A fairly slow start, game ideas slowly coming together, an I decided to make something isometric this time. Which unfortunately means that I need to do more art usual… Very placeholdery iso tiles for now, until I get some gameplay together, then I’ll have a go at redrawing (or maybe rendering) something a bit nicer…

Next comes the ‘fun’ bit… proper sorting of the tiles with moving objects like the player and enemies…

All my base, actually… My basecode is here

Didn’t get around to learning enough Unity to make use of that this time, so I’m going with the usual C++ with a bit of D3D and a sprinkling of FMOD. It’s pretty much the same base as I’ve used for the last couple of compos, just a couple of bugfixes and a bit of minor tidying up.

- D3D setup, Windowed/Fullscreen switching
- Texture loading
- Text rendering
- Maths (Vector, Matrix, Camera classes)
- Basic input
- Bloom effect*
- very very basic wrapper around FMOD for audio

Still not got around to writing a model loader for it, though

(*Yeah, OK, this one does seam mildly cheaty – but there’s open source rendering engines out there, and things like Unity, that give you a whole lot more!)

Not sure if I’m compo-ing or just jamming – guess it depends on the theme and early progress…

Inspired by other people doing it, here’s a little montage of my 8 games (and 8 years!) of LD48…   Shame I missed so many along the way… was just a mix of work/crunch, a few years of  a WoW habit, and a couple of themes I didn’t like…

It’s done… well, as done as it’s going to ever be…  my little 48hr FPS

Fairly happy with it considering that I wasn’t able to spend Sat evening working on it – and almost gave up at that point. But it’s a bit boring, only one weapon and one type of enemy – with more and more waves of them being thrown at you on the same (randomly generated) terrain.

Well, it’s not as fun/finished as I’d hoped (no title screen, only one type of enemy)…  It’s just a very basic FPS where you fight off waves of smokey snake like creatures (all islands have smoke monsters, right?).  I’m about out of energy, just got to squeeze out a few sound effects, then I’ll call it done…

Slightly prettier landscape, with a shader to multitexture it. And the player can shoot. But there’s nothing to shoot at yet…  (And my water looks rubbish compared to Unity!)

If I’d spent last night on it, this might have been fairly decent, but I’m now a fair way behind schedule, not going to be able to get it nicely finished- but I’ll try to get some enemies in…

Slow progress, but some progress.  The heightmap is now ‘island-ized’, and I can run around it in first-person. It desparately needs a sky and some water

Off to a BBQ soon, so I’m going to lose the most productive LD-ing time, the saturday evening…  Not sure if anything will come of this one…

Terrain

Something on screen…  got some fairly smooth terrain being generated (brute-force, no LOD, rendering a 128×128 grid… so the islands will have to be fairly small).  Not sure if there’ll be water around them or if they’ll be floating in space…  Still not entirely sure what will happen on these islands, but I expect it’ll involve particles…

Hmm.. Unexpected…

Rainbow Islands?  Carrier Command?  Pirates? 4 8 15 16 23 42?

Initial thoughts involve a landscape engine, but I don’t really want to go for the whole over-ambitous full 3D thing… not got the tools/tech ready to load models…   Can’t really go for anything high-tech these days, from near scratch, it just gets pwned by the Unity users… so maybe I’ve got to actually start concentrating on gameplay?!

Think I’ve got enough gear at the ready… just need a good theme and some motivation

(Spent my ‘LD Preparation day’ finally clearing the junk out my spare room, and moving in all the computer gear, which has been set up in the bedroom for far too long…  Potentially the home office of a future indie game developer… more likely just a location from which to play too much Starcraft 2 in the gaps between continuing to work long hours at a ‘big games’ job…)

As for my LD plans, I think I’ll stick with my traditional C/C++/DirectX, with the base code that I’ve used for my last couple of LDs

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