I’ve got two ideas for this weekend.  I’m pretty sure I’ll do #2, but it sounds hard, with lots of math.  I don’t like math.

#1 – Pixel Editor

This is a unique idea.  It’s a paint program, with features intended for pixel art, lots of zooming and whatnot.  So what’s special?  Well, it can ‘render’ in various ways.  Think of the Puppygames type of look – big pixelated things, but they’re done up all nice in photoshop with glowing outlines or whatever.  You can take your pixel creation (zoomed in to at least 2x) and render it with several different effects, saving your work in a 32bit png:

- An outer glow around it in whatever color you like

- ‘Tetris blocks’ (each pixel is a shiny block rather than a single color)

- An overall highlight, treating the whole shape as one huge tetris block – if a pixel has no left neighbor, shade its left edge, if it has no right neighbor, brighten its right edge, etc

- ‘Piping’, highlighted stripes on the internal edges of the shape

- Other!?

I think that would be a really cool tool for making that nice modern-retro art.  Almost a SFXr for graphics, in a way.

#2 – Hitsuji Editor

I saw people talking about doing this in the chat too.  They called it a manikin editor.  I just want to take the concept of the editor I made for my long-ago LD entry Hitsuji and make it nice and more powerful, so you can do freeform creations instead of sheep holding swords.  The concept is to make models by stringing bitmaps together with pivot points, then you can rotate and translate them all (scaling would be nice too).  Then you make animations for them, and it stores it all much like a 3D model, only it’s 2D.  Then obviously you can put that in a game and animate it all nicely and smoothly.  I love how it’s trivial for such a model to transition from one animation to another.  I could see a lot of potential for games made with these types of characters.

#1 sounds a lot easier than #2, and it’s more original.  But it’s definitely not as useful…

Rise Of The Owls

It’s a TD game that takes place inside a tower. You will enjoy it if you learn the hero abilities! It’s fairly easy to win (though sometimes it seems insane) once you know how, but to get a high score requires great skill and daring.

win32 version: Click On Me (1.12mb)

If it doesn’t work for you, you can try the command line argument “opengl” to run it in openGL instead of DirectX. Probably won’t help, but hopefully it works anyway!

Let’s get eclectic!  For lunch, it’s pizza, egg rolls, and corn on the cob.  I’m not a giant pig – this is food for two.  Iced tea for the lady, pineapple juice for me.  Speaking of giant pigs…

My cat is so fat, he needs two chairs.

Can’t show a screenie since I am currently working on the offline computer, the only one with decent art programs on it (stupid Vista won’t run PSP9 or Max5).  Thusly, what I am doing now is art!  I’ve got lots in so far, though endless hours spent doing it.  Six in fact.  Still need some stuff for the buttons you click on and the title screen, and the treasure the owls are stealing, then I guess art is pretty much done.  Then I’ll need to get some challenge/point/structure to the gameplay, and some sounds.  That should pretty much do it.  I’ll need more heroes than I have to reach that point, but I’ll just reuse my existing art for those, because man, I’ve made a lot of little heroes.  I think about 8 unique characters.

I wanted the game to include a skill tree for boosting all your heroes, but I think that’s something for later.  You’ll have to be content with the strategy/luck involved in which heroes you get.  Not much luck needed at this point, since the pool of heroes currently is the same as the number of rooms at the inn, and you’re allowed to have multiples of the same.  I want to change that, but can’t until there are a whole lot more heroes.  Which probably won’t happen by the deadline.

So I’m off to do that.  I’d also like to have more than one kind of monster, but that too will have to go by the wayside.  Hordes of ordinary owls is interesting enough for now!

In classic autumn colors, it’s a delicious crunchy, nutty, raisiny cereal, with a side of the world’s finest juice (right, PoV?).  My wife was really upset to find I had put the juice in that cup.  She really hates when the food is the same color as the vessel.  But it’s all so lovely and autumnal!

Lunch: LD baked potatoes with sauteed veggies on top.  Hard to tell that it says LD, but I swear it does.

Dinner: grilled cheese with tomato soup and horchata.  We tried burning LD into the bread by putting butter in the shape of the letters, but it cooked evenly anyway.

Progress on all fronts simultaneously (except art and sound).  This shot depicts the Inn Menu open.  As you can see, many of the bunks are occupied with clones of Archie the Archer, since he’s the only hero in the game.  The cursor you can’t see is on one of them, eliciting that handy tooltip that describes him.  At the top of the tower is a vast collection of invaluable treasure.  Hidden behind the row of bunks, you can just barely see that the owls now have life meters for your convenience.  Every few seconds new heroes come to the inn, and ones leave, giving you an endless array of heroic selections.  Of course, they’re all Archie right now.

I guess the next step is to let the owls steal the treasure.  They drop it when they die right now, but I don’t actually know that, since they can’t pick it up in the first place yet.

Well, by “game” I don’t mean something you can play.  But it is something you can watch as all the (temp art, in case there was any doubt…) elements function as intended: the owls ascend the stairs and even descend again if they reach the top.  The archer as you can see fires arrows at them.  He can even kill the first one before they get past him!  The excitement is palpitatious!!  Things are going well, I think, though I am dreading the actual real implementation.

My game is this: tower defense, inside the tower itself.  Eventually, there will be a pile of gold that the owls are stealing at the top.  You of course strew archers, chefs, and yetis about the tower to stop them.  The twist is that instead of buying generic units, you buy specific heroes as they show up visiting your inn (so a random element to that).  So you might dump Archie the archer after a while for Blog the barbarian.  The end goal is something with 100+ different guys (some not too different, like an archer who does more damage or fires faster than another), and a lot of wacky variety.  Don’t think there will be 100 of them by tomorrow, though.

A hearty breakfast to get towers going: LD’ed toast, scrambled owl eggs with fakon and cheese, and a sunrise smoothie with raspberry garnish.

Here’s my setup for this weekend.  Laptop in the living room.  There’s a shiatsu machine strapped to my chair, though!  I will probably also venture into the actual office, because none of my good art or sound programs run on this computer (Yay, Vista!).

Gotta get fueled up with a healthy dinner before you compete!  Here’s to hoping the theme is “heartburn.”

Theme Owl Series, #2.

Well, I gave up on the actual contest. But lately I’ve really been having fun making generators (you know, web ‘games’ that randomly spit out some name like “Fluffyborg The Transient”), so I made another that sort of fits the theme! It’s not based on any particular movie, but it’s not hard to see elements of every Summer blockbuster in it. Here’s a ‘screenshot’:

In a world…

Where ice cream is optional…

ONE woman…

And a boy…

Must face the worst disaster the world has ever known.

A Spike Lee Joint.

Coming Summer 2038 to a holotheater near you.

The ‘download link’ is http://hamumu.com/random.php so go generate some previews of your own!  I’m marking this as my final entry, but I do hope to add more possibilities to it right up until the deadline.  Luckily, the link won’t be changing!  Ah, the magic of the web.

(Yes, I included both turnips and unicorns)

This might be my record for least finished LD entry (of ones where I actually bothered to submit anything), but here it is! There’s no game here, you can just hop around on 3 ships a little bit and then exit. PRESS Q TO QUIT! Z is jump, and arrows move.

You can download the awesome windows EXE here: Miyamoto Download (712kb)

Enjoy your hopping!

And there’s a good reason!  I spent at least 8 hours of yesterday stuck at one spot in the game – dealing with the + and – signs of camera position versus ship position (the ships are like individual tile maps, but those tile maps are placed in the world… kind of inspired by DrPetter’s Swarming Of The Machines!) versus player position versus waterline.  It is a trivial problem, solved in the end by swapping some signs around and actually watching which way things move (or, more quickly, by drawing a simple diagram, which I never did).  The reason I spent all day on it was that I was watching TV and not even trying to think about it.  Just haphazardly flicking values every so often.  I don’t think I’m very dedicated to this project.  But I’m gonna try some more today!

Once I finally stopped TV for a second though, I nailed that and now I have Miyamoto running and jumping along a set of 3 boats, quite successfully.  He has no animation, but whatever.  I think I will add enemies and things you can stomp to sink the boats today.  I’m not feeling very pressured.  The unofficialness is getting to me!

Okay, there’s now a ship editor that loads and saves!  You can’t actually choose which tile to use (of course, there is only one tile… but you can’t erase it!), but you can load, save, and exit.  And it shows you the waterline.

Pretty classy ship, huh?

Super Miyamoto!  I don’t have the foggiest clue how to actually animate him,  but I’ll worry about that tomorrow.  I really need to start on some code, I think…

Well, I spent all last night thinking up VS ideas, then watching TV and thinking of more, then when TV was over I said, “that’s it.  I’m going with Schrodinger Vs. Pavlov”.  I thought it’d be cool, an army of dogs that you can steer around with a bell cursor, vs. a guy who can place boxes that contain pop-up cats that may be alive or dead.  Then I was thinking it would be like a board game, where the Pavlov guy has cards with various dogs and bells and things, and the Schrodinger guy has dice with 3 alive-cat faces and 3 dead-cat faces.  The closest I got to an actual idea was that Schrodinger could commit his dice to various battles, and hope they were enough when actually rolled.  It didn’t actually make a game, though.

So this morning I woke up still with no ideas that worked, and finally decided it had to be the very first idea that struck me as solid.  I didn’t want to do a platformer, but here I go anyway: Miyamoto Vs. Yamamoto.  You’ll hop from ship to ship, bouncing on their various parts to sink them, then hop off before you sink with them.  It won’t be Mario, because you’ll be dodging fire directly aimed at you by the cannons and other oddities, and the ‘defeat each ship’ motif is a little different.  Got some ideas, anyway!  Time to build a ship editor!

Hey, visit the rules wiki to see what I’ve put down for Mini LD. I’ve got a set of rules (well, a list of ways it’s different from normal rules), and a host sign up page, which I conveniently nabbed the first slot on. Feel free to edit and improve the whole thing. This isn’t my deal, it’s the community’s.

Things still quite unknown include: how judging works, or not if we don’t do that, and what category/tags/whatever the entries and journals need to go into. Will each one have its own category? Maybe a general Mini-LD category? If so, how do we separate the entries for different months? These things need work.