I decided at the last minute that I wanted to try my hand at straight LWJGL and 3D (which I have never done before).  This was probably a mistake.  Normally I have Slick2D to help with the heavy lifting.

So after three hours of fiddling with OpenGL settings, I finally have TTF text on the screen as well as a first person camera.  Woo!

Results:

The font (Fifteen Okay) is a freeware font I found online.   I hope we aren’t expected to make our own fonts from scratch.

I’ll give this the old college try, even though I won’t have much time to work on it.

Platform

Java

Supporting libraries

Slick2D, LWJGL, XStream

Software

Eclipse IDE, Gimp, Sound recorder, sfxr

Battle Station

My last update before submissions are due.

Working tile map

This is my tile map that I got working last night.  I can create new levels in TilED and easily import them into my game.

Collision boxes

About 20 minutes ago I got the collision box generation working.  You can sort of see how my tile graphics are designed in this shot.

I obviously won’t have a working game done in the next 35 minutes, but it was a valiant effort I believe.  What was missing before I would consider this a game:

• Collision detection and response.
• Enemies with some basic pathfinding / AI.
• The main gameplay element: mind controlling the enemy.

Let me do a re-cap on what went right and what didn’t go according to plan:

• The Spartan framework along with Slick2D was great for getting a jump start on the simple stuff.  In a few hours I had a game shell with splash screen, moving player, camera focus, and mouse rotation.
• TilED was great for designing levels.  I had a basic arena map done in a matter of minutes.
• GraphicsGale saved me when GIMP was repeatedly crashing.
• I hadn’t thoroughly used the Spartan framework, so I was unsure how to go about creating new modules for game Entities (Actors).  When it came time to add enemies and pathfinding, I was completely stumped.
• I hadn’t ever used Slick2d’s TilED loader before.  It took me some time to figure out how to use and manipulate the tile map once I had it in my game.
• I hadn’t ever drawn tileset graphics before.  I wasted a bunch of time drawing and redrawing tile graphics to get something usable.  Also GIMP crashed on me quite a few times, ruining my work.

The moral of the story seems to be: know your tools and libraries.  Much time could have been saved if I didn’t need to fumble around with the tool or dig through the API docs.

Maybe next time I will put together something playable!

So, 21 hours into LD18 and here is what I have to show for it:

Who ever said Java had poor framerates?

It may not look like much, but that is the start of a game.

I have functioning:

• Sprite sheets and animations.
• Action system and input bindings for actions.  This also ties to the animation system.
• Attaching/removing actions for objects.  This lets me switch controls to different objects when the player mind controls an enemy.
• Camera follow attachment.  This lets me focus the camera on any object.
• Mouse aim / character rotation.

Major things left to do:

• Tile map loading.
• Collision detection.
• Enemy AI.

Hopefully I can get something playable in the next 12 hours.

I’ve been brainstorming ideas for the first 3.5 hours.  I decided to go with Idea #3 (Mind Control).

Basic game will be a top-down arena shooter.  Player can mind control one nearby enemy at a time, but the catch is that the player can’t move while doing mind control.  Will hopefully make for some interesting hit-and-run gameplay.

Hey all.  Long time lurker here.  This will be my first official entry into the Ludum Dare compo.

Some tools I will be bringing with me on this journey:

Language:

• Java + Web Start
• XML for configurations (hopefully)

IDE:

• Eclipse

Framework:

• Slick2D/LWJGL
• Spartan Framework

Graphics:

• The GIMP

Audio:

• The ever classic sfxr
• Audacity
• ModPlug Tracker (if I have time to make music)

Timelapse:

• CamStudio with DivX output

Version Control:

• A local Git repository

Battle Station: