At the end of today’s work, I have a semi functioning level:

And a system which converts the tiles you have placed while working into shapes:

The aim of the game is to solve the puzzle while creating as few shapes as possible. (you leave a ‘trail’ wherever you walk, wherever you shoot, wherever enemies walk and explode, and so on. The trail is converted into shapes.) If you have created too many shapes, you do not solve the puzzle.

The bulk of today’s work went on the shape generation system. Tomorrow will be the content creation and polish – I need lots more levels (hard coded of course!), and for everything to look nicer, as well as sounds.

I kept repeating that to myself for a long time. My game-making morals are to keep innovation and originality as the most important things, and I would never just incorporate a LD theme into the story or art style of a game, but rather have interesting and unique game mechanics. I found that very difficult to do with Minimalism – but the sentence in the title of this post gave me an idea.

You don’t need minimalist mechanics, but your mechanics can be to be minimal?

I’ll be entering this LD using my new, updated framework: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53835113/new%20framework.zip

It’s been put together from my old LD and my game project, and is completely untested, so don’t use it for anything. Also, don’t look at its source, because it’s bad code >.>

Tools I will use:
Programming:
Visual Studio 2010
C++
SFML 2.0

Sound:
Autotracker! (thanks GreaseMonkey)

Graphics:
Paint.NET (pixelling like a programmer)

Last LD, I complained about people not knowing they had to receive a certain amount of votes to be put in the rankings. Happily, this has been fixed for this LD, but tehre is another issue: “save” after typing a comment, even with no rating, leaves a blank rating.

This is a big problem for linux-only games, where people who are unaware (like I was at the time) type “no linux, sorry” into the comment box at the top of the page and save it, without realising they are leaving a rating. Not only does this give the user an exaggerated coolness but it also stops the game from showing up as much, meaning the linux owners will probably never see the linux games and as a result the linux-only games are not being placed in the rankings.

Solution: if a user doesn’t leave any star ratings, don’t count it as a vote.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=8539

Post mortem: went well, didn’t make enough levels, could have made it easier to understand.

Now that’s out of the way, here are some interesting statistics!

I typed 106,134 keys
I clicked 19830 times
My mouse travelled 1.16 miles
Exercise is bad for you

Timelapse:

Playthrough:

All the art for the first level, minus UI, is complete.

Oh god.

I’m feeling good about this Ludum Dare so far. Currently I have (what I think is) a good idea, all the gameplay and a playable level complete, albeit with placeholder graphics and no sounds.

As I didn’t explain my idea in my previous post, I’m going to do so now: you are an unwilling villain, serving the Evil Overlord. You are given tasks to do by the Evil Overlord, but the objective of the game is to help the GOOD-aligned protagonist succeed in his goals. The good guy does not know you are trying to help him, so will treat you like an enemy, and he isn’t very smart – if left to his own devices, he will not complete his own objectives.

You must guide him and push him and his minions to complete his objectives… without the Evil Overlord growing suspicious. Actions such as not following the Evil Overlord’s orders and not shooting the good player when he is right next to you will make him more suspicious. If he grows too suspicious, you lose.

Here is a screenshot (remember, placeholder art!):

That’s it for today. Tomorrow, I’ll add the final graphics (with my artistic talent they will still look like placeholder art) and all the extra content I need.

In the distraction-free zone of my bathroom, I could freely think before having breakfast. I want the good guys to win, yet you are controlling the villain… but your overlords must not notice you are trying to help him.

As always, graphics last, gui later and breakfast first! Good luck everyone!

I’m using a new homemade framework, which is slightly more advanced than last time – better collisions, a better sound system and a mini particle engine. You can get it here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6vNgTMtYIF9ZEY2RVpWRWFHVk0/edit

Also, DON’T VOTE FOR THE END OF THE WORLD!!

There seems to be quite a few of them – no score in any section whatsoever, even with a number of comments saying they played and liked the game. I know that I’d be really disheartened if this happened to me. Is this a bug, or just a lot of people decided to comment without voting? What is happening?

EDIT: Where does it say there is a 12 vote threshold? I had no idea, neither have I been told in ld 22 or 23. It’s not mentioned in the rules.

Play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=8539

Have fun!

I’m pleased with my entry, and especially my time management while making it – everything went according to plan. I managed all the content on the second day and even added something which means if you beat all the preset “stages”, it will randomise them until you die.

It also has the best name: gobblegoks. Go and play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=8539

Now, I have a timelapse ready to upload, but not just yet because sleep comes first before everything except, of course, ludum dare. I will be writing a post mortem in a few days as well, and the timelapse will be uploaded as soon as possible. Thanks to everything who watched the stream. I’ll tie up any loose ends tomorrow and in the coming weeks: any unexpected huge bugs, play games, get people to play my game, and maybe even port to something other than windows if I can (*gasp*).

Goodnight!

2 bad nights in a row, during Ludum Dare, which is strange because I’m not an insomniac and I’ve always been able to sleep fairly easily. Guess it must be the Ludum Daemons.

Anyway, I thought yesterday I would delay the “level thing” (see previous blog post) until I was less tired, but if I am to stick to that plan because generally I go through 3 stages in the day:

1. Groggy

2. Awake

3. Tired

Now, as I woke in the night and was extremely hot stage #1 is a lot longer than normal, and stage #3 will start earlier, so I have to prepare for whenever stage #2 may arise. I guess I can click “generate sound” in sfxr while not being able to function normally, hmm?

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I had an idea to begin with of a “game development evolution”. There were several different versions of this, my favourite being an old pong or NES game gradually evolving to a modern game, or a single game development evolution where you start as the only thing implemented (a character), and as you complete tasks more and more things were filled. The trouble with these it that, in order to be successful, they required good content rather than creative gameplay, which I am not very good at – sfxr for all sound and I haven’t yet been able to make better graphics than this.

So,  after about three hours I realised this and changed my plans, and my new idea thankfully meant not all the time was wasted. The game I am now making has gameplay based around evolution, where you have to strategically evolve/devolve into bigger/smaller entities with different characteristics to maneuver through changing terrain while still killing the enemies, which also are big or small or move through units. What I had planned to do today was to get the mechanics finished and made the level-changing-terrain system (‘level thing’) working. However, I discovered I was far too tired to actually make a good looking level thing, so I added extra mechanics like powerups and fixed some bugs I didn’t know existed, in exhange for an early night so I will actually be able to concentrate tomorrow.

No new screenshots as of yet.

Goodnight!

Here are some amazing screenshots of a game whose greatness you are unlikely to encounter again.

I have actually progressed further than this, especially with the game idea, but most of it is not visible here (actually, most of it is not visible/not in a working state to be visible at all).

Goodbye!

My old idea sucked. It was going to be some kind of “evolution of a game development”, where you start as just a player then the world builds up and more features are added. But, after starting it, I found it was pretty much only a content themed game which I cannot make well enough. So, I’ve thought of a good actual gameplay idea, and shall make that. It’s only 3 hours

I thought I’d save this post until I’d finished preparing the framework for this LD. It’s slightly different from last time to make it more lightweight and I will be able to entirely understand it, because I actually made it rather than copy pasting from a wiki. Also, -1 abandoned!

I will be livestreaming this ludum dare at http://www.twitch.tv/pighead10 , as well as publishing a timelapse on my youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/thepighead10

Tools I am using: SFML 2 for everything code related; probably sfxr for sound; Visual Studio 2010 express for code, and my homemade framework (fyi: it’s terrible): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/53835113/LD24FRAMEWORK.zip

<pighead10> !timeleft
23:25:20 | <yaib> LD 24 starts in: 2h 36m
23:25:21 | <LudumDareBot> pighead10: 2 hours, 34 minutes, 30 seconds until Ludum Dare 24 begins

 

I’m going to sleep now (what? In LD? Missing the theme announcement?) so hopefully the theme will be a nice surprise. One that makes cute sounds, and is fluffy, and tastes nice.

Goodbye!

Generate your world pixel by pixel

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=8539

Hello there!

This is my second ludum dare thus far, and as such my second game I’ve actually made. At least I used a 2d engine this time, so it wasn’t overcome with graphics problems right from the start, and thankfully SFML is an incredibly simple-but-complex language to use, and with my rudimentary resource management framework, I could produce something that people could possibly want to play.

What went well

I’m tempted to say “everything!” simply because I enjoyed it more than last time. Why? Because the basic gameplay was complete at the end of the first day, so I actually had time to add features I wanted rather than scrambling to get the basic gameplay to work. I am not a particularly creative person, but I have what I like to call “logical creativity” – I don’t think of a game from scratch out of thin air, but I literally go through aspects I can program and that I want to have in the game and come up with an idea. In this case it was “I suck at graphics -> single pixel game -> tiny world -> minecraft -> build a tiny world out of pixels”. What I particularly loved is that I found my game fun to play when I was testing it, and I even had time to add a bit of polish like sound effects at the end.

What I should have done

This is going to cover one thing only.  TESTING!

Because I was enthralled by adding sound effects and adding a controls menu, which I didn’t anticipate to have time to do, I finished right at the end so had no one to test my game in progress. When it was submitted, not only was it full of balancing issues but it was massively ridden in bugs.

Bugs in final (or near final) release:

• Crashed whenever you went to menu or exited game
• CTD when you spammed space
• Some computers couldn’t run it at all until today
• Crashed if you walked off the map
• Memory leaks
• More memory leaks

The “computers couldn’t run it” and “crashed when you went to menu” bugs are fixed now. The crash-on-exit bug was caused by a memory leak in the destructors, and to solve it I removed the destructors which caused more memory leaks. But as it’s a 2 bit game, I didn’t think many people would run out of memory while running it. There was an issue with frametimes which was causing the ultimate unrunnable bug on some computers only, where I thought SFML wasn’t tracking the frametimes correctly and I updated the entire version of SFML before realising today that I had just got the frame time before rendering. Additionally, there are complaints of difficulty, moving to slowly, etc, which I would have tweaked had I actually got people to test the game before submitting. I should probably fix the CTD at some point, because almost everyone who gets more than 100 points suffers from it.

But, overall, I am pleased with the game. So go play it! Comment! After I’m done with my random 20 I shall probably go through the comments and play all your games.

Goodbye!

Here is the promised timelapse!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDWYMco7GQo&feature=youtu.be