Falling behind slightly due to having to do a bit more tweaking and more work around code than I expected for things to behave themselves. Methinks this may be the last time I’ll be using SGZEngine in it’s current form.

Anyway, progress!
I’ve fixed the camera and added it’s “smarts” in again, so it only draws what it sees, not everything it can find.
I’ve added movement and attacking for men and ships! YARRRR
There’s wind – depicted by the crap clouds. It’ll randomly change direction and strength, and will affect your ships trajectory. Quite amusing to watch them perform wide arcs to get to where you told it to go as the wind’s throwing them about a bit.
The whole map is finished.. minus the randomising of where forts and treasure start.
All the graphics are done apart from the hud, though that wont take long ( nice big block of solid colour will do, if need be )

Screenshot:

What’s next…
Looting and Pillaging!
Capturing Mines and Forts ( and placing them, of course )
Some context sensitive clicking ( at the moment, left click to select/deselect a unit, right click to move, left control and right click to attack )
Hud stuff. This is probably of prime importance, actually.. as there is a lot going on, and I don’t want another derelict disaster *cough*
Polish ( sound, music, perhaps fix some of the tiles which look a bit crap )

Ahem, anyway…

I’ve taken the derelict scroller and rewritten it from the chunky scroll to a smooth scroll.. though, I’ve lost it’s “smartness” where it’d only draw what it could see.. now it draws every sodden tile ( otherwise, it gets lost and starts blanking out tiles before you’ve moved over them, and not drawing quick enough.. hmm.. some investigation later is needed. )
I’ve also added mouse support into my engine and exposed it to Lua. Need to do something with it now!
Finally, engine wise I told it to spit out a delta time properly… may as well stop making everything frame-dependent

Currently have a large (100×100 tile) map loading in and being rendered. Actually, it’s technically two maps that get loaded, one for the background, and it keeps another for collision stuff.. may change this later as it’s taking it’s time per frame ( probably due to the rendering of all those sodding tiles! )

Anyhow, time for dinner.. here’s another screenshot in the meantime:

Woke up, had a small fit with the theme ( my original ideas wouldn’t fit for it ) so made some tea and had a think.

Hmm… Islands…

After some scribbling in GIMP, I ended up with this.. so a piratey game sounds like it could be fun to do!
Also, I’ve already done most of the tiles I’ll need now, and they’re not too horrendous for a change either.
Enjoy the test tile grid I created.. now to actually get some code done!
Decided I’ll be using SGZEngine again… but perhaps gutting bits out as I go in preparation of redoing the thing.
More details about YARGH! ( working title, though it’ll probably stay ) as I think of them!

YARGH! Tile Example

With any luck, I should be able to take part in this weekend’s festivities of bludgeoning code to do our bidding in a short amount of time.

For a change, I actually have a rough idea which would fit about 80% of the themes already, with some modifications here and there.. just need to figure out the development platform, hmm.

It’ll either be the usual SGZEngine of lore that I’ve been dragging about for a while now ( though it’s in desperate need of being rewritten, ) a brand spanky new engine, or something web-based ( so that’s another new engine then, technically ) which would foster the power of PHP/MySQL, and perhaps one of them new fangled WebGL/HTML5 type things that have been gaining exposure recently. We shall see.

At any rate, looking forward to it.. and here’s hoping I actually finish something for a change.. rather than leave them to languish on the “I’ll get back to it” pile *cough*

That was fun.
Really, it was.. the majority of coding this was pretty good – as I had structured things fairly well for the most part.. till I went mad and started putting chunks of code in whatever file I was in at the time! Damn you Lua for allowing me to use any global function in any file at any time!

There were, however.. a few head smashingly horrific issues that did cost the game.

(more…)

About twenty mins late as my archive manager decided it would make bad zips – cause it felt like it.

Didn’t completely finish.. sadly… but this is something I’d definitely like to finish at some point.
You do get hot-seat multiplayer for your efforts of downloading though!

Skills were not implemented, which makes the Alien Queen utterly useless ( it can’t lay eggs that spawn into brood ) but the other classes work fine as they have weapons AI wasn’t implemented either.. so you can wander aimlessly through the HUGE part-designed ship and kill them.. but that’s about it, sadly. Lockers weren’t implemented either, so you can’t even gather loot! Yea, time managed to get the best of me, it seems.. I’ll explain more in the post mortem.
There’s also no win conditions… I forgot that… heh

I’m quite knackered after all that.. here’s a final screenshot showing what GUI I managed:

I currently only have an AMD64 Linux build as my Windows running laptop is in need of a reinstall.. I’ll get a Windows build done ASAP. You can grab the engine source from the SVN though, and compile it that way if you wish.
Other source is actually in the data zip – it’s all Lua script.

I’ll post up a post-mortem after I’ve had some sleep.. it’s been fun again!
Good Luck to everyone!

-edit-
Seems like my laptop was alive enough to produce a Win32 build! it’s up now too: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=267

Well I’m getting there.. slowly but surely.

I waited up for the theme last night, then went to sleep to think on the theme, so I didn’t start till about 9am GMT this morning.
Most of the day has been design, and getting some base assets down.
Code-wise, I’ve implemented a camera system, and a slightly insane map loading system again – something which wasted a huge amount of time as I stupidly based it on the Moons of Subterrane loader. which was designed specifically for it, and not for scrolling at all. This got rewritten twice, because of my stupidity.
More importantly, you can move your marines about ( though can’t choose the starting classes yet,  the menu systems are in there ready for it though ) and it recognizes doors and entities separately from the rest of the map on load.

Now, a screen shot.. then bed for a few hours sleep; tomorrows plan is finish most of the code by lunchtime, then work on assets and tidying till Midnight, which gives me two hours to port and package the final submit ( no bugger ups this time! )

Excuse the nasty hashing, I may fix this tomorrow with better art… if I have time!

A hulking mass of metal drifts
effortlessly through space.

Once teeming with life,
now quiet like the dead of the night.

This is a derelict.

For the brave amongst you,
there are unbound treasures aboard
worth unimaginable fortunes,
with a wealth of information
just laying for the taking.

However.

This is a derelict for a reason.

Pray you never find out why…

Sounds menacing, doesn’t it?
Derelict will be a top down turn-based strategy game with you controlling four marines from six classes.
Your mission is simple: raid the derelict for as much as you can find.
Your marines may leave at any time.. it’s just in how many pieces you need to worry about…

Well, after a successful LD15 ( I actually finished something! which wasn’t too bad either, if a bit brutally difficult and incomplete ) I feel up for another one.. lets see if I can not stuff up the submission this time

I’ll have a bit more of a battle plan this time.. I shall be planning my time carefully rather than just barging ahead blindly.

Tools:
GIMP, GCC, CodeLite, MilkyTracker

Pre-Developed Code:
My engine… of which the source can be found here: http://svn2.xp-dev.com/svn/stuckie-SGZEngine/ most of which is hideous, hehe .. it’s also not been touched much since LD15

And that’s that! Looking forward to another Ludum Dare, and hopefully another finished game

Just a quick note as I’ve had a few comments about this now:
As stated in my post mortem here I _severely_ buggered up the submission and included an old EXE in the upload, but the source to the correct version.
I did upload a fixed EXE compiled from the source in the package, however… but people may not have caught it.

The easiest way to check whether you have the correct version or not ( so I know if there really IS a speed issue or not ) is if you get sound. The old EXE has no sound, the correct one does. Those who have tested my game, could you double check that you’re using the correct EXE, please?

Again, if you want to make sure I’ve not just fixed something and tried to put that up, you can compile the source yourself, and can check the source for the framelock code in code/engine/CInterpret.cpp and the updateInterfaces function, which does a nasty hacky SDL-specific framelock to 60FPS.. I’m sure FRAPS or something will be able to detect the FPS of the game, and tell you whether it’s framelocked or not.

I do apologise for this and will make sure I properly test things in the next Ludum Dare!

The dust has barely settled, but I’m throwing up a post mortem anyway…

Moons of Subterrane was interesting in that for the most part, nothing went wrong.
I had been feeling a bit ill and stuff, so didn’t do the full 48hr run, I perhaps did 24hrs instead…
So in keeping with my previous post-mortems, the good, bad and ugly -

The Good:
As said, nothing really went wrong during the work I did.
Adding things was really easy due to the way I had set it up – albeit slightly convoluted in that maps and enemies/stations are in different files.
The system kinda worked like a database to that effect… where each room was designed in a text editor and given a room number, and the map just referenced the room numbers. All data was loaded in on level load ( which can cause a pause or two )
Enemy spawners and flight paths were relatively easy to add as well.
Seeing as I did miniLD11 with Little Quirks ( which I’ve still been working on ) I was a lot more confident with the engine and how things worked, or should work, which was probably how I managed so well this time

The Bad:
Again, I didn’t really factor much time in for sounds.. and a ZX Spectrum could beat the sounds I did!
Testing was quite tricky as well, as the levels can be quite involving.
Also, no animations… so everything’s a static sprite – doesn’t look quite so good as it could’ve been but then, I’m no artist!

The Ugly:
The submission phase… heh… I buggered this up spectacularly and only just realised after I got a comment stating it was far too fast.
The game was coded primarily on a Linux box, and I had a Windows laptop setup to do win32 builds on. I tested and built the correct binary, but somehow transferred an older binary to my Linux box when packing things up. Same thing happened with the Dingoo and Wiz builds ( they should work but just not have input, instead they crash due to other factors which I fixed this morning. )
Now, I have updated my entry with a fixed exe to download.. but this is tricky though as my original submission does have a broken exe – HOWEVER, and here’s the fun bit.. I included full source in that package and if you were to compile an exe from that source, you’d get the correct working version!
Also, I did put up various versions on my site, as I had some other people who were testing my game throughout the duration on Windows for me.
You can find them all here:
http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/ld15/

(The submitted package is: MoonsOfSubterrane-LD15.7z and the Win32 fix is: SGZ2D.exe)
You’ll see that the exe in hour 44 does infact work at the correct pace ( without sound.. though the sound is so dire and you’ll be probably turning it off anyway ), and you can check the source in the submitted package: specifically line 132 onwards (the updateInterfaces function) in Source/code/engine/CInterpret.cpp – there lies the nasty hacky SDL specific framelimit code – which obviously isn’t active in the submitted exe.

Also… KATE on Linux seems to do stuff to the files it edits, as on Windows they seem to have extra blank lines between every normal line.. hmm..

So yea, although nothing technically went wrong during the competition, and I was surprised at that, I managed to bugger up the submission in spectacular style, instead! Woo!

Well, more or less…

I only got the first seven levels done – the entire Moon of Chronos, and the first two sectors of Kala. Rest are repeats of Chronos with slightly different gravity pulls, and textures.

But wow, I felt it was complete enough to actually submit!
Here’s some screenshots of the past few hours:

But it’s all submitted now so, hope you have fun playing it as I have had making it this weekend
Even if I did only spend about a day all in on it due to feeling a bit bleh…
Good Luck to everyone that entered!

That’s me reached my third milestone!
Seems like it’s third time lucky, this time ( this is my third main ludumdare ) and I might actually really finish this on time

Obligatory screenshot:

All game mechanics are implemented and work, it’s now a case of sorting the levels out properly, and sound!
There’s meant to be 25 levels in all ( or atleast, I’ve made space for 25 levels) – five areas per moon.
Each moon has a different graphic set ( read, I’ve changed the colours in GIMP ) and a different amount of rooms per cavern. Your first moon – Chronos – starts with 4×4 caves, whereas the last moon – Wenut – will have 8×8 caves.
Oh and be warned, the gravity changes per sector Chronos Sector 1 is fairly light, Sector 2 is heavy as sin, but 3 – 5 are about average.

Currently, Chronos is complete… though some of the rooms could be tightened up a bit, but it works for the moment. Rest of the moons are just repeats of Chronos for the time being.
Playable is here – http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/ld15/MoonsOfSubterrane-44.7z

Now for some sound!

Scarily, LD15 ends in about 14 and a half hours.. I’ve still a lot to do, most important of which is getting font support in for some feedback!
Some sounds wouldn’t go amiss either…

However, the onslaught of nasties continues as base spawners have been implemented.
Here’s a bit in the first sector of the first moon that’s somewhat nasty:

I had just destroyed the one on the right when the screenshot clicked they take quite a beating though but at least they stay dead! There’s also a puff of smoke when something collides with a bullet or enemy. Definitely crying out for sound effects now!

What’s left in Order of Importance:
Fonts.
Picking up Researchers and Repairing ( as you can still shoot stuff so, yea..  I can change the game to destroy all enemy spawners if need be )
Sounds.
Some actual level design ( though the way the levels are built, I could whip up a lot of them in the last two hours quite easily. )

Nicities:
Frontend.
Music.

Current playable with four spawners is here: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/ld15/MoonsOfSubterrane-32.7z
It’s getting there.. and I might actually finish for a change!

Well, it’s the end of day one now… haven’t worked on this a whole lot ( about five, maybe six hours in total?), to be honest, but I’m reasonably pleased with what I have so far!

There’s a funky maze like cavernous system to the east of the player in that screen shot… the building is a research centre, of which there’s another one in the caverns that you’ve to find to rescue the peoples in there before the moon destabalises. Rescue them by landing on the pad ( the thing in the middle sticking up like a sore thumb. )

Those red things are nasties ( there’s a few different types of nasties, and there’s a number of different attack paths they take as well ) which can be shot cause if they smash into you, you take some damage and eventually explode ( same with careening into the walls, which seeing as the ship’s currently a nippy little bugger, you’ll be doing a lot ).. luckily, the research centres will repair you a bit.

There’s 28 ( count ‘em! ) main cavernous screen types ( not all are in the demo just now! ), and plenty more derived from them – adding beastie spawn points, research stations, and all sorts.

Of the core gameplay, I’ve only really got the picking up of researchers to do, then it’s just implementing some fonts to track score, health, time and create some fiendish level designs and appropriate bleepy-bloops!

Current tech-demo is here: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/ld15/MoonsOfSubterrane.7z with cursor keys and “z” to fire. There’s GP2X-Wiz and Dingoo binaries, though they run a tad slow just now and I haven’t set the controls up properly yet. The linux binary is AMD64 compiled and the Win32 exe was compiled and tested on Windows 7.

Now for some sleep…

Not sure I’m going to get something done this weekend due to being a bit blegh, but I’m going to have a shot.

Using my engine again ( which I’ve just committed a bunch of stuff to the repository for “chunky” scrolling action and a bit of a cleanup that had been sitting on my laptop for a while ) which, should you want scarred for life in reading atrocious code, is here: http://svn2.xp-dev.com/svn/stuckie-SGZEngine/

Currently, my game concept is as follows:
Gigantic maze-like caverns ( possibly randomly generated ) full of nasties and helpless people.
Rescue the helpless people from their research stations by landing on the pads to pick them up, and take them out the caves to a safe area ( your ship can only carry so many, so you’ll need to ferry the buggers about. )
Might as well grab some precious minerals while you’re in there too, for some extra points.
Do it before the caverns cave in due to destabalisation from the nasties.

I’m leaning towards a Cybernoid-style gameplay experience – so expect viciously difficult sectors, with switch-screen scrolling rather than smooth-scrolling, allowing each screen to be a puzzle in it’s own right.
Not sure if I’ll keep the Cybernoid “constantly falling” mechanic, or implement actual gravity.. depends how much of a clone I want it to be, I guess.

Art is being done in the Gimp as usual, sound effects and music in MilkyTracer should there be time.
Right, I need food.. hopefully have something playable by the end of the day, and I’m predominantly targetting handhelds again, so expect a 320×240 res unless I whack some scaling in there.

Well, as I’ve been working on it throughout the week, I’ve been putting a lot more effort into it, and it’s been going way past the original 48hr game concept, hehe.
As such, I thought I’d post up a post-mortem on what went wrong in the 48 hours, and what went right.

The Good.

The theme was great. I love sandbox style games, be it sandbox in a “giant world to do as you please” sense, or even in a “here’s a puzzle, figure it out as you like” sense – as Little Quirks was to be. So that got the creative juices flowing, so to speak!

My concept was very simple – basically a Lemmings clone where they can crawl up and along walls and ceilings. The art was nice and simple too, fitting with the cute aesthetics as well.

The engine was in better shape than last time, after being used in another couple of projects since LD11 ( Plight of The Weedunks being one of the most well known – yes, this is basically the same engine, minus the 3D layer! ) and I got something up and running very quickly, and only took an hour to upgrade the engine to do dynamic colour replacement.

The Bad.

Hard drive hiccup. That wasn’t fun, especially seeing as I’ve just recently replaced one of them. Losing several hours of work is a killer, and more so when you’re in the middle of an SVN commit to an external server to try and avoid losing too much. Moral of the story, save and commit often!

Sound. Or lack thereof. I actually factored no time in for sound. This may have went against me if I had actually finished within the time limit. Something to be wary of for LD15; making time for everything is quite tough, but then that’s half the challange of Ludum Dare!

The Ugly.

Tilechecks are quick, and for the most part work very well. However, when there’s a lot of logic behind what your entities are doing (crawling around any side of a tile), those tilechecks quickly spiral out of control. I really should have been doing pixel checking with a hotspot being at the bottom of the sprite. Then again, I was able to get a ludicrous amount of them squirming around, with a full Lua-based state machine for each of them which a more expensive pixel check routine may not have allowed. A puzzle for sure as to what would’ve been better

What Next?

It’s become apparant that there’s actually a bit of depth in this concept while I’ve been continuing it after work, and it’s been slowly going beyond just a 48hr game. I’ve decided to continue working on it on the run up to LD15, as it’ll let me see what my engine still requires, and fix some of the hideous bugs I’ve uncovered along the way.

I’ll still be releasing the game – source and all – when it’s done, and probably post it up here complete with final tag … more than likely 48 days after MiniLD11 rather than 48 hours
The game was also designed for handhelds ( GP2X, Wiz, and Dingoo in particular – click for image – ) so you’ll probably see it on one of the sites for those hand helds when it’s done too

After losing several hours of work due to a hard drive hiccup ( annoyingly while I was backing up the code to SVN at the time ) I won’t be able to finish this within the 48 hours.. I can’t even release anything just now as it’s currently very broken.

The code I lost was most of the refactored state machine – which worked properly! So I’ve been having to rewrite that again, and it’s not pretty.. specially seeing as it’s not working as well as it was.
I shall be continuing this throughout the week when I get back from work, so I’m hoping to have it finished by the end of the week.. though if I was to restart it, I’d be writing an actual pixel detection routine as this tilecheck system is just hideous!

Once it’s done, I’ll write up a post mortem of what went right, and what shot me in the bum.
Here’s a picture of it’s current state ( clicky for full screen ):

That’s 256 Quirks running around a screen area of 1024×768.. it’s now got a dynamic playfield so if you set the config file to any ( reasonable ) resolution, it’ll create a playfield big enough for you.

That’s it just now.. as a warm up to LD15, it’s highlighted a few issues that I’ll need to resolve to take part properly… but it’s been fun anyway
Apologies that I couldn’t finish in time, but I’ve had a lot of good feedback from this so far, so I’ll try get it done throughout the week.

As I’m going by 48 hours since I started, I have about 20 hours left.

I have hit a problem in that the Quirks’ state machine is rather unwieldy and complex… a better solution would have been doing pixel detection, but my engine doesn’t currently support that ( something I’ve noted down to fix later ) as such, it does a variety of tile checks depending on the Quirk’s orientation and direction.
This is unbelievably nasty… and it’s forced me to go back a bit and redesign it all on paper first so I can see all the combinations I can get. It’s still going to end up a massive mess, but I can atleast tackle each segment at a time and make it a bit more bearable to code!

I’ve also realised that I’ve spent most of my time wrestling with the code and doing some ( basic ) graphics.. there’s no sound effects of any sort, and I’m thinking I’m going to have to squeeze them in in the last two or three hours before packaging it up.

On the plus side, there’s now interaction! There’s now randomly coloured Quirks! And the engine can sustain about 256 Quirks ( nice retro number to coincide with the graphics! ) before slowing down! I did have it throwing about 900 on the screen, but it slows a fair bit, as each Quirk gets it’s own monolithic 500 line state machine ( and that state machine isn’t even finished yet! )

Here’s a hundred Quirks, with an updated Graphics set, and the red box o’doom cursor

That’s the end of the first day and I’ve got quite a bit done.. most of the state machine for the Quirks is complete so they act… Quirky?

Anyway, for a windows binary to see how it’s progressed click here.

I also managed to do authentic Spectrum style attribute clash by accident!
I’ve left this in for retro goodness, hehe.. I know what I did wrong too ( my pixel replacement routine goes over the entire screen buffer, rather than the individual animation frame buffer ) so it’s all good.

Basically there’ll be two modes.. puzzle and sandbox.
Puzzle is basically a Lemmings clone, get them from A->B without killing them ( falling from a great distance will kill them! )

Sandbox is a bit more interesting… taking on GEvOlve’s territory again, they breed.. and this is where the colours come into play. Each offspring is a combination of the parent’s colour should be good for a random screensaver like thing! Basically, just keep them happy by building them things to clamber over and have them breed. As the puzzle part relies on everything in this mode, this is being done first ( and it matches the rules anyway )

Hopefully I can get this done for tomorrow night, so till then, enjoy the little quirks running around