Like many, I did a timelapse this weekend! I did a webcam capture as well, for the first time. It was funny seeing snapshots of my pain and/or elation at different points throughout the weekend. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLDeczIW2JI

So, here it is, my entry for Caverns:

Refuge puts you in a turret defending one of the last cities of humanity from the alien invasion.

There is soo much more I wanted to do with this, and didn’t have time… but isn’t that always the story? It was a mad rush for the finish line, but I think I got it to a playable state.

Now I must go eat, because my stomach has begun consuming itself. Timelapse and postmortem to come later!

Not nearly as far along as I should be, but getting there. I’m definitely not going to have time for art tomorrow. I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping I’ll be able to get the gameplay done. In its current form:

Biggest wastes of time today: trying to figure out how to do inversed masking in Flash (to draw a black rectangle everywhere except where there is light), and tracking down a slight error in my matrix math that was throwing off all the scaling. Doh.

I am at another coffee shop… and I am drinking cucumber soda. It is strange and delicious. Also, battery is almost gone. Heading back home to recharge and get some quiet.

I’ve made some progress, but not as much as I would like. Having a hard time getting gameplay down. I like where the current version is going, though it’s nothing to look at.

Time to get started… If only I had an idea.

I’m going to attempt a roaming Ludum Dare this time around. I’ve got the laptop, might as well put it to use. At the coffee shop next to work right now. There’s someone playing on guitar and there’s a really old guy to my left that is really into it. STOP DANCING OLD MAN! I’M TRYING TO MAKE A GAME!

Better late than never! Took me a little under 72-hours, but finally managed to finish this to a point where I’m happy to release it. It’s a flash game, so you can play it here:

http://phuce.com/uploads/queens/release/

Thoughts before I crash:

• Flixel is awesome.
• Not having a level editor to use with Flixel is not so awesome. I am now very competent at adding and subtracting multiples of 32 for manually typing in levels. -cry-
• Pixen… ah, pixen. Also not so awesome. Only good pixel editor I could find on Mac (I normally dev on my Windows box), and it had a ton of issues. Wouldn’t export sprite sheets correctly, kept crashing. I ended up having to patch the src for it multiple times over the weekend.
• Someday I will learn to finish gameplay before art.

Fun!

Making decent progress on the mini-LD. I asked the actors to pose for a quick photo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IjsHysbTUk

I can’t believe how long it took me to reboot to get rid of that Windows Update dialog, hahaha.

Next compo I’ll get the webcam going, too… much more interesting when you can see the person I think.

Long post, more after the jump, but the headlines in summary:

• Learning from past mistakes
• Step #1: Add tile mapping
• Step #2: Add collision detection
• Step #3: Add physics
• Step #4: Evolve game concept
• Step #5: Iterate gameplay
• Step #6: Build-out and polish
• Step #7: PAAAANIC!
• Step #8: Deep sigh of relief… followed by panic

(more…)

I’ve uploaded a patched version of Deathbeam! It offers a big performance boost, rendering and collision fixes, and tweaked scoring. After I released it I found that it got horribly chuggy on pretty much any computer but the one I developed on (except when I was in OS X… weird).

This should not be considered for voting, of course!

You can get it here:
Windows: deathbeam_p3_win32oo.zip Mac: deathbeam_p3_osx.zip

And Python source is here. If you go that route, I recommend running it with python -OO deathbeam.py.

Update: For anyone who isn’t judging for the compo, you should get the patched version here with better performance and fixed collision edges.

Windows If you get a “This application has failed to start …” error, you need to install vcredist_x86.exe.
Mac
Python source (python2.6 + pyglet)

Instructions:

Update: Visual instructions here.

Aliens have invaded and are exterminating the humans! Their massive deathbeam is tearing across the world, destroying everything human. It’s up to you to save them.

You are the white dot, and you have a jet pack. Use left-arrow and right-arrow to walk, spacebar to jump.

Grab the other colored pixels and take them to the rescue teleporters to send them to safety. The more people you deliver in one teleport, the more points you get. Some humans are worth more than others!

Getting hit by the beam will kill you and other humans. Your suit protects you against the turret fire, but the civilians aren’t so lucky.

Actually it’s not, very… but it’s going to grow up, soon.

http://vimeo.com/4219935

Making slow progress. Had to throw out my initial stab at a vertically oriented game and ended up going horizontal instead… I’m liking it a lot more this way. Got my moving beam and I can pick up and rescue people. I like the feeling of it so far, but I need to put more pressure on the player. Luckily Entar kicked my imagination and I have some ideas now.

So much to do before I sleep! I’m hoping to get the gameplay ironed out tonight, and focus on art + polish tomorrow.

Physics are mostly done, and a jetpack to boot! Gotta work out some weird sticking problems and do better collision response. Added some simple particle effects for the jetpack.

Off to lunch now.

Finally got Pyglet loading tile maps exported from Tile Studio, and doing collision against the edges. Loading a y-down tile map in a y-up coordinate system is surprisingly confusing when you’re tired. ¬_¬

Physics next!

First Ludum Dare entry! Whew… tiring.

Move using the arrow keys, X drops bombs, Z fires your gun. Avoid the aliens. Killing one will set of a chain reaction of bodily explosions!

Download (Windows only):

http://phuce.com/uploads/moonbase.zip

I wasn’t able to fully finish the game in time. I finally got an idea I liked on Saturday, after scrapping 3 others. Unfortunately, I spent too much time messing with graphics and AI and such and not actual gameplay. Case in point:

That took… a long, long time.

Anyway, at about 2 hours until deadline, I finally got the gameplay implemented, tested it… and it wasn’t fun.

So I bit the bullet and threw all the gameplay out except for these gluttons, which seemed to be the one thing that had potential. I managed to get health and a basic hud in during the last 10 minutes, but didn’t get scoring or menus or anything.

This is actually the first game I’ve ever released, and I’d never used Ruby or Gosu before for development, so I’m pretty happy with how it turned out even so.

Seems like I had to give up on a billion ideas, but today I finally got one I liked… making progress, bit by bit. Basic mechanics are in, but still lot’s to do to make it a game. Hopefully I don’t die from Red Bull before I can finish.