Here’s the timelapse for my entry… Text got cut off in someplaces because of the font I used… :\

Timelapse

Here it is, “The Haunting”.

Game includes all instructions and 12 levels of gameplay. In fact, this is my most complete game in terms of gameplay for a 48-hour compo.

Game can be downloaded from here: Covenant_LD14_Haunting.zip (6 Mb)

C++ source for game and framework is included in the zip file.

While making the levels, I’ve found some bugs, unfortunatly… It’s possible to get stuck on a level (doesn’t happen too often) and sometimes some possessed walls disappear.

Anyway, the game is actually fun (for me, at least)… Reminds me of those old-school games, where it was all about the gameplay…

For the first time in a LD submission, I didn’t make any music for this… Wasn’t inspired enough to do so, which sucks… The sound, although it was done very fast (with SFXR), is also not the best I’ve done (the funny sounds I usually do with my mike work better)…

Anyway, hope you enjoy, and feel free to send comments my way!

Well, my game is almost done… Added gameflow, splash screen, instructions, game-over and hooray screen…

Just level design and music to go (already have sound effects, cortesy of the awesome sfxr!)…

As you have noticed (if you’ve followed my posts), I deviated from what was my main goal this time: have enough time for level design and balancing…

Making levels is pretty fast (in 30 mins I can probably build about 10 or 15), but they won’t be interesting unless I play them and test them and all that… Unfortunatly, I won’t have time for that, since my guild is raiding Ulduar for 3 hours now, and I wanna go…

Music is also pissing me off… All my previous entries had music in one form or another, but I’m simply not inspired enough to do anything decent that don’t make a person want to shoot himself in 3 mins… Maybe after my raid I can work on it…

After the raid, I’ll probably have 2 hours of solid work to finish my entry properly (need to sleep, I’m dead tired and I have work tomorrow)…

Looking forward to playing lots of stuff that came around… People really streched this (stupid) topic to the limit…

Just finished the enemy code (pretty fast, as I expected, which is always nice)… Unfortunatly, I found a bug in the rendering system that almost drove me nuts (since it was hard to debug)…

Apparently, stuff was being drawn in the wrong order (which screwed up the shadows and the blood stains)… Apparently, the problem was the particle system flushing the sprite cache, but it was hard to track down (had to resort to Pix, to be sure I was doing everything in the correct order). This bug made me loose almost 2 hours…

Anyway, now that I’ve got enemies, I can probably think about gameflow code… And for that, I need to find a name and a background story for the game… I’d get started on the music, but my wife’s still sleeping after a night out with the girls…

Got a second alpha version, now complete with lava and spikes…

Got a nice scrolling effect on the lava and all (useless time gameplay-wise, but it’s fun anyway).

You can download it here (AWD_Alpha2.rar). Hope to get some comments, feedback would be nice…

Think I’m calling it for the night… Lots of stuff still to do, but nothing really hard (enemies, gameflow, music/sfx), and then it’s off to level design (want to build at least 10 levels for this one).

This one is shaping up as one my best entries ever (gameplay-wise)… Graphics are as sucky as they come (wish I had time/will to make the maze itself 3d, for example). One of these days I have to try one of those competitions that are similar to this one, but that allows for an artist and/or an pre-made engine.

GUI work done…

First alpha version (only one level, no restart, etc) can be downloaded here.

Just get to the exit, fetching the keys to open the doors. Exit doesn’t work yet, though…

Anyway, comments are appreciated…

Still to do:

- Functional exits

- Game story

- Gameflow code (menus, title, instructions, game over, end of game, etc)

- Enemies (most code is already present, so this is easy)

- Lava, water and spike tiles

- Level design

- Music and sound

For now, I have some friends over, gonna party a bit, but if I muster the courage, I’ll probably still return to coding today, hopefully I can finish a lot more of the gameplay code. Want to devote the maximum ammount of time for the level design (which was always lacking on my previous entries).

Just added the keys and doors mechanic… Keys and doors can have 8 different colors, and a door can only be opened by a key of the same color…

Moving/crushing blocks add to the mayhem…

Next stop is to build the lava, the spikes, the enemies, the spawn area and the exit situation (so you can actually win)…

I’m trying to get everything done gameplay-wise today, so that I only have the sound, music, gameflow and level design to do tomorrow… Also have to find a backstory of sorts, so that this looks like it has a purpose… Oh, and a name would be nice aswell…

Got the crushing and the blood working…

When the player is crushed between two walls, it desintegrates in a particle system of blood, and the blood splatter continue on the floor, which is neat:

No occlusion, of course…

Now for a small break, stretch out for a bit and afterwards, maybe get the entrance/exit logic in place, along with the door/key system…

Some of the blocks now move (I define which can move and those that can’t in the level def file).

Must be interesting in a medium size level get blocks to start moving every 100 ms or so, should be quite chaotic…

I’m already seeing some pitfalls in the design basis of the game, which isn’t nice… :\

One is that the blocks should affect each other during the movement, or I can end up with a situation in which the blocks will try to be in the same place, which would be bad. Can solve it by either making them stop if they hit each other, or by adding lots of collision response code to them, instead of just validating with the map.

Another issue is that I’m not sure if this is fun like this… Thought so, but the moving walls are not that difficult to avoid (at least for now, when I add enemies and stuff, they might).

Anyway, next step is to make the collision response on the player/creatures when they get hit by the block (they should be dragged, not insta-killed)… Seems much more fun to squash them against a wall with blood dripping, etc…

Collision detection is now working (at least with the walls)…

I also managed to add a small shadow, that makes it look a bit better… Still sucks, need to redraw the wall tiles, if I have time…

Anyway, I just remembered something… The scrolling view is cool, but might kill the gameplay, if the player doesn’t see the tiles moving in his direction… Need to test this more…

Anyway, next step is to get some walls moving and doing their thing…

After some difficulties finding a way to draw the player character, I finally got it drawn and going…

First idea was to use something like:

(that’s my cat, photo taken during the compo). But then I realized that I didn’t know how to animate even that crap, so I went for the amorphous gelatinous blob concept, which worked out… Still ugly, but at least usable…

Camera follows the character around, no collision detection yet (that’s my next move)…

Just completed the tilemap loading and rendering (yeah, yeah, tiles are ugly!):

Anyway, now to get the player character moving and such… Problem is I have awesomely bad drawing skills, so I don’t know how the hell I’m going to make something decent…

Woke up about 1h30 ago, had breakfast and saw the theme… URGH!

Advancing Wall of Doom is a terrible theme… Anyway, after a city-wide power outage, I had an idea.

My game consists on a maze-like scenario, where the player has to find a key to open the exit to the next level.

Only thing is that some of the walls is the labirinth move from time to time, picking up speed and killing/dragging the player.

Other ideas include a weapon that can help the player manipulate the environment in some way, lava pools, enemies and all the normal goodyness of game development…

Now to get a map working…

Looking at my archive, I find that this is my 8th competition ever… Hope that is my lucky number this time, and I can actually submit a game that I’m proud of… I usually deliver a complete game with sound and everything, but I never seem to quite nail it gameplay-wise.

So, my primary goal this time is too try to tone the ambition enough to have time to actually do level-design and such, while keeping it high enough to actually be fun to code the game.

I’ve just finished to build my framework (don’t know if that’s against of the rules or no, I’m just taking some stuff out of the way, like D3D initialization (ripped from the samples) and some stuff I took from my previous competitions (like a particle system, which I love!)). I hope that’s not against the rules, but I’m guessing it goes in the spirit of the compo, considering lots of people program with Flash and SDL and other such platforms that implement that logic from the base.

Anyway, here it is, for those that want to look at it…

Framework Source

I’m using Visual C++ with Direct3d for most stuff, FMOD for sound. For art, I’m using 3d Studio and Photoshop CS3, and for sound, I’ll hopefully use Musagi and Sfxr… If I do any 3d artwork I need to spritify, I’m using IBGen, but I doubt, since my talent with 3d is almost NULL… I wish it wasn’t (and that I had a loader of some format or anything), so I can do 3d stuff for a change, but that’s wishful thinking…

Advise for the first-timers: don’t do 3d…

Competition starts at 3am local time, so I won’t stay up waiting on theme… I’ll probably just set my alarm to 3am to see the theme and go back to sleep thinking on an idea… goooooooooo proceduralism!

Good luck everyone!

Finally, I finished… It took me about 18 hours or so of work to get this up and running… and I had to do a plane travel from Lisbon to Dublin in the meantime and all…

This was by far the smoothest compo I was ever in, probably because the game isn’t as ambitious as my previous attempts… I don’t know whatever I should be happy for finishing a product (complete in terms of menus, music, sfx, even a pause key!) or unhappy because it’s so unambitious… I’m getting old, methinks…

Anyway:

You can download it here (Game)

Source (C++/DX9) can be downloaded here (Source)

You can also download a more complete journal here (Log)

Timelapse can be downloaded here (*.wmv)

And I think that’s it, looking forward to judging you all (eheheh, sounds funny said like that)…

Covenant, signing out…

Almost time to turn in…

Most of the game is done, including sound and music… Just composed some stupid tunes on the acoustic guitar, recorded it, cleaned it a bit in Goldwave, and it’s done… Got a game music and a title music… even considered adding some lyrics to the title music, but I don’t have the gear to mix up the voice and the guitar and I can’t do both at the same time, because I suck! J

Going to wrap this up for tonight, get everything ready for my trip tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll be coding again in about 15 hours or so (which leaves me with about 7 to 8 usable hours left)… Thankfully, only things I miss are the Main Menu, the Instructions, some levels (which can be done pretty fast) and some gameplay tests)…

Solved the stalemate on the game design by adding another color… that breaks the pattern and makes the game more fun…

Now I already have win and lose situations, with all the flow in it…

As usual, took me longer than I wanted, the glue structure of the game (get to the next level and such things…)

Anyway, this part is done… game starts, goes to the first level, if you’re successful (that is, if you can build the tower with bricks to spare), you go to the next level, otherwise, you get to repeat it…

Now to add the lives indicator, and add the game over and well done screens…

I’m a bit worried about sound… I doubt I can make it work today and tomorrow I won’t have the gear for it… K

Ok, basic gameplay is inplace (no win conditions yet…)…

I’m trying to play it, but the game reveals itself impossible in lot’s of conditions: for instance, in the screenshot below, you can see that there’s no way I can transform that block into something that doesn’t screw everything up…

I wonder why most my games in LD48 end up like this: impossible… I should think things through better before coding…

Anyway, I’m gonna try and find a solution…

Explosions are done…

They even look cute… Anyway, now I have to decide on exactly the gameplay is… I can drop blocks from wherever I want and they explode if they come in 8-way contact with blocks of the same color… So now, I just have to decide between the explicit building (where the player has to place blocks so they don’t blow up, according to some pattern and as fast as possible – this option would have me change the 8-way collision to 4-way, I think, or else it’s just alternating stuff. This choice is also more work in the level design thing); or the implicit building, where blocks come out of the sky and the player has to change their color while they drop, so that they don’t explode when they land… This last option is much easier, since it becomes more or less random and I just have to design towers… I’ll do a break now and decide…

Progress is going extremely well…

I already have level definitions, rendering code, some game logic, input, etc… Only thing that’s lacking is an actual gameplay idea… or better, a decision on the gameplay decision. My wife’s been helping me with ideas, and I have 3 or 4 possible gameplay paths available, I just don’t know which one is more fun/less work…

Anyway, here’s some photos and such…

At my desk, heavy in thought:

My cat ready to pounce the mouse:

48 hour salad (all done with tomatoes and olives by my wife):

Brain food for lunch: burgers, mediterranean salad, cooked mushrooms, raw carrots… everything the body and mind need:

And the game screeny:

The blocks of any color can be placed in the tower structure, and they’ll fall down until they found another block or get to the ground…

Woken up about 2 hours ago, and saw that the topic is Tower… Basically, it sucks… My wife came up with the basic idea of what I’m going to do: a brick tower building game… the game part is still unclear, but I probably will think of something… I want to try to have most of the game built today, since tomorrow I’m off to Dublin and will loose lots of time in travels and such…

Anyway… Here are the obligatory pics:

My office:

First food of the day:

And the screenshot:

Hey guys, long time no see… I’ve been away from the 48-hour compos for a very long time (since compo 8), but I sure hope I can participate on this one… Only doubt is that because of work, I’ll have to be on Ireland (Dublin, more exactly) on Monday, so I have to take a flight on Sunday… As such, I’ll have to interrupt the compo for 6 hours or so, and I’m not even sure if my hotel has Internet so I can post my final entry… Oh well, the challenges of the 48-hours…

Anyway, I did a small framework, nothing fancy, just canibalized the DX9 init code, added a blitter and a particle system, some keyboard stuff and sound through fmod and voilá, here’s a framework… Window init and such is boring…

So, here it is, for all that might want to muck with it: Framework

Cheers all, and good luck!