This may be of interest to LD-ers, if there’s any of you that don’t already visit TIGSource

Assemblee is a two-part game-making competition!  Each part has its own rules.

1. In the first part, artists and musicians will have a month to create as many art and music assets as they wish.  These assets will be voted on at the end of the month based on the quantity, quality, and variety of the assets provided.

2. In the second part, designers and programmers will have a month to take the assets created in part one and make games with them (assets used need not be limited to one person or team).  The programmers cannot make any changes to the assets unless it’s done during runtime.  The best game will be voted on in the normal fashion.

Full info here: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=8751.0

Sounds like this one could be a lot of fun!

Spent most of the day so far messing with physics (Tokamak) – attempting to get boxes that can be pushed around. Sort of works now, but it’s not great… but also got the collectable gems in.  (I’ll have to do some screenshots with the lighting+bloom turned off, to show just how plain the geometry+textures really are…).  Anyway, need to add win/lose contitions, and support for more than 1 level…  And maybe some audio, but this one may have to remain silent, as I’m almost out of time…

There be blobs!… proper polygonal blobs. With blob shadows, and physics (I’m using Tokamak again)

Actually, I’m only intending to have one blob, for the player. There’s still no controls/gameplay, I’m not expecting this entry to reach a particularly complete state – I’ve been rather too overambitious (and wasted loads of time tweaking graphical stuff) .  But I should have at least some gameplay by the end of tomorrow…

Still not sure what the game will be, though…

Ambient Occlusion?

Still no gameplay whatsoever, but some very basic level editing, and sort-of per-vertex ambient occlusion, which works fairly well…

Well, they were meant to be rock/dirt textures, but they look far more like chocolate brownies! (mmm… chocolate… need more snacks!)

Making progress… As usual, I’m putting the tech before the gameplay… I’ve not go a game design beyond having my usual blob character jumping around it and avoiding the lava…  Now do I put a physics engine in it? Or keep it simple and spend the time on visuals…

So I’ve spent the last 3 hrs or so finding out that Windows 7 + Multi-monitor + Fullscreen D3D = problems…

And that you can’t use debug-mode D3D with Win7 and recent NVidia drivers…

So nothing game-like yet… but here’s a pic of my workspace

And first random scribblings of a game idea

So long as I don’t get called in to work over the weekend (big work project currently in the submission process…), and as long as the theme isn’t Evolution (lol, I’ve been voting that one down for years, still don’t have any half-decent ideas for it!), then it looks like I’m in

Just got a shiny new PC upgrade, too – a Geforce 275, an SSD, running the Win7 RC…  so expect some brute-force GPU abuse – I think I’m mostly set up ready for some gamedev…  got a reasonable supply of caffiene and snacks…

Planning to use the same little DX9 base code that I used for my last LD entry – no fancy 3D model support, but it handles all the initialisation stuff, texture loading, 2D blitting/fonts, vector/matrix classes (which I had fun discovering a few arkward bugs in during my last LD48…), and very basic shader loading

It’s done, complete with some badly recorded sound effects…

http://www.bluescrn.net/ld48_13/bluescrn_LD48_0xF0.zip

Final screenshot:

OMG… It’s almost done!… for the first time in maybe 3 years I’ve got a decent LD48 entry, and not given up to play WoW or drink excessive quantities of alcohol!

Added a front end… an all in one title-instructions-trackselect screen. Checkpoints are working, best times are being recorded (even loaded+saved!) and being used to unlock levels…

I need to do some more work on the track generation algorithm, though – as of the 100 tracks that are selectable, quite a few appear to be impossible (due to intersecting track mesh). Then I’ve got some time for some finishing touches – it’s a choice between (very bad) audio, or maybe a ghost car system!

Time for a food break now… just a very boring toasted sandwich, I think…

Just added checkpoint rings and a starting grid texture. Also got basic track selection in. It’s going to be a time-trial only game, not much hope of adding AI players at this point – so next I need to add the timing code, and checkpoint/finish/failure detection.

Ghost cars would be nice… but that’s pushing it a bit for an LD48 game…

Textured at last!… now for the arkward job of generating normals…

Not a huge amount of visual progress – but I’ve got some player control and camera code working – took a lot of tweaking to get something usable…

Now I need to get a player vehicle in (wipeout-style hovering thing), and decide whether to keep it wireframe or start texturing it…

Now added the Tokamak physics lib to the project..  I’ve got a sphere rolling around the track. I can’t render spheres, though – so it’s just represented by those red lines… but it works

(Oh – and does anyone know if you can make Wordpress default to a sensible size post editing window, rather than the tiny default I seem to get?)

It’s got curves and slopes.. now should I add a physics engine?…

I did intend to tidy up and upload this a while ago, but never got around to it… It’s something I’m using for another project, but makes a fairly nice framework for quick little C++/D3D-based projects. Such as an LD48 entry…

www.bluescrn.net/ld48_13/ld48.zip

It includes:

- D3D init, window creation/resizing/windowed-fullscreen

- Texture loading

- 2D and 3D polygon blitter classes, using (very simple) shaders. (Easyish to add additional shaders)

- Bitmap font rendering (fonts created by the Angelcode BMFont tool, loaded using TinyXML)

- Basic render-to-texture support, and the beginnings of a postprocessing system – currently a fairly rough bloom effect

- Vector and Matrix maths classes

I know there’s still differing opinions over using ‘base code/custom libs’ like this – but this is all fairly basic stuff, and there’s nothing in here that couldn’t be found in other freely available libraries. Just judge my entry (if I manage to complete one!) accordingly…

Have made some nice progress after my late start – but I’m completely knackered, so not sure if I’m going to continue it… if I’d had the full weekend, it could have been pretty cool….

Well, been at work all day, so got just over 24hrs to try and throw something together..

So it ain’t original, but should be a bit of fun to make… Yep, a Nebulus-like rotaty towery thingy

Well, I think I’m done… it’s rather a lot more minimal than I’d hoped, not been feeling too well this weekend, so decided to stop early. I’d hoped to make better use of Chipmunk and put in ropes/chains and other fun stuff, and some hazards – but kept getting too distracted playing it / building levels (it’s got a built-in level editor, if you press E in-game, but it’s a bit arkward to use, and I didn’t get round to writing any instructions…)

Final(ish) version is here…

http://www.bluescrn.net/LD48/LD48-11-bluescrn.zip

My pet blob is back… and it’s almost a game now

As well as the graphical style, the controls are quite minimal – just the left and right keys

The editor is fully functional now, and the objects are rendering quite nicely… now I need some gameplay!

Got rigid objects working with Chipmunk, after eventually realising that adding the static body to the space is bad and makes it all go horribly wrong… No gameplay yet, but a mostly working editor mode (lacking load+save…)

I was planning to learn chipmunk before the compo, but never quite got around to it… so it took a little longer than planned to get it up and running – but now I’ve got a load of rigid body boxes flying around the screen. And the beginnings of a level editor for a physics-y platformy thing. Minimalist in a mostly visual style way. And in my usual LD48 minimal-as-in-nonexistant audio way…