Sorry for no update post yesterday but I was extremely busy! Here some screenshots to make up for it…

Paradise is not all it seems

There be Zombies here!

Light ‘em up. Watch ‘em burn!

[Play and Rate here]

Just past the 12 hour mark here, and my island is complete.

Player controls and physics have also been added.

6 hours in, and I now have terrain, proper game maps, and a camera.

Creating the map specification, and a loader and renderer for the data took longer than I expected!

3.5 hours in, and I have opengl setup, and my model loader written.

Here are some palm trees.

Crysis eat your heart out!

I’m still not sure what this is going to be about, but it WILL have trees

Construction – covers a wide variety of game types: (eg, Solomon’s Key, TRI, Minecraft, Tower Defense) Construction can be for offense, defense, art, and puzzle solving, or just for the pleasure of tech trees.

End of the World - Sets the scene for a myriad different background stories. eg, Alien invasion. zombie apocalypse, eco-awareness games, exodus from earth.

Ghosts – Haunted house games. Or you are the ghost doing the haunting. Or it can mean doing away with collision detection, which can open up lots of possibilities for less experienced programmers.

Guardian – A boss encounter. Or you are the guardian protecting something from wave after wave of creeps.

Inverse World – Upside down platformers? Things replaced by their opposites? I dislike this theme.

Mirrors – Laser games. Mirrors in a PvP sense of like vs like. Mirrors as portals (eg, Alice in Wonderland).

Outer Space – Lots of space games possibilities. Or more abstractly in contrast with an Inner space, it can emphasise the periphery of the game world.

Quarantine – Things escaping? Trying to manage a contagion? Not too many interesting ideas for me here.

Salvage – The idea that in game items can be sold or recycled. Quantity over quality.

Symbiosis – Interesting gameplay possibilities. Multiple player controlled entities which support and complement each other.

Trapped – Fairly generic theme which somewhat resembles the Escape theme from LD21. Dungeon crawler? Jail brake? Stuck in a well? Maze?

Unstoppable – Runaway train concept. Or a game that never quite manages to finish.

I had a few difficulties with the RTS game I was making, which set me back a bit. Then I realised I didn’t have enough time to complete it,

So it was either abort or change direction, and I’ve decided to do the latter…

Moving on from the terrain, to the HUD.

When I heard the theme Evolution, the first idea that came to mind was zerglings mutating into lurkers and guardians etc.

So my plan for this LD is to create a simple RTS game with mutation as the primary means of unit production.

I’ve wanted to make an RTS game for some time, but it is a complex genre of game. I think my skills have only recently grown to a stage where I can tackle it… at least I hope so! Either way, this will be quite a challenge for me.

My first task has been to setup a GL environment, create some terrain textures, a terrain mesh, a Z-map, and a pathing mesh.

I shall be taking part again, crafting a game with good ol’ opengl for graphics and fmod for audio. No engines. No frameworks. Just some tedious fmod initialization code that I declared for LD22.

I am also better prepared for LD this time as I have made myself a bucket-load of utilities to help with content creation: A colour palette generator; Texture creator; Texture post-processor; Tileset editor; HUD creator; Button creator; Static 3D modeler; Dynamic 3D modeler; Terrain mesh modeler; Experimental tracker music creator.

I’ll consider this LD a live test of these utilities, so if they prove themselves useful then I’ll consider sharing them with you all after the contest.

Since I always have hot dinners, this evening I shall be preparing enough food to last me through the weekend. I have a hearty crop of beets growing in my garden, so it will likely be some variety of borscht.

Tonight I intend to wake up in time for the theme announcement (2am, but an un-missable experience imho) and then fall back asleep, before beginning work on my game at about 8-9am Saturday morning.

I hope to post progress reports and screenshots about three times each day, so if you’re interested be sure to follow my updates.

Good luck to all!