It’s now Wednesday, and I finished my game Sunday evening. I’ve had a few days to think about it and my experience.

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UPDATE: Fixed bug where the second level wouldn’t let you start play. August 12, 1pm EST.

Finished! Play through Java WebStart here:

http://codebynumber.com/projects/ld12/Game.jnlp

There are two levels, and you can win or lose, depending on your skill in (dun dun DUN) snatching the owls! Think of yourself like a bird-loving Indiana Jones and it all makes a little more sense.

It works in the Compo Game Loader, and you can pull down the zip that includes the source, screenshot, thumbnail, gameinfo.xml, etc. at:

http://codebynumber.com/projects/ld12/towerzip.zip

To play it, go to the link at the top of this post, don’t use the zip. This zip doesn’t include the bugfix of August 12, so the second level is not playable (sorry!).

It’s been lots of fun, thanks everyone! Can’t wait to play all these games!

OK, I’m back from a Pug Meetup, where my happy, happy pug partook in some made for dogs peanut butter flavored frozen yogurt:

As for the game, I think I am adding locked doors so that the key can go to something next.

Added a pre-rendered Game Over image to the game, plus the animation now stops (so dying is now worse than being notified of your death, it actually stops play). Next up: winning!

I woke up a little late, and I have a thing to go to in an hour. When I left my computer last night, I stupidly said “I should see if I can get my resolution higher on my monitor” and went in and mucked things up big time. After 20 minutes, nothing worked and when it rebooted, I was in 640 x 480. I went to bed and tackled it this morning, but nothing was working. Finally, I realized the KVM switch was probably interfering with the autodetect or something, so I routed it all to my linux box and it now works. Unfortunately that means my Windows box is now headless, and that’s where I keep my Civ IV! Maybe I need a better KVM switch… Maybe a need a bigger apartment so I can have two monitors and keyboards.

Edit: Got a demo going! It’s Java WebStart. If you play it, let me know how it went!

Progress is going well. I have introduced an animation thread into my game so it’s not turn-based. The rendering is spotty - the player flickers just noticeably enough - but there is a lot of improvement I can make in the rendering code. Right now all sorts of things happen in the paint method, which should go elsewhere.

The camera switches direction every 1.5 seconds (it’s supposed to be a security camera). Collision detection still works, which is never taken for granted. Next thing I will do is package it up as a JNLP so I can put up a demo.

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Ended up on the phone for about an hour, and went to the grocery store for a few small things. Came back and made homemade salsa.

The game is coming along. The lines that make up the tower all behave like walls, and the staircases finally behave like staircases! Meaning that you can use them to get between floors. This is great progress, and I’d be really happy if only I didn’t know all the hacky stuff that’s going on behind the scenes. I’m actually thinking about writing some unit tests for the collision and game logic code, since it was a really touch and go process to get the stairs working correctly.

My dog is dying for some attention, so we’re going for a walk, and I’m going to consider what to do next. The easiest thing would be to add items to pick up (keys for locked doors, I’m thinking). But the most technically difficult would be enemies patrolling the floors, since it’s entirely turn based at this point (I only draw when a key is pressed). So I would have to add an animation thread to get something moving on its own.

13 hours in, and I have something! It’s not much, but it can at least conceptually be seen as a building (see the levels?). The brown things are stair cases between the floors, which should probably end at the latitude where the next level up starts. But those aren’t things you think about until you try explaining it to someone.

The little stick figure is the player, and right now it goes back and forth and up and down, with reckless disregard for walls and viewable areas. Next up: collision detection.

Read on, for more trials and tribulations of the first 13 hours…

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Last night I made some notes and drew a picture of my idea, and I felt ok about it. This morning I woke up and felt a little lackluster about it. Part of the problem is that I don’t particularly like the genre of puzzle, plus I don’t like games about timing (i.e. pacman, avoiding your enemies by timing your moves). And I ended up making my idea both of those. I think I can redeem it from timing, and add some sort of weapon, so if you don’t want to time your moves with the guard’s patrol, you can just kill him. But that is definitely far off in the future.

I think I will go ahead with my current design, because I’m committed to not being tied to it when I want to change stuff later. I will try to reconsider the game after each feature, so hopefully I can push it towards a better design without spending a lot of time up front. Also, if I finish all the features today, I can always dream big and keep going, right?

And now, for the breakfast:

Yogurt, granola bar and juice for me. Wellness Super 5 Chicken for Max The Dog.

Plus my helper…

If it looks like I’m working in a closet, that’s kind of true. My apartment doesn’t have closets, so, ultimately, it is a closet.

I, too, am a first timer. I have the place to myself (and my dog) and a grocery order delivery scheduled for Saturday afternoon. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.