Have you ever found yourself in a situation where the more you mess with your game the less fun the game becomes?  This Mini Ludum Dare I decided to skip good programming practices and just hack stuff together to get gameplay up and running quickly.  The problem is, many of these messy ad-hoc solutions are now causing me trouble.

I don’t want to disappoint anyone, but I think I may take a break from this project.  If/when I pick it up again I will most likely do a complete rewrite of the code.

I took a little bit of a break today and didn’t accomplish as much as I could have.  Since the animated gif I pretty much just added the title screen, a land mine that explodes, and the damage meter.  I still need a few more enemies, levels, sound and music, and a few other things.  The hardest part, I think, will be in trying to make tracks that are actually fun to play.

Still need to add missile launching, enemies, crashing, exploding, mayhem and destruction.

I don’t know how much I will be able to accomplish over this weekend, but I made a mess of graphics for “More Exciting Bike.”  It’s like Excite Bike with explosions!

The timelapse video of me working can be found here.  It’s only 22 of the 48 hours, since I turned my computer off at night and deleted the frames which where black due to my screen turning off from inactivity.

What went right:

• I had a lot of fun.
• I chose to not worry too much about graphics, theme, story, etc.
• Ran into no major time wasting bugs.

What went wrong:

• Scope of the game would have been better for a PyWeek.
• It would have been better to start with a library or codebase that handled much of the grunt work for me.  Instead of working on a game, I spent a lot of time writing code for gui, animation, tilemap, resource management, collision detection, etc.
• I didn’t have anything a player could control until 3 hour from the deadline.

I’m thinking of trying to bring this game to a completed state within the next few days.

I have most of the foundations of a game (probably more than I really needed), but nothing playable yet.  Actually, I don’t even have any player controls.  However, with what I do have I’m sure I can get a game together pretty quickly tomorrow.  I’m going to have to simplify a lot of my ideas, but it might still be fun.  I hope I can pull it off — it’s going to be challenging.

There above screen shot doesn’t well represent the work I’ve done.

Although my game engine is somewhat functional, it is not yet a game.  I don’t have this guy running around yet.  Maybe in a few hours I’ll be in better shape.

I’ve had a cold for a while and my brother might want to do something tomorrow, so I’m not sure how much I will be able to participate.  If I do, I’m not sure if I want to try to use the Flex3 compiler for a Flash game (which will require some learning as I had not used it yet) or simply use PyGame (which I am already very familiar with, but not able to make Windows executables as I only have access to Linux.)

Umm…  Do we need to declair our intent to participate?  It seems like everybody else is, so I guess I will also.  I’m going to see what I can do this weekend.

I wasn’t originally going to participate in this Mini Ludum Dare, but I wound up making two simple toys that are a little fun to play around with.  I didn’t really want to commit to actually making a game, and since the theme is ’sandbox,’ both programs are entirely pointless.  Both require Python and PyGame — which are easy enough for anyone to obtain.

Squiggle Draw

It looks better in motion (along with perhaps a higher squiggle value.)  Basically, you draw and it makes the lines all squiggly looking.  As you can see, Left Mouse Button draws, Scroll Wheel increases/decreases squiggliness, and Space bar clears the screen.

Download: squiggle_draw.py

Particles

This program lets you play around with particles.  You can place down ‘attractors’ which draw particles towards it or ‘repulsors’ which push them away.  Left Mouse Button puts down attractor, Right Mouse Button puts down repulsor, Scroll Wheel add/removes particles, and Space Bar clears attractors and repulsors.

Download: particles.py

Some of you may have already seen this 2009 Global Game Jam Keynote video, as it has been around for a few months, but I first watched it only a few minutes ago.  As we will very soon be taking part in a 48 hour game development competition, I thought I might bring attention to this video.

Kyle Gabler give a number of great tips.  His 2nd Theorum of Destruction is likely very true for a lot of people.  I know for myself, the less I care the better my results become.

I decided to go with the theme “Swarms.”  Here is a mockup of what the final game might look like:

I already have the people and aliens running around.  They don’t exactly “swarm” in any coordinated manner, but I’m not going to worry too much about it.

After lunch I’ll impliment the player’s ship, tractor beam, tossing aliens, and alien ships.  I’m just going to hack this together as quickly as I can.

I’m not sure what kind of game I’m going to make or even if I’m really going to try to compete.  However, I did hack together the start of a little program, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it.

I haven’t decided upon a theme yet, so I don’t know what kind of gameplay I’ll have.  At first I was thinking about the theme ‘Random,’ so I wrote up a little random terrain and trees generator.  I didn’t know what kind of colors I wanted to go with so I tried it with both day and night options.

I personally like the night scene more than day.  I noticed that “Light and Darkness” is one of the options, but I’m still not sure what I might do.  Currently there is no way of dynamically transitioning between day and night.

The themes I might be most interested in are, “Construction/Destruction” (Perhaps building cities on the mountains … or something?), “Indirect Interaction”, or “Swarms” (UFO’s?).

I guess I’m going to sleep on it.

I quickly hacked together a Towlr of my own.  You can play it if you have Python and Pygame installed.  You can get this game on this page.

You can get this amazing 3D game here!

You’re all going to hate me!

[edit]So as not to decieve anyone, I ran out of time so I just quickly made a joke console program.[/edit]

I’m not sure I’ll have anough time to actually make this.  Most of the graphics are done, but programming and level design might take too long to actually complete.  To make matters worse, I’ve had a cold for a few days so I’m feeling pretty tired.  Oh well.

[edit]I forgot the ‘l’ in Mr. Splode’s name.  Title now corrected.[/edit]

What I have is far from a game.  Maybe if it was a 3-day competition I could have completed something interesting with it, but as it is now all you can do is run around a tiny test stage.  It’s a very quick and dirty 3D engine with terrain collision and animation.  I have a hard time thinking small sometimes.  Maybe next Ludum Dare I’ll learn my lesson!

My Tower Thing – Requires Python, PyGame, and PyOpenGL

I spent the past couple of hours trying to get a simple spacial partitioning system working so ray/triangle intersection tests between game objects and the world mesh would be reasonably quick … or so I hoped.  On my machine the frame rate drops horribly with even as few as 10 intersection tests per frame!  I guess Python’s not a good platform to write a 3D engine in. 

I am making a 3D game and I was thinking it might be easiest if I designed it to require an analog control joystick or gamepad.  Does anybody here not have a joystick of some kind?

Also, I might as well tell about my current progress.  I have a nice start to my 3d engine with loading .OBJ meshes and textures and correctly rendering them.  This is going smoother than I thought it would.

It’s 4:46 am here and I have a bit of insomnia.  Anyhow, I spent more time than I should have creating the main character for my game, since so much more needs to be made.  My original plan was to write a simple 3D engine, so here’s Castle Man looking at something that cought his interest:

I know this is past the deadline and what I have is nowhere near complete, but I thought I’d share it anyhow.  I was hoping to have had at least 20 of the 48 hours available, but this turned out to be a rather busy weekend so I only got to work 12 hours on it.  With that said, however, what I do have is pretty decent (though the code is quite messy.)

It wasn’t originally going to be a simplified version of Mario.  I thought if I got the Mario part working the rest of it would be a cinch, since the rest of the game would only involve small modifications to the Mario code … Maybe if I had more time.

It requires only Python and Pygame.  I included a batch file and a shell script to help people run it, but if that doesn’t work for you just go into the ‘lib’ folder and have Python run ‘main.py’.

Mario can run, jump, collect coins, hit question blocks, break bricks, stomp on goombas, and die.  The controls are ‘left’ and ‘right’ to run and ‘x’ to jump.  The level has one really difficult part, but it doesn’t really matter because there is no real way of completing it.

Have fun and enjoy it!

Download: wizard_v001.zip

I decided, what better movie to make into a video game than a movie ABOUT video games!  I’m surprised how much I have accomplished so far.  I have working game entity system, tile maps, animation, collision detection, game states, and some sprite and tile graphics.  It would have been a lot quicker and easier if I did not have to recreate the graphics for the games manually, but the rules are the rules.

Right now it’s just a Mario 3 clone, but I hope to also add in elements from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Double Dragon, and Rad-Racer.  Am I biting off more than I can chew?  Most definitely.  Screen shots for the final battle between Jimmy and Lucas:

I have no idea where the unicorns will be…

Will the poor little tortus ever make it home?  With your help he might!