I iced my ‘Ship’ project. Stuck it in the carbon freezing machine. I’ve decided it was too large in scope for one month. The good news is that I’m not giving up on the challenge, and the even better news is that I’m not doing a 180 degree turn. It’s more like a little detour, a side trip, and pretty much 90% of what I have already completed can be used in the new project.

The paused project is a side-scrolling platformer with RPG elements and an open world similar to The Legend of Zelda. The problem with that is generating the content. Way too much work for one dude and a computer in a small time frame. I’d like to come back to the project sometime, as I think it would be fun to actually be able to spend time designing levels instead of rushing through to complete them in a semi-arbitrary deadline like the end of the month. I felt that it was best for myself to drop it early instead of pushing through and not having any time for a backup plan. Though, now with a third of the time gone, I will have to redouble my efforts.

The new project will be more of an arcade platformer. I envision Donkey Kong and Pac-man. Single screen (or close to it) levels. Sounds good in theory. We’ll see how implementation goes. I should be able to have a prototype set up in a day or so, and maybe a screen shot. We’ll see if it’s entertaining and what kind of tweaks I should make to raise the fun factor.

A quick MSPaint mockup. You run around and collect stuff to unlock the goal, while avoiding the boss attack and his minions.

After writing my last entry, I found a tickle in my throat that turned into the flu and limited my time in front of the computer. I managed to do a couple things yesterday, like add running and crouching, with the different speeds and jumping abilities. This morning I made some minor modifications to allow stretching of the ‘moving’ platform. Baby steps.

My first major goal is to complete the player’s abilities. The sooner I can finish that, the sooner I can tweak things as I test. Today I want to make the built-in player abilities like double jump and wall jump toggle-able, as the first step to making them dependent on equipping an item. New abilities will of course open up new areas of the world.

I believe I have some issues with the lighting in regards to framerate. I may need to optimize my lighting code. This leads into another player ability, the lantern or flashlight, that I would also like to complete today.

A couple months ago I started playing with Flash and Chevy Ray’s FlashPunk. It was much easier to get into than I imagined, in part because of the great folks at FlashPunk.net and the active forum. Flashpunk, Abel Toy’s skeleton, and code from the forums helped me lower the learning curve without having to start at the ground floor, and perhaps giving up before seeing any real progress.

One of the projects I started is a side-scrolling platformer. I originally worked with my own code based from Abel Toy’s skeleton and learned quite a bit. I knew I was reinventing the wheel, and eventually moved to Noel’s APE – Advanced Platform Engine and Matt Thorson’s OGMO Editor. I’ve had a game idea running through my head for the past few weeks and have been thinking about moving forward with an implementation. This is where the Ludum Dare October Challenge comes in.

The October Challenge is a great motivational tool. Watching everyone come up with ideas, suffer through problems, make progress and come out the other end is great.

My goal for the month is to finish the game and put it online. I don’t plan on making any money from it, however it won’t hurt to shoot for that $1 goal, so I’ll throw some ads on the page. If I am happy with what I make, and it passes a gauntlet of my friends, perhaps I’ll submit it to a game portal.

The idea is something akin to Master Blaster meets The Legend of Zelda meets Mega Man. The player has just docked with a large capital ship after suffering some damage to his own little freighter/fighter. The larger ship, however, has just been attacked by aliens and what was originally supposed to be a simple repair and depart turns into a quest to find and collect parts, solve puzzles and save the capital ship from the invaders. Before the end, the player will have gone from the docking bay to the holds to the bridge to the depths of engineering, and everything in between..

So far, I already have some modifications to APE.  The first one I did was to create an alpha layer customized for each level so I can make some of them dark, like deep within the capital ship where the worst problems live. The follow up modification was to create light objects to attack the darkness and create ambiance. The second modification to APE was to give the doors a target. By default, APE goes from level 1 to level 2, etc. My doors have a target world and door, and when you go through them it loads that world and automatically puts the character to the matching door. This allows the player to visit the world in a non-linear fashion.

I have a little art done. Most of it is borrowed from my previous platform attempt and has a different theme, so it won’t make it past the art phase at most, and should be replaced bit-by-bit as I work on each of those type of objects. I want the style of the game to not be very cartoony, but of course, with 32 pixel by 32 pixel tiles, it’s not going to be anything close to real, so we’ll see how it ends up. I think I will end up being the artist, as I have no idea the extent of what will be required at this point and it’s hard to direct an artist without proper concept art and art design docs. If I do feel like I can bring an artist on board, I have a friend who I think will do nicely.

I expect to be challenged in regards to time. There may be some technological issues, I’m sure, but I think it will always come down to time. If things get tight, I may have to scale back on the size of the capital ship. I hope by the time I start feeling the pressure, I will have already completed a majority of the game engine.

October officially starts in a few hours. My first steps from here are to add more player abilities, like running and crouching. The basics of the gameplay need to be completed in the first two weeks, if not sooner, so I can start spending time working on level design and art.

So now I get back to FlashDevelop and the project code-named ‘Ship.’

The first concept art sketch of the Ship, the setting for the game.

Unfortunately, I am on-call this weekend, so I may end up working on resolving a customer issue rather than coding a game. I also have a baseball commitment tomorrow afternoon/evening, so even with no calls I will end up with less time than I probably need to finish. Having said that, I’m going to give it a shot.

My tools of choice this time around are FlashDevelop, Flex 4.5, Photoshop, Audacity, Pen & Paper.

No preference on theme. Just gonna roll with it.

I am putting on my tights, lacing up my boots and preparing to step into the ring for the twentieth incarnation of the Ludum Dare battle royal.  This compo I’m doing something different. Last week I started playing with FlashDevelop and FlashPunk, and I’d like to see if I can come up with an entry using it.

Goals:

• Sketchy – I’ve been drawing pictures for my entries on blank paper, scanning them in and colorizing them in Photoshop. I really like the way it looks. If I do it well, it ends up kind of like South Park or other ‘cheap’ looking cartoons.
• Simple – Don’t overreach with the game idea. Do something easy that can be completed by Sunday morning for polish.
• Future – I’d love to make something that can be updated or ‘finished’ after the compo is done and stuck on the web. I will try to keep that in mind while coding. The hard part will be deciding between a compo get-it-done-now solution versus a long-term solution.
• Music – I’ve never done an entry with music. I think it adds a lot to the feel of the game, so I’d like to give myself time to do that, and something more than just dropping in a midi file.
• Place – I’d like to show up in the final standings somewhere. There is a lot of competition now, compared to two years ago, so this will be hard. Any appearance in the top five of a category will feel like a compo win for me.

Tools:

• FlashDevelop IDE
• FlashPunk framework
• Adobe Photoshop CS4
• DrPetter’s sfxr for sound effects
• Audacity for post-processing sound effects
• Wolfram Tones for music
• HP OfficeJet 6450 All-In-One for sketches
• mIRC for chatting
  

I’ll be entering. It will either be just the usual suspects for tools, or I may add Unity. I didn’t get a chance to become as comfortable with Unity over the past few months as I would have liked, but a 48 hour time crunch is a great time to learn new tools, right?

So I should probably finish my shopping list and order everything off Amazon so I don’t have to leave the house this weekend.

Last Ludum Dare 48 Hour Compo I failed to make enough progress by Saturday afternoon and I retreated. The next day I decided that I would take a look into the game engine Unity that I know a few people in #ludumdare use. It looked pretty neat so I decided that I would use my “Enemies as Weapons” idea as a test game to learn the Unity editor and play around with the scripting.  A month later, not a whole lot of progress was made, but I did end up getting a little used to Unity and it isn’t completely overwhelming anymore. Last weekend I upgraded to 3. 0, took a look at MonoDevelop and liked what I saw. I am in the process of migrating my JavaScript code over to C#, which may be a smidgen more difficult to deal with than JavaScript in some ways but is much more powerful.

The Game

The working title is LoneStranger’s UFO Defense (How original! It will look nice next to LoneStranger’s Caverns, LoneStranger’s Shredder, LoneStranger’s Islands…. and should also not to be confused with XCOM: UFO Defense). It’s a side view, single screen game where you have to defend your people from the invading alien invasion force. Along the way you will use captured and scavenged alien technology to build up better weapons and defenses. I have a little dude that runs back and forth along the bottom, and a random-moving UFO in the sky. The player can shoot non-lethal bullets at the moment.

An early shot of the UFO Defense game.

I’m currently putting together the full gameplay docs, and along with that, the desired feature list. I will then split the list into “must have” and “would be nice” and “maybe sometime in the future” categories. Furthermore, the features in the “must have” category will be ranked based on an implementation order that makes sense. Anything on the “must have” list should be in before the end of the month, and I should really have most of those implemented before working on the “would be nice” list. The lists will be the topic of a future post.

Platform

My target platform is the web using the Unity web player. I know it’s not as widespread as Flash, but it’s what I’m using and that’s what I’m stuck with.

As far as my revenue making strategy, I don’t think I want to bother with any official sites, though that may change. My current plan is to host it on my own website and throw some ads on the page. I am already signed up with Google AdSense, and that is probably what I’ll use unless I do a little research and find something else that pays better. Advertising the game itself might be a challenge and will have to be word of mouth initially. As with some other PoV Challengers, I feel the goal of October is to make the game, not necessarily make the target profit.

Challenges

TV in general is a big time suck. My wife and I recently signed up for Netflix and added a lot of movies to our queue. I’ll probably be drawn to about one or two movies a week, but if I’m disciplined enough on non-movie days, I should be ok. Pandora and my headphones are a great way to focus energy toward the project. Other web things I usually peruse each day might be another timesuck, but again, discipline will be key.

Artwork isn’t a strong point of mine, but I do have a couple friends that draw. They have both told me in the past they won’t hesitate to do things for any games I make. The plan here would be to finalize all artwork sometime in the next week or so and ship them off my sketches and requirements so I can get it all back before the deadline.

Music shouldn’t be a challenge in it’s most simple form, since Wolfram Alpha can make some really fitting backround tunes. However, I would like to take this a step further. More on this in a future post.

The Future

Of course, I should keep at least one blurry eye on the future and make sure that I’m designing something that could be easily ported to another platform. I’d love to do a iOS game if I felt that this was taking off (and it paid for the Unity add-on itself). Things like control scheme and display would have to take this into account.

And….GO!

I already started, but now that I’ve made my first post it really feels like a compo… only longer and with a better goal!

It took me about five hours to come up with a good idea, but I finally got one after bouncing ideas off my wife.  I messed around with my basecode for a bit, enabling MIDI support (which was broken), sketched a few things on paper and brainstormed gameplay.  I believe I have a working idea that doesn’t appear to be a game with the theme grafted on.  I’m too tired to continue tonight, so I’ll go to bed now and wake up early to start moving forward….

The basecode I am using for the Ludum Dare 48 Hour Game Programming Competition #18 is largely the same as the past two three four five six seven competitions. I haven’t made any changes to it since the last compo. It’s Java based and initially came from the Killer Game Programming in Java book that I bought a few years ago. Since then, I’ve added a bit to it that I found I was redoing over and over again.

Download it here.

Goals this time around:

• Hand-drawn art style. I sketch things out on paper and scan them in to colorize. Bold colors and gradients.
• KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid! I’ve had my best luck when I keep my game simple and try not add too much complexity.
• Make useful additions to the basecode that can be used in later competitions. The screenshot stuff is an example of something I did previously that helps out a lot.
• Finish most of the work by Saturday night so I can spend Sunday polishing.
• Don’t run into dumb problems that eat up eight hours.

Tools in use:

• Java 6 SDK (though last time I included a version for JDK 5)
• Eclipse IDE
• Photoshop, maybe some Illustrator
• DrPetter’s sfxr for sound effects
• Audacity on my Mac, plus Rockband USB microphone
• HP OfficeJet 6450 All-In-One for scanning doodles
• Everlasting Gobstoppers
• mIRC for chattery
• Killer Game Programming in Java and the base code I mentioned above.

Looking forward to the compo!

I’m getting ready to go to sleep for the night so I thought I’d update with where I’m at.

Wandering around the map.

I have spend a lot of time this evening working on the collision detection between the Player, the Tiles and the Mobiles. I have also been adding interaction between the different objects so that they can do things like create and remove themselves. I still haven’t scanned in any sketches to make them look better, but that will come.

I’m just so tired and that energy drink didn’t do crap. I’m just going to go to sleep now and wake up a little earlier than I was going to. Tomorrow morning I will figure out of my concurrency problem is synchronized away and then create new mob types. Goodnight!

Since my last update, I’ve worked on the player movement using KeyPressed and KeyReleased, so it moves whenever the keys are down and doesn’t fall victim to the keyboard key delay. I also implemented some bounding boxes so that the player cannot move off the screen and cannot run into other objects. Their bounding boxes don’t have to be the entire tile, but they are limited to being rectangles. I would have liked circles or an array of rectangles, but I think that’s more than I need at the moment.

The level manager is working with the tile manager to load levels. I can now edit a text file and make changes to the map. It’s stored using a basic text format with some metadata and a grid of letters, numbers and symbols to determine the tile types. Here’s the most recent screenshot.

TileManager and LevelManager are loading levels from text files.

You can see my bounding boxes in the image.  The tiles and the player have their own boxes and the player’s box cannot overlap it without the collision detection saying that he can’t move there.  The cyan colored box on the inner edges of the W’s is actually a reverse bounding box.  The player’s bounding box must overlap that box at all times, or the collision detection will not allow the player to move.  This is just a trick to keep the player from moving off the screen.  At the extreme, the player’s box will overlap by one row, and at that point the player is in the outside edge of tiles.

Now I am going to move from using the generic GameTile class to more detailed tile classes for each tile type.  After that, I believe it’s time to scan the doodles and put in the final graphics.

I should have done an update last night, but I didn’t really have much to say.  I don’t really have much more to say now, but I wanted to post something before it got too late.

Islands is the theme, and it’s not too bad.  I could have restarted last compo’s game, Exploration, since my idea for that was island based, but I decided to go in a different direction. My entry for Islands is going to be a puzzle game where you walk around different islands in order to get to the goal, avoiding traps and other dangers. Here’s a screenshot.

First screenshot. Simple tiles, simple graphics.

Basically I just used Photoshop to create simple tiles.  I have some art sketched out, but it needs to be scanned and colorized. I’ll do that later, but for now I need to work on the actual gameplay.  So far, the smily can move around and the tiles each have bounds that will stop the player, but that’s it.  I also recorded a little bit of sound effects, but those haven’t been moved over from the Mac yet, and either way, there aren’t many game actions to tie them to yet.

Next up is to work on the movement. Right now, it’s dependant on KeyDown presses, which are limited by keyboard delay. I’m going to implement KeyDown/KeyReleased pairs to change this.

I hereby officially declare my intent to enter the Ludum Dare 48 Hour Competition #17.

And the standard goals:

• Keep the usual art style. I sketch things out on paper and scan them in so I can colorize.  Keeping with bold colors and gradients is probably what I’ll do.
• KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid!  Making something too complex is just a recipe for a headache at 1pm on Sunday afternoon.
• Make useful additions to the basecode that can be used in later competitions.  The screenshot stuff is an example of something I did previously that helps out a lot.
• Finish most of the work by Saturday night so I can spend Sunday polishing.
• Don’t run into dumb problems that eat up eight hours.

Same base code as the past six competitions.

Tools in use:

• Java 6 SDK (though I typically include a version for JDK 5)
• Eclipse IDE
• Photoshop, maybe some Illustrator
• DrPetter’s sfxr for sound effects
• Audacity
• HP OfficeJet 6450 All-In-One for scanning doodles
• Everlasting Gobstoppers
• mIRC for chattery
• Killer Game Programming in Java and the base code I mentioned above.

As far as themes go, Hunt, Island and Companion sound fun.  Evolution might be good, too, but I’d have to come up with something good. Might have to sketch some ideas out for each of these before Friday, and check the results of the previous rounds to see what else could slip through.  Good Luck!

I uploaded my entry, even though it isn’t near complete.  I figured it’s worth getting feedback on what I have for future reference.

I’ll probably write a post-mortem in a day or so, but I know the number one thing that I did wrong was that I didn’t organize properly at the beginning.  I didn’t know where I was going to end up, exactly, so I didn’t know how to get there.

Here’s the screenshot.

The compass isn’t linked to anything in this version, since navigation wasn’t completely implemented. The arrow keys aren’t supposed to move the ship.  The plan was to let the user select a direction, and then sail that way for a few spaces.  How far they traveled would depend on which direction the wind was blowing, and whether or not any events happened, like finding land, meeting pirates or running into hazards. Unfortunately, I never got the planned movement implemented and so the compass sit

Head on over to the entry page to check it out.

Went out to breakfast to our favorite place.  Had some eggs, hash browns, chicken apple sausage and biscuits and gravy.

Now I need to get down to business if I’m going to have anything to show for this weekend.  First up is navigation…..

Had cereal for breakfast, more chips and salsa for a midday snack and then a Subway sandwich and baked BBQ chips for dinner.

My wife then left to go baby our neice and nephew, so I got to play the music loud for a few hours.  When she got back, she surprised me with a nighttime snack.

A Wendy’s Frosty Float.  It was yummy.

As far as coding goes, I’m not sure I’ll be able to have the entry I wanted to have.  I spent a lot of time on stupid things, like math.  I do have a ship that moves by the arrow keys (just for testing, that won’t be in the final game) and a compass that reacts to the mouse-hover and click.  Next step would be to implement navigation, which includes setting a direction and an interval.  I also will be implementing fog-of-war because part of exploration is having to go somewhere in order to map it out.

I’m not using a traditional full-array to keep track of the tiles.  I’m using an image and I’m reading the map data from that image’s individual bit mapping.  I’m going to implement the fog-of-war using a similar method, with a second image that starts off with each pixel being off and they get turned on as you go.

Navigation is going to be direction and time based, so you’d pick one of the 16 directions on the compass and sail.  The ship is locked into the tile coordinate system to make things easier.

I fear there is way to much to do before the deadline tommorrow, so I’ll have to go with the essentials and just add on with whatever time I have left over.  I hope to have a real game to submit, and not just a demo.  I lost a lot of time trying to get my printer to print out a map so I could trace it, draw on it and scan it back in, but I ended up not even using that.  I just created a new map by myself and Photoshop instead.  The compass math stuff was a pain in the rear, though in the end pretty simple.  I always end up spending extra time trying to do whatever it is in an abtract way, which can either be a killer or a timesave, depending on if I end up using it for anything else.  For example, in the last compo, I spent extra time on the basic tile properties, which let me add new types of tiles in a matter of minutes later on.

Anyway, I think I’m done for the night. See you in the morning!

I’ve got an idea for Exploration that I’ve had for awhile and wanted to do as a project.  The theme gives me a great opportunity to do it.

The idea is that you are an explorer sent to sail the world and to bring back riches and claim land in the name of the mother country.

I don’t have much at all yet.  I struggled with how I wanted to represent the world data and scrapped a few ideas before settling on a bitmap and accompanying data file.  As of now, I have it able to load up the bitmap and extra info into a class, but nothing is done with them yet.   I’m falling asleep at my desk, so I think I should get some sleep and continue fresh in the morning.

Just putting the idea I have to task in my head before I sit down to sketch.  Good time to eat dinner.

Hot dogs, corn, chips and salsa. The corn water started to invade my hot dog buns, so I had to separate them. It won’t do to have soggy buns.

It’s almost time….. Make that last grocery store run. Sharpen your pencils. Grab a stack of scratch paper. Plug in your microhone. Take the dog for a walk. Pick out your favorite coding music. Sign into IRC. Start your IDE. And go rent Twilight. You’ll need it.