I’ll be making a game this weekend, probably using Flixel/FlashDevelop this time.

My past games: www.originowl.com

Ciao!

I’m getting a pretty late start, I was learning salsa dancing when LD started, and have been walking the clouds ever since, but now it’s time to find an Island to land on.

I started learning flixel/actionscript 3 a few weeks ago for research at school. I’ve made a basic platformer and Pong, and I’m going to use flixel for LD17. My next research project is to make a clone of River Raid (Atari vertical scrolling shooter/shmup) and I’m going to get half my research done for LD17.

My vision for this game, as of now, is to make a scrolling shmup that scrolls in the direction of the player. The player will fly a plane over water and land on islands. Islands will be a source of fuel and ammo for the craft. The player will shoot down enemy craft while traveling between islands. Islands will sometimes be controlled by an enemy, and the player will have to shoot down enemy craft and drop bombs on island fortifications. Stuff I probably won’t get to is commodity trading for profit, purchasable upgrades, craft, and fortifications.

This sounds like a good start. I’m quite tired right now and I’m probably only going to get about 12 hours of work done all weekend, but we’ll see. I’m working in a public library today, chair is pretty comfy.

I’m calling the game Tail Spin, a spin on the 90′s cartoon Tale Spin, which involved flying planes between islands.

I’ll use either game maker or vc++/allegro/same skeleton project i’ve used for past LDs. That project and my past LD entries are at www.originowl.com.

On a related note, my final project for my assembly programming class was a shmup which ran on a Motorola HC11 microkit, using a two line by 16 char lcd display, 8 leds, 8 switches, and an interrupt button. I’ll get a video of the game.

Ciao! Good luck all!

Problems: Halfway through I got some bad news from a friend that took my attention for at least 12 hours and sapped my motivation once I did get back to finishing the game. I didn’t even try to name the game. There were other forces working against me during the compo. One was the unrelenting fury of the sun. A heatwave struck san diego with the start of the compo, and I was rarely in air conditioning. I did my best work under trees in breezy parks.  I was also without my mouse during the compo, something especially useful in the game maker development environment, even more so as this was my second GM game and I was learning new tricks.

Concept: When I saw ‘caverns’ it only took a few minutes before I was thinking down the rabbit hole from alice in wonderland. I remembered the scene (from the disney version) where she eats to grow big and drinks to shrink. I had the concept of using size altering items with cavernous environments to create situations that could be easy, difficult, or impossible depending on your size. I remembered how mario also grows by eating mushrooms, and so a mario-alice hybrid was born.

Didn’t get to: NPC’s to push a story: The characters and story would have come easily, simply by mixing elements from super mario bros and alice in wonderland. A grappling hook to swing over obstacles. Flame jets, pools of lava, more ice, button switches, and assisting NPC’s through rooms. Multiplayer co-op mode which would open access to new areas, the players would be able to stack.

Bugs: Any size larger than default will have to jump to clear the crest of a slope. Eating two mushrooms simultaneously causes player to embed in floor. Other occasional oddities. For these reasons, I included cheats, F to shrink (Fan), G to grow, R to restart. I was considering making F to shrink an item to obtain, this is based on elements from the original version of alice in wonderland (Lewis Carroll). However, it is possible to pass all levels without the use of cheats.

I’ve started playing the entries, good job everyone, impressive games. Thanks for playing.

http://www.originowl.com/Home/greencow-ld15

Finality.

I will be developing using either C++ with Allegro and my toolkit/empty project: allegroblank or Game Maker.

I’ve just updated my library to include midi support through allegro functions. I will compose music using Anvil Studio.

Graphics using Allegro Sprite Editor and The Gimp.

Sound via SFXR and my microphone.

Good luck everyone!

Link to my site with exe/source downloads and infos: http://www.originowl.com/Home/drsplodeyhead

wow it worked! i can finally run python games. one less stumbling block between me and games =]

python 2.6.2: http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6.2/

pygame 1.8.1: http://www.pygame.org/download.shtml

Had to do a last minute downsample of the sound to make the zip small enough to upload =P

Posted to: http://www.originowl.com/Home/advancing-wall-of-math

Download: http://www.originowl.com/Home/advancing-wall-of-math/LD14-greencow-awom.zip

screenshot:

The game I’m making is Advancing Wall of Math and it’s set in outer space! Hmm, didn’t I do a math game before?

Well, this one is going to be of the shmup style, but you’ll be shooting numbers into ships to complete math problems. Here’s an advancing wall of doom if you consider 1+3=doom.

I’m about ready to make a game. I just updated my msvc blank project and allegro toolkit at the site where I’m publishing my games: www.originowl.com.

School has kept me very busy, 5 more weeks of math and english and piano and then I’m moving to UC Santa Cruz to do game design. Living on campus in the forest making games all the time, yeah I think I can handle that.

Good luck and love to everyone!

Cannon Hearts Tower is my entry for miniLD6, the secondary theme is ‘LD12: The Tower’ and the tertiary theme is ‘miniLD5: Cover someone else’s game’. This is a cover of Sivart13′s game for LD12:  “Cannon Hates Tower”.

Use up and down to aim your cannon and hold space before releasing space.

This mini game will be used in the LDCollab framework as a single level, with the other miniLD6 entries.

This first version does not use score files.

The Max Score is 1000. Post your best score in the comments. I’ve gotten 650.

Download: http://sites.google.com/site/roboticarts/cannon-hearts-tower

I’ll be using my usual c++ with allegro.

Download From:

http://sites.google.com/site/roboticarts/buffalo-road

Well I was supposed to be working on my compsci final project, but instead:

I’ve created a skeleton project for Allegro 4.2.2 on Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express (their free IDE).  This project includes a 2d graphics viewport, which can be scrolled/shifted, and a soundbox for your waves. There’s keyboard and mouse handling. There’s a sample background, sprite, and sound which obviously cannot be used in a Ludum Dare entry. These are just to make sure everything works right away.

This project and more info is here: http://sites.google.com/site/roboticarts/Home/allegro-blank-msvc-project

Post a comment if anything doesn’t work or if anything does work.

I’m riding on the clouds of my notification last week that I’ve been accepted into the Computer Science: Computer Game Design major at UC Santa Cruz for Fall 09 =D Many moons of dreadful calculus and so forth and still some moons to go, before my schedule has courses like: Game AI, Interactive storytelling, 3d graphics and animation, game theory, and many game design studios. It’s going to be awesome. I’ll be on the LD4Ever and probably get some folks into it there.

Here’s to our grande olde arte of gaem maeking and a fun weekend!

hmm just whipped this up in 2 hours..hmm i’ve been meaning to make a sprite/animation editor to port to the ds, so i can use my ds to draw and animate sprites with the touchscreen. but, i think i’m done for tonight, and probably for the weekend. i’ve got tons of homework due as school started again last week and i lost the first week to burningman. ciao!

I wasn’t having any particularly awesome ideas friday night, I wrote the basic “Hello, Tower” code. By the way here’s what I used:

Slow old laptop, which I’ve done all my coding on for about the past year. I like to write comfy code on the couch. Windows XP.

My IDE is Microsoft Visual C++ Express 2008, library is Allegro, graphics in Gimp.

Anyway I went to sleep without a decision at my usual 11pm, too tired to think. The possibilities I had come up with at this point:

1. Grow towering corn stalks by watering, but watering off center will cause corn to grow at an angle and eventually fall.
2. DeSprawler, pluck people from suburban houses and drop them in big city apartment towers.
3. A tetris game where you cleared equations instead of lines.

I woke up at my usual 8am, still not enthused about any idea. After lunch, about 1, I had decided on and started to code tetris. Now, I’m glad I finished it and I’m happy with it, but I could have come up with something more original, but so much time had already passed, I figured this would be simple to do in the time I had.

Also, funnily, I almost did a tetris clone for a previous LD. In LD6 (Light and Darkness) I started a game which involved working at a solar panel assembly plant. Solar panel parts would come on a conveyor belt, in tetris-like shapes (but I was going to have many more shapes) and you would pick them up with the mouse and drop them into a grid. The object was to fill as many grid cells as possible, but to make things trickier, the lights were slowly dimming, but completing a panel would raise the light level depending how much of the panel grid was filled. I didn’t finish that game in time, but now that I have a tetris engine, it would be pretty easy to finish it up to some extent. I put this into consideration when deciding on my LD12 game, which is actually not a good basis for the choice.

So, Saturday was making tetris for about 10 hours, rotation is the tricky part, I drew out all the pieces in all the positions on graph paper and typed in about 300 lines for this data. It’s all modularized so I could easily add more pieces and positions (I was thinking, tetris with 8 direction rotation, bricks on diagonal lines). I tested and got the numbers and symbols in the bricks and tried forming equations. They weren’t coming out too well, always the wrong symbols, I was thinking of giving up now because the game seemed overly frustrating. At this point there was not the tower of equations in the start. The game hardly had to do with the tower theme.

I played Notch’s entry: Breaking the Tower for at least an hour on Saturday night, too much fun, I had a few tabs of the game open and would leave them alone to just gather up resources while I coded. Note to self: there will be time to play other people’s games when they’re good and done after the compo ;] These web browser games are great, such easy distribution! This is exactly why I learned Java earlier this year, to distract people so I could win at LD ;]

Saturday night I went to sleep at about 1am, pretty much given up, woke up at 9am, lollygagged, at about 11am I decided I would go ahead and finish it. Sometime after this I came up with the tower idea, put that in, and now I was making equations! I got into it, making the equation checker, and I was doing pretty good on time. The game was a grid on a black screen with green text until about 4pm, 4 hours from the end, when I started making graphics. Making the background with help, code for level starting and sequencing, and tile graphics came pretty quick.

About an hour from the end, I remembered that in LD10.5, the game I submitted didn’t run for some people because I didn’t include any runtime libraries. So I researched that, found some libraries I hoped would work, but I didn’t actually get to test them on a virgin computer until after the end. This was because when I built the game in release mode, I got a screen full of tiles! One hour from finish and here’s the showstopper. Only happens in release, so I couldn’t debug easily, I was stumped. I narrowed it to some problem accessing the grid data, and switched _setstr to strcpy, and it was fixed! Whew, 15 minutes from the end and I almost didn’t have a game. Built my zip, wrote my post, uploaded and that’s a wrap. gg.

I’ve posted pictures of some of my meals, workspaces, kitties, and screenshots as the game was being made at a picasa album here: http://picasaweb.google.com/greencow/LudumDare12