Alchemy! Magic! Illogical crates! Pink trees! Victory conditions!

Lack of title screen! Unintuitive gameplay! Excessive exclamations! Becoming unhinged under pressure!

Rain! Flooding! Swimming! Watering plants! W and Y also jump, for you strange foreign people!

Bam! So, huge increase in filesize, because I’ve added a lot of music. But there’s stuff to do now, if not actually a goal yet.
Arrow keys to move, Z to jump, X to pick up or drop blocks, hold X and release to slam a block into something. Break leaves to get seeds, plant seeds to get trees, smash trees into the volcano to get nothing. Stuff happens at dawn (though you can force a “dawn” using space for debug purposes).

Try it out. Move with arrow keys, jump with Z, grab/place/slam blocks with X. Slamming doesn’t do anything besides make a noise yet.

So, I’ve got some basic mechanics working. Use arrows to move, Z to jump, and X to pick up or place blocks.

Try it out.

No gameplay, but tiles are loading and displaying property. Not that that’s really a huge milestone, but still. Progress!

Just a doodle, but some ideas are finally starting to gel in my head, and I think I know where I might be going with this now.

Working title is “Atom Planet”, and my themes for it are basically half of the finalists.

I don’t have a really solid idea yet, but the notion I’m leaning for is something sort of minecraft-like, but with space as an extremely limited resource – to the extent that you may end up needing to destroy and rebuild things just to move around in the tiny world. I’m tempted by isometric cubes, but that seems like something that Flixel wouldn’t do well natively. And isometric platforming is always awkward with a keyboard, in my experience… Still, isometric is better than flat tiles to give a sense of solidness to things. Although I suppose I could make it side-view.

So, the usual. I’ll be using Flixel (+ perhaps Powertools) for codebase (Unless I fall back to Processing for some reason), GIMP for graphics, sfxr + Audacity for sounds, PXTone and FamiTracker for music. Let’s do this thing.

So my game has all of its initial scope filled out, which means it’s time to playtest and polish! Impressions and feedback on the current build would be greatly appreciated! (Tap X to advance text and fly.)

So, I’ve got my concept mostly solidified, and the intro cutscene done (press X to advance the text)… Now to start working on actual gameplay. I should probably get that sorted out.

After last LD’s disaster, I’m glad to have a nice shiny new functional computer to be doing this on! Standard declaration of tools and such:

Framework: Flixel (+ Power Tools)
Graphics: The GIMP
Sounds: sfxr and Audacity
Music: PXTone and/or Famitracker
Food: Mostly breakfast foods and beef stew
Desk: You don’t wanna know

So, yesterday my desktop PC picked pretty much the worst time possible to quit working. I’m stuck typing this on my hand-me-down Macbook, without access to any of the tools I intended to use to make my game. I still intend to see what I can scrounge together on this combination of Ubuntu and OS X Tiger, but Flixel, Famitracker, and PXTone are all Windows-only, as far as I know.

My working title for my intended game is “TIME BOMB SET! ESCAPE IMMEDIATELY!”

I’m in once more, and have gone to the trouble of rescheduling dental appointments in order to participate. I’ll be mixing things up a bit this time, using Flixel rather than my usual Processing. I’ve never made a game in Flash before, so this is gonna be exciting. Other tools include my usual sfxr (and possibly the various derivatives that have sprung up), PXTone and/or Famitracker, and possibly The GIMP if I make any actual art.

So, my LD20 entry was my return to game-making after a considerable hiatus. I didn’t do much in the way of exploring new technology or tools, opting instead to stick with what I knew and focus on turning in a solid result. What went well, and lessons learned:
(more…)

A little over 13 hours left and I’ve got no enemies, no AI, and no level design. But c’mon, tell me this isn’t the most satisfying stick you’ve ever picked up in your life.

Yay! I had to scale back the ambition of my attack system considerably, but I think I’m actually liking the end result a bit better. A simple combo system is more in keeping with the spirit of the Dragondot franchise, anyway. There will also be charge-up attacks. Also, now has sound! http://nmccoy.net/games/sausage/ld20/index.html

Viewable here. Man I spent a lot of time on IRC…

So, one of the game development lessons I’ve learned over the years is that if you want to have a satisfying game, every little interaction the player has with the game should also be satisfying. With that in mind, I’ve spent the last few hours tuning my movement controls, with a black dot jumping around on a black line:

If you want, you can try it out yourself. Enter to start, Left/right arrows to move, Z to jump, Z in the air to airdash.

Sleeping on my idea has indeed proved fruitful; it’s a bit more coherent in my head now. And IRC has spoken on the subject of my game’s protagonist, so I can present my first tentative title screen:

Expect GLORIOUS CIRCLES.