Spent too much time messing with Blender and graphical stuff yesterday, I’m still lacking any gameplay – but I’ve got a scrolling map, and  aplyer that the player moves+shoots, and has collision detection. A slightly unconventional control system – arrow keys for forwards/backwards/steering on the player – but with mouse aiming.  WIP build here:  http://www.bluescrn.net/ld48alone/

So I’m in for another Ludum Dare (as long as the theme isn’t too silly…). I’ll be joining the #MidlandsIndies in Coventry tomorrow, but may spend Sunday at home in front of my ‘real computer’, as I struggle to be productive on a laptop in an unfamiliar environment…

This time, I’m giving up my usual C++/D3D this time, and I’m going to use Flash (AS3 in FlashDevelop) using Stage3D!

I’ve put together a little framework for doing sprite-based 2D games using Stage 3D. I call it ‘Turbo2D’, and the source is available here, if anyone fancies messing with Stage3D themselves.

There’s also a little test/demo here!

It was going fairly well – but after staying up too late last night working on this, I’m low on energy and enthusiasm, not sure if I’ll actually get it into a submittable state.  Too much time spent drawing the bike/biker, and learning about Chipmunk constraints…

Got the bike physics working quite nicely, after turning the friction up to 11.  Enabled bloom, added a smoky background.

A massive volcano has erupted… can you escape the advancing lava (well, I missed out on ‘Advancing wall of doom’ when that was the theme)…

Need to sort the camera out next, it’s not very playable that zoomed in…  but it does show off the bike that I spent far too long drawing, and which now has nicely working suspension…

Sine Rider

Struggling a bit to get decent bike suspension/controls working, but at leas there’s a partially controllable bike in there now…  time to work on the level generation code, and think about how to make it into more of a game…

Bike bits

Why did I decide to make a game that needed a human character… that’s my golden rule of Ludum Dare… minimal art, and *absolutely no humans, or other hard-to-draw creatures!*

Spent hours now trying to draw this bike and rider…  this will have to do, let’s get back to some code…

Wheely Good Progress

The chipmunk is alive!   Generated a nice rock-ish texture in Genetica (which is awesome, btw), use that most-overused Photoshop grass brush for some grass, and got it all UV mapped nicely.

Abusing 4×4 matrices for 2D sprite transforms – I’ve got a matrix class in my base code but no actual sprite support.   But I’ve got a super-inefficient sprite class going now, along with an as-simple-as-possible entity manager  (not much more than an array of pointers…)

Now I’ve got to try drawing the rest of the bike… that’s a bit more challenging…

Very early progress

The theme seemed a bit uninspiring. And I wanted to do something that’s not a tile-based platformer this time…  ended up thinking about the motorbike chase in ‘The Great Escape’, and decided to do a physics-based motorbike game, with procedurally generated terrain (rather heavily inspired by Tiny Wings/Extreme Road Trip/Smuggle Truck/Elastomania etc.)

Got a basic sum-of-sine-waves rendering+scrolling, but I’ve got some ideas to make it more varied. But first, time to add Chipmunk for physics, and get the beginnings of a player in…

So I recorded a timelapse of this LD48 – Chronolapse did a great job of capturing screenshots, although doing a batch resize+crop and high-quality encode from jpegs was a little trickier… The end result was pretty good, though:

And of course, the final game is here

Well, just submitted my finished build! It’s a bit simpler and shorter than I’d hoped, but as my first real Unity project it’s been quite a successful weekend.

Play it online (Unity plugin required)

(I expect that it requires a fairly quick graphics card to run well, though… there’s quite a lot of objects/polys/particles involved…)

Done: Level exits, dying, restarting, spikes, controls/physics bugfixing, basic sound effects.

Features cut: Enemies

Todo: Build more levels, Try to figure out Unity shaders.

Stuck with the ‘completely untextured but lots of polys’ style. Could have spent ages on texturing things, but I’d had enough Blender->Unity problems without even going there (mostly because Blender displays everything double-sided, and doesn’t automatically flip normals when a mesh is flipped…)

Been quite a successful weekend considering I’d only spent 2-3 days beforehand messing with/learning Unity. It’s horribly hacky, inefficient, and badly structured – but it’s a playable game

Created a fairly crude player model. So I’m not running a box around the level any more… Also got collectable gems, but I can’t get Unity shaders working, so they don’t look very gem-like – I just want to make them lit+additive, to look a bit like oldskool Amiga ‘glenz vectors’…)

Slow going, but I’ve got an almost working grappling hook system, it’ll grab the closest ‘grapple point’ (the round things). Yes, the block on the end of the chain should be the player, but it’s still a placeholder block.

And the colours are pink as Unity crashed and I lost some updates to my scene file, including the lights… Next to add some collectables, and a way to reset the level/load a new level…

‘It’s dangerous to go alone… take this…. grappling hook!’ is the basic idea

Using Unity this time, and I’ve only spent a couple of days learning the basics. Been having a real hard time getting meshes from Blender into it cleanly, but now I’ve got a first block in, I’ve been writing some scripts. Got a basic (brute-force) tilemap system, and simple platformer physics/collision (just done my own, to avoid some of the trickiness of using ‘real physics’ for a platformer)

Also figured out that you’ve got to smooth time.DeltaTime values yourself if you want anything to run smoothly when vsynced…

‘Playable’ version here

Cool, came in 5th in a compo that I almost abandoned halfway through due to isometric sorting woes

But looking at the scores in general has reminded me just how much the Humor category needs to be nuked from orbit!

Being hit with a load of 1′s and 2′s in this category (which isn’t relevant to a lot of games) isn’t much fun. It’s obviously not just my games that suffer from this – even Notch’s epic Metagun was given a couple of 1′s in this category, and that was a solid 4-5 game. How about just removing the humor category, if a game would have scored high here, that should add to the ‘fun’ score, shouldn’t it? (Maybe even score Fun out of 10, instead of 5?)

Also, there’s been a bit of what I can only describe as ‘troll scoring’ going on – with solid 4+ games being given 1s and 2s across the board by at least one voter (in a lame attempt to vote down the competition?)

I’d almost suggest filtering out the highest and lowest couple of ratings for each game when calculating the final results?

Discuss…

It’s as finished as it’s going to get. I’m reasonably happy with the end result – as it didn’t go so smoothly this time – going isometric was a bit trickier than I’d anticipated… Download it here

So less time for the gameplay itself – but maybe that wasn’t a bad thing, as keeping the game simple forced me to be a bit more creative with the level design. And although the game is short, just a few small levels, the last couple should present a reasonable challenge

Player blob is in, with controls and basic collision detection. Enemy ‘attack’ logic is in, and they can be made to destroy each other (although they just disappear for now)

Unfortunately, the game is probably going to be much simpler than originally intended, with just one enemy type. I’m going to concentrate on making it a bit more playable (game progression, player death, etc), then decide whether there’s time to add another enemy type, or to add death/destruction effects for the enemy/player/rocks

I went to bed last night thinking my LD48 was over, after wasting so much time trying to make a fundamentally incorrect depth-sorting algorithm work for my isometric objects/tiles… I stripped it down to something much simpler (ground layer, tiles/objects layer, simple sort based on one depth value) that worked well enough – but I’d lost a whole lot of time.

But I got up this morning, and decided to give it another push… and it’s amazing what a difference a sky texture and some very simple lighting makes:

Loads and loads still to do, though… map loader, player logic, enemy logic, collision detection, and more…

Well, it looks like I’m probably out… Tried something new, underestimated the challenge, and it didn’t really work out… my attempt at something isometric (2D, no z-buffer) has failed, after spending the whole afternoon trying to sort my depth sorting…

Whilst depth-sorting a grid of isometric tiles is trivial – adding in objects that can move smoothly around the map, well, it’s not exactly simple!…

Will keep hacking away at it for another hour or so, see if I can figure out a ‘good enough’ alternative – but I’ve wasted a big chunk of the day on it now, can’t see much hope of recovering from this and finishing something

So after spending a couple of hours working on an isometric tile sorting algorithm, I made the fatal mistake of spending time on art… I could have just kept my placeholders, but started messing with my Wacom Bamboo (these seem quite popular amongst LD-ers this time?) and try painting some rocks and grass…

Going to have to stop for dinner soon, but I need to hack together a little entity system as quickly as possible, and attempt to get some gameplay in, before spending a lot of time on player/enemy graphics…