I finally got landing on shore to work. I uploaded a brief video

Whale of a Tale footage

and while waiting for the video to upload I added trees and grass;

I’m STILL trying to get landing working. I’m almost there. but until then, have this picture I drew because I was frustrated with the problem at hand:

I’ve run out of whale related titles, but I am back from our “super official Victoria LD meetup” with Blackduck and Zatech. and I decided to set up my computer in a different spot, which allowed me to finally set up a second monitor!

Behold: workspace photo!

So yeah. I’m still fiddling with getting off the whale. so here’s a pic of our brainstorm last night (I’ll give you a guess as to which marker was mine)

Ipods actually take really good photos. I’m impressed

There isn’t much new from last night, mostly I just made the character different, made him walk better, as well as the whale. As you can see you can now ride the whale by stepping on a dock. given that a whale is close enough. Right now I’m trying to make you get off the whale somehow. Current attempts are buggy and involve instantly jumping back onto the whale.

A bit of an update. I’m not content with the player sprite, so I’ll probably make it more abstract and not a duder. Changes are;

• added some terrain variety (stone, deep water)
• made it so whale can only be placed in water, and vice versa for the duder.
• Duder is moved with WASD

Next step is making only one of each available, and then letting you hop on whale to swim to other docks. I want to try making trees again, my last attempt was pretty ugly.

This is my esteemed colleague blackduck’s interpretation of the game, call it concept art if you will:

Here’s a screeny. Not sure where I’m going with this, but here it is (whatever it is). the environment is randomly generated, and you can select docks to spawn whales (whale shown above, the two rings is the spawning thingamajig). Current problem is placing whales on land. and then I make whales controllable or something. There will be land and water based movement. as well as WHALE BATTLES (one might say they are Whale Based Battles). I’m going to cram in the theme somewhere, some time.

Good luck and good fun to all! see you next week-end

I ditched the latter par of the whole “So bad it’s good” thing. AKA “It’s bad”. I mustered up all my experience from my 8th grade game-maker games in order to create this masterpiece entitled: BOBER<S QUEST

alt title: Why game-maker is so notorious

Here is a screenshot for your viewing (dis)pleasure

actual post thing where I say the exact same thing again: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-25/?action=preview&uid=1548

btw sorry if this post is completely rubbish, I’m in the rubbish mindset from wasting an hour of my life on this.

don’t have much of an idea for what the game’s going to be like, so I’m fiddling around with the menu.

THEME: fishing

LIMITATION: game ends in 60 seconds

RULE: all variable names must be palindromes (fairly easy because I’m using GameMaker :V )

I’m mildly baffled at the audio ratings my game recieved.

[ - - 5  3 2 - - 4 - 1 1 - 2 2 1 - 2 1- -]

First off, look at all those dashes. My game certainly had audible sound, and my game being made in game-maker, I see no reason for it not to work. I do however appreciate the amount of dashes I got versus the amount of ones, Protip: make sure those headphones are plugged in.
Although I may be biased, my audio certainly deserved more than a one.  This makes me mildly angry because those ones are mostly either
A) I’m on mac/linux and I’m jelly because I can’t play it but I’ll vote anyways, I’ll just give audio 1/5
B) I don’t hear audio, has nothing to do with the fact my volume is turned down. I’m in a bad mood so I’ll rate 1/5 instead of n/a
C) the game only has one song and one sfx, I am completely ignoring the fact that the game really doesn’t need any more than that and rating 1/5 because there aren’t 50 songs and/or they’re not chip-tunes and all pixel art games need chip tunes

I also got a lot of dashes for community, which is almost more gobsmacking. Remember people, there is a handy button for viewing the person’s journal

The humor category also bit me hard, as I didn’t make a funny game. Which make memad at the category, as I’m sure I’ve said before, giving a game props for being funny is great, but we shouldn’t be forced into making a funny game, and we shouldn’t turn a cold shoulder to more serious or neutral games in the process.

Anyways, </rant>, I think I’m just disappointed because I got 95% praise in the comments, and then I get on the computer today to see this. I’d really appreciate it if people commented for reasons other than to congratulate as well. Being told your game is great is good and all, but nowhere near as helpful as some good ‘ole constructive criticism. A few people commented that the game was “missing something to make me really enjoy it” and it frustrated me that they offered no solutions (as in, I had to sit around for a week and figure it out myself).

I’m really happy with the game I made, but this puts a bit of a damper on my desire to work on it more.

also whoever rated 2/5 for graphics. . . just . . .

My game is done! I’d tell you all about it, but I already did that over at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=1548

Done implementing oxygen, I’ll take a few moments to catch my breath, and it’s off to implementing score!

Slimes are done! I may give them the added feature of leaving a slimy trail if I have time later, but for now this is enough

Slimes:

• Move at your speed (2x faster than the mole)
• Deadly
• If it hits water it dissolves into it, making the water toxic (toxic water insta-kills you)

Moles:

• Move at half your speed
• Deadly
• Every so often it will destroy the next dirt block it runs into (max 8 )
• Acts kinda like ores do in water

And I’ve started work on the HUD, take a look:

Here’s what I need to do:

• Slime enemy
• implement some sort of HUD (showing score, health, and oxygen)
• Add the menu stuff (instructions, etc.)
• polish and stuff

Let’s do this!

updated

• water graphics
• added roots
• added trees

If I can’t find anything else aesthetic to do, I guess that means I have to makes something useful. Blob enemy time!

It’s completely ridiculous and I love it.

[/pun]

So yeah, water works more-or-less the way I envisioned it, it does in fact make lakes instead of rivers, but it just makes it that much more dangerous, which is good. The next thing to do is make ore float and do something about water’s dangerousness.

and after that it’s enemy time, I’m thinking a mole and the ever-mandatory ball of slime.

Trying to make water work. it’s not doing so great. Here’s how it’s going to work:

• If there is an empty space below water it will fill up that space
• if there is a block below the water and space available on the sides, it fill flood up those sides
• Only downwards and vertical movement, in a way that makes underground rivers, not lakes.
• Water will probably instantly kill you, as a result you’ll have to make sure ore doesn’t fall in.
• Ores float in water; temptation

oh, and I also made the darkstone more beveled.

Once Water’s working I need to make it be dangerous, I’m still not sure whether to do insta-death or oxygen bar.

I’m also changing the game, whereas before it was going to be some sandbox thing; I don’t have enough time to do that. So your goal will be to collect a certain % of ore before time runs out (getting the same ore in a row gets you more points), and return to the surface with them. After water I’ll add enemies or something. maybe some details like trees and tree roots.

not particularly exciting game-play I might add, but there is game-play nonetheless.

you control that miner man, and click adjacent blocks to destroy them. And no, you can’t right-click to place them back.

When you destroy an ore block the ore falls down, potentially mixing around with other ores, i’ll either keep it like that; so you have to be careful, or make touching ores merge togheter to make new ones.

back from my wonderful 8.5 hours of sleep, and I’m ready to implement some sort of actual game-play! (this post totally isn’t just so I can click me name to see my previous posts and find out what I was supposed to do today).