Hey peeps and thanks for all the lovely comments you made on DiggyDig so far!

First I want to explain a couple of things here as reply of some of the comments:

I apologize that it is so crash prone, again. My engine is not very stable and i experiment a lot with it. I try to improve that while i work on it, but it is quite difficult to get it to work properly on different machines with all the different hardware configurations. In that respect, ludumdare is the only wide scale test i have available right now, so i am using your feedback to improve this piece of software so it will eventually end up working alright. LD 21 was already a great help there! Thanks for all your input on it.

Thanks for the praise on the game mechanics. It is certainly not unique, but rather borrowed from minecraft/terraria and taken to a slightly different direction. Getting the mechanics work properly actually took most of the time, so i only had a couple of hours left to create the content, which you can observe in the timelapse.

The limited amount of time, i think i had around 6 hours left, is of course the cause for the lack of game depth, versatility, actual content, and everything else basically.

The physics are very hackish. I never coded collision with rastered terrain before, so i am happy that it works as well as it does.

Post Mortem

What went right:

• I got the mechanics and gameplay to the degree i wanted to. I was not expecting to make a stellar entry either, instead i just wanted to fiddle around with this idea.
• Although loading times are terrible, i was able to get a quite big world created from a number of bitmaps. This was actually an important proof of concept, as i plan to use this technique to improve on the concept.
• The music was quickly hacked into like an hour before the deadline. It is not too shabby, so i’m fine with it.
• The overall appearance is not over the top, but okay. It could certainly use more polish but you can see what it is supposed to be.
• I had awesome food.

What went wrong:

• I couldn’t fall asleep on thursday, therefore overslept on friday, and was screwing up my sleeping rhythm just before LD.
• The theme. I was raging all night after the anouncement, and the day after about this ludicrous theme. I was thinking about making a game actually fitting the theme, before i realized it is just too generic to actually make a game of it. Same as Escape was, but this is getting offtopic. Anyways, only got started with the actual project some time saturday afternoon, so i wasted a lot of time actually not working.
• I spent too much time on the tech side of the game. It was not so bad this time because i was trying to get something done i planned to do anyways at some point, but i really  should get more gameplay done next time.

Aftermath

I will use the next month to play with this prototype.

I will :

• add dynamic lighting and normal maps to create a denser atmosphere.
• create a 2d Ragdoll animation thingy for teh awesome moves like i already started with as you can see in this basic proof of concept:

• add different kinds of terrain materials, and an actuall surface
• add physics (actual 2d physics) for bridges, elevators, traps, and more
• if the january is still not over by then, I will start experimenting with smooth particle hydrodynamics, or an approximation thereof in an attempt to add realistic 2d liquid simulations. I am not sure how well this will perform, but man, that would be wicked to have

I am not sure in what direction i will take this to be honest. This has an aweful lot in common with terraria, which i don’t like. Don’t get me wrong, i love terraria, but i don’t want to basically remake it. So i will just keep working on this and see what i can make of it. While i have a few hints, i am not fully certain about it.

Thanks for reading, and all your precious feedback!

with love

wzl

After getting to bed a short while after the theme was announced i thought about some ideas. Alone,…alone… isn’t almost every protagonist in a game alone? What makes the game themed alone? locked up in a cell? I dont know. I’ll just go with my gut instincts. Although the idea i had is probably not feasable in the given time frame.

However, getting up at 9:30 and…

Too tired, gotta . reach . hat

…making breakfast…

nom nom for more coding power

and after a cup of coffee i’m ready to go.

I will mostly listen to some web streaming, di.fm liquid if the playlist is awesome, and the soundtracks from the humble bundle.

If you’re interested in following my progress, you can do so at wzl.3ln.eu (we’re fucking 3ln!).
It is a kind-of-live stream with 0.3 fps, but fullHD %)

After Feasting at my parents place

Nom nom nom

I finished preparation on my work place and everything else:

wooooooooooooooah

Also HATS, because HATS. And i hide a kitten beneath it.

Awesome weekend is Awesome!
[+1 Kitten]

I just had to do this

for kittens

nyaaa

:3

As the Compo seems to be getting increasingly more attention and entries, the voting process is getting longer and more difficult to manage.

How are you supposed to vote, or which game are you supposed to vote? Usually, with this amount of games you’d look for screenshots or names that catch your attention. But not everyone has decent graphics or is creative when giving his baby a name, that doesn’t make their games any less play-worthy.

We were briefly discussing this on irc, and i came up with the idea of batch-voting for the entries, in a similar fashion as the theme votes are being made. Every hour a list gets accumulated by games that 1. have not been voted for by you yet, 2. a good amount of games which didn’t receive that much attention 3. a number of games taken randomly from the remaining.
you will only be able to vote games from within that batch(this is only true for the voting list you can request, so you still can vote others when following direct links to the submission page), and to get the next batch you’ll have to wait for the refresh.
This will also ensure that people will be able to spend more than a minute playing your game, before throw it out of the window just to quickly get their hands on the next, because they have to wait anyways, they might just aswell spend it playing your game.

If you’re a diligent voter, you could *unlock* a view-all- entry list when voted 25% of the entries.

This is just a quick idea to get more fairness in the voting progress of such a huge submission pool.

You guys have any other ideas or suggestions?

I’ll be using my own framework again, including jitter physics and ac.al audio lib.

I made some improvements on the appearance of Into Beyond, let me know what you think

I signed up for 8bit funding, and today Into Beyond got approved and i put it live.

If you don’t know what the hell Into Beyond is you can check my past Journal Entries or watch the videos on my Youtube Channel.

So if you like Shoot’em ups, exploration, space, rock, aliens, planets, stars, moons, asteroids, guns, lasers and all that stuff, hop over to http://8bitfunding.com/project_details.php?p_id=257 and spread the word <3

As always, updates will be posted on my blog at

http://redwatergames.blogspot.com

Thanks and love <3

wzl