Time for timelapse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLFC40lIRA4&fmt=22

and some statistics. This graph shows the frequency of programs I used during the compo:

So here goes my game. It’s not my finest work ever, but I’m really happy with the result (especially when considered how the game looked couple of hours ago).

It’s called Wall of Locust and it’s about a farmer who’s not only under attack by locusts but bush fires as well. So he uses his windmills to control the fire and destroy locusts. Level ends, when there is no fire and no locusts any more.

I wasted too much time (5 hours) trying to figure out graphical problems with near plane. I accidentally set it too near 0.0001f and things didn’t work so well on my Intel card .

Windows binary and source 1MB

Now off to sleep, I have to go to work in three hours .

Although it doesn’t seem like it from the picture, there are hordes of locusts swarming  there and back .

I’m usually trying to learn some new technology during these short compos . So this time I managed to get rid of immediate mode and use vertex buffer objects.

I want to finish up the base logic before going to sleep.

For tomorrow:

• tune gameplay
• design levels
• replace ugly crap with pretty graphics
• particle systems

Not really 3D yet, but getting there .

After much struggling with getting all of my tool chain setup, I finally have alpha blended particles in OpenGL. That’s what I call amazing progress in just three hours .

Not my most favorite theme, but already starting working a bit.

My game will be a strategy, where you as a farmer will fight against locust, who will eat your crops. Still deciding, if I should go for 2D or 3D.

Here is the motivator anyway .

Yeey for another Ludum Dare, this is going to be my third one.

No matter what theme, I will use quaternions for something. I never really got around to implementing them in any of my projects, so this is as good time as any to finally grok the whole thing.

Language of choice is C++, SDL and propably SDL_mixer for sounds. And if I have enough time, I’m going to do game logic in Lua.

Good luck to everyone.

I finally uploaded my timelapse video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAu-JOiZpYk&fmt=22

I wrote a little program, that apart from taking screenshot every minute, records the window that currently has focus as well, so now I can tell, which programs I’ve been using the most during the competition.

As you can see I’ve managed to watch a movie in the meantime. That’s probably why my gameplay sucks .

[Update]

For anyone interested in my logging tool I uploaded the code and the binary to http://ondrew.googlepages.com/logger-0.1.zip

I wrote it just before the competition, because I needed some multimonitor screenshot making tool, but I didn’t have time to do it properly, so it saves each monitor as separate file s$ID-$MONITOR_ID.png.

The meta data gets saved to sqlite3 database (mainly because I wanted to try it out), you will get a table with these columns: process name, window title and time the snapshot was taken.

For statistics do SELECT process, count(*) AS sum FROM work GROUP BY process ORDER BY sum;

I ran it for two days straight and it didn’t cause any problems like memory leakage or performance trouble, but let me know, if you hit something like that.

And last – beware – everytime you start this tool, it will start taking screenshots from zero, thus overwriting all your old screenshots. If there is some interest I can fix it and add some more features, but first I have to vote and give out awards .

So here goes my game and I’m pretty happy about it.

I’m especially proud of the chopper’s propeller and the lazy camera. All the other stuff needs polishing.

The game itself is quite hard, so let’s see if anyone can beat it.

I learned a lot about OpenGL particles and I can say – they suck.

http://ondrew.googlepages.com/ludum2008_chopper.7z – 2MB

http://ondrew.googlepages.com/ludum2008_chopper.zip – 3MB

It’s five o’clock in the morning in my country and in three hours I’m going to work, so let’s see how that goes . But it was definitely worth it.

Ludum dare rules, thank you guys.

[UPDATE - five hours after deadline]

I just found out, that the game is damn slow on some computers, I made the following change outside the competition time, so feel free not to take it into account.

Plus it seems there is some issue on Intel cards.

Updated binaries:

http://ondrew.googlepages.com/ludum2008_chopper_speed2.zip

http://ondrew.googlepages.com/ludum2008_chopper_speed2.7z

Not very surprisingly I’m a little bit behind schedule. I learned how to do particle effects in OpenGL and did some explosions and shooting (it looks much better in motion, trust me )

Now I’m starting to write the logic for truck attacks and level loading.

I’ve managed to get the 3D models properly working. Apart from that I wrote control system, so now you can fly with the chopper around the screen and quite nice logic system, which allows me to define, how the objects interact with each other.

The game is however still not present . I’m going to implement shooting and destroying of trucks before I go to sleep, which leaves for tomorrow

• truck following roads to the the base (which the chopper has to guard)
• truck firing back
• camera to follow the chopper around
• different enemies
• propeller
• etc

Finally managed to get my 3D model loading and displaying . Took my an hour longer than planned and it looks damn ugly .

I wonder if everyone has problems finding their models in 3D? I usually don’t know, if I’m drawing them improperly or if they are just off the screen

Managed to get up, read the theme and eat some breakfast.

After about an hour of generic coding I finally came up with an idea for a game, did some modelling in Blender. I would like to write a chopper vs cars thing, so I’m aiming for

• shooting
• explosions
• roads
• 2D collisions (yeeey)

Let’s hope I can finish

When I see all these awesome libraries people have, I feel ashamed I didn’t prepared properly .

My library basically just creates an OpenGL context via SDL and that’s it.

http://ondrew.googlepages.com/angiine2008.12.05_21.15.20.7z

Usually I try to learn some new technology while working on Ludum Dare game, because the tight deadline makes me much more focused. So I would like to plug (and learn) Lua as a scripting language to my C++ engine. Let’s see how it goes.

Good luck to everyone.