Unfortunately there is no way I can finish something. I had an idea and motivation but I just didn’t have enough time and energy for a LD.

Things are not going too well… I managed to spend about 8 hours working on my game today but I’m really tired so I’m not very productive and I’ll have to sleep as much as I can tonight.

It’s not unusual for me to spend the first day on just base stuff and not really start the game until day 2 but this time I’m not really finished with that and I won’t be able to stay up all night until the end of the compo so I’ll probably be able to work on it only about 10 hours tomorrow and that’s not going to be enough (my previous games required 30-35 hours total and I was way more productive than I am this weekend).

It’s too bad as I think have an idea for a fun game and it would quite feasible if I could really give it my best.

Hi guys,

So I’m now totally unprepared as usual for this new LD adventure and hope it’ll be fun.

I’ll be using OpenGL to make a 3D game, I’m using SDL for initialization and input handling and DevIL to load picture files. For graphics I’ll use Cinema 4D, Photoshop (and maybe ZBrush?), if there is any sound I’ll probably do it with Reason.

Since everybody seems to be doing it, I’m also adding a mini library that I’m going to use. Well it’s not really a library just a few things I don’t feel like coding again this time. Here’s what it does:

- A Timer class that uses Windows performance timers to get an accurate timer (last time I checked SDL used the awful GetTickCount() on Win32 that gives really bad results)

- A simple Font rendering class that uses bitmap fonts generated by Bitmap Font Builder

- A texture and shader loading class (written during the previous LD)

- A few math stuff, bare minimum and incomplete Vector2D and Vector3D classes from LD12, plane/ray intersection, eye to mouse ray (I always need that one when making my level editor) and that’s it.

It’s really minimum so I hope you’ll forgive me for not respecting the proper delay and requirement of full documentation and stuff. I don’t even have a Matrix class or Quaternion or any fancy collision stuff, no graphics initialization, no object loading/rendering, just really boring stuff.

Download link: ld13-minilib.zip

(feel free to use it under a zlib type license: do whatever you want with it, you don’t have to credit me but don’t claim it as your own work)

And now it’s time for me to sleep at least 12h and miss the beginning of the compo

Good luck and may the Towlr not be with you ;P

Here is my post mortem entry. It’s a bit long so click the read more thingie to view it.

(more…)

My webcam timelapse video is available on youtube. I’m not posting the screenshots only one as it’s really boring.

A few tips for people testing my game:

Use the C key to test the alternate camera style (it’s very hard to play with it but it’s nice). EDIT: Also even in normal camera mode you use the END key to place the camera temporarily behind our blobby hero and view what lies ahead.

On the second level, you just have to get rid of the creature guarding the jump point. They always move in your direction so maybe you can trick it.

If everything else fails, use the cheat code: ctrl-shift-J makes a huge jump so you can skip levels or just have fun.

Here it is!!

Download (3.2MB)

I forgot to to add it on the screen but F1 brings the help screen.

EDIT: I’m still trying to resolve some dll dependencies, it doesn’t work on all machines currently.

EDIT2: Solved! the zip has been updated.

EDIT3: YouTube video available (also available as a higher quality avi (7.2MB)

EDIT4: I forgot to include the source code when i made my release (shame on me)

Not much of a gameplay yet, but at least it’s possible to move around in the tower.

YouTube Version (I couldn’t find how to embed it in the blog entry :/)

Better quality (2.7MB)

So much left to do, so little time.

The middle point has passed and I still have nothing playable. Doing 3D from scratch, combined with bad preparation are making my progress really slow. Will I be able to finish a game?

Tomorrow I’ll have to focus on gameplay at all cost.

So it has begun! The theme was among my favorites as it’s an open theme. Lots of games can be made with a tower theme.

I have an idea of what kind of game I’d like to make. The gameplay details are still fuzzy but I have enough to get started so now that the caffeine is slowly starting to work I’ll start the coding.

I’m not using a fancy pre-made engine library so I have to do the boring stuff again. I hope I don’t waste the whole day just to display some 3D objects, so that I can start working on the interesting parts. It’s annoying to have to code stuff like texture loading or a timer in every compo but at least we’re not using the insane “mechanical cat” rules where you weren’t even allowed to look at code you had written before the competition (apparently the poor people competing in PyWeek still have to do that). I remember losing hours because of that stupid rule during the making of my Lightstream48 and Ring48 games.

Hey guys,

It’s been a while since I participated in one of these but this time I’ll be there. Now I need to get ready as it’s been a long time since I did any game programming.

Once again, I’ll be using C++ and OpenGL to make a 3D game. This time I want to include some things I haven’t done in a LD before like using shaders for per pixel lighting instead of the default OpenGL lighting like in my previous games. So I need to make a few tests in the next days to make sure I remember how that stuff works.

I also need to see if I still know how to do everything to produce the 3D content quickly. Last time I used ZBrush and Cinema 4D and was able to model/texture/animate simple creatures quickly and export the results in a very simple text based format. So I’m going to do basically the same.

I think it’s going to be a great week-end.