So, on to a postmortem of my game…

My project went immeasurably better than my last entry, in LD11; To recap, in LD11 I spent about the first 30 hours building (And debugging) a rendering engine, which didn’t bode well for coming up with anything spectacular in the remaining time. I was also preoccupied with a few other things (including an addictive online game – hah). Ultimately though, I wound up with a minorly neat techdemo type game that was mostly thrown together near the deadline; I didn’t really want to finish it at all really, besides just to have something playable.
This time around, I had most of the rendering code done beforehand (and released in a library) – I didn’t get very tired of working on this project until very nearly the end – it was a very enjoyable experience.

A list of things that went a lot better than I planned:

• The pre-LD library release
  Having a library of basic rendering / audio code made a lot of the menial tasks of game development a thing of the past; I still wound up having to write some additional rendering code, but it wasn’t a long and drawn out process of debugging to make it work.
  All of the graphics in my entry are in fact procedurally generated or rendered by simple code, there are no art assets (except perhaps the font; that’s a windows system thing) – Having a coherent graphics library helped with this substantially. (I’m not an artist, you might be able to tell)
• The cavern generator
  In case you hadn’t noticed, the cavern is randomly generated every time you play the game – Most of my effort in this LD went into building this cavern generator; Ultimately I wound up with some simple rules for generation that worked rather well. I had to special case some logic about which caverns are allowed to connect to others, due to some really odd glitches when it was completely random (sometimes a connecting passage would run on top of another cavern somewhere.) – But the end result is really rather nifty; It sometimes builds some insane and highly unusually shaped caves, and it always connects all of the caves together. If I actually had an interesting gameplay mechanic, this would have been an excellent platform to execute it in
• Other technical things
  I love LD because it’s such a good platform for just trying random stuff out. One thing I did in my entry was to split the rendering across multiple threads – So there’s a one frame lag in the world position, but it’s not noticeable at all in the game. The helper thread renders the cave world to a backbuffer one frame ahead, and then the next frame that backbuffer is copied, and used with the lighting code to composite the final output bitmap. I thought it would be harder but the simple signalling system I used was rather painless to implement, and I guess I’m fortunate that my rendering was simple enough to split off without having to deal with more complex synchronization. So if you’re on a multi-cpu system, you get a slight speed boost from this (And I did test that it works fine on single-core systems as well.) Additionally, this second thread performs all of the cavern generation, which leaves my main window thread free to render a progress bar – Having the player wait while the game appears to be frozen didn’t seem like a good idea.

And, things that didn’t quite go as planned:

• The Theme
  This theme was really the sticking point for me – I couldn’t come up with any gameplay ideas that I thought would be doable in the time limit; And I wound up not picking one to attempt until it was too late to do anything serious. As such, my game has a very simple goal. One of the early themes I came up with was one of “Exploration”, but I couldn’t work out how to fit that into a game without being boring and repetitive. So, I guess you’re free to explore the game world in this game, and if you don’t want to explore, there’s not much to it
• Music
  Hey! I had music! I’m reasonably happy with that. It’s very basic, and procedurally generated (just a set of predefined sequences playing with a random base note)… I just feel that so much more could have been done with this.
• Rendering speed
  Well, everything is software rendered. I was so happy to use my brand new shiny rendering lib – but it is a little on the slow side (it’s highly generic) – some of you have noticed this, on slower computers. The lighting effect in my game is built using essentially a pixel shader that copies pixels from a backbuffer to the front buffer with some lighting value – It’s rather far from the most optimized way to do this… However, I expect the game will be playable on most semi-modern computers. If I had to do it again, knowing what I know now, I would probably opt to set up direct3d or something, and use hardware rendering for this effect.

Overall, as I’ve said, I had quite a lot of fun this LD, and I think I’ve come up with a number of good points I can improve on: I should probably work to secure gameplay sooner, even if it means trying something that doesn’t seem possible. I should probably expand my rendering library to make it easier to import external graphics, so I won’t be so tempted to procedurally generate everything (Or just build much better framework code for procedural generation)… And all games could use to have more cats in them.

That is all, thank you for your time
-Stephen

Here’s my timelapse video:

So this competition has been rather entertaining this time around – I didn’t have any real solid ideas for what sort of game to make so wound up with something not really very game-like; I’m pretty happy with it though – the tech is good; the game could have been better, but ran out of time and motivation.

I’ll probably post a proper postmortem within another day or 2, but need to do something other than the computer for a while now :>
See you all later

Duplicating combo submission stuff:
Download: Win32 Binary | Source

See desk: (uber-high res if you click)

For your enjoyment, my LD15 library code / win32 binaries:
ld15_lib.zip

And, in case that doesn’t work or you want a higher resolution: The original, 720×480 Xvid w/ mp3 audio, 76.21MB

Desktop Rox is an asteroids-like game, which was based closely off an idea I wanted to play with, specificly rendering the game on top of the desktop, rather than in a window of it’s own. In hindsight, it took a lot of time to get  all of the lower level rendering functionality I needed, so I wasn’t able to complete it to the level I wanted to. And, while I still have time, I’m really in no shape to be doing anything else with it at the moment

Next time I will assemble/write some sort of library to reduce the workload, but for now I’m very glad I finished a game, and that it’s actually pretty entertaining to play – and it’s nice that the core design isn’t that bad, I’ll probably refactor it and stash it somewhere for future use. It was very rushed however, many things I wanted got left out completely or half supported and not really doing anything (sound, antialiasing, multiple rendering modes) and the UI is a very very hacky job (hope you can read the font)

Download the game (and the source) here: http://akkit.org/ld48/desktop_rox_final.zip
Also, if that one runs too slow or doesn’t work, I have a test mode build that you may be able to use in this archive: http://akkit.org/ld48/desktop_rox_final_alternate.zip

I’m very happy with the tech, it’s performing admirably with even dozens of  sprites on my system – I’m basicly making an asteroids game, but  I think this counts as minimal (it’s so minimal it doesn’t even have a background, ha!) – Just finished the majority of the asteroid code (creation / movement / collision), and I’m now going on to make a ship and a way to shoot. Which I expect won’t take too long. I’m expecting to complete sound effects but I don’t think I’ll get to music.

And with the judicious application of heat, and careful attention, you can expect to see results such as the following:

I must say that this specific reaction does take a lot of time and effort to ensure success; But the results are delicious, and certainly worth the effort.

Now,  my game’s tech is still done, it’s severely lacking in gameplay though. So that’s what I’m doing next   Then I’ll even post a screenshot!

I think I might try to get some sleep pretty soon- Remember; sleep is for the weak!… and we’re all just weak. …weak… puny… humans… won’t deserve to live when the robot uprising comes

As it turns out I hadn’t eaten in a while and that was making it hard to focus and continue; but pasta to the rescue!

Mm, breakfast [while everyone else is] in bed. I’ve got most of the core graphics engine design issues resolved for now; proceeding blindly ahead to get the rendering code I want now, and then I’ll be building gameplay.

So for now I’m going to write up all the things I think the game should do, and come up with some scheme to ensure they all get done. Onward!

And a gratuitous food shot (ham and cheese is popular)

I’m getting very excited about this I’ve got some interesting ideas and am eagerly awaiting the compo start!

my lazy attempt at motivation

I’m not exactly new to LD, but it’s been quite a while. I’m planning to enter LD11, and I have some interesting ideas up my sleeve I’ll be writing all my code completely from scratch, using Win32 -I have a lot of experience doing this though, so I don’t think it’ll be a handicap.

I’ll also be recording a time lapse video of my progress, which might be amusing to watch afterwards – Good luck everyone (you’re going to need it )