20 minutes in and I’ve got a lovely game idea and a single image to help keep me on track.

A motivational video for the TIG’ers among us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJFyz73MRcg

For the past few months I’ve been slowly working on a sweet game, and I just recently got the graphics engine code working properly. It’s a library for BlitzMax that makes it phenomenally easy to handle ASCII graphics coupled with a specialized paint program for the creation of ASCII “images” to use with the engine.

You can download it for yourself at http://rolep.webs.com/ASCII%20engine.rar

So to make my entry this time, I’m planning on using sfxr for sound effects, Famitracker for music, BlitzMax for programming, and my own engine and paint program for the graphics.

Check it out!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=1540

My game is almost finished, now that I’m working on a restful night of sleep. It’s got a heavy emphasis on the fact that it’s moddable, and as a result the actual game isn’t terribly long. I expect to get my entry up and available within the next couple hours.

Special thanks goes to LandsharkMeww for helping test the game and taking a look at its data files a bit and giving me a second opinion.

Well, I’m throwing in the towel for LD. Maybe I’ll wrap some stuff up tomorrow so I can at least get it out for the Jam. My problem is that on Friday, I was forced into mowing the lawn after explaining that any time was fine except for this weekend. Then I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning trying to get even a bit done but ended up doing little but working in circles trying to get an idea and later in the night just struggling to stay awake. So I went to sleep for 3 hours, and made painfully little progress on Saturday. I was so tired I decided to just sleep for as long as I was tired and slept from 11 to almost 9. Productivity today skyrocketed, but 14 hours just wasn’t enough to get it all done. I’m so close to being finished, but there’s simply no way for me to squeeze it into 2 hours, especially considering how tired I’m starting to get and how fed up I am with the bizarre bugs I’m getting after making some minor changes to make the enemy templates get read from a moddable external file rather than the hard code. So this is thanks for the motivation to get back working on a game I started a while back and a cruel insult because you stole my sanity yesterday. Oh, how I wish I had just gone to sleep Friday night ;(

:S

Just throwing it out there, for anyone else who shares my pain.

I’m taking the extra time to do something extra for the moddability of my entry. Why? Because spending an hour to implement this is probably going to yield more positive results than the extra few enemy waves I might design instead. I’d already made it easy for myself to work with content by defining enemy waves and dialogs outside the game code with a simple syntax, and now I’m making it work with the enemy definitions as well. I’m not going to make movement patterns moddable, though, because that would be a freaking ton of work >_>

Adding a proper story to my game. Story meaning a simple reason why the enemies are shooting at you and why there’s a small green circle chasing around a smaller one. If you saw my earlier post, you may recall that the portrait shown is of the enemy leader.

First playable build. Still no sound, and hardly any game content, but just putting it out there:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10116881/Project_Cerebrum.zip

Now that I’ve finished the gameplay and all, I’m working on making the enemy types and designing the waves for the game.

So I’ve got three characters for the game -

You:

Your computer sidekick:

The alien leader:

This is the name of my game! You can’t have it.

The gameplay is almost complete. Now I have 12 hours to cram in some sound and some content.

My game has some basics in terms of gameplay and no audio, but at least my graphics don’t suck too painfully badly at this point

A lot less of the graphics are placeholders now.

Hurrah for placeholder graphics, no?

Anyway, I’ve got basic enemy AI all tidy and everything so that’ll be very easy to both create and adjust. Now I need to make weapon AI, and then make the player thing move.

I’ve got an idea, and I’ve started to get things up and running. I think I’ve got something I can finish in time, so we’ll see how it all goes.

First screenshot, after appx. 30 minutes of actual work. Still trying to set my mind on what I’ve got to do

Additionally, as an encouragement to other TIG’ers competing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJFyz73MRcg

(is it not possible to embed a youtube video in a post? :/)

The creator of Simcano has gone long after the deadline. The screenshot shown with the entry was taken at the deadline; spot some of the differences between it and the linked game. I’d played it shortly after the deadline and saw its highly positive comments recently so I went at it again. It went from previously only placing tiles to now being a full game.

I want to give Perrin an award for his game, but I can’t because he doesn’t have any journal posts.

I want to give people awards for their games, but I can’t because they don’t have any journal posts.