these buttons “Build Fighter” and “Build Colony Ship” would pop up. But not yet. Also, there is a nominal enemy faction but I haven’t modelled any of their ships (may just do a colour swap) and they have no AI yet.

Also, I need to implement mousewheel zooming so you can get a better look at the pretty models.

But mostly I need a miracle.

Am going to sleep now…

Here’s how it looks now:

I can now select planets (see the Earthlike planet on the right). No UI yet.

It is looking like there may end up being a lot more Expand, Exploit and Exterminate than Explore in this game.

The ones above the gameplay plane, unfortunately, break alpha blending with the planet indicators. C’est la vie. If I have time I will split the stars into 2 particle systems to avoid this.

In the end I’ll probably be going with a real-time 4X design. I wanted to do a space trading-type game, but supply and demand economics would have taken quite awhile and the asset load would be about the same. I can almost certainly do RT4X better and quicker than trading. Right now I’ve just cooked up a subset of the assets – will be going for lunch and then start on the code.

So I’ve finished the improvements to Booon, the add-on library/mini-engine I’ve been using (thin layer on top of XNA). This version adds state control, simple collision detection, and improved audio support (with easy positional audio). The full source and example program are available from my compo site.

http://sites.google.com/site/haitaka/ludumdare16

After participating in LD14 and sitting out LD15, I’ve decided to take a shot at it again. This will be my second compo – as usual I shall be working with XNA 3 and my lightweight add-on library “Booon”. I’ve been beavering away at improvements to the library, and will post the source before the compo begins.

Best wishes to everybody – oh, and *makes hypnotising movements* yoooou… muuuust… dooownlooooad… XNA… redistribuuuuuutables…

In response to many comments, I spent a few hours to improve Wall Girl and have released the results.

http://haitaka.googlepages.com/Wall_Girl_PR1.zip

Edit: If you have yet to rate Wall Girl, the older version is available at:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/04/19/wall-girl-final/

If you intend to rate the game, please do so before playing the new PR1 version.

Changes:

- Most of my respondents observed that the game was too hard for them. In response, this new version comes with an Easy mode. Press X at the title screen to start Easy mode.

- The Normal mode has seen several balance changes. On the whole, the game is easier, but a couple of parts have actually been made more difficult.

- There is now music! Still no sound effects, though. I was really bummed that I couldn’t finish the music in time for the entry, but here it is. Not great, but it’s my first shot (in a very long while) at composing something from scratch.

- Several cosmetic enhancements have been made to the boss fight.

- This version has a readme! It’s actually more like a full-on manual…

I think this is really very close to how I envisioned the game when I first started work on it, apart from the lack of a tutorial mode. If you have a bit of time to spare, reviews and/or comments would be appreciated.

Hey, everyone who commented on my entry! Thanks so much for playing and commenting!

I felt it would be good to respond, so here’s some quick answers to the comments.

(1) Sorry, I was too busy making fancy-looking graphics to do the reset button ><

(2) Sorry, I couldn’t finish the music in time, so there’s no sound! Once I regain some energy I will release a new version with sound. I think this game has legs.

(3) Yeah, the wall-switching is a bit cumbersome. I guess this is where memorization comes in – if you know the pattern beforehand or can read it quickly, then you know which wall colours to use and can set it up pretty quick. Not sure if that’s bad design… You can actually just hold down a shot button and move laterally across the wall to change all the circles at once, by the way.

(4) Sorry, there wasn’t a help screen, or it would be more obvious that there are three weapons (Z, X, and Z+X), and that each corresponds to a different colour for wall-switching. Edit: I haven’t encountered any problems with the wall-switching – maybe my explanation was unclear? An animated tutorial might help.

(5) shrt, it seems you have one of Those Keyboards. I’m not sure what the exact reason is, but some keyboards (like the one on a laptop I once used) seem to not want to register a combination of a letter and certain arrow keys at the same time. So you can’t press Z, Down and Left together. Best I can do is to put in 360 pad support, and possibly other pad support too, in the remake.

(6) All told, if you actually use all the bombs, you have 12 shots of the superweapon. This is (in theory) enough to clear the Horrible Rush Of Enemies before the boss, and kill the boss, without firing a single conventional shot, and being invincible about 90% of the time. (Edit: Assuming you don’t die before the Horrible Enemy Rush, that is.) C launches the superweapon when your wall is up, and re-summons the wall when it is offline. I was actually worried that it would be a game-breaker, but it seems it… well, wasn’t. If you’re having trouble, use more superweapon!

(7) There’s a semi-hidden trick to the game. You can operate either the spread shots or the laser simultaneously with the missiles. To do so, hold either the Z or the X key to fire the spread or laser, and simultaneously tap the other key (X or Z). This increases your firepower very substantially, but also makes your movement speed erratic, so threading a path through bullets gets a bit tougher.

(8) Have you ever encountered flying monks that *weren’t* attacking you?

Edit: (9) Muku, your comments were completely spot-on. I wonder if you were reading my mind! Yes, I realized a couple of days ago that I should have added a readme with instructions – will try to remember to do so next time. Yes, I am actually considering a more extensive remake/expanded edition with SNES-style blocky sprites (after I finish solving the more obvious issues). Yes, I did think about adding one or two ticks of acceleration, but my experience in the past has been that adding excessive acceleration to a shmup causes the player’s movement to feel sluggish – that’s probably something that can be solved with tuning though, so if I do a more extensive remake I will seriously consider it (thanks to your feedback!). Finally, the wall mechanic currently relies heavily on memorization (you switch the wall between waves to prepare for the upcoming wave); in the remake I am thinking of giving the player the choice of 2 different “wall modes” – manual and semi-automatic – where the former is the same as the current wall, and the latter is easier and more responsive but also far less flexible.

Dinner last night was Chinese.

Clockwise from upper left: cold dish platter (chicken, roast pork, char siew and jellyfish), diced duck in lettuce wrap, roast chicken, tofu mock-meat with veggies, dessert (hard to explain unless you live in Asia), fried shrimp in wasabi sauce, steamed fish, and noodles in the centre. Not pictured: Peking duck and one other dish which I forget – probably veggies of some description, if memory serves.

Hooray for crappy photography skills and almost-as-crappy cellphone camera.

Actually, this was my grandmother’s birthday. Dinner took 4 hours, which kind of put a ding in my development time. Food was good if somewhat “innovative” (roast chicken on top of fruit salad?).

Well, on to the post-mortem.

What I did right:

- I was using very familiar tools.

- Tools were mostly in place before development began.

- I deliberately left out 3D skeletal animation from my toolset. Integrating it would have tempted me to make animated 3D characters, which would have killed the project due to the time required.

- Character sketches at the start gave me a very clear direction.

- Chose to hard-code my level rather than making a more open framework.

- Froze development half an hour before the end of the compo, to avoid running out of time.

What I did wrong:

- Not enough practice with composing music. The first song took 2 and a half hours. The second was half-done in about half an hour. In the end I scrapped music because I couldn’t finish the boss fight theme in time.

- Didn’t build my toolset with quick development in mind. Some features which would have been useful were left out, like sprite animation and object state-management.

- Included toolset features, like lighting, which pushed the game’s specs to a point where some people couldn’t run it.

- Edit: Made the game too hard. I forgot that most people are not shmupfans.

- Attended the birthday dinner. I kid, I kid – making Grandma happy is usually a good thing, and I got a nice meal out of it too.

I’m calling this one done. Will post a post-mortem (and food!) later.

Download:

http://haitaka.googlepages.com/5parrowhawk_LD14_WallGirl.zip

Instructions:

(1) You’ll need at least the XNA redistributable to run it. Also, a decent 3D card (anything from the last 4-5 years. Technically Intel GMA should work too!)

Download: XNA redist

(2) During gameplay, Z fires spread shots, X fires laser, Z+X fire missiles.

(3) The wall circles block enemy bullets of the same colour. Move into the circles and shoot to change the colours.

(4) When the wall is up and running, C uses your super attack (+ temporary invincibility). When it is offline, C summons it at the cost of one bomb.

(5) When the game finishes, please press Esc to exit. Didn’t have time to test and debug go-back-to-main-menu, even though the code is half-finished.

Troubleshooting:

If it doesn’t run even after installing the XNA redistributable, please consult my contest page:

http://haitaka.googlepages.com/ludumdare14

All graphics done.

I’m gonna see if I can finish that music track I was working on…

Finally!

I will need to do the title screen, game over screen, and so on, but not just yet. It’s 5 am and I need to catch a quick nap first.

Hopefully there will be time for music (I have a track almost complete) and possibly even sound.

Back in a couple of hours.

All the gameplay’s done except the boss. Gonna see how much of it I can implement in 8 hours.

The difficulty is pretty tough. I guess it’s about on the same level as the Extra mode in “Perfect Cherry Blossom”. If I have the time to implement scoring, I’ll start an unofficial highscore board here after the final submission is done!

The above screenshot says it all. I wanted to have more enemies and bullets on screen for the picture, but they were gone before I could take it *grin* All the player’s abilities are now complete – after this I’ll be doing the level design.

http://haitaka.googlepages.com/WallGirlAlpha3.zip

Please test if you have the time and energy. I really do appreciate the feedback.

The controls are: any key to begin, then arrow keys to move, Z for firebolts, X for laser, Z+X for missiles. When the wall is up and running, C launches the super attack (which consumes the wall). When the wall is not up and running, C will expend one bomb to summon it. You have 3 bombs.

The circles that make up the wall will absorb same-coloured enemy bullets. If you move into the circle and shoot, it will reappear (after a brief period) as the colour of the shot you used.

Enemies who hit the wall are immediately killed, but the circle they hit will be pushed back towards you! If the circle is pushed back too far, there is a chance that it will disappear. After three circles are gone, the entire wall disintegrates. This is a good time to use the superweapon (before it disintegrates, that is).

Esc exits the game when you’re done (sorry, it still doesn’t return to title screen).

For troubleshooting, etc., please see my previous entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/04/18/wall-girl-all-player-weapons-complete/

Finally.

The circles that make up the wall will absorb same-coloured enemy bullets. If you move into the circle and shoot, it will reappear (after a brief period) as the colour of the shot you used.

Enemies who hit the wall are immediately killed, but the circle they hit will be pushed back towards you! If the circle is pushed back too far, there is a chance that it will disappear. After three circles are gone, the entire wall disintegrates.

Currently there’s no way to regenerate the wall other than dying. However, once I implement the bomb/super attack (the next item on my agenda), the player will have a way to regenerate the wall.

Also, have an advancing wall of sickeningly cute.