It’s been an awesome weekend. Unfortunately, I attempted something far too big, and so while I’m really pleased with what I have, there’s no actual goal, or win/lose condition. Then again, I’ll probably continue working on this after LD finishes.

I’ve added sound effects and the last few animations, fixed the last couple of bugs I came across, and put in a spectacular menu screen:

Ah, isn’t it truly beautiful?

Anyway, it’s 9pm, and I know I couldn’t get much more in here, so I’m done! Good luck to everyone still working furiously on their games.

Game page is here.

Firstly: Play it here!

Made some decent progress. I have goblins in, with some basic state-machine AI – they get a job, then go to work until they get tired and go home to sleep. They did get hungry too… but I got horribly stuck while making the food industry. I think probably I’m tired and my brain isn’t working, so I should get back on track tomorrow.

I added goats! When a goblin works the goat paddock (no animation for him doing so yet… not really sure how it should look) it gradually spawns goats (don’t ask where they come from) which are adorable. I love their animations more than anything else in the game.

However, also visible is the butcher’s shop – that’s the building with the dead goat hanging-up in front. But don’t worry goat fans! No goats are actually harmed yet because of the aforementioned ‘getting stuck’. Currently, the ‘work’ code is the same for all buildings – in fact, all buildings are the same class with different data attached. It’s pretty handy as it means adding a new workplace only means defining its cost, size, image and how long it takes to produce things / what happens when it produces something. But the butcher is tricky, as I need him to grab a goat, carry it back, stay indoors a little while, then come out with some meat to carry to… somewhere. (I haven’t figured that out either.)

But yes! Not sure if I’ll make it an actual game in the time, because there’s currently no goal or lose condition! I wanted you to be able to send goblins pillaging, but apparently making a game based on Dwarf Fortress in 48 hours is a tad unrealistic. Who would have thought?

See you all tomorrow!

Good morning so far! I have a basic interface in, and some not too terrible art.

But first: The obligatory lunch photo! Cheese and pickle sandwich, banana, crisps, chocolate muffin and apple juice.

Below is a current screenshot.Nothing too fancy, but it’s getting there. Next is to actually have goblins moving about – wander to the pit, mine some stone, go back to the hovel to sleep.

After a brief period of oh-my-goodness-what-on-earth-am-I-going-to-do-for-this-theme – related panic, I’ve settled on a game idea: Goblin Fortress! It’ll be a basic city-builder game: build up your goblin settlement, occasionally send some goblins off to ransack unsuspecting villagers, defend yourself from the angry townsfolk.

This is very much a game where I can keep on adding stuff until the deadline, rather than having a fixed goal… Hopefully that won’t be a problem.

I’m using AS3 with Flashpunk, GIMP for the graphics, probably musagi and sfxr for the audio.

It’s after the time, but I really wanted to add high scores, so they’re in! Let’s see who can beat me at yak-based urban demolition! As always, go to http://charitygamejam.com/ and then click the cartridge that says “YAK”.

And now, the post-mortem:

What went right:

• I chose something simple. This is by far the biggest help. I tend to want to do something fancy, with lots of procedural generation… this time, a simple game, which I had plenty of time to do.
• I used a language I was comfortable with, and which made me productive. I don’t know AS3/Flashpunk as well as I could do, but I have made things with it before, and this helped a lot.
• I found simple solutions for things. The city is a simple grid. You destroy the buildings where you land so you can’t get stuck in them. The enemies are helicopters, so I didn’t need to do any pathfinding.
• I made music, sound, and art that I’m pleased with! It’s nothing amazing, but the NES theme meant that I didn’t try and spend ages making it look and sound great, I could  just make things simple.
• I added little touches as I went along. As the game was simple, I had the time to add shockwaves, tween animations, and little people who run away, which made it more fun but didn’t take that long to do.

What went wrong:

• Not a lot! I could have been more prepared sound-wise – I had no experience of musagi, or audacity, so fiddling with those took longer than it should have. But it wasn’t a problem in the end.
• I didn’t get time to add the building variety I’d hoped to. Very few of the city blocks were planned to be empty grass. I wanted tower blocks and things, but by the time I could have tried adding them, it would have meant breaking the code probably.

What I’ve learnt:

• I can actually make music that I don’t think is terrible!
• I can make a 48-hour game with a decent level of polish!
• Heinous is pronounced “Hay-nuss”.

Whoohoo! I managed to make a game that actually feels pretty complete! This is unusual for me.

Heinous Yak Destruction is now available to play on the charitygamejam.com site. It has music, explosions, helicopters, and an actual lose condition! Huzzah!

I didn’t quite get the time to add online high-scores in. The backend is there, just not the stuff in-game. I’ll fiddle around with it tomorrow and hopefully get that included.

If I had more time, I’d have liked to add more buildings – I’d hoped to have big tower blocks and shops as well as the tiny houses. Never mind.

Well, it’s 9:30pm over here, so I’m stopping for today. (Yup, I’m hardcore and I know it. ) As always, the current state of Heinous Yak Destruction is here.

I’m pretty pleased! I’ve got some sound effects, you can smash things, and there are little people who run in terror. So for tomorrow that still leaves the… bits that make it a game rather than just a toy. Some kind of difficulty or time limit, probably in the form of the military coming in to destroy you. Not entirely sure though. Oh, and music! Which I might not get done, to be honest.

Not many people seem to be updating on the blog today. I feel like I’m spamming, but I last posted several hours ago. Where are you all!?

In case anyone else wants all the colours in hexadecimal form, here they are:
(more…)

Heinous Yak Destruction is going fairly well. I’m quite pleased with my little yak character. Turns out that small size + only 3 colours per sprite = really easy art.

If you feel like being a giant yak, wandering a randomly generated (but currently rather dull) city, you can play here. I update the version on the site every so often.

Currently you can’t destroy anything, so you can start the game stuck in a building. Press ‘r’ until you get a city that lets you move.

Still to do:

• More buildings
• Heinous Destruction!
• People running in terror
• The military coming and trying to stop your aforementioned heinous destruction.
• Sound
• Music

So basically, all the things that make it a game rather than a remote-controlled-giant-yak simulator.

I’m finally giving this jam a serious go, after not really doing much in the last few LDs. Hooray!

‘Heinous Yak Destruction’ is a name that came out of http://videogamena.me/ a week or so ago, and it’s going to be a b-movie-style “Giant Yak Destroys a City”-em-up. It’s just before 11am, I have the basic Flashpunk stuff set up, so let’s do this!

So far today I’ve managed to get some base code done that I should have done a long time ago (hooray!) and basic player movement.

The level generation is still just a test thing to see how the tiles look… not great, but they’ll do for now.

I’m currently metaphorically bashing my head against a wall, trying to do collision checking. I’d forgotten how horrible it is. I think jumping in using hitboxes isn’t a good idea. I’ll have to simplify it, get it working, and then make it horribly complicated.

Not visible is the scrolling view as you move around. (Yay!)

Anyway, not spending enough time on this today, and hitting a block have injured my plans in getting Done. Oh, well.

Or, “Oh no, what am I letting myself in for?”

My themes are the above. Dig dirt, Descend into the ground, Destroy the environment for your own selfish needs.

Title: Dig, Descend, Destroy

Because I cannot think of a name.

Description:

Yet Another Mining Game ™. Dig, admire the not-very-realistic water and rock physics, collect treasure! Probably die horribly.

Mockup:

Definition of Done: (Oh dear, this is the hard bit! I’ve tried to limit myself, which means I might actually achieve ‘done’.)

• Player can run around and destroy terrain.
• Terrain is randomly generated to some extent. Caves, mineral veins, streams, all very basic.
• Water moves around, in a semi-realistic fashion.
• At least one kind of dangerous enemy.
• Animation of some sort. Fairly basic.

The more I look at this list the more minimal it looks! I’d like to try to have:

• Terrain generation that makes sense and isn’t boring.
• Several enemy types
• Terrain be falling-sand like, to some extent. Haven’t fully considered how that would work.
• Sounds! Not that likely and if so, probably sfxr.
• Particles! Ooh, sparkly.
• More player control over the terrain. Buckets, maybe explosives somehow.
• Maybe a shop? That’d make some sense.
• Even more feature creep…

Code-wise, I’ve decided to go with C++ as it’s what I’m most comfortable with, and depending on what convoluted physics models I end-up developing, Flash might not be fast enough.

Art is likely to be done in a mix of Paint and the GIMP, as the latter is better but takes forever to load up.

Sounds will probably be generated in sfxr, should they exist at all.

Music? You must be kidding!

So yeah, I spent too long getting nowhere, and didn’t feel like carrying on today (though I did make a brief attempt to fix things) so I’ll declare myself out.

Good luck to everyone else! There are quite a few games I look forward to playing.

As is traditional now, I’ve spent a couple of hours having things not work for no explicable reason. It doesn’t help that Flashpunk’s documentation isn’t very good, but all I’m trying to do is draw a line, for which there is a function, which does nothing.

Maybe it’s a simple thing (the equivalent to forgetting to add a tween to the world) but whatever it is, it’s burned me out a bit. If anyone could tell me how to draw a line and make it work (preferably onto a Canvas, as I’ll be doing collisions from it too) then I’d be very, very grateful! And you’ll get a warm, fuzzy feeling, along with a game that has lines in! Everyone’s a winner!

Hooray, I kind-of have some playabilitinessification.

So far, you can move around, and trhow an anchor at the little red dudes that come out of the huts,to knock them over. Then you have to pick-up your achor before you can throw it again, which at the moment is a huge drag, and it’s hard to hit things with the anchor… Hmmm.

The idea is that after throwing, you’ll have a chain to the anchor, and you’ll run round knocking dudes over with it. I may well get nothing else done, which is a bit rubbish! Too much time spent fiddling with the (veeery basic) animations.

Screenshot!

It’s sort-of, kind-of, playable here.

The theme is a bit of an odd one, but I don’t think it’s terrible. That being said, I don’t actually have an idea yet!

First thoughts:

• Where are you going?
• Why is it dangerous?
• What are you given?

Naturally, all my vague ideas are monstrously too big for 48 hours. Maybe some kind of randomised structure, so that each of the three questions has several answers. But that still doesn’t help me know what I’m making! Especially if I want to stick with text-commands. Hmmmm.

Something about today made me lose motivation for LD, but then again, this doesn’t come around often, and it’s always a good laugh.

For some reason, I fancy doing an HTML/Javascript game, which relies of text commands as input – not necessarily text as output though. Most obvious use for that would be a text adventure, but I’ll try and think of something more interesting than that. Depends on the theme, of course!

Anyway, may the code be with you all! I’ll see you in the morning.

I’ve managed to be busy then uninspired, and spent most of yesterday discovering that FlashDevelop wasn’t working, and reinstalling that and Flex. So, I have very little of what could be considered a game:

The latest version looks like this, except the #s are replaced by text loaded from a file.

My eventual idea,thought of in the shower, is something a bit like a cross between a roguelike and Infinite Blank. So, a potentially infinite set of roguelike rooms, created and edited by players. This is quite blatantly well beyond what I can achieve before the end of his compo, but oh well!

I’ve wanted to enter since I heard of this, and having suddenly got a simple, but pretty cool idea last night, I’m going for it! And to make me more likely to complete my game, I’m posting publicly about doing so. That way, I can be motivated by public humiliation!

Not sure I want to give away the idea yet, so I’ll just say I’m finally going to properly try Flash with Flashpunk, and Box2D. Should be very educational if nothing else!

Dear C#,

I know we got off to a bad start. I was prejudiced against you, despite what my friends said. But in the end I gave you a go, because Visual Studio 2008 is the only IDE on this, my Dad’s laptop, and I didn’t want to use C++. I mean, me and C++ were good friends. Good friends. But she’s too awkward to work with.

You didn’t meet up to my expectations, when your console output was so slow; when you only allowed a few, predefined colours. I could see the good in you, see how you were trying so hard.

Then today, well, I’ve had enough. I wasted so much time today, when I should have been writing game logic, searching through your documentation, trying to find how to draw one image onto another. Eventually someone helped me know how to do it, but it’s still awkward. Why does it involve another class? It’s a basic, fundamental thing to do.

But the final straw was window sizes. When I want an 800×600 window, that means the inside. I wouldn’t mind if there was a way to know the border sizes, but there isn’t, and they vary between operating systems. There is simply no way to do it. Or if there is, it’s not worth the hassle.

Goodbye, C#. It’s not me, it’s you.

(Relatedly, I guess I’m out of the competition now. Bah!)