Here is link to my entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=66

LD #3 was my first one, but starting from 4th Ludum Dare I named all my entries like “Smthng Warrior”… but now I broke the pattern!!

So I present you, my wannabe-artsyfartsy minigame “LIFELONE”.

8 minutes of soundtrack btw.

I’m almost done. Once again way too little content, but that’s what usually seems to happen when making anything content-based in a very short amount of time, logically.

Before posting final + screenshots, here’s a second foodphoto. It’s a late dinner consisting of duck ragu and nettle pasta.

Ah well. I have now maybe ~30 seconds of gameplay, including a small somebody-speaks-to-you sequence. What’s missing is a lot more level stuff, and some actions for levels which I need to do to have any use for this game’s “twist”. Also I made a thing which sort of advances music based on where you are, which means I have to do a bit more composing as I add more level data. Plus, no sfx yet, hopefully I have time to add some later.

I don’t have very much to show yet, most of the work so far has been about tweaking animation/gameplay movement feel. I drew this little critter to go around with in the game. Movement feels somewhat ok now, except I’m still missing a jump action which I think would probably be nice to have. I also composed a few notes to test a soundtrack related idea.

Way to start the compo … is to eat and post a foodphoto. My wife whipped up some excellent ingredients for this Tex Mex moment.

In fact I’ve been working on an entry for maybe 2-3 hours now, but I don’t have anything sensible to post about it yet.

It’s done, just in time!

Ta-dah: New addition to the “warrior” series yet again… meet Drill Warrior!

Click here to go to the official compo-system page of the entry!

Download FINAL v1.0.0 http://jet.ro/files/DrillWarrior.zip

(or grab source)

I wasted some time to watch a movie from tv, but I still coded some more feats during commercial breaks (for real!). I now have added THE thingies to discover (diamonds?). Finding them gives you a fortune, or something, which you can invest partly into new gear. Fear not, you will also get some money up front to spend, I think. Yes, I also added a shop to buy a drill. I’m still missing the “scanner” which is supposed to be an important feature, since it should add the game the possibility to actually use your resources wisely rather than just blindly dig around. If I get around that, then I should also add a shop thing to buy scanner batteries.

Ok, I created some bkg music, drawed some sprites and tweaked rendering. I based the tunnel/rock rendering thing on a technique I also used in Rock Warrior (my entry to one of the past LD compos), but tweaked it to suit better for this case. I’m not the inventor of the that though, I think I originally found the idea from iq’s site. I’m also watching VGA awards with my other eye as they’re airing that in Finland currently…  …  + Feeling a bit bored now, let’s see how much I get to make more gameplay stuff – which is lacking too much atm.

Ok. I had again a long nights sleep, then a long breakfast, went to shower, helped my wife with some tailoring stuff as she’s making a dress, etc. Needless to say I’d be behind the schedule if I had made one. I guess I’ll have to drop some of the stuff I was going to make, but that’s how it always goes in LD, stick to the most important stuff (or the things you just want to work on?).

From my last screenshot you might be able to pick up a “scanner” feature. I haven’t actually implemented that one yet, and not even started on a “shop” feature. Also, my visuals are still totally on prototype level, so I’m a bit divided if I should start making even a bit of visuals now and leave some of the gameplay features unimplemented unless I still happen to have some time in the end. Also, I have SFX in but haven’t made background music yet (tried to make something though, but I wasn’t happy with the first try). My guess is that I’ll now work on some gfx and music and then see what to do with the missing gameplay.

And still having just proto-visuals.

I can both move and draw rectangles. Maybe I can concentrate a bit more on gameplay for once by using only crude rects for visuals (which I can hopefully upgrade towards end of the project)…

Slept a loooong night and now I’m just starting to work on something. Let’s see how this goes on…

Well, at least I got level generator thing somewhat done. As I said, I have planned this stuff further and the implementation side is behind “schedule”… I’m starting to think that I’ll run out of time in any case if the goal is to get any interesting amount of gameplay mechanics done. I’ll still keep working as long as I’m having fun here, but I won’t submit an entry unless I get stuff working well enough.

Oh, and I spent too much time working on some stupid non-essential things (gameplay-wise), such as extracting tiles from an image and padding them and inserting into a different sized texture atlas, and then toying around with different drawing modes of sub-pixel accuracy (comparing normal and pre-mul blending and whatever), and then just throwing most of that experiment stuff away. Well, the atlas thing is still in place, but I could have totally done stuff without it as well, so it was still just extra effort for no real gain.

I’m posting this pic a bit late, forgot first to add this right after the breakfast. After this rye bread + ham + coffee combo, I also did a re-run of yesterdays breakfast.

In related news: my compo entry is not advancing well. Basically I have it “all planned out” in my mind, and done bunch of groundwork with editing & coding & part of graphics. But I don’t have anything playable, not even close to that.

Partly this is because I have been feeling a bit sick, and I have slept more than during normal nights… If I don’t get my entry done in some adequate fashion, I’ll leave the idea for some later time then, since I do like the idea of what I’m building (although I wasn’t actually too fond of the theme!).

Ham, bacon, tuna and lots of cheese. Yum.

I went to the supermarket to buy some food and now I have a pizza in the oven. Here’s image of it before it got in there:

Progress with my entry has been a bit slow – still in rough concept thinking / design phase without any actual code yet. Progress so far can almost be summed in these little editing helper tiles which aren’t even supposed to be any final gfx:

“lol”.

Ok, so it was 04:00 (am) here when the theme was announced. I kept myself awake to get the theme and then I went to sleep immediately after that.  About 10 hours later I finally got up from bed and made some morning coffee and ate a little croissant-thing with it:

I thought it might help with the idea side to sleep and maybe wake up with head full of good ideas. I don’t know if that worked at all, since I don’t have a big bunch of ideas, but there’s like 2-3 of them and I’m probably just going to start working straight away using one of them.

In the past many have posted basecodes before compo. I also used some sort of basecode, which has usually been just a dump of the very basic stuff from my previous entry (available for anybody already), maybe doing some small changes every time. Sometimes I have done this basecode extraction stuff during the compo and sometimes a little bit beforehand.

Since many have posted their basecodes separately, I decided to make my take on it available for you all in a zip file as well. Once again this is just a slightly modified dump of the base stuff from my last entry.

Get a little bit of more info and a link to the zip file here:

http://jet.ro/2009/12/11/little-framework-for-making-prototypes-or-an-ld48-entry/

I wrote about Rock Warrior to my blog and added a separate page which also has a sort of mini-mini-post mortem – including a YouTube video of the game.

Get it from the entry page.

For some reason I have had trouble sleeping for 2-3 past nights. So I was pretty tired even when the compo started, which kept being a problem for the whole compo.

After first day I stopped working quite early and tried to get some sleep, but still just couldn’t until some hours passed by. Well, I did get up for a little while and tweaked some stuff before trying again. For the second day I were still tired and although I liked the theme and had lots of further ideas for my entry, I was too tired to work on it. Both days I just stopped working for quite a few times and tried to take a quick nap.

Still I’m glad I made and finished at least some kind of an entry, although I feel the gameplay is lacking.