These seem to be all the rage, so here are my two (!!!1!!@!!) previous entries (the first of which didn’t even get finished on time..)

In other news my engine and test game both compiled and ran in Linux (Arch x64) with minimal tweaking, so a late/post-compo port is likely (and should only take a few minutes).

Also, my theme picks are Isolation, Bugs and Darkness (oh and double zombie rainbows of course!), I voted all others down.

Okay, inspired by the 2hr warm up game idea from IRC, I made a 2hr game based on the best (but sadly downvoted into oblivion) theme “Isaiah Mustafa – The man your game could smell like”.

It was made in a little over 2 hours since I was a bit distracted and getting it all to package up took some finagling (good test of my pipeline though), but here it is:

Windows (Linux may come later)

The goal is very simple (and not terribly fun); avoid the green “Double Rainbow Body Wash” boxes, and collect the red Old Spice ones to reach 100%.

My workspace hasn’t changed all that much since last time, but here’s a pic:

The CRT on the left is to my old PC (usually a headless server, but I’m setting it up to run IRC all compo).

Software I’ll be using this time:

• Visual Studio 2008 Pro (C++)
• My custom engine (“QEngine”, uses Ogre, Bullet, OpenAL and a few other bits and bobs; source was released in my earlier post)
• GIMP
• Paint
• Blender
• Notepad++
• sfxr
• Either LMMS or Musagi
• Spotify!
• svn

I’m leaning towards making a shmup of some sort, as I’ve never made one and my last few projects have been first-person.

I might also make a quick warm up game to make sure everything is in order…

I will be participating in this weekend’s Ludum Dare (yay!). It’s my third LD48 and I’m looking forward to making something!

I’ll be using a custom-made engine (written in C++), the engine is rather incomplete and filled with ugly code (atm it’s mostly just an Ogre/Bullet/OpenAL wrapper with a disorganized state machine and simple event system) so I don’t recommend that anyone use it, but as per the compo rules here is the GPL-ed source.

Also: I’ll be posting a workspace pic or two once I get all cleaned up and prepared, I’ll be using chronolapse for a timelapse, and I should be hanging around IRC on and off.

C’mon, I want to see 200 games based on this!

So I’ll keep this brief (it’s 2 am…), but I released an update to Island Hopping with online leaderboards and a few more features a bit under a week ago with the help of some friends. So we put it up on Mod DB (here’s the page) and got a surprisingly large reaction… I was just looking at the leaderboard stats:

• 135,000 Runs recorded (!!!)
• 13,629,036,774 total points earned
• 796 Hours worth of runs (that’s 33 DAYS, and I released it 6 days ago….)
• 1112 unique usernames (and there are about 31,000 runs by “Anonymous”…)

For 48 hours of work, plus a couple weeks’ on and off tinkering, I’m absolutely amazed…

Yay #7 in Fun and Overall! Congrats and thanks to everyone who participated and voted! I only got to rate about 66% of the games thanks to a hectic couple of weeks, but I’ll definitely still have a look at some of the ones I missed.

Update: More final version released, (includes fix to the double jumping issue mentioned in the comments), here’s the mod db page for it http://www.moddb.com/games/island-hopping/

Thanks to homework and all sorts of unexpected junk these last couple weeks I wasn’t able to get this ready until now, I still have yet to make a web interface for viewing the high scores or a tutorial, but whatever…

Here’s what I’m calling the version 1.2 beta, it’s probably fairly buggy and missing things, but I think/hope it is significantly better than the compo version.

Tutorial is listed as an option, but I never got around to it, so just ignore it for now. Also, keep in mind that this is my first attempt at online leaderboard stuff, so I might disable it at any point (or it might break) due to unforeseen events.

[Download Link]

Released a more final version on Mod DB: http://www.moddb.com/games/island-hopping/

Changes:

• Improved double jumping (also double jumping is removed for hard and insane modes)
• Online high scores
• Local high scores
• More options (toggle music, allow internet access, field of view, etc)
• OGRE dialogue thing removed in favor of ingame options
• Jumping is now mapped to all letter keys, up arrow, ctrl/alt/shift/enter/space and mouse clicking
• All of those above keys also restart the game now (there is a 1/2 second delay to keep you from clicking right through it though)
• Misc bugfixes
• And probably more but I’m drawing a blank now…

Anyways, I’d appreciate any feedback, and I hope you enjoy it! I’ll probably keep working with it for a week or two, so suggestions are welcome.

Alright, I think it’s time for some post-compo thoughts.

(more…)

Alright, so this was my first experiment with timelapsing (I used chronolapse). I used 120 seconds per picture, so it’s sorta choppy, and I missed a couple hours when I forgot to turn chrono back on, but it’s definitely a cool way of seeing how you work.

LD17 Timelapse \”Island Hopping\”

Also, you should really check out my entry page: here [/shameless plug]

Yay, I actually finished something this time!

My Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1503

I made a sort of 3d platformer, you jump from island to island at high speeds. It’s simple but (hopefully) a little addicting.

It looks better in motion...

I actually just took a (very rainy) walk, and I have an idea… since I failed to finish last time and I thought that one turned out fun (Tron-style FPS with colorful grids and whatnot), I’ll probably reuse that concept, but re-imagined with islands (obviously..). I’m not terribly happy with something so similar to what I did last time, but it beats anything else I can think of right now… and I know it’s fairly unique, even if I’ve personally done it before…

A little over an hour now…

I finally got all my homework for the weekend done (digging through civil war letters to quote was ever so much fun…). I’ve also got my base code about as far as I can get it.

I really doubt anyone would want to use it (I threw it together in about 4hrs total, ugly code, probably all kinds of buggy…), but to comply with the rules I’m posting it now.

It’s basically a simple state machine plus physics, graphics, audio, and input.

The dependencies are:

• Ogre3D (1.7.0 RC1)
• Bullet 2.76
• irrKlang 1.3.0
• The newest version of OIS (comes with Ogre)
• Chaiscript’s newest version (never got around to adding this, so comment out an include or two and it’s gone)
• Boost 1.4.1 (threading and date/time, these are because of Chaiscript, so again, not 100% necessary)
• Windows and Visual C++ (though it would probably compile under Linux if the ‘#pragma once’-s were replaced with proper header guards…)

Download: here

Once again, good luck to everyone!

So I tried LD last time and didn’t quite finish my project in time (my failure post), and I’m going to have another go at it this time…

As before I’ll be making something 3D and using C++. I’ll be using Ogre for rendering, irrKlang for audio, OIS for input, Bullet for collision detection/physics and maybe Chaiscript for some scripting goodness.

Last time I used the beginnings of an engine I was writing, but it became sort of a hassle to work with something meant for a much larger project, so I’m starting from scratch this time; though I will probably hack up a quick bit of base code tonight.

Also, I just cleaned up my workspace, so here’s a ‘before’ pic:

(Note the sexy desk (made of 2×4′s and particle board) and 15 year old keyboard…)

Good luck everyone!

Given another couple hours I could’ve finished it up, but at the moment it’s not ready… I slept late this morning, and I also missed the first 6 hours because of a party… It was my first LD though, and I intend to do it again. So, lesson learned.

My game was going to be called “Electromigration”, it procedurally creates the level as you go, it’s an fps and the goal is/was going to be to keep exploring and finding randomly placed upgrades while fighting off enemies. I had the level generation working perfectly, and enemies and shooting are all there. But I still need to make the game generate enemies and upgrades in the level (at the moment all you can do is walk around the endless level and spawn enemies via the console).

It looks sorta VR-y, with colorful grids (as the player explores, the areas that have been walked through fade from red to green, so you can see where you’ve already been).

I probably should have prepared better, I used a custom engine, but all I had finished in the engine (which was meant for another project, and had been started a week before LD started) was part of the lua scripting setup and the basics of the graphics engine (I used Ogre) setup, so I wound up writing a lot of needless low-level stuff… on the positive, I really did a lot in a short time (that was a couple thousand lines of C++…) and an ingame lua-based scripting console was amazing for debugging/testing.

Here’s a couple screenshots; I might keep working for a few hours just to get it done…

Alright, I’m declaring that I intend to participate… this will be my first LD…

I will be using a work-in-progress custom engine/library, at the moment it’s pretty incomplete, and right now I’m hacking a copy of it into a simple physics wrapper, with some audio and stuff, so it’s more of a framework, so that I don’t have to write all the lower level stuff during the 48 hours…

My engine/library is made with C++ and uses Ogre3d, Nvidia PhysX, OpenAL, and if I have time to make it do something, perhaps some simple lua scripting as well.