I’ve submitted Safari Park Escape; you can download it here.

I was way too ambitious, and it’s lacking all of the mechanics that were going to make it interesting (like individual inventories for each animal, random items, reinforcements in the battles, ranged attacks, fog of war, high scores…). But it is a complete (if limited) game, with various possible end states.

Anyway, time for bed. Not sure if I’ll come back to it to add all that stuff in (the code’s a disaster); I’ll see how I feel in the morning.

Delicious bean stew. Now to get back to finishing my game.

That’s the battle screen; Elephants vs. Park Wardens, taking place in a town (there are different maps generated depending on what kind of tile you were on in the overworld).

I have the basic game up and running now. It’s missing a lot of the extra stuff that’ll make it fun, but if I had to I could submit it as is. I’m hoping I’ve still got time to add in Items and Inventories though, as that should make it a bit more interesting. And it would be nice if I could spice up the combat by letting you gang up your animals on individual humans, but we’ll see how much time I’ve got.

Hey, we’re back!

It’s not the prettiest thing ever, but I’ve at least got the beginnings of some gameplay in there. This is the overworld map, with the animals and the various humans trying to catch them on it. The next step is to implement battling, which is going to need a bunch of new map generators among other things. There’s still a lot to do (detailed todo list below the cut), but it’s starting to look like I might actually have something vaguely playable by the end of today.

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I could do with a more interesting background, but I’ve got the basics of a character selection screen up and running. No gameplay yet.

Starting to suspect I may have made a NOOB MISTAKE and gone with a graphics style that was way too time consuming to pull off within 24hrs. Graphics are done now, but I’ve yet to write a single line of code

It’s taken me way too long to get these sketches done, and there’s still a ton of stuff to do to them before I can sit them in the game, but that’s the first step out of the way.

Weird. I’d got the impression Self-Replicating was a sure thing for the theme. Not to worry though, I reckon I’ve got a decent idea to be going on with.

I’m going to attempt a strategy roguelike idea I’ve been thinking about for a while now. It’s going to be called Safari Park Escape, and the idea is that you’re trying to get a group of animals (escaped from a safari park) to evade their keepers for long enough that they eventually give up the search, and your animals can live free and wild in the British countryside. It’s a bit ambitious, but if I keep things simple it should be do-able. It also sets itself up for a sequel: Safari Park Liberation, where the escaped animals come back to liberate all the animals they left behind…

* – Little known fact: ‘Porridge for Victory’ was an actual slogan used in the Second World War in Scotland. Winston Churchill, struggling to cope with the UK’s extremely limited supply of food, instituted a strict ‘Porridge-only’ diet on the entirety of Scotland, uttering the infamous words, “Miserable buggers. They’ll probably be happy they’ve got something else to complain about.” This policy is the real reason behind the continued antipathy between Scotland and England, and is the reason many Scots still cannot look at (or even smell) a bowl of porridge without wanting to throw up.

I missed the last one due to a combination of having to work and not liking the theme enough to justify squeezing it in to what time I did have, but I’m definitely in for this one.

I’ll be coding in c++ with SDL, SDL_image, vorbisfile, PortAudio, libfreetype and GLEW. It’s the same code framework I’ve used for the past few Dares. It’s badly in need of an update, but it’ll do for now.

For this Dare I’ve set myself the challenge of not moaning about the theme being too generic/boring/not double zombie rainbow and instead just getting on with making a game. And as I seem to go with a different art style for every LD game I’ve made so far, I’ve also been experimenting a bit with Inkscape and Paint Shop Pro. The upshot being that I’ve given myself the additional challenge of, whatever kind of game I wind up with, it must feature happy cartoon guys with wings (example below the cut).

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Right, I’m done. Get it here.

It’s not as chaotic as I was hoping for, and in the end I didn’t add in dynamic weather (I couldn’t face spending any more time on such a buggy, broken mess), but it’s plenty annoying and ugly.

I’m about half-way through my game, so I thought I’d post something before I go to bed.

My idea was to make one of those games that’s incredibly ambitious and also thoroughly buggy and broken (e.g. Boiling Point). So I’m making a roguelike with as much stuff in it as I can possibly fit. In no particular order:

• Noise propagation.
• Avalanches.
• Full ecosystem (plants eaten by herbivores, which are eaten carnivores, omnivores eat everything).
• Dynamic weather.
• Predators track you (and other prey) by smell and noise.
• Floods.
• Hunger, thirst <- every creature in the game suffers from these. Some will change their behaviour as a result.
• Traps which the player can only see if they’re observant enough.
• Probably other stuff I’ve forgotten.

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…using advanced graphite reconstruction technology I was able to re-create it, exactly as it happened.

Don’t have much to say in the way of a post-mortem. I hated the theme, but liked what I did with it. The coding went remarkably smoothly and I was pretty much done by the end of Saturday. Which was just as well, as I had to work on Sunday.

Get it here. There’s Windows, Linux and OSX builds. I forgot to do a timelapse this time, but I do have a plan… Also, I wanted to record a video of the game, but I can’t for the life of me find a screen recorder that actually works

Back from work, and the loading screen’s in and I’ve added a bit more polish to a couple of bits that needed it. A loading screen screenshot:

It’s looking like I might even have time to build the Linux and OSX versions before the deadline, which would be a first for me.

I seem to have somehow managed to get everything done in a single day bar the loading screen. Which is good, because working tomorrow means I won’t be able to get back to the game before about 4:30pm. This screenshot doesn’t really show anything new, but that’s because most of what I’ve done in the past few hours has been audio, or stuff I don’t really want to show to avoid ruining the surprise(s).

Funnily enough, I seem to have ended up with something I’m quite proud of, despite hating the theme with a passion.

I also added a fuzzy border and hooked up my synthesizer code, so there’s now sound to accompany it. I think I might add some background drones too though, as it can get a little sparse if the player stops doing anything.

I’ve now added giant sproingy pixels. You probably need to see it moving to get the full effect.

So I spent most of the morning thinking up a name. I think it was worth it though: Explosive Transcendental Circulatory System.

Here’s a screenshot to go with it:

It’ll get slightly more interesting later.

Ech. Feeling distinctly grumpy this morning (I hate this kind of broad, all-encompassing theme – creativity thrives on constraints!). Anyway, I guess my game’s going to be a kind of black box (well, technically a multi-coloured, epileptic-flashing black box), with the player tasked with discovering how it works.

I will at least finally get to use my realtime audio synthesis code with this one. Expect to hear plenty of squelches and zaps.

…in case I decide to join in anyway, here‘s my basecode (C++, GPL). Dependencies are: GLEW; libjpeg; freetype; libpng; portaudio; SDL; SDL_image; SDL_ttf; zlib. Other programs I might use are Inkscape, Paint Shop Pro and Tracktion.