Tried to add a classic map by hand. Noticed that it was stupid, and decided to write a image-to-map function. After a few bugs, here it is! This bitmask tutorial helped quite a bit to make the code cleaner.

Classic Map

Gotta post something to keep me motivated:

A simple screenshot of my game. Maps are working, as well as collision between entities and the map. Player control is in as well.

Basic player control is working, as well as collision between the ghosts and the map. Implemented some very simple AI controllers that will always “move forward” in a random direction.

Next in the queue:

• Make a “traditional” maze
• Implement a simple pacman
• Implement ghosts killing the pacman, and an intro/resetting screen
• Implement coins/coin-pacman interaction/losing screen
• Implement power pellets

That should be the basic. After that, its up for balancing/AI, and polish.

Play the game (1-4 switch ghosts, arrowkeys, awsd move selected ghost):

• Java Applet
• Fat Jar

LINUX USERS: please let me know if the java applet runs for you! If not, the Fat Jar should run anyway. Thanks!

Thanks Mutuware!

After 3 hours, I have picked up my game idea:

“REVERSE PACMAN”

Time to start coding

I’m torn into two ideas at the moment:

1- QIX: you control the snake, the computer controls the ship.
2- Pacman: you control the ghosts, the computer controls pacman.

Both ideas are rather simple, and cool. Designing a good AI for both is the main challenge. I’ll think about them for a while, pick one and begin coding.

“You are the enemy” is an amazing theme, but not necessarily one that is easy to do.

The simple way to do it is to simply create a game where your character is the bad guy. This sort of “theme as dressing” can work if you are very good at designing a theme and a feel to go around it. But if you aren’t, it will just look boring: Packman with a goth, furious pacman? Karateca with an bloody evil karateka?

A second way is to design your game around the concept of evilness. “Infectionator” of ludum dare fame, or “dungeon keeper” are two such examples. Your game becomes a bit more complex this way though.

A third and harder way is to take a common game, and change it so that you control the enemies, instead of controlling the hero. Space invaders, where you actually control the invaders, or pacman where you actually control the ghosts. This can be very interesting, but like all interesting things, can be hard. The big problem is that most games are designed so that the player has many choices, and has to rely on his skill and decision making, while the enemies often rely on numbers, so making the player control the enemies in an interesting way, and making the computer controlled hero behave in a challenging way can be quite difficult.

With all this in mind, the first thing that I thought for the theme was to make a “reverse-QIX”. In this reverse QIX, you control the QIX, and the computer controls the spaceship trying to fence you in. Since QIX has one enemy and one player, it makes sense to switch them around. However, making a competent AI for a QIX ship seems like a hard programming challenge.

Since my initial idea for this LD was “a simple action game”, I have to think of a few more things. One thing that immediately springs to my head is a “You’re a shark and you have to eat people”. This is a great idea, but has already been done before.

Another idea would be a “reverse missile command”, where you can throw missiles at a city protected by turrets. This time, the challenge would be A) making the gameplay interesting to the player, and B) balancing the turret AI (it is very easy to make a super strong AI in this game).

I will go cut my hair, make a decision, and begin coding… so far I’m favoring the reverse QIX game.

• Environment: Lots and lots of blankets, all sorts of hot tea and coffee — Check!
• Programming Environment: Eclipse, Java, Slick2D, template classes — Check!
• Tools: Script for timelapsing, Gimp and Inkscape, Autotuner, bfxr, and a bunch of online music generators — Check!

Everything is mostly checked out. It is a cold morning in Ibaraki, Japan, and I’m ready and pumped to go. Doing laundry and other home chores while waiting. I can’t get the QiX idea out of my head – I really loved that game. It feels a bit like cheating for me, but I can’t prevent myself thinking about how to implement all the necessary geometry and mathematics for that kind of game (mostly, how to generate a group of rectangles from an arbitrary number of points, and how to merge and split line segments).

I guess I will go with the QiX idea anyway, and twist it accordingly depending on the theme.

My plan, if everything goes all right:

• Saturday: Get the basic game running (making rectangles, detecting end of stage, enemies, twist).
• Sunday: Polish, polish, polish (sounds, animations, transitions, etc)
• Monday Morning (LD ends at 11:00 my time): Public testing from friends, bug hunting, packaging and go!

Or so I hope. All plans melt in the face of the enemy

To end the post, here is a picture of my support team:

My helpers this time out.

The time has come! One last LD before the end of the world

I didn’t really had time to prepare for this LD (my 4th! How the time flies…). Between LD24 and now, I tried to develop a topdown shooter inspired by the boardgame “galaxy trucker”. But without the time pressure, that project quicly ended up falling to the wayside

But I have thought a lot about what I want to do this LD. In my last two tries (LD23 and LD24), my ideas were too ambitious, and the game suffered because of that. This time around, I’m keeping it really simple. I’m going for a limited, top down action game, where I can increase the difficulty by adding more/faster enemies.

Ideally, I want to make a QiX like game if I can make the theme fit (with appropriate twists once the base game is done). If I can’t make the theme fit, I will go either a bouncing physics game, or a top down shooter.

Or… maybe I will have some crazy idea and blow it up again. I hope not.

At least this time I should have plenty of time for game reviews after the dare! So I should make up for the shameful LD24 where I barely reviewed 20 games.

Hope to see you all around tomorrow! GL HF!

Well, while still in my work trip, I managed to set aside sometime to rate some games.

Given that I’m currently on a linux netbook with a tiny screen, the amount of games that I can try out is rather limited, even if you don’t account for work and things like that.

Nevertheless, I managed to rate about 10 games today, and I want to highlight this one:

Social Evolution

Social evolution is a “pick up the right items” kind of game, where bad and good upgrades fall from the right side of the screen, and you must pick up the good ones. The gameplay and mechanics are rather simplistic, but the art style of the game was very remarkable. I recommend playing this game to realize what kind of cool graphics you can make over a simple pixel base.

If you want me to rate your game (a comment is always attached!) feel free to comment below! If your game is windows only, it will take about 10 days before I can rate (when I get back from my trip), but I promise I will!

Cheers, and thanks for all the games.

Today I got a friend to play my game together with me, and I realized that the interface is completely non-intuitive. Here is a small guide about how to play the game:

* Goal: Your goal is to please the different clients, by selling them cats that fit their preferences. Each client has a completely different preference, such as big cats, spotted, active cats, etc.

* Breeding screen: You start the game here. Select a Cat and click on the “breeding area” to select a cat for breeding. Ribbons indicate females. Small cats are immature and cant breed. Select a cat and click on the lens to get more info about it. Select a cat and click on the river to throw a cat away. Click “end turn” to advance the game: Cats will breed and eat food.

* Pet Shop Screen: You can buy 4 different items here. Click on an item to get a description of the item. Click on “buy item” to buy the selected item.

* Sell cats scree: The list of your cats, and the list of available clients can be seen. Select a cat, a client, and click on “Sell Cat” (bottom button) to sell a cat. Select a client and click on the mouth button to get some info about that client. Select a cat and click on the lens button to get some info about the cat.

Sorry about the lengthy manual. When my friend started playing the game, the confusing parts of the interface became immediately obvious. Many of those were easy fixes. This is why it is VERY important to get your game tested by another person during the dare (of course, to get your game testing, you need a working prototype early in the dare).

Hope you enjoy the game!

I’m kinda in a hurry, but I managed to, kinda, finish my game. I’m not sure yet whether I’m more or less happy with it than I was with my LD23 game.

But I have to go to a dinner, and when I’m back I’ll try to write a post-mortem.

In the meanwhile, check out my game!

Well, I finally got the breeding mechanic and interface down (although it still lacks prettyfying). These kittens have a simple diploid chromossome, which mimics our real world’s crossover and mutation mechanics pretty closely – I’m happy about that.

Now you can breed cats! And Zombie kittens!

Now I will rest a bit, and then start to implement the shop where you can buy some things to help your kittens (like food so they don’t starve), and buyers so you can make some money.

Here is the link with the fat-jar. At this moment, it is just the breeding screen – but you can have some fun already! That is, until the food end and all kittens die!

I’m finally getting into the zone. I’m finishing the breeding mechanics and interfaces, and I’m getting many simple and good ideas for the game, and ideas on how to implement those.

In my current computer, it is not likely that I will be able to dedicate any work or graphics or sound, but it sounds like a fun game is brewing. Expect a prototype in a few hours.

By the way, has anyone else had issues with Eclise+Ubuntu? Whenever Eclipse autocomplete something for me, it loses mouse input, and I have to alt+tab to some other program before Eclipse can recover mouse input… it just happens on this computer with Unity, no problems on my KDE boxes. Anyone knows a simple solution?

Cheers!

I defined my game plan, the genome for the animals, functions for randomly generating genomes, crossover, mutation, and generating genotypes from phenotypes.

Thinking about it… seems that I’m really slow, specially considering that I started late……. *sigh*. Time to start on basic interface and game mechanics.

Ok, after 8 hours, I’m finally sitting down to get started on my LD entry. This time around everything is against me. I had a hellish week, which left me tired enough that I had to just crash after the theme was announcing, and I’m also travelling, which means I only have my wimpy netbook at my disposal. But at least I got the theme I wanted since the first LD!

Last LD, I make the mistake of not making the management game that I wanted, for fear that it was not going to be popular. This time around, since everything is already stacked against me, I will throw caution to the wind, and do the damn management game anyway!

The idea is that you are a breeder of a certain creature that uses haploid genetics. You have to make money by managing your herd, and selling creatures that meet certain specifications.

Let’s see how this turns out.

Turns out that due to work related issues, my intercontinental flight was moved away from the 25/26 weekend.

I should be happy that now I will have a weekend all for myself to dedicate to LD24: no worries about not being able to submit on time, or my laptop battery dying.

On the other hand, I was getting really pumped to code from the spacious economic class.

Anyway, I’m in. Like before, my tools of the trade will be Java/Slick2D for coding, GIMP/inkscape for image editing, sfxr/autotunes for sound/audio generation, and I will be making a timelapse of the whole thing using the screenshot grabber on my ubuntu laptop.

This time I will be coding from my tiny netbook, instead of my gaming Desktop, so that will suck. But let’s see what I can get done!

Cheers,

Hey Guys!

Recently the university I work in was asked to prepare a two-day intensive course on game programming to a small group of high-school kids. Of course I offered to organize that. (Even though I’m not an expert in the field)

I really like to use hands-on approach, so I thought do it kind as a half LD-half class. I plan to use the first two hours to teach them some basic concepts on game design, and help set up their development platform. After that we’ll use the rest of the time to let them prepare their own games, LD-style, while I coach them. Maybe with some breaks to give some quick lessons on animations, event handling, etc.

Does anyone with similar experience can give me some ideas, tips or pointers? If anyone has any material that they would let me use, it would be awesome.

(unfortunately, the course will be late September — I would love having them participate on LD24 as the final assignment )

Cheers,

You guys may have heard of Darwin Tunes before. If not, it is an experiment on evolutionary computation, where small music samples are automatically generated, and evolved based on feedback from the public.

After you give feedback to any particular sound loop (follow the instructions in the side), you are given a link to download the loop you just heard. The loops are CC-BY-NC, so I guess they could be used for LD?
Most of them sound really cool, so this seems like a good alternative for those of us without great musical talents

Woooo, Ludum Dare 24th on August 24th!

Except… I will be 10.000 feet above the ground that weekend! I have a Tokyo-Sao Paulo flight leaving on August 25th, 7GMT, and arriving in Sao Paulo August 26th 12:00 GMT (with a 5 hour layover in Houston). Let’s think about it:

Negative points:
* No internet access (I will probably have to join the Jam)
* Probably no electricity (Prototype on paper, bring extra batteries!)
* No feedback on my game (Maybe I can ask the Air Stewards to playtest?)
* Tiny netbook screen!

Positive points:
* Badass as hell!

Am I doing it? Absolutely! And I challenge you all to find a weirder/more limited developing environment

See you in august!

I’ve had it with this motherfucking games in this motherfucking plane.

If we could get the standard deviation value for each of the scores we received. Maybe even the skew.

That’s all