Well, I got something ok out of this one, and it is a good idea, but I don’t really want to push myself to hard, I have enough videogames to make next week. Until next time.

Doing my favorite style of LD, in which I don’t work the whole time, and don’t get something super polished, but it still fulfills my original plan, and is somewhat good to play. I managed to get all of the interesting bits in on the first day, even though I don’t have a full game loop done. Normally I have the game loop in by this point, but none of the interesting bits. Think I am going the right way today. Also I have the audio in, so that is nice. Today am going to get all of the spawning and wave stuff working, then maybe stick the game frame in real quick. Should go alright I think

What you aren’t hearing here is that all the bullet shooting from the boss is audio sync’d and creating the soundtrack.

Found an empty booklet, so I have something to use for notes. HUZZAH! Came up with a few good ideas, and I think that the first one is actually quite solid, so I might just go with that one. That was easy :d.

Thinking about doing an audio sync’d version of warning forever, with the intent that the enemies that you face will sound somewhat like minimal techno. Going to try to focus the sound set on that group of sounds. The potentially unfortunate bit is that I am going to need to write a collision detection routine, and potentially some 2d physics junk, because the unity stuff isn’t really meant for what I want to do. Maybe unity isn’t really the right language for this anyways, and I should just do it in something else.

Probably just going to bang out the basic stuff real quick now, and try to get it as playable as possible as quickly as possible, then fall down the depression hole of proper physics later. HERE WE GO!

I left my notebook at the office, so I am just going to dump my ideas for this jam here. I think I have been failing at jams recently because I haven’t worked out a good idea before kicking the jam off, and instead just going with the first thing that pops into my head. Apparently this doesn’t work very well.

My Ideas.

1. A game based on minimal nation by robert hood. Was thinking that this could take the form of a shmup, but I am not sure how I would work the sound into it more specifically. It would be nice to make just black and white shmup that had a strong audio sync. Maybe each level has enemies inspired by a different song. Or perhaps the whole game is based around the track “one touch” where you can only have one simple input. Would need to write covers of the tracks or something though.

2. Work on a game that I need to work on anyways, based around a different classic piece of minimal aleatoric music. Don’t really want to talk about this, and couldn’t release it on the website. Also it is 3 player. So wouldn’t really be working on LD at all.

3. A rogue like that only uses a single mechanic from the list of rogue mechanics. I have a design that I started working on that was just focused around throwing and area effect spells, perhaps I could do a rogue that only does one of those things. Maybe throwing only, you can pick up darts and they only destroy at a certain distance, and below that they just do a bounce back.

4. A platformer where you can’t move backwards, only forwards. and jump. I am thinking this could be a bit like aaron steed’s bump, except realtime. Don’t know if it is possible, or worth it. Maybe. I suspect he has already attempted this, and it didn’t work for some reason.

Arrgh, writing game ideas like this feels so pointless, really need a proper notebook to record all of them. I think the issue is that text doesn’t really allow me to visualize the ideas as well, I can only write them, and I struggle with creating images this way.

Maybe I will just switch over to physical prototyping and try to come up with a game that way. Or just skip it.

Play the unity web player here.

Added the full game loop + highscores + some sound. Hopefully enjoy?

Added the gameplay on train in to work this morning. Going to make it so the gameplay actually loops, try to take out some of the cheap bombings (the bombs can spawn on top of you), and  add just a high score list. Seems like a worthwhile thing to spend an hour of work time on.

Really really wishing I had flixels collisions in unity though, I am having a bunch of tunneling problems with the way I am doing collision detection now.

Kinda want to do a quick warmup today, and have an idea for the flammable one. Don’t know if I am going to do the full thing or not.

One of the things that I have struggled with in the past with unity is getting 2d physics and collision to work. Going to give it another quick try today, making this arena box pushing defense game. In 3 hours. Wish me luck. Here is where I am now, spend the first 30 minutes doing concepts, the next 45 doing all the alt, and now have a bit of time left to do the code. Maybe I will make it!

Oh, I am using unity with 2d toolkit (is 2d toolkit allowed? It isn’t open source), and sprite something for art. Maybe I will figure out how to make some sounds as well, using figure or something like that.

Added some flammable crates:

Hey, I guess I should have written this update a few weeks ago… Bad hotel, a game that I made back in LD20 and then remade for iOS in a more finished version with my company has been nominated for a IGF award in the audio category. Super exciting, off to GDC!

Ah well, a bit of a failure

so it goes.

The failure was for the usual reason, I didn’t get to the fun bit quick enough, instead I spent my time messing around with map generation and 3d modeling and that kind of thing. I still have yet to put the core game loop in, and the deadline is bearing down on me too quick This isn’t really that different than the normal LD, but I kinda want to get a full night of sleep tonight, rather than burning myself out.

I did learn a bunch on this one though:

• how to do custom editors in unity, with realtime feedback.
• how to do animation on prefabs.
• relearned how to rig characters in blender

I might keep jamming for a second, and see if I can get anything else in or not…

I still don’t have the core loop in, but I added a little ball that follows you around. Hopefully this will become the enemy tomorrow.

I gotta go do other things. Good luck to everyone!

More inside. (more…)

Well that is progress.

Step 1: Put in a goat.

Step 2.

Everything else.

Alright, I think I got something: You play a goat that needs to eat some bushes without being discovered. Basically a top down stealth game where the environment can be consumed. I guess I just want to make a cover of this game, but retheme it in a garden and you are a goat.  So yeah, a cover game. I suspect something will go horribly awry, and I will need to change everything. But that is the fun of it, making things up as you go along.

Oh also, I don’t really have 48 hours, because I have some other plans. SPECTACULAR FAILURE HERE I COME!

(Also, how sweet does that game look?!? Holy crap!)

Oh also, since I didn’t do the “I’m in” post:

- unity

- every asset and script I can grab from the asset store and tutorials

- probably maschine for some tunes

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.