Well, I only had about 10 hours or so to work on this this weekend. But it’s coming along really nicely:

In fact, rather than release something that’s barely functional but a good idea, I think this has enough potential that I’m going to keep working on it and release it when it’s finished. I know I’m onto something when I can’t bring myself to hit ESC and go back to the code, instead I keep going just one more time around.  Plus it causes hallucinations, which is cool (Not like that — try staring intently at any slowly rotating pattern for 20 minutes and then look away). 

Basically, it’s a multitrack solo jam recorder. You need a guitar (or other instrument) for it to be any use. The innermost loop is the drums, next one out is the bassline, next is the lead, then the outside ring is the rhythm. The whole thing rotates at a specified BPM. The drums don’t change, but each time around it randomly picks a ring for you to play (if it’s the bassline, it drops your recorded input by an octave, fmod is great, it makes stuff like that easy).

And that’s pretty much it. It basically works, but all the options (like bpm and which loop to load) are hard-coded and it needs menu screens and a few more options and stuff before it’s really useful, and I’m hoping to add a “fakebook” style chord mode where you can put in some chords just so you can tell where you are. And the wheel never stops. 

It’ll probably take me a week or two to finish this up, knowing how little free time I have ahead. Anyways, thanks a bunch to destroysound for hosting this, great topic and great idea with the samples. 

Busy weekend for me. I just got started a about 2 hours ago. But I’m going to have more time to work on it tommorow so even though I won’t exactly line up with the official start time, I’ll see what I can get done in 48 hours.

Here’s what I’ve got so far — it’s not really going to be a game, more of a music-toy. “JamClock” the clock that rocks. Oh yeah.

Sorry it’s about 20 minutes late, I had a last minute problem with my release build. It’s still really incomplete, so it’s not like I’m going to win anything anyways. 

Here it is.. in all it’s horrible incompleteness. 

Glacier Final

The idea is to save the mammoths from the oncoming glacier by placing ice blocks (tetris pieces) ..

i’ll put up a post-compo version with docs and stuff later.. phew… dinner time

You are the glacier. You move ever southward. Your job is to ensure the extinction of the mammoths, neantherthals, giant sloths, and other pesky ice age animals.  That is the way of the glacier.

Those are temp mammoths. I’ve got the wall building working pretty well, but there’s still a ton of gameplay missing. For example, the mammoths don’t move. They just stand there. Which might be accurate mammoth behavior, but it’s not very interesting.

I’ve got a long ways to go on this one, but so far it’s coming together.  Hopefully it will end up being fun, it’s not quite playable already, and that doesn’t leave a lot of time for tuning. 

Not a ton of progress, but more than it appears:

I’ve got a scrolling map, and the red block is the mouse cursor that allows you to place down new tetrominos. Well, just a block for now. But it’s a start.

More hints about the gameplay: You are building the doom-wall out of tetris bricks. It’s kind of an anti-tetris, you want to fill up as much of the board (and there’s no disappearing lines or anything)

I’m about to have some “Thin Mint” ice cream and go to sleep. But I’m pretty happy with my progress.

As you can guess, my game involves a wall of Tetrominoes. But that’s all I will reveal so far. It’s also about mass extinction. 

I’m trying something different this time. I put some of the gameplay tuning numbers into a config file (which is not that new), but I’m also checking the file time every time the game loop updates, and reload if it changes. I might set this to only happen in debug builds, but it doesn’t seem to slow anything down so far. The cool thing is that now I can tune my gameplay values in real-time, just changing the number and saving the file. This was inspired by Ben Garney’s clever google spreadsheet trick over at CoderHump (worst blog name ever). So far I only have one value, how fast the game scrolls, but we’ll see.

Ok.. I’m in! I’ve been looking forward to this.

But… I have no ideas. There’s plenty of possibilities with this theme, but none that I’m really excited enough about to work on all weekend. Yet.  I forgot this item was even on the list (though I may have voted for it).  But I’m sure I’ll think of something.

So for now I’m just starting with generic stuff - opening a window etc - and hopefully an idea will come.

Woot! My article got featured on gamedev.net:

Better Programmer Art: Or how to fake it as a game artist.

I use a lot of examples from past LD48 games (mine and others), and most of this is stuff I’ve learned through doing these contests. Ironically, in the most recent contest I didn’t have time to replace the placeholder art so it pretty much ignores all of these tips. 

Hope this is helpful to the community. Enjoy!

Jovoc

My wife stayed up late last night and tried to beat “Crossroads”. But she uncovered a nefarious bug, so this is just a warning to everyone. It doesn’t show up until level 9, aka “zigzag”, but it prevents you from passing the level and if you’ve got that far that means you’ve been playing for at least an hour or so.

The bug is with non-square levels, so it only happens on levels 9 and 10 (the last two levels..). It doesn’t allow you to place words on the right half of the level so “DECIDE” (or “DEVICE”) in the screenshot above never gets added. It’s not surprising, since it’s in code I added in the last half-hour of the contest… heheh. I’ve already fixed it but I’m not going to release a post-compo version until after judging is complete to avoid confusion.

If this happens to you, and you are stuck on level 9, there is a workaround. Without closing your game, edit the file gamedata/level_09.txt and make the level square (17×17). Add ‘#’ marks (walls) to fill up the extra rows. Then
hit ‘r’ to reload. If you’ve made a typo, it will crash. Otherwise, it will reload your level and you can continue. yay. Same goes for level 10. An easier fix is to copy level_11.txt over level_09.txt and achieve victory two levels sooner.

ps. The level format is pretty simple. If you make any good levels, send them to me and i’ll include them in the post-contest version.

It turned out pretty good despite much turmoil! 

It’s like scrabble or a crossword puzzle, but with more cars.

Crosswords Final

My original idea included lots of extra tiles that werent letters, like a one-way tile, and a gas-can, more letter slots, etc.. but i didn’t have time for those. Hopefully i’ll make a post-compo version next week.

Edit: added a 800×600 build for people on laptops and such.  Also fixed a last minute bug which prevented placing tiles in the first column, making the game unwinnable. 

I kept fighting with the CgFX stuff this morning, but I couldn’t get it to work. The docs make it sound like it’s as simple as calling cgGLSetupSampler( samplerParam, myTextureId ); but i can’t get it to work.  I’m sure it’s something simple but I’m running out of time.

So I’ve ripped out all the shader code (kept a backup to try to to fix it later), and am back to using regular opengl, and drawing the letters with overlays (quads) instead of fancy shader tricks. Sigh.

It’s not like I would have had time to get the shaders looking good anyways. Now that I’ve got words displayed, it’s time to try and get the gameplay going by the end of the day.

More progress, but not on the gameplay side. I wanted to use Cg shaders in the game this time and learn how to use fxComposer. I’ve done a lot of shader stuff before but not with CgFx and FXComposer. 

My road shader is a modified version of the default FXComposer phong shader. It works in FXComposer (on the right) but I can’t figure out how to get the second sampler (with the font image) to work in my program. Grrr.  I’m going to sleep, I’ll take a fresh look at it in the morning. A word game won’t be very fun without any visible letters. 

Update.. Not as much progress as I’d hoped but I still think i can get something playable today. I got car movement and pathfinding working, and more work on the maps, even though you can’t see the letters yet because there’s no texture or shading.

Also, even though it doesn’t look much different, the dark blue aand beige colored blocks are actually 3d models, i got a simple obj loader in there. Next up… letters

Ok, I decided on a much simpler idea than I was thinking about in the earlier post. Whew..  This one i have a chance of completeing.

It’s called “Crossroads”. Get it? Crosswords + Roads.. heheh.. It’s not really going to be crosswords, more like scrabble, but close enough. Anyways, I’ve got the beginnings of the board worked out. I love word games, and I’ve always been meaning to make one for LD, the closest I’ve gotten is “Headline Recycler” for tins, which was really neat but not fun at all.

How do you mix roads and crosswords? well.. wait and see..

Anyways, It’s 1:20 am here,  not too late, but I’m hoping to get an early start on the gameplay tommorow. Goodnight all.

Well, here’s my desk photo. A little messy but functional. Along with my LD mascot Holly. Believe it or not, this is her 3rd LD contest!

I’ve got mixed feelings about the theme. I’ve got a really good idea I think, but it’s really complicated and again more of a graphicsy idea than a gameplay idea. But I think I might go for it, next week the wife and baby are out of town so i might actually have a chance to make a post-compo version.. I’m going to start sketching out the design and decide if it’s “ambitous” or “impossible”.

I’m in! I’m going to try my hardest to keep it simple and fun, but the ideas I have already are way off on the complexity scale… but whatever happens i’ll do something. Should be fun!

oh and here’s my basecode:

int main( int argc, char *argv[] ) { return 0; }

Well, I’m back from spending last week in LA at the siggraph conference. Looking forward to playing all the entries.

Here’s a link to my timelapse video. Thanks to Daz for the ETL screencap program he posted, which I used to make this (plus ImageMagick to add timestamps).

A quick postmortem: I was using this compo as a chance to experiment with Ogre3D, so I didn’t expect to end up with something too polished, but i did hope it would be at least playable, which didnt quite happen.

What went right:

• Ogre particles — easy and they look great.
• Art assets. I tried to focus on the minimum that I would need, and they turned out pretty good.
• Learning Ogre. I learned a lot more this way than just reading docs would have taught me.
• Great theme. I had a lot of good ideas for this one (maybe too many).

What went wrong:

• Camera — I spent a lot of time messing with the camera. Afterwards, i realized I should have just went with a fixed close-to-overhead camera.
• Starting with ExampleApp was more trouble than it was worth. In the end, I wasted a bunch of time rearranging it.
• Too many ideas: The theme generated so many ideas for me, I kept changing my mind and adding things. I should have gone with a straight up tower defense.
• Too ambitious. Didn’t get first-playable until Sunday.

I posted a little list of tips on LD Survival, and ended up ignoring almost all of them.  That’s okay, I had a great time and got a bunch of experience with Ogre3D.

A technical note: I was using Ogre’s OpenGL mode during development, and noticed at the last minute that the D3D mode was much faster. So the readme encourages you to use the D3D mode. However, I didn’t realize until afterwards that it blows up after a few minutes, so if you get everything flying off the screen, switch back to OGL. I probably forgot to initialize something.

I learned a lot about Ogre, but I didn’t quite finish the game. It’s still sort of playable but don’t get your hopes up.

Here is the entry:

Moonbase Defense Final

Includes a cgl info file for the game launcher.. that thing is great.

Well, it’s sort of playable. Not much though.

You can build a network of towers, they shoot the bugs, woo.. but right now there’s no win/lose and only the gun tower actually works.

Holy crap! Ogre particles are freaking awesome.. Here’s two of my three planned weapons, the Fiddy Tower and the Flame tower (the third is the “missile tower”).

Looks like those bugs don’t stand a chance. Except there’s still no gameplay at all yet…

I wasted a lot of time rearranging the Ogre tutorial app… but I’ve got towers and enemies.

Too bad they don’t do anything yet.. just sit there.

I’m changing concepts yet again… my last idea didn’t make any sense.

Now my gameplay can be described as “Moonbase Commander” meets “Tower Defense”. Which should be pretty cool. So it’s yet another tower-defense game but different. If you’ve never played moonbase commander you should look for it.

I’m still learning to use Ogre so im not sure if I can pull it off but we’ll see.

I spent the morning mostly making some gun tower models and getting them into Ogre. Now I’m going to see if I can get something playable.

Ok, I have a totally different concept now. It is perhaps doable in the weekend. So here’s the first screenshot with some towers in it..

It’s going to be an auction/action game! And no.. that’s not a typo, it will have auction and action. Whee.

Ok, after prototyping with parts from a board game, and drawing some, erm… concept art… I have an idea. It’s not very well thought out yet.. but it’s something.

EDIT: I just came up with a completely different, much simpler, much better idea. So there will be no more rookery. Phew…