Early in a project, things like this are funny. Later on, I find the time lost incredibly frustrating. I don’t think windows is going to find the error before I do…

-TF

Ok, this is not a major update, I was asleep and then I had to fly to Illiamna and back, so I’m just picking things up again now.

Flash games on the web take the form of .swf files, which are streamed by their host. The flash player won’t normally play a frame of a flash movie until all the assets used by that frame have been loaded. Working in FlashDevelop/FlexSDK, you really don’t use frames much at all, everything is done from AS3 code, and the .swf which is created is a flash movie with 1 frame. Because you don’t want to show the player a white box until everything has been loaded, normally you add a pre-loader, which is small, and which allows the flash player to show something to the user while the rest of the assets are loaded.

Up till now, all of my projects have been wrapped either by the Mochi version control wrapper, or by Whirled’s wrapper. These include preloaders, so I’ve been able to totally ignore all aspects of preloading up unitl now. Unfortunately, as in my normal development flow I had set up my FD project as an ActionScript3 project. In order to get the FlexSDK to create a movie with more than 1 frame, so that that first frame can be implemented as a preloader, there are a few compiler options that need to be set. FD has a AS3+preloader template option, so I re-setup my project and away we went. (This really isn’t a big thing, but I lost 30 minutes because I didn’t know my tools).

Also in the line of I didn’t know my tools, if you hold shift while using the pencil, GiMP will draw a straight line!! Learning this alone made entering LD worth it to me.

Implemented a main menu and intro animation. Next up is building/support placement and a stress heat-map. That might take a little longer, so I figured I push what I have public.

Embedded flash versions here

-TF

Really not too much to show here… the ground and caven backgrounds are just solid fills with some about 5 colors airbrushed over each at random. The grid is generated with two for loops, and there are two instances of each… I’ll be storing stress information in the cell objects that comprise the grid. Next up is to draw some houses and supports which will be placed by mouse click. In anycase, here’s the game so far:

(oops, WP doesn’t like me embedding a swf from my domain.. oh well, here’s screenshots instead) (And here’s a link where I’ll keep an index of the in-progress .swfs)

-TF

So I was having trouble with an idea.  I’m trying to stick with the definition of cavern which is a naturally occurring void in the earth, and perhaps that’s too limiting.  I came up with two concepts I like though, and one I’m going to develop.

The runner up for me was Stalactite.. here’s the crummy mockup:

Where the idea was to grow stalactites by somehow moving the water around. The soluble minerals that could become stalactites would be limited resources, as would the water. But although that could be a neat simulation, I didn’t see a game.

Option 2 is a competitive game where there is a town being built over a cavern. There are two players (I’ll initially code hotseat multiplayer, and then code some type of AI). A grid represents the town, and another grid represents the cavern. Each turn a player can either place a building, or a support. Buildings have different weights. If the stress at a given point exceeds some constant (TBD), a sinkhole forms and the buildings within the confines of the sinkhole fall to the cavern level and are out of play. The game ends when… (I’m not sure yet). Each player gets points for his opponents buildings in the cavern, and loses points for his own buildings in the cavern.

My goal for the rest of the evening is to get a mock-up done of this, and a basic UI.

-TF

Okay, I was expecting the cold topic… I mean the keynote speech referenced the frozen north of Canada, and everyone would immediately assume that this meant the cold topic wasn’t the winner… but obviously, when they put together that video they knew that everyone would assume that whatever topic they referenced wouldn’t be the winner so clearly they would use whatever topic was in the lead in the video…

I really don’t know what to do with this theme. A shooter or RPG set in a cave … is a shooter or RPG set in a cave, it could be almost anywhere else with a graphics re-skin. Flying through caves hasn’t really been bettered since Caverns of Mars, and I’m probably not capable of cloning Spelunky in 48 hrs. The only ideas I’ve had so far have been silly (a game based on Troglobites, where the player would have to use senses other than sight.. (makes a lot of sense for a flash game, no?))

I’ve set up my framework though (I suppose I should have disclosed it, but it consists of one switch statement, an int to switch off of (gamestate), a timer, and 2 global constants (ScreenWidth and ScreenHeight)) Code and in-progress prototypes will follow.

You know… once I actually have a viable idea.

-TF

I’m going to try to sneak in under the wire (I didn’t see a timeline for when you had to say you were planning to participate in LD15 to participate). I’ve wanted to do one of these for a while, but always manage to not notice the start date and time.   I’m pretty sure I’ll be working at my real job tommorrow, so I’ll lose some hours there, but other than that I think I have the full weekend available.

Planned platform: Flash

Tools:

FlashDevelop (IDE)

FlexSDK

GiMP (gfx)

Audacity (SFX and music if I get that far)

Should be fun!

-TF

www.nightflyergames.com