Lack of motivation at the half way point means that I never did get around to art.  Also, the lack of playtesting makes me nervous.

But I think I have a pretty neat game.

Click here to play The Growth online.

Download the source + SFW.

Edit: If you can’t see the text (flash under linux?) please try this build with embedded fonts.

I had mixed motivation levels today.  I did manage to get things to a playable point.  I should have gotten more done though.

Play my current build on line.

I have a very simple tile system in place.  I thought I would have simple gameplay by this point, but I’ve run into a problem where my recursive flood fill is blowing the as3 stack.  I’m too tired to figure out what I’m doing wrong, so I think I’m going to call it a night and look at it with fresh eyes tomorrow.

I’ve participated in a lot of LD48s, but I’ve never posted a workspace photo.

I really should learn to make music with that keyboard.  It’s probably time to get rid of the g3 imac as well.

Roads to Nowhere Post Mortem

My Significant Other was disappointed to discover that the fancy salad she made me for lunch on the Sunday of the competition didn’t make it into my food journal because even though I took the photo, I was too busy implementing last minute game play to write the post.

So, here it is.  Pears soaked in craberry juice, roasted almonds and brie cheese with mixed greens.  Very tasty.

In the end I did get my pathfinding working to the point that I was happy with it.  However I spent so much time on debugging that I had to simplify my game play significantly.  Painfully, the game play that is included barely requires any pathfinding at all.  Another downside to so much time wasted bug hunting is that I didn’t take the time to improve the graphics.

On the plus side, I got a few levels made, and I think you can call this a fairly complete game.

Follow the link to play online:

http://disruption.ca/roads/roads.html

Click here to download the source and .SWF:

http://disruption.ca/roads/roads.tgz

I’ve spent a lot of time today fighting with buggy path finding.  The code is supposed to find the shortest path from any road tile to the city.  It’s mostly working, but it occasionally produces incorrect results when there are loops in the graph.  Frustrating.  I haven’t implemented any game play yet because I’ve been trying to get this right.  In the future I think I will need to take a more planned approach to this sort of thing, and work out my algorithm in advance instead of just hacking together the first idea that comes to mind.  Either that or modify my game play idea so it doesn’t require any path finding more advanced than a flood fill.

Dinner this evening involved hors d’oeuvres at a Christmas party.  There always seems to be something else going on during LD48 weekends.

Taking a picture of my food in the middle of a crowded room in a formal setting was a bit weird.

Deep dish pepperoni and mushroom pizza has become a bit of a ld48 tradition for me.

Eating Cinnabon cereal is easier than working on path finding.

Be amazed by the glory of placeholder art!

Of course I’ve had placeholder art become final art too many times in the past.  Lets hope not this time.

In the min-LD3 theme description, one of the suggestions was to write an article.  I decided to spend my 48 hours figuring out how to use free tools to build flash applications.  I didn’t actually get the article written over the weekend.  But now, two weeks later, I finally finished it.  Here is the link if you are interested:

Actionscript and mxmlc

Windows binary: http://disruption.ca/dl/dots/erik-ld48_11-dots-Win32.zip

Python source: http://disruption.ca/dl/dots/dotsSrc.zip

Tonight a social obligation cut into precious coding time.  This did involve dinner at an Indian restaurant though.

mmm… greasy, greasy pizza.