Previous post: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/21/morgawr-pointnclick-update-4/

Huya! A new day, a new morning and.. new content for my game.

I woke up early this morning (4am) and started working on adding content and puzzles to my game. With the engine finished and everything, I’m really surprise at how fast I can develop new content and rooms. Currently I have planned 22 rooms + final scene, so far I’m at 7 room finished already. The rest shouldn’t be too hard either, then I can dedicate my time into a (maybe) better soundtrack and polishing the details.

I have a very good screenshot of the final scene but I don’t really want to spoil anyone (because I think the surprise effect is really worth it), however you can have this in-game screenshot of room4 (The cave):

This is really creepy, I HOPE this thing doesn't try to eat me... *wink wink*

Previous post: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/21/morgawr-pointnclick-update-3/

After a full day of development, I think it’s time to go to sleep! It’s been a long day, fun and interesting. I met my good share of problems and eventually solved them all. I was able to iron out all the bugs in my code and now I’m just writing Lua scripts and drawing images for the game. I don’t even have to recompile anymore.

I’ll be brief, as I’m really sleepy, however I will drop a couple more screenshots:

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

Screenshot 3

Good night Ludum Dare! See you tomorrow morning!

Previous entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/21/morgawr-point-n-click-update-2/

And here I am… I was able to implement all the features I needed in my engine, I’m quite happy about it. Obviously the code is a mess and it’s a huge clusterfuck, however it works and I can’t really nitpick about code design and practices. It will have to do.

I spent the last hour fixing minor bugs and glitches (I know I should be working on CONTENT instead of polishing the code, but I’m a programmer at heart, it just bothers me that my code doesn’t run like I want it to). So far I ironed out all the bugs except one, a very annoying bug that prevents the inventory/dialogue windows to popup for whatever arcane and mystical reason. It happens at the beginning of the game, sometimes… I will have to fix it before release, but so far it can stay.

I successfully implemented the item combination and chaining of events using Lua structures, it’s really amazing. I hadn’t even finished half of the engine code and yet the Lua engine behind it was able to move me forward one room (which promptly crashed cause the room didn’t exist yet). This is exactly what I wanted to achieve, so far I shouldn’t be worry about the code itself any longer (except for polishing and bugs) and I can focus on content creation.

I was also able to record two songs in the soundtrack.. the intro song and the ambient song (during the game). They aren’t amazing because this old ass computer (from 2003) has a very bad integrated audio card and 2GB of RAM doesn’t cut it anymore. However they are something. You can be the judge!

Intro song: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24348553/LD/Intro.mp3

Ambient song: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24348553/LD/Inside.mp3

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/qZVah.png (not much has changed, there are just two keys, which you combine to open the door, and there’s an introductory dialog message)

Cheers!

Previous entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/20/morgawr-point-n-click-update-1/

New update for the point’n'click game.

I have the whole story in my head but I don’t want to disclose anything yet, just in case I change my mind, or even for a simple surprise factor. I’ve finished setting up the base engine, working inventory, picking up items and all that stuff. Entities in the game communicate by throwing messages to each other using Lua (and Angel-Engine), so after I complete the base engine and all the content (images) it should be really easy to rig together based on a simple cause->consequence reaction.

What I’m missing so far:

•  Combining different objects together
• Using objects on other objects
• polish, lot of polish!
• game art
• puzzles
• music

After all of this is done, I would call the game complete. So far I’m mostly worried about point 1 and 2, but again, it shouldn’t be too hard to set up. I’m using recursive structures for data definition in Lua. Pretty neat stuff.

Here’s a screenshot of the “first” room in the game, a simple “unlock the door with the key” challenge. Art is temporary, depending on the time left after I finish the game I may come back and polish it a lot more (I hope so).

Screenshot

(old post: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/20/morgawr-point-n-click-first-ludum-dare-game-ever/ )

And here we are! Roughly 3 hours and a half have passed (maybe 4 after I submit this post) and I’m going at a steady pace…

Thanks to the underlying engine it’s pretty easy to add new content, it just takes some time cause it’s C++ (and I’m not a C++ programmer, I’m using this as an experience to learn). Here’s what I did so far:

First of all, I started with designing the level structure of the game. It’ll be a sequence of rooms (like most escape-the-room games) and I had to code them down to .lua files. After I got that to work (it took me a long time because Lua wasn’t really happy and kept giving me problems.. after 1 hour I realized I forgot a comma and it kept giving me syntax errors… damn) I implemented item placement in the world. A small screwdriver image (it’s non-allowed content, I made it prior to the competition but I’m going to swap it out with real graphics after the game works) at the center of the screen.

Tweaking here and there in the code, I then moved on to implement a simple icon (your usual Examine/Pickup/Use icon) to follow the mouse cursor while in game. This was much easier than I expected and in 10-20 minutes it was all up and running.

Now I’m currently working on events with mouse clicks on the screen, operating on items in game and in the player’s inventory. Ironically enough, one of the hardest challenges so far is figuring my way through GlCoords. AngelEngine uses world coordinates instead of screen coordinates and when placing items on the screen (especially when retrieving their coords) it can be a pain in the ass.

Anyhow, here’s two screenshots! The first one shows the screwdriver on screen and the Examine icon following my mouse (cursor doesn’t appear in screenshot), second one shows an interactable dialog screen drawn on top of the game. (linking the screenshots cause wordpress stretches them and I’m too lazy to find a way to make them look good)

Screenshot 1    Screenshot 2

Hello everyone!

This is my very first time participating in a LD event, so I don’t know how well it will go. I just hope to have enough fun and deliver an acceptable game by the end of the week-end.

I don’t yet know (by the time I write this post) what the theme announced will be, however I plan to work on a point and click adventure game. I will adapt it as I see fit for the theme itself. Due to real life misfortune I am left with a very old computer (from 2003) with very low specs running Linux, so I don’t know if I will be able to port the game to Windows in time (I might try borrowing a windows laptop just for the porting), so yeah.. this will be a 100% Linux game.

The game itself will be developed in C++ and Lua, I’ll be using a game engine called Angel-Engine (a really amazing engine for quick development/prototyping of 2D games, you should check it out) freely available (under BSD license) here http://code.google.com/p/angel-engine/ . I will also be using a boilerplate/library I’ve been working on for the last few weeks, it’s a library for point ‘n’ click (and visual novels/interactive stories) game development based on Angel-Engine. The code is freely available (I have not yet decided on the licensing but it’s either GPL or BSD so no big deal) at my github: https://github.com/Morgawr/Virtual-Click

The Virtual-Click engine isn’t finished yet, of course, so I will take the chance and see if I can get it to a finished/workable state during the Ludum Dare itself. It’s going to be a fun challenge.

I’ll be updating this post, as the LD compo continues, with screenshots, opinions, reflections and I’ll be listening to your comments and critiques to help me polish and develop a fun and entertaining video game. After this is over, I’ll try and stick together a small timelapse video: I’m going to capture a screenshot every 10 seconds using a small C program (using scrot) during the whole duration of the LD.

Thanks for reading this, hope it will be an interesting competition!

Cheers!

Morg.