Way back when before LD#19 I decided to build a game engine for doing LDs quicker and better. I had not actually done an LD to that point, but I knew that my speed in C++ coding wasn’t going to get me working quick enough. I started building an engine in Lua so that I could code super quick. The reason that I didn’t just use Love2d is because I wanted to be able to easily port my games to iOS, and at that point love2d didn’t support iOS. I called it blud as a tribute to love. Seemed opposite and the same in some ways.

So the first game was soundman stepper, and it was super fun to build! Lua is awesome to work in, super fast, the entire reference for it fits on three pages.

After that compo, I realized that you really need to enter flash games to have a small chance of your games being played, so I switched over to AS3, and learned enough of flixel to get by. In the meantime I kept developing blud, and started borrowing more and more features from flixel into the framework. For mini28 I did a game for iphone called pyoing, and released it on the app store the next day.

I kept developing blud, and for LD21 I did a game called martin vs monty. That one is yet to be released on the app store, but hopefully I will get back to it and polish it up and such.

In between these things, I actually started getting paid for being a game developer. The first fruit of these labors has finally popped out. I am still using the code that I developed during and for LD to some extent, and the lessons that I learned during LD to a large extent.

Pugs luv beats is a music composition game, and it is available for the iphone and the ipad. If you want to read some superlatives, you are going to have to go elsewhere, because I am not too good at writing them myself. Luckily create digital music did a nice writeup of the audio side of things.

Not much update graphic wise, so no new stuff there. Audio wise, I got the steps / phrases / and chains clicking forward, so you can kinda sequence. There is only one instrument currently, and you have to load the sample from the debug console, but here is a quick demo of what you can make so far.

Sorry gents, I got this other project that is calling my name. I think I am going to be posting updates on ludum dare anyways, and try to get something nice together for sunday night.

I am doing a kinda sorta clone of LSDJ / LGPT for iOS. Due to the limitations of multitouch, I am going to have to make some changes. Like chording isn’t possible in the same way, and things need to have more on screen stuff. I have a few ideas of how to deal with that though.

I currently have a synth that can trigger samples at different pitches, and the phrase / chain / song structure together. I need to get the looping working, but the structure is there. By the end of the weekend, I would like to have the PTCH, VOL, and FILT commands in. I suspect that I will be hard coding the samples in for the time being, just because I don’t think I can implement physicsFS this weekend. I might give it a try though.

Here is where the graphics are currently:

Look forward to demo audio links.

Did a bunch of work on itch over the weekend, I now have it close feature parity with the last time that I wrote it. Strangely enough, it seems to be at bug parity as well. Or maybe just some of the bugs.

Any who, I got this fine chunk of code running.

I added a few essential features that were missing from the last build. You can now delete ops, and the system saves and loads the project that you are working on.

I think that I just want to smooth out some of the bugs, get the turtle drawing tools (pen down, pen size, pen color, etc), and then I will be ready to submit. This is certainly going to be a rush, and I am going to release it in a bit of a rough state, but better to release then not.

Well, I may have screwed myself for the october challenge. I decided to change projects. I decided that a brainfuck interpreter for iphone is retarded, and no one would want to use it. Well maybe there are a few people. The other problem was that my core programming interface was really bad, and it was hard to enter programs. I just couldn’t bring myself to work on it more.

I decided to resurrect an old project that I never released. Itch is a partial clone of scratch for iOS. I wrote a bunch of it way back in the day, and even have videos and stuff. There were a few problems with it. One big one was that I never implemented saving, so it was a pain to work with. Another was that a bunch of the interesting opcodes were hidden in an arb opcode. Yet another was that I was paranoid about both apple and the scratch team, on one hand apple was way more strict about interpreted code, and on the other I didn’t really understand code licenses, and was afraid of the scratch one.

No longer! I have started rebuilding the project, and have a pretty good stab at it going after one weekend of work. I am probably just going to include the logo / turtle ops this time around, and leave the interactive and sprite drawing for another time. If I have time I might throw in some sound opcodes. To see.

In all likelyhood, this will make me miss the october deadline. I will try my hardest, but if I don’t make it, at least I am not putting out something that I think is a bad idea down at the core.

Hey folks… This is me throwing down the gauntlet on the october challenge. I did it last year, and made some good money, so why not do another round and see what I can come up with.

I have been working on a sequel to the project that I did last year, but not that hard. This year, I am doing a brainfuck interpreter for iphone, with 2 new opcodes that allow for waiting for a timing sync and playing a note on a synthesizer. I got the interpreter working pretty quick, and did a crappy interface for it and a really basic synth back in june. You can see a video of that version of it here. After I finished that, I realized that it would need a ton more work and shelved it while my real job took off.

I came back to it yesterday, and overhauled the graphics engine with a nice new sheen of vectory goodness:

I also started work on expanding it from a single interpreter, to 8 interpreters so that you can get a few different instances running at once with different synthesizers. I don’t really want to spend too long on this project, but I think I can jam out the synths in a day or two, and then get the file loading working, and that should be good!

I should mention that this is not a game, more of a music app, but that is where my skills lie, and I think this is closer to completion than any of the games that I did this year. Also I think that it is a bit easier to stand out in the music market than it is in the game market, so that is where I am going.

I tried not to post that much today, actually, I just forgot about posting in the whirlwind of finishing the game. It isn’t a compo game, I worked on it with Sean and Yann for graphics and sound, and I will be posting it on the Jam page shortly. First, some screens.

Right now it is iPad only, so kinda hard to distribute. I may spend a bit of time tomorrow trying to get it working on osx or windows.

And of course a gameplay video and a timelapse of the completion.

Added in the knife controls and physics, and the rest of the player controls. Also added in the graphics for the second character as well. Don’t have the level goals in yet, and it is kinda disconcerting. I should probably just jam them in and use the real graphics when they get done.

This is kinda taking a bit longer than I expected it to… Really need to get the full game loop in soon.

man, I spent way too long copying the collision detection out of flixel and into my own framework, but now I have working collision detection, hazzu hazzah!

Also I threw in the little animation that my buddy and teammate Sean put together before abandoning me

Also I forgot to start the timelapse until quite a ways into the project, but it is started and running now.

Hey folks. I think I am going to do the jam this time around, not because I need the extra time, but because I want to work with an artist! Namely my buddy Sean, who is the newest addition to my company. I am going to do another iOS game, probably two player, probably competitive, because I want to continue from the game that I did for LD mini 28. I know that probably means that I will totally sink in the rankings on the site, but I have found it hard to excel there anyways, and I think it is better to do things that I can have on my phone to play with friends.

I will be using my blud framework, which is a lua based engine that uses openframeworks. It is extremely loosely based on flixel. I have been using it and building it up since LD19, and it is getting pretty solid now. I will probably also steal code from my past LD entries.

I will be using PureData for audio, and TexturePacker for building spritesheets. Maybe box2d if the game calls for it. I imagine that sean will be using flash and photoshop for graphics.

Hey folks! Pyoing is live on the app store. I didn’t do much to it past the compo version, but my friend / co-worker Yann at Lucky Frame made the sounds for it. He also spent all day yesterday throwing together this amazing promo video and website.

I guess I can do a bit of a post mortem? Eh?

So about 12 noon, uk time I decided to throw my hat into the ring on this LDmini. I was otherwise just watching tv that weekend, and wanted to muck about with my game engine a bit more. I spent about two hours working towards getting something like Rampart in place, where you could place bases, and then you would be able to chuck cannonballs from your base. That seemed to fulfill the war theme, and was something I had been interested in making since the last LD.

At around 4, I went out to have a BBQ and did that until around 5:30pm. It was nice to get away from the compo for a bit and kick a ball around, and eat a ton, etc, etc. While I was there I talked to Yann (the man in the gif above) about the game, and he suggested a few things. First that I should just make crossfire, forget all of the ramparts stuff. Second he asked if I was using box2d, and I said “no, I think I can figure out the physics just fine thanks”. When I got home I spent about 5 minutes banging my head against the idea of doing the physics myself, and then about 20 minutes setting up box2d. I think I went to sleep that night with all of the basics in, except for the win / lose states. You could chuck around the balls, etc.

The next day, I got started on it and first put in the win / lose states. Then I did the full game loop with the beginning and ending screens. It was nice to have a tweener library around to get cool animations for everything without much work at all. I play tested it a bunch with my partner, and decided to add the limited shots mechanic. That made the game a whole bunch more even, and about strategy. After that, I still had some time, so I did the retina display version of the game. I had the graphics pretty well integrated with the box2d stuff, so I had to retune everything for the larger masses that were flying around. This resulted in the retina and non retina versions of the game playing slightly different. Hopefully this is not a huge problem. The last thing I did was integrate the audio engine, and throw in a few sfx. They were not super great, but good enough. I think I finished everything up by around 11pm. I want to say that the whole process took about 11 hours of computer time to get finished.

The next morning, Yann did all the sfx over again, and it made everything better, and we submitted to the app store. Done

The final thing was all the promo video, which is basically a scene for scene rip of the crossfire video. That took about a day to do, and we had to learn apple motion. Our greenscreen was a pink blanket purchased from a charity shop around the corner:

Anywho, thats about it! Here are a few promo codes, if you could please post the one you use in the comments, that would be great! If you don’t get one, let me know and I can post some more:

A4PE3LMF7AL6
EYJJWAFXKRNL
NFMN6LNJKKMY

I am done! Woop! I got the non retina graphics working, and sent it out to a few friends. I decided not to submit to apple tonight, so that my audio buddy can get his paws on it and fix the audio track to be more nice.

One thing that really bit me is that when I changed the sizes for the graphics, I also had them tightly coupled to the box2d objects, so all the weights of things got jacked up. I did a quick fix and platform specific’d everything, but now the game plays slightly different if you are on retina display or not. Luckily there is a pretty big fun area with the mechanics.

The offer is still open if you want a build, just fill out this form, and I will hook you up.

Just did the following:

• Rebalanced the game, played against my girlfriend a bunch, now it is anybodys game. Also made the ammo limited, so there is more of a strategic bent to it.
• Did audio. Luckily I had some code lying around that I could rip off. Thing might not have gone as smoothly if not for that.
• Came up with a name, and did the default screen and icons.

• Clean out the assets. For some reason, the .app is 24mb. This is absurd for such a small game.
• Submit to Apple.
• Fix all the size constants so that it works correctly on an old iphone, non-retina display.

If anyone would like a build of it, I could send you one on TestFlight. Add your email addresses in the comments if so . You will need some iOS device.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTxKJaCEhl0

I think that is probably the shortest amount of time that it has ever taken me to get a full game in. There is still a bunch of tuning that needs to be done, but so far so good! I think this is a pretty ok version of crossfire, and it also plays a bunch like FingerBattle, one of my favorite two player iphone games.

I got some box2d going on, got a graphics pallete picked out, now just need to make the rest of the game!

One unfortunate thing (for LD) is that y’all won’t be able to play this, but I am going to try my best to get it ready for app store submission by compo end.

Oh, I guess I should also mention that I am using ofxBlud, my lua framework that I started building for LD19. To get it working you will also need openframeworks. HAHA! I AM THE WORST LD’R EVAR!

Decided at around 1pm today to do an entry for the mini! I have been meaning to make a version of rampart for iphone since a friend told me that my last LD reminded him of that game. So, I started on that, and then just went to a bbq for like 5 hours. While there I realized I would rather make crossfire for iphone, so now I am doing that!

Ha! If anything comes out of this, it will be amazing!

[ ENTRY | PLAY THE COMPO VERSION [Web - Flash] | PLAY THE JAM VERSION | Sources]

You built a hotel in on a patch of ground that missiles like to hit. You must now attach shields to protect it. Last as long as you can manage. You have to wait for the shields to be delivered to you though.

Z – Load, then attach a shield from the left

X – Load, then attach a shield from the top

C – Load, then attach a shield from the right

There is a Jam version as well that has better music, and sound effects. It also has a global high score table, so you can get ranked. The gameplay did not change at all though.

Thanks to Bender for the post format. I hope you don’t mind me borrowing it.

Watch the timelapse.

Post mortem in the extended.

(more…)

I am quickly approaching my self imposed deadline of “6 or 7″ and have a bit of stuff left to do. Oh noes!

I gotta make a opening screen, a help screen, and a death screen, or else this game will be completely incomprehensible.

The good news is that I now have music, and some particle effects. The bad news is that is where the polishing ends. Good thing that I meant to make it so ugly

Spent the past few hours writing a bunch of base code to help out with the additional mechanics that I want to put in. I also did some more graphics work (A HILL.). Best excuse to show off another screenshot ever. So you are seeing countdown bars for the upcoming bricks that you can drop on your tower. I was thinking it might be nice to put in a pax briticannica style “hold down to get more power” thing to this. Don’t know if I will need it though.

I got a call from the friends that went to the movie, so I am going to meet up with them instead of running myself into the ground. My eye is starting to twitch and I have been at my desk for 11 hours straight, so that seems like a good idea. We will see if that means better work tomorrow. Also I have a tagline for the game: a 3 button realtime strategy tower defense brick game. No title yet though.

So, this isn’t particularly fun, and it is horribly buggy, but you can play the game now. I should have tried to get to this point quicker, but I guess that is the fun / challenge of making games, that it is unclear on how to execute on mechanics. There is a bug where you brick dropper can get stuck off the tower, so you just gotta refresh in that case.

Instructions:

Press Z to drop bricks.

Protect the HQ.

Go Play! (flash)

So, now that I have that, I can start working on everything else, and ideas are starting to really flow. Here are some things that I want to do:

• Tune the aggressiveness of the missiles. Right now most of them don’t even come close to hitting you HQ. There is also no difficulty ramp.
• Have the brick dropper need to refresh before you can drop another brick.
• Make more types of bricks that can be dropped, including offensive ones that will attack the missiles.
• Have a brick dropper on either side of your hq so that you can protect the sides. The brick dropper would either get the next brick in the completed queue, or it would wait until a brick finished constructing.
• More enemies (the UFO, and possibly ground troops)

Now, the question is, do I keep hammering away at this, or do I go watch Thor3d…