So I got this thing now! Going to try to throw together a base building missile defense, where you control the position of stuff on the base, but not the base itself. Seem fun? Got the initial state of the base being set up through diffusion limited aggregation (more or less). I spent way to long getting that working, the secret is that if you are using flixel, and then yanking things around, remember to call reset on them on weird stuff will happen with the positioning.

Oh man I am at a loss… So far my ideas are:

Tumiki Arena – Tumiki fighters except in an arena. It would fulfill the theme because every time an enemy died, they would give you a gun or whatever for you to handle further enemies. This could either work in robotron style, or in astroids style. With the second one it would be a bit like captain forever. I don’t think that is a bad thing though.

TowerTron – Similar to above, but you can pick up and drop turrets. Maybe this is more like herzog zwei crossed with tower defense. I don’t know if I can figure out A* this time though, or really any pathfinding.

Castle Defense - Missile Defense, except you can occasionally add stuff to you towns and cities, and they all shoot automatically at the missiles. “this is a dangerous place to have a town, here take this”.

Ok gonna just roll with one of them. I clearly need to light a fire under myself, I just spent 20 minutes messing around with my timelapse script. HOLY CRAPPU, GOTTA ROLL.

Also, here is my desk, and my lunch and dinner (I just cooked 2 meals at once):

ok, I was putting off posting my in, but that awesome keynote did it for me. IM IN. I don’t have the support network I did the last time (my partner is in a far away land (((), so I think I am going to have to make my own food and stuff. boo hoo. Also, as of the last ludum dare I did, I am making games full time now, so this is not like a break for me at all. I also have a fallback game that I want to make already, so I might be breaking the theme a little bit and just rolling with that one. Maybe not.

Enuff!

I am going to use as3 / flixel / flex SDK this time around, my lua thing was fun to write in last time but I got jealous of all the people that could just throw up their games on the web. What I would really like is to do something with lua alchemy so that I could just repub my game directly to iphone with no porting, but I don’t think that is going to be happening this weekend. Maybe for next time.

Probably renoise for music / sfx again, and photoshop / wacom for art.

Woo, sophomore  LD for me! LETS ROLL, IM IN11!!!

Yep finally posted. I used some unliscensed music, but it was already too lowres to include on the wrapup, so I strike out on two counts. Sorry, shoot me.

Also some notes on my game, for next time I decide to participate. Also this comprises what I saw other people doing that I would like to rip:

• Flash, Flash, Flash. I need to learn it and use it, or else not many people will play it (my game). Even though I could theoretically release my entry for iPhone today, the tradeoff for lack of feedback just isn’t worth it
• Trigger Mechanics. My game is effectively a cross between mario and guitar hero for the first three levels, but the player doesn’t have quite enough agency about when the notes trigger. I could fix this by changing the sound triggers from platforms that the player stands on to switches that the player needs to throw. I was really overloading the verb “positioning”.
• Play up the cool part. I didn’t get to the cool part of the game until about 3 hours before the deadline. As such I didnt get to tune it, and it makes it not very cool. My opinion of the cool part is the player ability to reposition the area around the goombas so that you can make a goomba sequencer. It needs more messing with though, because right now the goombas really trigger too much.

Any who, here is the utoob.

Has some big graphical bugs in it, but at least it is playable.

I am so impressed by the people that managed to make actual games during this compo, it gives me something to look forward to for next time.

Soundman Stepper windows version

Alright! I am now submitted. Somehow when I started, I thought that I would have enough energy to port the game to windows after 9. Ha! No way that is happening, I am going to go to bed and curl up with a comic book.

I feel pretty good about my game, there are mechanical, aesthetic and experiential issues, but I think it is fun for at least 2 minutes.

Here is all the food that I ate and forgot to post:

cabbage rice and egg

breakfast 1, kix

kale and rice

more cereal

Finally starting to feel like I can get in the entire game that I planned to get in on friday night. Also, I am starting to feel like the levels can be passed, and that the game is not beyond confusing any longer. So many feelings!

A new build for the osx heads.

I decided to do the soundman theme because I have been listening to dancehall pretty much since the compo began. If anyone is digging through the posts later on and wants some reading material, here is a article on the complex relationship dancehall has with sexuality.

a wild tutorial appears!

I only have one level in place, and watching my girlfriend play through it demonstrated that it is deeply confusing, but oh well, here is a build.

osx only so far, sorry about that.

So wow, that was close.

My game relies on audio quite deeply, and I am using openframeworks, an engine that I have used before a few times. I have only used it on iPhone though, where I always do my own synthesis. It turns out that part of openframeworks might have a memory leak in it on osx though. yurgh!

I was only using the leaky part for timing though, so I just switched over to getting the synth timing from the display refresh. Not too terrible, I just wish I hadn’t wasted a few hour trying to track down my crashing issues.

So close to having the level loop in place, then 12 hours tomorrow to build content. Yip Yip!

Platformer.

When you land on a platform, it triggers a note. There are buttons that you can pick up. When you go by a switch, its button is triggered. Buttons on platforms trigger that platforms note.

you need to move the button to the correct place so that running by the switches triggers the correct notes in order.

There is also something about goombas that I can add if I have time… I am more than a bit concerned because I am going to have to integrate a platform editor at some point. UH OH!

also I drank a ton of seltzer. LETS ROLL!

pens on paper what!

Yup! I am so ready to roll. I couldn’t sleep this morning so I got up early and started reading game design blogs.

Also this morning, I purchased 40 pounds of satsumas. So I will probably eat some of those this weekend.

Also, I kinda buried my link to my base code, so here it is again.

Alright, I am announcing my intent to enter this compo. This is my first true LD, although I used the october challange as an opportunity to put together a nongame software.

I am currently rushing to put together a game framework. I am building a lua wrapper around a large swath of openframeworks. I am also wrapping up a chunk of my own audio code, so that I can do real time audio synthesis in the game. The wrapper is currently being developed for iPhone, but I am going to try and get a osx port together by the end of this weekend.  I will stick them up on github as soon as they are  semi-solid.

So other than all of that groundwork that I need to jam on, I am also learning lua, and learning to type in dvorak (20WPM yay!). So yeah, pretty much trying to ensure my own failure. WOOOHOOOOO!

edit: bwap bwap, finally posted my engine code, have at it. Blud Engine. It isn’t as far as I would like it, but I figure I can code the rest this weekend.

Getting to the point where I am concerned it will not get approved in time. Still “waiting for review”.

wiresq on youtube

I think I neglected to mention in my last update that I am totally new to the ludum dare website, so I am somewhat unsure of the blogging etiquette. I am going to err on the side of too many posts, and let the admins unpublish my drivel if need be.

Last night was somehow productive even though it got off to a pretty horrible start. I spent the bulk of my time trying to come up with a way to use core data to save my progress, but then discovered that the api just has far too much overhead for my liking. After that, I got some progress on the UIScrollView control that I am using for my main editing area, but then decided that I didn’t like using UIKit at all and was going back to my standard openframeworks hacked together ui framework.

I burned another hour trying to get the software running in openframeworks, unfortunately it is pretty unstable in the github right now, and I was somewhat running out of energy. Eventually I got it though. The main bulk of my progress happened then, I got a scrollview that you can pan around, and started working on zoom features. My scrollview is not as nice as the apple one, but I think it will work alright.

I totally ran out of energy for coding, but I didn’t really want to go to bed, so I spent another hour pixeling interface details to use later. I imagine that is the approach I am going to take, pixeling as a break for my mind from coding.

I tried to go to sleep, but I must have had too much caffeine, because I couldn’t make it to bed until 1:30 am. Ah well, I think I can still hit my goal of getting the core of the app done this weekend, possibly without great graphics. That will give me a few weeks of tweaking to get it ready for the store.

I didn’t really fully explain the app yesterday, so I can do that right now as well. The core of the app is a cellular automata called wireworld, which is a bunch like conway’s life, but it is a bunch easier to create turing machines in it. In fact, people have created some really neat ones that solve primes and etc. There are two things that I am going to pack on top of my wireworld implementation. The first is that the automata will run at a user defined rate, say 120 step per minute X a clock multiplier. The second is that each cell in the system can be linked to the trigger of a synthesizer. I have a sample based synthesizer that is ready to go, and I started writing a clone of the dx7 that I might be able to jam in if I have time. There are some other features, but I think they will need to be excised for this weekend.

wireworld + dx7

Ok, I am going to do this thing!

I am already breaking the rules at night one though, as I am not really going to be making a game. I have two in progress projects, one of which I am going to try to take over the finish line. The first big one is itch which is a graphical “programming” language for iphone. I dusted it off last night, and discovered that it is in desperate need of a rewrite, so that kinda spells doom for me getting it done. The second project is wireworld + a synthesizer, again for iphone. This project is only just started, so I can do it right the first time (ha, ha, ha)

Anywho, something to do. I am also taking a week long vacation in the middle of october to visit with my girlfriends family, so this may have some impact on the project.

my workspace

Also as an update, a picture of my workspace, and for dinner I ate a bunch of food from the little italy street festival that is happening down the block. Lucky for me this isn’t a weekend challenge.