I love that 100 yen stores are open 24 hours.  After running into too many walls, and realizing that javascript canvas just seemed to slow without doing lots of tricky things (which I don’t know) I decided to look at flashpunk.  And it it is pretty much exactly the structure I’ve been looking for and partially made over the last week (albeit in flash rather than javascript, but that just means at least some hardware acceleration(including my lappy with the last flash update)).

I visited the 100 yen store around the corner again and grabbed some supplies to last me through the night, while I go through the tutorials on the flashpunk site and try to get something out in the next 9 hours and 39 minutes.  It’s for these reasons that I normally go easy on the caffeine, so that when I want to use it, it actually has an effect.

So I went for a walk to go get some taiyaki and think about what to do.  I’ve ended up spending so much time getting the basic useful classes I’ve been wanting for working with the canvas sorted that I totally don’t have time left to make what I was originally intending.  So while munching the aforementioned taiyaki (pictured below), I decided on the best course to take now.  I do like the game plan I had in mind and would like to keep pushing at it after the compo, but I also want to finish something for this, so the logical option: Branch the project.

Now it’s a matter of taking these last 13 or so hours, working with what I’ve made so far and making something fun, slightly flashy and not too tricky to code.  Not too much of an ask there.. right?

Nom'd off fish face

Dang, one night down and hardly anything to show for it.  It’s annoying that I most of the code I wrote yesterday is all stuff that I’m sure others have written in the past, all just things to make stuff work.  I really wish that I’d found a Javascript library that did the things I wanted it to and not had to spend so much time trying to work out how to make it do those things myself, rather than just spend that time actually making game code.

Ah well, 2 hours to go until the half way point.  What I’ve got running is next to nothing, just random map generation that’s not in the final shape I want, along with some other classes sorted.  I’m going to sprint through as much code as I can over the next 2 hours, just throwing in a bunch of pseudo code of how things should work, and slowly fill that in.

Also, spagetti with pre-made sauce from last night (now I’m actually having more banana toast).

There’s an idea in here somewhere, but as usual I’m geting bogged down trying to the language I’m using (this time Javascript and the HTML5 canvas) to do what I want it to.  I need to stop messing around and just get something controlable moving around on screen.  But first to grab some festival food.

It’s a good thing I can’t embed this motivational poster, it might give people seizures (waring: might give you seizures). Click though to see the awesome Distractionness. P.S. it’s all HTML, Javascript and CSS, the CSS to make the layout took a while yesterday as I suck at CSS.

On theme related news, I started as a hater, thinking it’s just a ‘game mechanic’ rather than a ‘theme’. But really you can still interpret it in other ways, just think of the definitions and interpretations of ‘enemies’ and ‘weapons’. If one complains that they can’t make an arty game from this, then you’re too stuck on what those words normally mean when applied to a game. Think outside the screen.

Also, 3 hours gone already ohmy.

Hrm, hard to think of this theme in a non-mechanic way.  In the meantime, FOODUM DARE!

Banana is supposed to be good for the brain or something right?

BANANA TOAST!

Also, snacks are esential.  These are from the nearby 100 yen store.  <3 100 yen stores.

Cookies and something with a tanuki on it!

Time to throw in a post before everything starts, with the obligatory environment-I’ll-be -sitting-while-coding photo.  Note the drink at the ready to the left of the lappy and the notebooks to the right.  All I’m missing now is snacks, which shall be amended with a trip to the 100 yen store around the corner in a moment.

As for tools:

• I plan to use Javascript and canvas for code, so the result will be playable online.
• Most code writing will go down in Notepad++.
• GraphicsGale for graphics, possibly with a bit of dash Gimp.
• DrPetter for anything sound, if I get around to it.  Err, sfxr and musagi that is.
• If appropriate, though I have no ideas for it, I might go grab some audio from the festival going on this weekend at the nearby park.

Finally, I might take advantage of the fact I’m working on a tiny laptop and take it out and about to code for a bit.  Change of scenery and all that.

Haven’t played too many of the games yet, partly because of being stuck playing Hempuli’s Paradise Fort and having too much fun.

Anyway, the tower:

Note the damaged sections where it was HIT BY METEORS!!!

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So Fishing didn’t make it.  However, that does not mean it is dead!  The original idea that spawned Fishing to be added to the themes list was the amusing idea of having a fishing mini-game in another game, so that is my challenge to you!  No matter how mini, or how small, try to put a fishing mini-game in your game.

If you’re thinking making one game is hard enough, here’s simple fishing game logic for you (which I’ll probably use):

• 3 sprite image – one with pole normal, one with pole being tugged, one with fish pulled up
• choose random time to have pole pulled down for 0.5 sec and change sprite
• check for some key press, if pressed while pole is down change to fish pulled up sprite for some 1 sec

Fishing For Life!

I’ve always loved this switch.

So I had a bit of a curve ball thrown at me earlier in the week, my computer finally up and died.  So I’ll be working in at my space at the uni here.  Luckily I’ve been throwing everything needed for development onto my portable HD, so I should be good as long as I don’t need to actually install anything.

Workspace:

CRT dual monitor! It's like I'm at NASA!

Tools will probably be:

-Flash Develop, because it can run off a portable HD.

-Flixel, with the base code JonothanW threw out there… which I should probably look at before we start.

-sfxr and musagi, because DrPetter is King.

-Graphics Gale for graphics, because it does pixels.

Also, food:

Ohhhhhh. Now with 4 kinds of grain!

It is interesting.
It is original.
It is open to interpretation.
It is best.

Vote for Fishing.

There’s a few buggy bits, I somehow got it crashing when you try to do smooth scaling, the code became a beast and I have no idea how well it’ll run on other computers. Many more tweaks that could be made, but it’s done enough to throw it out there. It’s pong with fluid dynamics, kind of like plasmapong in that I used the same paper for the fluid dynamics code, however I tried to actually make the game side more pong-like and fun to play (I always found that plasmapong was beautiful to look at, but the game wasn’t exactly ‘fun’).

I did find out pretty quickly that even at low res, it’s probably not the best idea to do fluid dynamic simulation in a scripting language. Luckily the LuaJIT version of the engine that sfernald posted in this comment (you can download a bare version here, minus the example game) actually did provide a huge speedup and made it playable on my compy.

You can download the actual game code here, just throw the files in the same folder as the LuaJIT executable and run that. More tasty pixel fluid dynamics after the jump.

(EDIT: replaced rar after fixing a small problem, where it told you you lost when you won, and added 2 more palettes. On a side note, sometimes when running it goes very slow for me, in which case if I close and start again it’ll normally be fine)
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Had something I wanted to try at this sort of low resolution, and after reading through a paper and a fair bit of fiddling I’ve got the basics working. Not exactly an original idea, but I thought a nice improvement would be to actually try and make it fun. Am I being vague enough here? A screenshot might help a few people catch onto what I’m talking about:

Anyway, will try to add more tomorrow, as it’s far too late already.

Thank you to all the people that have played and commented on my entry, much obliged.  I left it alone for a week, wanting to come back to it with a bit of a fresh head and hopefully fresh eyes.  In replaying it a bit there are a few particular points I think are worth talking about, important aspects of the game which I fell I either did or didn’t get right.

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