I submitted Maze++. I’m quite pleased with it. I’m pretty tired.

Trying to avoid producing something the same old maze escape game while writing a maze escape game may not have been a good move, but I’ll wait for comments. If I’m lucky the extra features will keep this game interesting, despite it needing more work.

I had a complete failure of confidence yesterday evening, so I’ve decided to change my idea completely, as I really don’t have the motivation to keep working on this one. I’ve decided to make a simpler game instead, as I’m now short on time. I’ll adapt my current engine to run a maze escape game instead of a platformer.

To avoid making an unoriginal, boring “Escape this Maze” game, I’ll add some extra features, like buttons, doors, TNT, destructible levels, and so on.

I’ve updated my live build, which is here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16895250/ld21/build.swf

I’ve made good progress, I started with a fun idea, and Flixel is great for 2d platformers!

My idea: you, the essence of pure evil, have been put in a normal prison by the rather dim-witted forces of good. While the prison guards are mere men, they have been given a good supply of silver bullets!

All you have is an evil toolkit, which will probably contain dynamite and a collapsible rocket launcher, which you will have to use to fight your way past prison guards, machinegun towers and helicopter gunships.

So far I have a system to load levels from bitmaps, scrolling, a character with basic physics and wall jump.

Live build: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16895250/ld21/build.swf

I’m pretty sure I’ll be in for LD21, so here is the full set of tools I expect to use:

Geany [IDE]

MXMLC/Flex framework [compiler]

Flixel [library]

SFXR/BFXR [SFX synth]

GIMP [photoshop-like]

Inkscape [vector]

Audacity [sound encoding, editor]

Blender 3D [3D graphics, FX, modelling]

and I might even try and do music:

Seq24 [sequencer]

Qsynth [midi synth]

I’m also hoping my main development PC will be back up by then, the system disk and GPU failed about a month ago, but I should get replacements in a few days, so with luck and the Ubuntu install disk, I’ll have a proper PC instead of a netbook for this one

Starting to get excited, and it’s great seeing all these others joining in. I’ll probably be keeping an eye on Notch’s live stream again

In the last few days, after doing Mini LD #28, I’ve changed my mind about which tools I want to use for Flash development.

For a long time I’ve been using the open source HaXe compiler to build Flash 9/10 swf’s, but I ran into some show-stoppers with it. The biggest is that I can find no sane way of making a preloader work with external API’s (Kongregate, Mochi, etc.), and some other lesser issues with compatibility. This isn’t a big problem for LD, but for anything I want to publish it’s a huge problem.

The best solution is a change of compiler, and main library. As far as I can tell, the best alternative (for Linux, and my code style) is the Flex framework with Adobe’s mxmlc compiler. While it’s slower and not completely open source, it should get round most of the big problems, while still running on Linux and not needing a specific IDE.

At the same time, I’m also starting to use Flixel, because it provides neat ways to do most of the tedious work for me (I hope that’s not cheating ).

The first test will be if I can re-write my Mini LD entry using the new kit. So far I have an almost working core, with stats, players, SFX and AI.

Current public build: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16895250/flixel_sea/build.swf