I so wanted to do this LD, but I had lots of real-life stuff on this weekend. I still tried, and got about what I expected for the limited time I could spend. Seeing some of the other entries, though, makes we doubt if participating was a good idea.

When I read the theme, I was pretty excited. It’s a very flexible theme IMO that allows about any kind of game if done right. I don’t have Super Mario Galaxy, but I always liked the videos and the idea to have a spherical planet to run around. Also, I was wanting to do an remake of the AtariST game “Startrash”, which was really something totally different back then. The spherical wrapping of the map-array was a great challenge to me, so I tired.

First I thought about mapping an rectangular grid across the sphere but I think it would not have worked out properly. Next thought was to make all the world of a 3D object and use 3D collisions for the movements. But usually that approach takes a lot of time for tweaking the right parameters. Also, I really wanted the game to be “blocky”. So I remembered some subdivision techniques I used many years ago to build a sphere from uniformed triangles. The idea is to use an 4-sided tetrahedron and then insert new nodes at each center of a triangle. So this 2-3 times and you have a very smooth sphere.

But how to connect the triangles into an height-array so the ball can move? That was pretty tricky for me and I decided to add a 3-index array to each triangle that has the neighbour indices stored. That way I could move like: current = sphere.triangles[current].neighbour[0]
I also made an separate array for the height of each triangle and later one for the colour.

The path-creation algorithm was pretty easy. Just start at one point, then move to random neighbours until you hit an triangle that’s of a different height. Reverse to any random triangle in that path then, and continue for the remaining steps. Sort of like a tree grows branches. Then iterate the path and randomly lift the steps. In the final version I do a very long path for height=1 to separate water and land before I grow the hills.

The next problem I encountered was the 3D view and rotation matrix for each cell.
This took a lot of my little time, because it turned out a lot trickier that I first thought. The main idea was to store the center-of-sphere to center-of-triangle vector for each triangle. Then build a rotation matrix from this and the direction something is moving to. do a cross product for the “right-side” vector then. Before rotating, move the object up the y axis to reach the top of the triangle (scale up vector by sphere.radius + height[itriangle]*sphere.height_per_step.

The movement of the enemies was pretty easy, because they cannot change to a different height platform. I just got the 3D position for the new triangle to move to and linearly interpolated between the old and the new position.

***Conclusion***
LD is always great fun. This time I had very little time and so I didn’t benefit and contribute to the social aspects of LD. That’s a shame. Next time I try to get the weekend off and chat a bit more and take time to see what others do. Also, this time were so many entries, that the reading of all the texts would take a full week to complete. I will try to read all this in the time until the next LD.
What when right:
-The idea is pretty good if done right. I made a non-violent game with a wrapping world to walk around.
-graphics. I’m not much of an artist, but I think with my minimalistic skills and time the visuals got to a state that might invite to have a play.
-path creation: It’s not as good as manually crafted levels, but for the short time I had it does a good job.
-time management: Knowing I had little, I concentrated on the bare playability basics without the use of any placeholders. I always had the partial targets to reach in view and was pretty much able to reach them. I am a full time developer in my real time job, so I could quite foresee how much I can do. Tip for not-so-experienced devs: Have small targets and plan double the time you think you might need.
-Language: Pinping a bit here, since GLBasic is my baby, but I think it’s really a great tool to produce quick results of some value.
-AC3D as a modeler. This tool is very fast at modeling easy shapes. Only the texturing is always a bit complicated. I should see if I find something better here.

What went wrong:
-There’s not much to explore. Manually crafted levels and some extra skills to the ball would be required.
-The game might be a tad boring. More different enemies and extras would have helped. Also a story and several planets to move between.
-no sounds due to lack of time. I have a song in my mind that I wanted to “SongSmith” and sfx would do good, too.
-controls: It works as expected. But… somehow the view rotates way too much. Maybe I should have implemented an slider for the rotation independently from the movement direction. Would have saved me lots of math as well.
-Using MSPaint was a bad idea. The Win7 interface is totally wrong. Usually I use CorelDraw, but I had no time.

1116 entries. Amazing.
That is like 33×34 people sitting all there and writing a game on one weekend.
33 people, that’s the size of a school class. So you have 34 classes all lined up. That’s the size of an average school here in Germany. Dude!

Lets say in average each developer spent 24 hours on each game. That would be 26784 man-hours in total. Taking an average of 150$/hour we get 4.017.600$ worth of games in one weekend.

and that’s a good thing! I can move now, and the ball is bouncing.
NExt to be able to collect them. Then add some enemies to get the basic game working.
Then polishing…

it’s 6am and I need to get a nap until 8:00. I have a hard day ahead

I can build 3D pathes now on my “tiny world” and I can rotate the current platform into view. Math done, tonight comes the fun.

It’s a start. I sort of like the theme now. It’s very flexible and I expect people to bring totally different games here.
My idea is to make a 3D world with different elevations and then build some sort of a maze. So, you might only be able to do one height-step at a time. Let’s see where this heads…

Two messages.
I’m in. I might be (as usual) very short on time, but I am pretty fast with prototyping, so that’s OK for ranking #899/1000. Olympic spirit, you know…

I use:
-GLBasic
-MSPaint
-Corel Draw
-MS SongSmith or some random music generator. I’ll see.
-Audacity+Microphone / SFXR for sounds

The second announcement is you can win! A fat, shiny 7″ Android tablet. All you have to do is using GLBasic this time instead of the language you almost picked. It’s really easy to use, very powerful and free for 2D games. You ain’t got nothing too lose – give it a try.

More Details…

You heard it right. For the anniversary you might consider switching to a new language, and win big:

http://www.glbasic.com/forum/index.php?topic=7957.0

Howdy.
I miserably failed the October challenge 2011. Mainly because I wanted to polish the release version a bit and add some website and example games.
But! I finally made it. You can get the GACK (Gaming App Construction Kit) now for your touchpad (HP, WebOS) or any Android Tablet that has a 1024×768 screen at least.
http://gack.glbasic.com

I sold already 10 pieces. Here’s a link to promo codes for the Touchpad:
http://www.glbasic.com/forum/index.php?topic=7324.0

Yes, I failed miserably because I had to fix some issues in GLBasic that took too much time.
But!! The thing is done. I’m just updating a few example games now and release before x-mas. Here’s a trailer for the complete package:
GACK – gaming app construction kit

I have a new button that allows the users to insert or delete images, that are correctly updated in the animations and level-background lists then. Tiny feature but a lot of work.

The next great thing I added are “elements”. Each player/enemy and shot and “vulnerability” has a set of 4 elements to choose from. You can control what happens on collisions between player-enemy, player-shots, enemy-shots and so on with them. Awesome! I’m so excited.

The last step is to implement a small menu for customizing the controls and an export function that makes stand-alone Apps for WebOS, Android, iOS and PC, Mac, Linux.

I always wanted to make my SEUCK remake into a touchpad app, so you can create games ON your iPad/Touchpad. Now that I have my HP touchpad and development is so much faster and easier, I started finishing it.
I hope to bring it quickly enough to the market to get a $ from it. I also hope that people are willing to buy it.

Plan is to make a touch-only GUI to create full games and make an exporter so you can “sell” the created games for iPhone and WebOS phones (Pre2,3, Veer…)

I also plan to bring at least one proper game as a reference/tutorial.

Current status: It’s working pretty much with touch input only.
I added a lot of ace features like:
-shots/players/enemies have “elements”, so water can attack water and such
-I plan to bring powerups
-I need an option screen for the controls of the mobile devices

GACK sprite editor

It’s quite some read, but it might be of interest for you, especially when you want to participate a LD48 for the first time. I wrote some lines about how and in what order I created a tiny math game for a mobile device.

Not a winner, judging by the already submitted images, but since it’s done, I’ll post it here.

OK, update! Wohoo, finally got something done.
The game is fully playable now. The next step will be some sort of menu system to implement.

You can try it out on windows. Since it’s an iPhone game, the controls are a bit awkard, making the game loose it’s spirit a bit. Please try it – don’t judge it by the boring screen shot. It’s nicely animated.

download:
get it here

I have the game physics working now. You can grab a Windows version at:
WhopIt!

Please read the README.txt, because the PC input differs from the iPhone one.

I finally managed to get the corners auto-rounded to avoid very steep angles.

I think a picture says more than 1000 words (which would be 128 bytes), and a movie even more, so I just made a quick one. Sorry for bad accent.

Whop It – pre-alpha

Yay. I finally polished the graphics of my LD 16 entry “Where is the cheese” and submitted it to the iPhone App Store.
Get it if you like it.

OK, here’s my story of the LD48 compo this year.

First, it was my 2nd LD48 so I quite knew what I could expect. The main restriction for me always is that I have a family that keeps me quite busy at the weekends. But this weekend my wife was invited twice to go out, so my actual time was:
Friday 3am-5am
Saturday: 12am-1pm, 8pm-12pm
Sunday: 8pm-12pm
Sum: 11 hours.

But that’s fine for me. I’m bad at polishing things. I’m quick at prototyping.

What went right:

• The idea. Really, I sat there for 2 hours thinking of a game I could do in ~10 hours and I was close to give up. then came the idea with “explore the fridge”.
• Music, Sound. I’m bad at anything about sounds. I have no idea how to make music and how to make sfx. So for the sfx I just did some “chip chip” and “squeek” sounds using my voice. That gave me the idea, that I do have 5 hours left in my MS SongSmith free trial version. I wrote a few lines in the IDE, launched it and just “sang” as it came to my mind. It was bad. But it was so bad, that it started to be good, again. I kept the first trial w/o any improvements. Had I tried to improve it, I think it would have failed horribly

What went wrong

• MS Paint. Really, usually I use CorelDraw for graphics, but I just wanted to do a quick prototype to see if the idea just works at all. I wanted to redraw the gfx with Corel later, but got no time. The gfx suck totally, but at least the game is fully playable.
• Sleep. I was so excited on Friday, that I woke up too early. I was dead tired on Saturday and close to be sick on Sunday.
• Communication. Really. I was so busy and had just too little time to chat and look what others did, that I have the feeling I missed a good piece of the compo. Might have been because I had so little time, too.
• Sleep. I’m still tired.
• Highscores. Next time I should try to find time to implement a simple online high score table. That might add long time fun to the game, since no one cares how much you can score if you can’t compete with others. Maybe.
• Sleep. I slept too little and feel like I can’t remember what I wanted to do the very second ago

Tools I used

• GLBasic. I’m the author of that language. I hope not to get a pimp hat for that
• MS Paint. Next time I’d better use CorelDraw, because the results are worth it.
• AC3D. For the fridge door I used AC3D, which is a very nice modeller for low poly objects.
• Audacity. For the wav sfx recording I used Audacity with the “save selection as wav” option. Was very quick.
• Microsoft Songsmith. Really, they all post YouTube videos about “Enter Sandman” with MS Songsmith, and they suck. But if you use it in the way they designed it for, the results are quite funny. Don’t expect anything serious. It’s a toy that will produce a joke. I should have saved the file as WAV and convert to MP3, later. That way the Linux version had had music.
• Nettalk. It’s a slim, free IRC program. I can’t program w/o IRC, I’m afraid of being alone

Final thoughts
The game was thought as a joke. I didn’t like the theme a lot, because all my “exploration” ideas were too big to realize in that little time. The feedback so far is overwhelming. Thank you so much. I really thought it’d fail miserably, thus I chose “cheese” in the game’s name. I’m happy that it doesn’t stink in the end.

Where is the cheese is a puzzle game where you have to explore a fridge to find the cheese. After you found it, you will get bonus points for rearranging the goods in groups.

Here’s a screenshot:

I also added a YouTube video.
Where is the Cheese – quick video

Here is the dowload link for the game

I really enjoyed having a few hours for a LD compo. I only attended LD8, before.

Wohoo! It’s a game.

If you like, you can try the attached thing. You explore the fridge in “Where is the Cheese” to find the smelly thing.
You just click on any item, and drag it with held mouse button to another place in the fridge. If you have the cheese, you get bonus points for connected COMBO items in the fridge.

What you say?