I've been an indie game developer since 1991.
I have done some professional work.
Ludum Dare 23 — April 20th-23rd, 2012 — 10 Year Anniversary
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I've been an indie game developer since 1991.
I have done some professional work.
Level transitions and game-state saving is working. All of the dialog code is in place, too, and you can now collect memory orbs.
Now that I am done with all the core game play stuff, it’s time to start working on levels and toss in another enemy or two.
Here’s the latest build of Introspect.
No time for talk! On to phase 2!
Alright, I’m back, and after a quick breakfast I will be on my way to pick up my fellow LDer. After that — We’ll be both back to work!
I’m happy with my progress so far. While I’ve taken perhaps a bit more time to work on the graphics than I should, it’s given me something quite nice to look at so far. The basic controls are done, I just need to start adding in the rest of the game play mechanics. Obstacles to completing the game are next on my list to do.
After that, I’ll be spending as much time creating levels in Tiled as I can.
And this time, dammit, I will have an opening title.
I’ve got some sketches of the weird main character. Let’s meet him/her now!
My design idea is discovery of both gameplay, and both of yourself (as the game character). I’m starting out with something alien and unusual looking, so you don’t have any preconceptions of the story or what is to come.
Well, I fixed some bugs in my Astar routines that are a part of my basecode, and now those changes have been pushed into gwslib.
I also tossed in some state machine stuff in case it is useful.
gwslib is available right here. To recap what it is, check my basecode post.
I’m ready!
Alright, now that I have some time to finish this up, I am declaring what I will be using, and sharing my basecode. Actually, baselibrary.
I’ll continue to develop in Actionscript3, using the Flex compiler. My IDE will remain FlashDevelop, as I am quite happy with it since I discovered the FlxDebug plugin. My graphics library will be Flixel.
Graphics will be drawn in Photoshop, or InkScape if I end up doing vector art.
Sound? I am not sure yet. SFXR is always there if I end up being lazy, but I might try something different this time.
Basecode? Some. It’s a hodge-podge of miscellaneous stuff, mostly for Flixel. For example, a simple class for drawing status bars, and another for creating scrolling text displays. The kind of crap I end up duplicating over and over, so I just stuck most of it into a separate library.
I’ve been working on a Tiled loader for Flixel. It’s pretty much feature complete*. The nice thing about Tiled levels is that they are more than just tilemaps, but can contain any amount of meta-data in so-called “object layers.” It’s decent if you’re into 2D tilemaps.
Anyway, here is the library as-is: gwslib Note that I use the fast SHA1 available here.
I wrote some Astar pathfinder stuff to go along with that, but it’s a bit broken at the moment. I will try to get it working before tomorrow afternoon.
*As long as you use the QT version of Tiled, and don’t use isometric tiles.
Winter-y greetings to everyone! I’m all excited for this festive Ludum Dare. I know it will be tons of fun.
This will be my third Ludum Dare. I’m not a veteran yet, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of things. I more-or-less follow Sol’s tricks and tips, plus or minus some of the more saner advice. *cough*
In fact, I enjoy it so much that I’ve had great success applying the Ludum Dare method to my projects. It’s great to get a prototype up and running in a mere 48 hours.
This Ludum Dare will be different for me! More on that later, when I figure exactly how it will be different.
What I do know for sure is that I’ll be doing my Ludum challenge along with a friend. We haven’t decided yet if we’re going to team up for a Jam game or do our own separate projects. Either way, it should be fun.
I’ll post about my tools/libraries later, as I intend to release my Flixel code base with lots of improvements over last year.
Since there was such a good response to my LD#18 entry entitled Infiltrator, I’ve been working on-and-off on a post-compo edition. It’s nearly done.

A list of what I have done so far can be found by clicking “read more.” (For now, just a raw dump of my changelog summaries. I’ll put together a more complete list of what’s new once I am done.)
I want to thank everybody who tried out my Ludum Dare #18 entry, Infiltrator. In particular, special thanks to those who took the time to comment and vote on my entry. You can still play/vote for my game right now, just click on the banner!
This was my second Ludum Dare, and despite the warnings from senior Darers plus my own analysis of my previous performance, I ended up making a few old mistakes and plenty of new ones. I’ll cover that in…
ChainedLupine’s post-mortem for Ludum Dare #18: Infiltrator.
I’m happy! Ahead of the game here… 17 hours left in order to get a nap then work on some levels. Woo!
Sorry, no playable snapshot at the moment. But here are some screenshots:


An idea of what is going on: You are an infiltrator into a military base which has been occupied by two armies. Resources are low, so you have no weapons, but your mission is kill everybody in the base while making your way to the next area. Enemies can be made to respond by your approach. From there, you can either use in-world hazards or other enemies to dispatch them.
Well, I’ve only just started to get into the groove of stuff after my first day, but there are more updates to my game.
Red enemies will attack blue, and vice versa. (Currently, the unarmed guards won’t punch other guards, but will in the future.)
See if you can get all the red guards to kill blue, or vice versa.
(Press R to restart the level, in case you die.)
Whoops! I noticed I forgot to enclose the whole thing in a frame. It looks pretty silly. I just fixed that.
Well, I’m about to call it a night. I’ve made a lot of progress with my game, and I hope I can finish up the basics of gameplay, tomorrow.
Here’s a screenshot:
Update: You can play what I’ve got so far, just by clicking this link. Try to lead the green guy to the red guy!

Impressive, is it not?
FlavorC64 is done. Clicky the above screenshot in order to try it out.
What is it? It’s a short bit of code I wrote to make C64-like visual displays in Actionscript 3. It is not an emulator!
And this is the source to the above FlavorC64 test app.
And finally, this is the required patch for Flixel which is necessary to make this work.
Note: Apply this rev5 patch first.
It’s all very ugly and undocumented code, of course.
PS: Big thanks to Nossat, who provided the disk loading sound. It’s not a real 1451 drive, but an Amiga 3000 floppy drive that I munged a bit to try to sound similar.
I’d really go for that theme. (It’s been suggested that it be called anachronism, which I support.)
In fact, I should publish my FlavorC64 library just for this. It’s not true emulation, unless you consider emulating slow, grinding disk access and flickering scan-line effects as emulation.
Oh, and it uses HiRes mode unrealistically, too, pretending that it’s just a straight 4-bit bitmap instead of using 8×8 cell attributes.
As I’ve mentioned, I will be using Flash plus Flixel 2.35 stable for my LudumDare #18 entry. But, I’ve modified my 2.35 version slightly, and so I am making a diff patch of my changes available here: ChainedLupine’s diff-patch of Flixel 2.35
It’s not a whole lot. Mostly it’s just small convenience patches, plus I integrated Photon Storm’s FlxBitmapFont class.
For my IDE, I will be using FlashDevelop along with rnelson’s FlexDbg plugin.
Oh, and here is my work station:

Kinda messy.

Capslock Adventure - It lives!
So you know my fake entry for PoV’s test of the new layout?
Well, it’s no so fake anymore. It includes kinda-authentic disk loading sounds! Once I am done and it’s playable, I will post a link to it for those who dare challenge the dreaded wizard lowercase!
I’m having lots of fun putting together this little warm-up game for Ludum Dare #18.
This will be my second Ludum Dare, and this time I hope to have a playable game at the end of it. In #17, I spent far too much time tweaking the visuals on my last entry. It might have looked nice, but it wasn’t very playable, and for that I apologize. I will try to pace myself this time.
I will likely be using my standard platform for quickie games, which is Flash. For tools, it’s the usual suspects: FlashDevelop and the spiffy and lightweight 2D app library Flixel. And for content? Photoshop, Musagi, sfxr, the usual trio.
I already posted a mini-postmortem in my submission screen, but here’s my expanded version.
First up, I want to give a big shout out to everybody who contributed to Ludum Dare, and to those who made this entire site and contest a reality. It’s great to see so many people active a community focused on game development. While this was my first Ludum Dare 48, I’ve participated in community-driven game competitions before and it’s always been a blast. LD48 was no exception.
Well, it’s done. Kinda. It’s broke — first level works OK, but all levels beyond are bugged. You can still beat the game, but the AI won’t put up a fight after the first level. Fixed!
Click the link to play:

I’m way tired. I’ll post more about it later.
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