I know not what evils I have unleashed.

I have an idea for what kind of game I want to make, but I’m not 100% certain about how successful I might be.  I have been wanting to test out Unity more and the idea I have might have quite a bit of content, so between how much might need to be figured out and how much needs to be made I might not have enough time.  That being said, I still intend to try to make something.

The idea I had was to present a different perspective on war.  You play as a defenseless civilian in a war-torn area.  There are soldiers, tanks, artillery, and bombers throughout the area battling each other.  The city is being destroyed and crumbling around you.  All you need to do to ‘win’ is to survive to the end of the battle.

I think I might be failing as far as purposely making it bad.  It’s so tempting to tweak things to make it feel a little better — I cannot resist it!  Anyhow, I’m making a compilation game.  So far I completed (with exception to sound) two of the games today.  I plan to keep making games until the time runs out, so I don’t know how many there will be in the end.

Game 1 is called “Lost In The Woods.”  Try to find your way back home.  Controls are arrow keys.

Game 2 is called “Alien Invader.”  It’s a somewhat standard space shooter with a twist.

Edit: If you have Python & PyGame and would like to test out what I currently have, feel free to download it here: http://temp.natewm.com/prog/agc_alpha_1.zip

Not only is there life on Mars, but that life is Dinosaurs!

I don’t know what kind of game I’m going to try to make, but I just spent some time in Blender making an astronaut on Mars.  This is not actual in-game graphics, but a Blender render.  The actual Unity game will look a little different.

I don’t know if I will be able to accomplish much this Ludum Dare.  Tomorrow might be all used up with other plans, but there might still be a possibility that something might get accomplished.

If I do participate I would like to try making something with Unity.  I’ve played around with it a little, but there are still a lot of things for me to learn.  I think it would be fun to try to at least make something small and simple with it.

I will be continuing work on my LD #18 attempt.  I did not upload it to the site at the time, since it was not really a game at the time — no winning or losing.  It may be possible for me to create some levels and turn this into a little platforming adventure.

Here is the timelapse from the LD #18 weekend.

I didn’t quite have enough time to finish even with the extra jam day.  I am still working on it and I hope to bring it to completion relatively soon. In the meantime, enjoy this timelapse video of me working on the game.  It covers 32 hours worth of work over a span of three days.  More information is provided in the YouTube video description.

Link to ArmchairArmada’s LD18 timelapse video

I didn’t really have a playable game at the time of the deadline, but I thought I’d share my game’s current status.

DOWNLOAD CURRENT PLAYABLE DEMO (Windows executable)

Enemies following and some musical instruments.

I now have improved player controls, animation, backgrounds, and bouncing enemies.  I have no idea how the gameplay is going to work, but I’m thinking of this Pied Piper type guy being able to tame different enemies with different instruments.  Then they follow him around like Yoshi’s eggs in Yoshi’s Island.  I’m not sure what happens next.

Bouncing Enemies

I had a few delays today — slowing progress down a bit, but I feel like I’m getting back on track.  Here is a screenshot of how my game currently looks.  It has almost no gameplay — just a tilemap and basic character controls.

Hero standing near some water.

I’m not going to be able to do much (if any) work on Saturday and part of Sunday, so I might have to attempt a 10 hour Ludum Dare this weekend.  Fortunately I’m going to know what the theme is so I can plan some stuff out whenever I have free time tomorrow.  It still might turn out to be a fun LD even with the reduced time limit.

I plan on using the usual Python and PyGame.  I’ll only have time for something simple.

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.