Heading to the airport later today for a 14-hour international flight. Sounds GREAT for LDing, too bad qantas doesn’t have power for my laptop on their A330s. So this is me signing off. Maybe I’ll finish something for the jam, but I might build a smokehouse instead. To bacon in.

In the morning I’ll do a title screen and some more enemies if I have the time (and maybe readdress the player’s movement now that I have mouse editing, which I’m probably going to keep). But for now I’m pretty tired. Check out this WIP build if you want (and make some screens, if you want!):

http://klikscene.com/flash/ld20.html

Summary: it’s LoZ, but everybody can edit the world.

Feeling a little ahead of schedule I decided to spend a bunch of time reproducing the LoZ tileset, overworld and interior, plus a couple of additions. Here’s an in-game shot of a screen loaded from the server.

Still a few hours left tonight. Hoping to get all the graphics and database crap and everything totally done so that I’ll have a whole 24 hours for game logic.

Oh, what’s my game actually about? Hacking and slashing as you build the whole world with other people (yeah, there is a basic grief control system). The map is currently about 1,500,000,000 screens… I might need to adjust that. And I should probably think about adding some sort of teleport function. And work on a title.

Well. I mean. Not the game, but breakfast.

Bread straight out of the oven, steaming hot. Drippy butter. Ice cream, kahlua, and creme de cacao. See my previous post for dough porn.

As for the game, goal met. Much easier than expected. I have secure server-side map updating and loading working, which is pretty much it for what I thought would be the hard part. New objective: eat.

Okay, I’m in. But I’m hungry. I’m going to make bread.
Messing about with this dough has given me time to  think about the theme and I’ve gone through a couple of ideas before settling on one that’ll be fun to make. It’s a game which relies on online user generated content, so it’s probably going to be a complete clusterfuck, but I’m looking forward to giving it a go (since I’m pretty much a total newb when it comes to database crap, etc.).

My current goal is to get the basic save/load script working before this thing comes out of the oven.

Play me!

I forgot that my internet has been going down for eight hours a day in the evenings this week for some reason. Normally I’d kinda like that because usually no internet means more productivity, but since I have no idea what I am doing in Unity or with 3D modeling or any of this it’s kind of affecting my schedule. Still, got my basics set up and some atmosphere happening.

Back from voting! Enemies as weapons is a great theme. I can see myself coming up with something really interesting for that. But I have a better idea. I thought of something gnarley for “technology in the wrong time period” last night, so I think I’ll make one of those anyway. Who’s going to stop me, huh?

My plan requires a bunch of public domain government recordings as material so it wouldn’t have been eligible for the main compo anyway. Can’t lawyer the rules too much now that we have the Jam rules. But I’ll still gun for 48 hours.

Main goal this weekend is to finish a thing with Unity. I haven’t done a lot with it so I’ll be working with some tutorials and junk given to me by my good bro allen. I’ll also probably be using Audacity or Goldwave, PSP7 and 3dsmax.

Good luck, everyone.

In the steamy, sensual rivercave of my mind
I stumble, I stagger, I stammer
Like some crazy South Korean circus clown
Lost, lonely, lifeless, laconically lazy
Marooned, marooned
I’m on a lagoon
I am an island
I am an isthmus
I come from Bermuda
I don’t believe in christmas
Look out! oh sinister holy man
Look out! oh righteous Bolshevik
I care no longer for your petty problems
I make my own decisions now
Today I laugh, I joke, I chitter chatter chitter
But tomorrow, tomorrow I go to Phillip Island

I participated in the last Klik of the Month Klub over at Glorious Trainwrecks, too.

For those who might not be familiar with GT, here’s the spiel from the front page:

Glorious Trainwrecks is about bringing back the spirit of postcardware, circa 1993. It’s about throwing a bunch of random crap into your game and keeping whatever sticks. About bringing back a time when you didn’t care so much about “production values”, as much as ripping sound samples from your favourite television shows to use in your game, or animating pictures of yourself making goofy faces on your webcam. Where every ridiculous idea you had, you would just sit down and code. When you would make up a “company name” to legitimize dorking around on the computer with your friends.

It is not about unfinished, unplayable games. If any part of a glorious trainwreck is terrible, it is terrible in a way that is AWESOME.

Klik of the Month (FAQ) happens on the third Saturday of every month, and it’s about coming up with whatever you can come up with in two hours. Usually using Klik & Play (a horrible Win3.1-era game authoring tool), and usually by gleefully abusing stock sounds and graphics. Personally I find it a fantastic challenge to turn out something interesting (although that’s certainly not mandatory) in such a short space of time with such a limited, primitive tool. Hope to see some more LD people there next time it rolls around.

This time around for KotMK#27 I wanted to try doing some pretty bullet patterns in KnP, so I made a horizontal SHMUP. I wasn’t sure if it would work, seeing as how KnP suffers once you hit the limit of 255 sprites, but it came out pretty decent. Check out KILL GOD.

Fellow Ludumer Hempuli missed out on KotMK#27 due to timezones so we decided to have an encore mini-klikkening. I was pretty tired and just wanted to see how far I could get with adding features to a little Dwarf Fortress fangame inside two hours (again, the object limit of 255 being a huge problem). Yesterday I added a bunch more features. It’s hard to stop adding shit, in fact. I can sort of see how someone could do it full-time  with the kind of love Toady does. Check out Lonely Hermit Dorf.

In general I’ve been on a bit of a KnP bent lately. If this stuff interests you, I also recently released two KnP RPGs:  MOTORCYCLE COCK and Mathora VI.

I’ve made a couple of post-compo modifications to my entry.

The main one you might be interested to hear about is that solo play is now possible. You can load and save by double-clicking the relevant buttons at the bottom of the editor. I just whipped up nine demo maps, included.

Note that you can’t overwrite a map, so don’t worry about that. Every time you hit save the map gets a unique filename which you can mess with later.

Besides the time considerations I originally didn’t want to include saving at all, because I thought that feature might deemphasise the interaction between players. But since I haven’t gotten much feedback from people who actually have another person to play with I thought I’d open it up a bit.

Just fixed a dumb bug in the way enemy selection was working in my entry that was causing minor problems with the way they reproduce and die.

Now you can have proper out-of-control slime populations to hack through!

Update: I’ve also just added an optional “crisp” executable for those who don’t like the blurry filtering. I can’t actually remember why I went with the original version but I seem to recall having a reason. Anyway, now you have the option.

I still had seven enemies, SFX, the title screen and a bunch of fixes to do when I crashed last night (at 2am, and the deadline is 11am for me). Good thing someone came stomping home from her “girls’ night out” at seven thirty.

But it’s done. It’s up. I have no idea if it’s any good but I’d really love to watch two people play it.

It’s a game that needs two humans. One of you designs the next level while the other plays. It’s something I’ve wanted to try for a while and I have a hunch that interesting shit might emerge but for now I’m probably going back to bed.

Still needs some things to kill.

Just an ugly progress shot before I get dragged off to lunch with some old lady that I think we’re only friends with because she got so excited over design of our business card.

This one is coming along a lot better than the last attempt besides one frustrating problem where Construct tried to help me by auto-hiding a canvas that had an X ordinate below a certain negative value–despite the fact that I was zooming in on that layer so it should still have been on-screen and therefore fucking VISIBLE.

It probably won’t be playable until fairly late, so I hope the gimmick turns out interesting enough to make up for the horrible graphics.

I’ve got it, my new idea to replace the impossible one.

I’m not sure if I should admit this, but it came to me during… an intimate moment. Since my special person is home this weekend I’ve decided to make something the two of us can play together.

Not much to look at yet. When it’s done, I hope to have created a roguey/gauntletty thing in which one player crafts the next dungeon level cavern while the other player hacks their way through the previous one. I’ve just decided to make it top-down rather than a platformer, which might be less of an experience than I originally imagined but it’ll let me get a lot more content done inside the time limit.

I guess I’ll miss out on votes for making something that needs three hands to play, but this is something I’ve wanted to try out for a while. When I was a kid we’d turn anything into an epic role-playing adventure; graph paper, Chinese checkers, Cluedo… I’m not sure if two people can get the same spontaneous story-creating effect with a video game that requires so much less imagination to visualise but I think it’s an interesting idea.

I managed to get past that last obstacle only to run in to a brick wall.

The evidently horrible way Construct handles updating the collision mask of canvasses not only slows the game to a jerkfest, but overheated my machine to the point of crashing.

I want to take a screenshot to show how far I got but I’m afraid it’ll catch fire.

I’m pretty disappointed because I thought this was going to be an opportunity to try out an idea I’ve been sitting on for a while. Right now I’m deciding whether I should turn what I’ve done so far into less interesting action game or try to come up with something new.

Not off to a great start with my underground space ice cavern game. Construct hates me and is refusing to erase chunks from the canvas, which is kind of a problem since it’s not going to get very caverny if I can’t subtract anything.

Standard Waiver, a short atmospheric first-person exploration game, was my first Ludum Dare entry. Here’s what went into it.

The foreground obelisk obscures the background one. It’s a mystery!

(more…)

Yeah, I know it’s not the catchiest title. But it’s done! Explory first-person thing. I won’t spoil it with a description.

Thanks to my unstable connection tonight getting this thing online felt like more effort than actually making it. Three cheers for Morre for helping me finally get it uploaded.

Download (win + source)

As well as being my first LD entry this is also my first game made in Construct. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out. There’s still one odd problem with sprites sometimes obscuring each other and I could probably dress up the level transitions a bit, but I’m totally out of steam for tonight. I might get to it before the deadline in the morning but I think I’d probably rather sleep.

Tools: Construct, Goldwave, Paint Shop Pro 7, and a bottle of knockoff Lifesavers (they make terrific crunching and ambient wind noises).
Total number of Construct fatal errors: 16.

(If you get errors trying to run the game, please try updating DirectX. It seems to help.)