We’ve been hard at work up in Duluth!  The end is in sight for completing Ant Onslaught.  You can select, move, attack, and harvest with ants.  Food allows you to create more ants, so you can face tougher enemies and collect food faster.  Ebuch has created an all too catchy piece of music based on “The ants go marching one by one.”  We have to play other music just to get it out of our heads!  Here  is a screen shot showing what the current game looks like:

Work has continued on Ant Onslaught. Last night while Ebuch made the sprites for the animations, some pieces of food and a few enemies, everyone else got a pipeline working for taking the xml files produced by Tiled, changing them to a csv file with python, and then it being imported by XNA with it finally being displayed on the screen.  With a map system we called it a night.  We’re starting off today working on our own and will meet up later.  I’ve worked on a few tiles and made a basic map on Tiled.  Pirate Cove has gotten A* working for pathfinding (which he mostly got working last night.)  Evad has animations and a working menu.  Lastly Ebuch is working on music.    Here is a screen shot showing a few ants on the map:

Greetings everyone!

We’ve started work on the game after we finished brainstorming.  So, now introducing Ant OnSlaught.  The goal of the game will be gathering food to hatch more ants in order to form an onslaught on a house and raid the treasure trove that is the kitchen!  It will play like a very simple RTS game and hopefully be fun.  Since all talk is boring, here are some early ant sprites by Ebuch:

Evad and Pirate Cove are busy mumbling among themselves whilst programming and have the basics laid out on paper.  Lastly I have been figuring out the map and mapping system (add “Tiled” to our list of programs we’re using by the way, though we’re not using it’s full xml export.)

Hello everyone, this is Laremere along with Ebuch, Evad, PirateCove, and maybe one or two more.  We’re all at the Duluth, Minnesota, USA gathering ( http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/05/duluth-minnesota-gathering-at-umd/ )
There are more of us here at the gathering, but they’re not on our team.   The tools were going to be using are:

• XNA
• Gimp / Photoshop
• Possibly Sfxr
• Studio One

We’re excited about the theme of small world, and we already have a basic idea laid out.  Of course, coming up with a name appears to be taking more time than the basic idea itself.  More info coming soon!

A few of us from the ACM club at the University of Minnesota Duluth are going to be gathering to participate in the next Ludum Dare.  If you are in the area and would like to join us, contact me at Laremere@gmail.com or post a comment below with a way to contact you.

So.  Well….

I’m not sure how this weekend will work out.  I may end up with not a lot of time to work on the LD, but I hope I do have the time.  The current idea of what I plan on working with:

Python for the language

Pyglet for the windowing and media

Some version of SFXr for sound

Photoshop or paint.net for art

The last few LDs I’ve slacked off on being a good participant, maybe this time I’ll be a bit better and go for a winner

I’m not used to the early start time at all.  Anywho, my declaration of entry:

Using

-Python

-Pyglet

-Aviary’s online tools (for sound and graphics)

-Some form of SFXer

-Possibly photoshop

Lets get this party started!

Here are stats from round three:

The chart is viewable in google docs here.  (this file includes round one and two voting stats and charts)

Check http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/tag/stats/ for all statistics related posts!

Redundancy; Quick, everybody do this:

I figured I’d make a fancy chart of the results from each round of voting this time around, for the fun of it.  After trying a few different types of charts, it seems that this method gave the most information.  Hope you enjoy!

The chart in google docs.

If you have any requests for different types of charts to display the info, feel free to suggest and I’ll see what I can do.

Well, this Ludum Dare wasn’t that good for me.  The biggest problems are that I don’t have any skill in 3d modeling, I’m not used to unity yet,  and that I didn’t dedicate much of my weekend to making anything worth while.  This screen shot is old, but little has changed in the place it was taken since it was taken, so it’s all good.  A playable and explanation of what to do is available after the more.

(more…)

Well, it’s coming along.  I have treasure and some other small things working.  Now all I need to do is make a few other kinds of treasure, put them in the game, finish the ship, and hopefully add some more sounds.  A current screenshot, and playable after more.

(more…)

Progress is going well.  I have movement, lighting, and some early sound all working well.

Controls instructions and playable after the jump.

(more…)

Theme turned out to be one of the two I had a theme for (the other being having a game about Fandom of LoZ: Twilight Princess.)  The general idea is that the player will control a submarine, which explores a shipwreck in hopes of coming out with grand treasure.

I plan on using:

Unity with Javascript – Um….. I’ll consider this a crash course.

3D studio max – if these weird graphical errors stop

sfxr – because nothing else can make sounds quite like it

Photoshop – if I by chance decide to make some textures

After much work, my entry is finally finished.  Little Jimmy roams around in his cavern collecting points and mining away.

Arrow keys to move, z to mine. Explore the cave to gain points. A mining a wall gets 1 point, a stalagmite 10 points, and finding a mushroom gives 100. If you mine out of the room, you should find another cavern, continue to find more and more caverns, racking up the points. I had allot of fun making this entry, procedurally generated caverns and all, so I hope you have some fun playing it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview&uid=530

Edit: View the timelapse here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNTvw0nG8o4

Lets see, I got on the computer at what, 10:30 ish, and now it is 3:12. (should have waited two minuets to write this.)  After much coding, I finally have cavern generation working.  Every cavern you’ll see is generated by the game from scratch including the first cavern you start in.  While you play the game will seamlessly generate the next cavern in the background.  It will then place it on chance with coming in at a random point on the direction your mining, and if the space it wants to be placed in is open.  What’s left is to do a tiny bit of finishing up on cavern generation including adding things like stalagmites and mushrooms to make the caverns more interesting.  Then I will hopefully get some music made that will play in the background.  After that I want to add a goal to the game (collect as many mushrooms as you can?) and some other goodies that will make it fun to play.

After collision got working (last post) I implimented digging, and it works great animations and all.  After I got digging as done as it’ll get, I tried tackling cavern generation…and ended up with laggy strait tunnel generation.  This was another bummer because I spent so much time working on it trying to figure out a good algorythm, but it failed in the end.  I got a tiny bit a spriting done, and now I’ve turned off the screen recorder for the night and am not going to work on it anymore at the moment.  I’m going to sleep on the algorythm, and hope tomorrow will bring better luck with my not waisting my time with failedattempts.

Collision, it rocks

I’ve been up to allot since the last post.  I barely had the code started, and I got windows and moving around working well.  After wasting a ton of time working on walls only to realize that the way I wanted to do them would infact take forever to do with all the different possibilities to consider.  After giving up on that for simpler walls, and failing at one attempt to do collision I was somewhat discouraged, but after a quick walk around the block, I was back at it.  I got collision working well now, and with all the basics set up,  I can finally start focusing on actual game play.

I’d also like to note that this is the first time I’ve gotten this far with a game basically ever.  I’ve known how to do it, but haven’t taken the time much, and have had to do a bunch of documentation reading (ug) to get the basics working.

Thanks to http://tell.fll.purdue.edu/JapanProj//FLClipart/ for the image. This counts as non-profit educational, right?

Just woke up, so now it’s time to get making away at My Little Cavern. This is the start for the art that I did last night. I need to do more, but I think it’s a good start. No game working yet, but it should be soon.

Art start

Part burrowing theme, part cavern theme is what my entry will be. The character (probably going to be named Jimmy) fell down a dry well. Convieniently, he happened to have a pickax. found a hole in the ground and brought a pickax for an adventure. He starts digging away at the walls of the cavern to see what he will find. I hope to have a game where you can take different approaches. There on one hand is the ability to dig around and see what you find in the world of underground. I also hope to add some building mechanic beyond carving away at the rock so that you can start a little house underground.