Here’s the postmortum I promised last week.  I haven’t read the comments on my entry yet and I wanted to get my thoughts down before I did.

THis LD48 was my third, if you don’t count the two that I intended to enter and never did.  My number one goal was to finish, and the number two goal was to do something fun.  I’m happy that I completed goal number one, but failed on goal number two.

Technically, I didn’t really even submit a game.  There is no real end condition or repeatable system that goes until you fail.  I never got a chance to actually implement the “monster at the gates” scenario, as I fought with a stupid bug at the end brought on by stupid changes on my stupid part.

What did I do wrong in the LD12?  I didn’t spend enough time on it.  I should have squeezed three or four more quality hours in.  My mother-in-law was visiting, and that led to the normal distractions as she visited with us and our newborn.  I probably could have completed something that resembled a game with a little more time, and I know that the time existed.  I just didn’t use it well.

I didn’t get any real animation done with the monsters or the dude.  It would have been nice, but time didn’t allow it.  I also used some sound, and while it wasn’t nearly to the level that I wanted it, I thought it was neat to hear the monsters gargle when they died and the arrow whisp away from the dude on the tower. 

I think my usage of the angle/power aiming mechanism was a bad idea.  I think I should have gone with the “point-and-click” method, which would have been easier for the user and fits better with the action oriented design.  The arrow was made up of separate graphics rotated to the closest 15 degree mark.  I could have implemented a rotation transformation, but that would have taken longer and probably been more CPU intensive.   

So what did I do right?

I met the theme of the Tower by simply having a tower in which the dude fired from.  I didn’t stop there, and created a middle floor from him to fire from and also made the doors at the bottom open and close.  The tower isn’t just a pretty graphic.  It’s functional and strategic.

The part I liked the most about my entry was the graphics.  Most of them were sketches from my initial game idea sheet.  I scanned it into the computer and photoshopped color into it and cut it into separate parts and images.  I think it gave my entry a unique style that I’d like to use again in a future competition.  I’m not a great artist, but I think if I don’t try to make everything perfect, it comes off better.  Reminds me a little of the original South Park or other ‘construction paper’ style.

Another thing that I really think I did well was keeping the coding distractions to a minimum.  By this, I mean that I didn’t get sidetracked coding something that wasn’t important ‘right now.’  In the past, I will start to code something that may come in handy later, but doesn’t really help me too much in completing more important foundation pieces.

So all in all, I think I did ok.  I can see that I learned some things from the last time around and I really look forward to taking the things I learned here for LD13 in December.  Same goals, but I will try to think through the game for a little while before coding to make sure that it is actually a game and hopefully fun. 

So this is ‘Tower’ since I didn’t bother to come up with a better name.  (I did all my naming duty with Fiona’s Purple Reign.)

The object, of course, is to defend your tower from the onslaught of baddies.  Unfortunately, there is only one type of monster, but each wave has it’s own speed and interval.  Use the arrows to move the guy up and down the tower, or left and right across the top.  A/D change the angle and W/S changes the power of your arrows.

I’ll probably write a post-mortum later, but you can download Tower.

I haven’t had any chances to really post anything today, so I thought I would do so as I begin my final push.

Here’s a screenshot.  So far, you can fire arrows at wave after wave of baddies.  I haven’t figured out how to give you more arrows, so I’ll probably just make them infinite and limit you to a couple.

Anyway, back to the salt mines.

I’m calling it a night.  Those energy drinks aren’t doing anything, though I’m sure once my head hits the pillow they’ll kick in.

Things to do tomorrow:

• Waves of monsters from the MonsterManager
• Display upcoming monsters in the current wave
• Add melee weapons
• Add scoring
• finish HUD
• boiling oil?
• number font object?
• and a number of other things, I’m sure.

Well, we’ll see how it goes.  See you in the morning!

Oh.  Hey. 

It’s time to bust out can number two.  And I’m running dangerously low on Gobstoppers.

I’m not done for the night, but it seemed like a good time to post a screenshot.  There isn’t much gameplay to it right now.  The idea is that monsters will progress from the left to the right towards the tower, where you are the person defending.  At your disposal is arrows that you shoot from one of three places on the tower.  Ok, so the arrows don’t do anything yet, since I didn’t implement the collision routines.  I have spent most of the past couple hours making the game look better than the black and white sketches that I’ve been using.  Now it looks like colored versions of my sketches.  I like the style, so I am going to keep it.  I think they look better than anything pixel pushed. 

Next up is probably the HUD display for the top of the screen to display the game info.

Oh, and the screenshot capturing is done from built-in code that dumps the frame before it displays it.  I think its neat.

So it’s time to bust out the big guns.

I’m behind, I’m not sure if I have something fun, and we’re down to the last 23 hours.

Here’s my dinner for today.  Cheap chinese food; barbeque pork and orange chicken with chowmein noodles.  Oh, and my wife stopped at another chinese food place to get wonton soup because the first place didn’t have any.  She’s such a wonderful woman. 

If you are wondering, my fortune for the evening is “DISCOVER THE TALENTS WITHIN YOURSELF.”

Yea.

Sure, it’s almost lunch time, but I thought I’d post what I ate this morning.

Bacon, Eggs, Hashbrowns, Toast and Biscuits and Gravy.  My wife had blueberry pancakes and helped me eat the B&G.  You can see baby Hunter in the upper corner.

Here’s my first sketch of a tower game.  You’re the dude on the tower.  The baddies are on the left.  They’ll be working their way to the right to attack your tower.  Not totally original, but it’s something I think I can make fun.  That’s always been the biggest hurdle in any “out there” game idea I come up with.

Now I just need to start working on the Java objects to represent these game objects.

Here’s where I’ll spend most of my LD48_12

Friday dinner waiting for for LD48_12.  Polish sausages with peppers, onions, kraut and a little mustard.  Peas, salad and criss-cut fries as well.

[this is a crosspost from my own blog that is in /planet as well, but I think it needs to be here to declare my intent to enter... and because it's compo related. ]

It’s time again.  Seems like just a short bit ago I was working on LD48 #11, and maybe it was.  The contests are on a much better schedule now which should help in participation. 

I’ve been keeping myself busy working on a reborn and re-imagined project from back in ‘03.  I’ll probably release more info on that when I have something good to show off.  If we get a compatible theme, perhaps some of the work on LD48_12 can be reassigned afterward to my other project.  Honestly, working on that project the past week has kept my skills and mind frame in the perfect place for the LD48.

Last time around I had to take time out from the alotted 48 hours to attend a baseball game.  I won’t have that problem this year, though I am in the mood for a good egg and bacon breakfast at a local joint Saturday morning.  I hope to remember to take a picture of that for the food compo.

This time around isn’t going to be much different than last time.  I’m going to use mostly the same tools as before:

• Java 6 SDK
• Eclipse 3.3.2 IDE
• Photoshop CS2
• HP OfficeJet 6450 All-In-One for scanning doodles
• No Fear Energy Drink (Go Boris Said #60!)
• Everlasting Gobstoppers
• mIRC for chattery
• Killer Game Programming in Java and the base code I used from last compo.

The only thing we need now is a theme!

Good luck, and see you in 1 day, 9 hours and 48 minutes! 

Update: I can add my Rock Band microphone to the list above.  Maybe sound effects this time!  See you in 1 day and 30 minutes!

I’m behind where I want to be, but I’m still chugging along.

So, it’s not really obvious from the screen shot, but this is not your usual Breakout game.  The idea is the same; the ball bounces and removes the bricks.  The catch is that you aren’t controlling the paddle.  The computer is.  Your job is to build up the wall and protect the goal at the top of the screen.  You do so by buying different types of bricks and deciding where to place those bricks for the best protection.

I’m not sure if I want to ’scale back’ the graphics to make it look more minimalist, more in line with the hollow ball and paddle.  I think I’ll be able to get at least a basic game ready to play before the deadline.  I can see myself adding more things into post-LD revision later on.

… and a bouncing ball.  With paddle.  But no collision.

I made a list of the probable theme winners yesterday and I pretty much had ideas for all of them.

Except Minimalist.

So I’ll probably just take one of my other ideas…. and minimize it.

Oh well.  Time to get crackin’.

Sausage and Portabella Mushroom.  We got the sausage pizza from the Supermarket and added the mushrooms.  Yum!  Now, only moments away from the theme….

Like I said in my entry earlier this week, I’ll be using code from the book Killer Game Programming in Java. I took the example from Chapter 12 and stripped out all the game logic, graphics and sounds, leaving the game loop and the classes related to images and sounds, etc. 

LD48_11_LoneStranger.zip

I’m really looking forward to this compo.  I am going to try to get out of work a little early so I can head on over to the grocery store and pick up a take-and-bake pizza for dinner.  I’m not totally set on the toppings yet, but I may go with some fancy mushrooms and maybe some sausage or something. 

I’m going to give the LD48 a shot this time around.  It’s been years since I have actually attempted any kind of game coding, and I yanked out my old Killer Game Programming in Java book this week and started going through the chapters again.  The personal challenge with this compo is that there is a baseball game (KC at Oakland) on Saturday that I’m going to attend.  That’s a huge chunk of hours out of the 48.  Perhaps I can come up with a way to make them useful.  Design? Sketches? We’ll see.

At least I don’t have to plant my tomatoes this weekend.  I did that yesterday.  I turned some half-barrels into self-watering planters.  If anyone cares, I’ll have pictures on my home blog, www.lonestranger.net, later this week. 

So I’ll probably use the design patterns from the aforementioned coding book and code in Java.  I’m using Eclipse as an IDE.  I have used Eclipse for some of my work coding in J2EE, but I didn’t know about it the last time I was messing around with game coding.  It’s nice to be able to get the method completion and object browsing that you can do in VS, only not using VS. 

The last LD48 that I did enter was way back in late ‘01 or so, for LD48_2: Construction/Deconstruction with a minor in Sheep.  I’ll have to dig out that old fossil if a game that I submitted.  It sucked.  In short, all you did was huck sheep from one side of the screen to the other, knocking over bales of wool.  But I guess the real success was that I completed something in 48 hours.  It’s a challenge in itself.

Anyway.  Good luck to all!