So 4.5hrs remain, and I have a playable (fun) bocce game.

The original plan was to have wacky objects to toss. I doubt i’ll have time to set up the detailed collision fixures for them. Having objects get sort of ‘tangled’ in eachother would be fun. But for now they will just behave like the regular balls.

What have I learned so far this LD? –I am still an absolutely terrible pixel artist. Oh well!

I’m in.

Tools

• OSX, XCode
• Photoshop
• SFXR
• Phillips Amnesiac Double IPA

Tech

• C/C++
• SDL,  SDL_Image,  SDL_Mixer, OpenGL
• Crusty old code from Justin Smith and my previous LD entries

Just a few hours left. Time to post-mortem my game…
Introduction
Take This Triangle is a 2d defense game inspired by vector graphics from the old-school. Spring physics from the new-school, and doobers from the school of Zynga.
TTT was written in C/C++ using SDL and completed in the 48 hour period and is playable on OSX and Windows here. If you want to play it on another platform it should compile just fine.

Figure 1: Estimated Time Usage

1. Vector Graphics

A massive amount of time was freed up by choosing to focus on what I don’t suck at (writing code, play testing games) and dodging what I do suck at (trying to be an artist).

2. Fun Core Mechanic

Dragging a springy things is fun. Clicking on doobers is fun. These two mechanics together worked well.

3. Small Scope

I managed to avoid feature-creeping the game or trying to undertake something too complex for the given time frame. Executing a small idea well is much preferable to a executing a larger, broader, but more rushed idea.

What Went Wrong

1. Starting at Zero

When the competition began I had an IDE and an zero base code. It took a few hours before I could begin writing game code. Preparation is key.

2. Distractions

Staying focused is always hard. I spent a lot of time doing other things (including sleeping) instead of remaining on task. See figure 1.

3. Polishing Too Late

I wish I had started improving  the art and adding particle effects in earlier. A screen shake, glowey lines, more particles, more feedback on the dragging / aiming, more tweaks to the difficulty curve, badass grid effects. Sooo many small things I would have liked to polish.

Conclusion

Over all the process was enjoyable. I am proud of my game, it is one of the few experiments I have made that I find myself returning to in order to kill a few minutes.

Please check it out!!!

As always, LD was a learning experience for me.

Amazing to see so many great ideas executed by so many awesome people. Enthusiasm and skills abound in this little indie community!

Great work everyone.

I will do a proper wrap / post mortem later, just posting to say OMG I FINISHED SOMETHING.

Now to switch computer off.

Good luck in the last bit of crunch time all!!! I don’t know who you are but I am exciting to play your game.

2:00pm (pst) waking up.

2:20pm oOoooh shit lots to do (why am I posting food pics!?)

I have about four hours left I can work on polish.

Last night I spent a good hunk of time (2-4 hrs) re-writing suspect code. When I was drunk on day zero I decided to use some byte flags and integer indicies to fixed arrays.

Good news: that code was bug free. apparently they aren’t that suspect after all!

Bad news: I rewrote it only to realize bug was something elsewhere. Oops!

Things to do:

- Improve Graphics

- Add Sound Effects (SFXR)

- Add Particle Effects

- Add Screen Shake!

If I can get these in, I’ll be happy.

So tired. Sun is shining. Must sleep.

Hoping to spend a few hours tomorrow polishing (particle effects are notably missing!!!)

Sneak peak…

About 2:10am and I am wide awake, but having trouble focusing attention on important tasks, like adding more to the game. Once a game is working the temptation to tune it becomes overwhelming… arrrrgg…

Mmm, at least I can have some Coke + Vanilla Ice Cream in the mean time.

awaiting sugar buzz

Just randomly generated music by playing around in Wolfram Tones (http://tones.wolfram.com/) until I got something suitable.

Fed the generated midi through GXSCC (http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-SanJose/8700/P/GsorigE.htm) to export a wave with a more retro feel instead of ear shattering 1995 midi.

Used Audacity to encode .wav into a .ogg.

The Result:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2797357/music_slow.ogg

Wow! easy random filler music!

Now to hook up some SDL_mixer or some such so it can be heard in-game.

Making good progress now.

I have basic game play working. (collect ammo, shoot, a game over condition, a tutorial)

Not spending my time on pixel art was the best decision I have ever made. I should have time to iterate on gameplay for once!

Surprisingly I am still here.

Night one was a good start.

7:30pm (pst) start. I managed to get a working GL app with mouse input and some text output.

9:00pm?? mmm burgers

MEAT

11:20pm I had a game design and started to code!

Drinking and coding proceded until about 1:00am when a friend arrived. Promptly forgot about LD and hung out with friend until about 6:00am when I decided I should sleep.

~12:30?? wake up

breakfast cartoons.

mmm food. mmm coffee.

~2:00pm started up again!

Game has enemies with ‘intelligence’!

5:00pm

Mmm leftovers.

Salad + Leftovers

Clearly I need to start busting my arse if I want something more than just-barely-complete.

I’ll do a screenshot post of game progress at the end of this thing. For now all you get is GRATUITOUS FOOD SHOTS!

I HAVE AN IDEA (and I can finally draw some text/lines on screen)

The game is an abstract ‘shooter’ (slingshotter?)

You are given 1 triangle to fire (click+drag) use it wisely.

I finished work about 15 mins before the start, haven’t slept more than 6hrs a night this week, and have spent zero time preparing a code base to work from. TIME FOR SOME LUDUM DARE!!!

What I do have:

1) 650ml + 1900ml of philips beer.

2) XCode on 27′ iMac.

3) Absolute minimal SDL + OpenGL template (will post once its pulled together)

4) Intent to make something! (Half-assed, but that is better than nothing!! woOOo!)

Looking forward to seeing what y’all make.

So what started off as a destructable terrain / mining sim, turned into an abstract shape collector turned into a space game, and now is going nowhere.

I thought I would attempt to just randomly write and play around to see what I came up with without too much direction.

Was fun while it lasted, but I feel I need to stop these fruitless efforts, take a break, come back and make an actual game.

Here are some screenshots of the “progress” (A lot of time was spent remembering basic trig, and recalling opengl, haha)

Lots of internal developments and side-tangents clearly not visible in the shots. After looking over em virtually zero visible progress in stills, but when “playing” the progress is visible.

On a side note: Anyone have some good music recommendations? HOOK ME UP WITH TEH CODE MUSIC.

7:44pm

9:54pm

12:19am

1:23am

First meal.
MEAT

My game is fun. 1277 fun at this point in time.

You can move the blue triangle.

Here is what I will be using as a base. It is my LD15 entry, stripped down to basic:

- XCode / C++ / Mac OS X (should port back to windows easily)

- SDL Graphics

- Sound

- SDL Image -> OpenGL texture loading

- Keyboard / Gamepad input

- Texture / Sprite drawing

- A 16x16px font

- A game loop

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2797357/LD19_BASE.zip

I think I will do the silly thing and find a way to adapt my idea (mining / digging / exploring / collecting game) to the theme. Seems to fit well enough!

Good chance to get hacking again. It’s been toooo loooooongggg.

So,

I haven’t prepared at all. Will be building pretty much from scratch (as I didn’t even have time to collect my LD15 entry source yet.) Need to seek out groceries. Have a birthday party to attend on sat… BUT I am going to hack something together!

bottle of water + kitten mug of coffee + das keyboard == source code

YAY!

If the theme is suitable, I may use LD19 as an opportunity to prototype out some tech and ideas related to a digging-collecting-building game I have had in mind for quite some time.

If I do enter, will likely roll my own GL code, using SDL. Copy and paste some basic code from a previous LD entry I did and go from there.

For once this compo falls on a date I can potentially take part! HUZZAH!!!!!

Nothing like a little friendly community and competition to get motivated into actually pleasure-coding again.

(wow, that sounds obscene. Especially in a low breathy voice…. pleasure coding…)

I finally finished up porting my entry for LD 15 to Mac OS X. It took a surprisingly long time (about 8 hours of work!) but amounted to virtually no change in the codebase. The code is available so hopefully someone else can save some time and avoid this nonsense.

• DevIL was removed and replaced with SDL_image.
• Sound and texture loading code was modified to work with OS X bundle path names.
• A 1 character bug causing poop to sometimes be emitted from the bats face instead of rear was fixed  (for real!)

Looks like a few people are having troubles running my entry ‘Life is Guano’

I am working on the OS X port of it right now. I will look into the problem with the windows build failing to start.

I am 99% sure this is just a library problem (I am linking against a specific version of DevIL and SDL_mixer both which I have not used in the past)

I’ll post another entry when this is fixed.