This is my messy/buggy framework (I always seem to find a bug to fix in it every project I make)

I will be using C++ with Ogre. Assets will be made with Blender and Photoshop.

This will be my first LD since LD18 so I hope to finish something this time, and get sound in which I have never managed before.

I will be using C++ with Ogre, CEGUI and OgreOggSound (If I can get sound in), and my framework. Photoshop and Blender will be used for assets.

The player now has a skeleton companion and clicking him will let the player control him with the mage on AI. The peasants seem way too weak now.

Still lots more to do so this will end up being a jam game. Maybe I’ll have time to fix the sound library compilation or find a new sound library.

More a mage than a witch but there’s now combat!

Finally got past my compiling issues and got stuff on the screen. The sound library wouldn’t cooperate so I’ll probably have to submit with no sound, though this is looking like it will run out of time for the compo anyway

I stupidly decided to update my Ogre installation and have had hordes of problems getting CEGUI to compile with the new Ogre so while compiling over and over I worked on graphics.

This is the heroine of the game. She is on a quest to become a lich and uses the bones of her enemies to make skeleton pets to help her on her quest.

This is a rendering from Blender because right now all the “gameplay” I have is the title screen I made before I tried to update ogre. This may end up running till Monday and be a Jam game =\

Freshly cleaned! I could barely see the bottom of the second monitor before because of the pile of books…

Here are my previous Ludum Dare Games

I’m most likely going back to my 3D roots for this compo. I will use C++ with Ogre, CEGUI and OIS. I will be using my framework that was used in LD16 which is here.

I thought this would be helpful since there is no in-game tutorial and the game may be a bit complex. The compo page for the game is here.

General Tips

The queen will randomly select a trade good to retrieve for the quest. If she asks you to get 5000 gold coins then reload. You will need to visit around 100 islands to finish and you will get bored.  Bananas might also get tedious (around 26 islands) if you are in a hurry to vote.

More after the jump.

(more…)

I managed to finish Voyage of the Queen.

I decided to try something 2D this time rather than my usual 3d to get something a bit more cerebral and less action.  It was written in silverlight which made it really easy to make nice GUI screens but I was doing low level blitting to do the boat sailing graphics. I had more plans for this game such as gaining crew, having more events other than pirates and upgrading the ship but the tile engine took more time than I thought and I didn’t really get around to the actual gameplay until Sunday. It was a little scary at the end because I had a really obtuse error message (Thanks Microsoft) that resulted in crashing at the trade and ship cargo screens about an hour before finish but I managed to fix it in time.

My compo entry is here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1128

I’m writing a sea trading game where the player trades goods between islands and tries to bring back a requested amount of a specific trade good to his home base as well as avoid pirate attacks. I currently have the boat able to sail around the map and visit various towns and a rudimentary trade screen. 10 hours left!

I’m writing the game using Silverlight and the WriteableBitmapEx class to allow blitting.

I was meaning to have the player go in and explore the tomb to find the skeleton leaders and defeat them, but I ended up spending too much time texturing the skeleton to build a proper battle system. It ended up being a game about a thief who runs around the tomb grabbing treasure, but then I didn’t have enough time to give the player a way to escape the tomb. So now it’s about a suicidal thief who runs around a tomb grabbing treasure.

Voting Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=1128

I’m making some sort of dungeon exploring game. I have a randomly-generating dungeon now and it is explorable. Now I need to populate it with something to make it more interesting to explore.

I will be entering using C++, Ogre, CEGUI and OgreOggSound if I get around to using sound. I have a framework (well more like a collection of helper classes) based on the needs of my previous LD entries located here (Just the headers and libs). It requires Ogre, CEGUI and OgreOggSound and is a bit rough and messy right now.

48 hours later, Dragon Genetics is finished. Dragon Genetics teaches the principles of genetic inheritence including dominant/recessive genes, epistasis, and  sex-linked genes. It uses a browser-like window to explain concepts and the player can click on links to get more information on a word. The player gets a set of missions to breed specific dragons by choosing the parents.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-13/?action=preview&uid=1128

The game was written in C++ with Ogre and CEGUI. I found the new version of CEGUI nice since it’s able to embed widgets in strings which is what I used to make the information browser. For content I used Photoshop and Blender. Most of the gui graphics are a CEGUI default. Also this is my second Ludum Dare (First Mini) and also the second time Photoshop has refused to work correctly during a Ludum Dare. I think it may have been a memory issue this time though since it stopped crashing on startup after I closed the visual studio with CEGUI source and an extra blender window I had open…

First the bugfix release:
GoblinHome 1.0.1 bugfix release

This was my first Ludum Dare and I’mhooked. Last weekend was really fun trying to get a game completed on time. I didn’t get the game I originally envisioned done but I got a good start for it and it does have a winning and losing condition so it is a game.

The good:

Time – I was able to schedule the core game first to result in something playable, even if I didn’t get all that I wanted done.

Blender – It was my first time using blender’s texture painting mode. I was able to make the troll’s texture in blender much faster than I was able to make the goblin’s texture in photoshop. It works very well.

The bad and what I will do better next time:

Blender – It’s been a few months since I modeled something and I forgot a bunch of the myraid of hotkeys and functions and spent time looking them up.

Art – It took 6 hours to make the goblin and 2 hours for the troll based on the goblin. I probably could have used my time better for features by making worse models. Part of this is probably also because I forgot my blender commands.

Photoshop – Photoshop stopped responding to my tablet’s pressure sensitivity right before I created the title and conclusion screens, which was a pain to figure out.

Group selection and health bars – I’ve been getting a lot of comments on these. When it came down to the end I had the choice of group selection, health bars, or a selection indicator for the currently selected goblin. The selection indicator won out as the most needed. The others were next on the list!

Framework – I didn’t have one so I spent a good chunk of saturday writing code to glue ogre, cegui and ois together and make a basic blank screen app. Next time I should make a framework to use to skip some of that.

The crash – There was a crash that took a while to track down that I did not see while developing. If you were to click on the goblin’s selection circle it would crash with a null pointer error. This has been fixed in the bugfix release. The bugfix release also fixed a rather nasty memory leak in the pathfinding which I originally thought was the crash bug but wasn’t.

GoblinHome is about a tribe of goblins that are trying to make a new home in a cavern, but they need to make the cavern safe to live in by killing all the cave denizens(currently just blue trolls) and also ward off attacks from adventurers.

It looks like I won’t get the adventurers or the home building in on time but I should be able to get the goblins and trolls to battle which can result in either winning or losing and will therefore constitute a game.

Hopefully I can resist the call of feature creep.

Platform: Windows

Libraries:

• Ogre3D
• CEGUI
• OpenAL

Tools:

• Visual c++ Express
• Blender
• Photoshop CS3