No need for another screen, it would look almost identical to the last.  But big big progress.  It’s almost entirely done, and I’m quitting for the night.  Now, you can walk around in the world, pick up and drop items, and create new rooms.  The new rooms even include riddles and the use of items, and new items in them.  Riddles and using items are not implemented, but the presence of new items is.  The remaining stuff is probably an hour’s work.  Then clean up, polish, security enhancements (the big issue with doing a webgame as opposed to a single player one!), and it’s all done.  That’s going to be the best part – seeing people stuff it full of new rooms and insanity.  This is a really simple project, but it’s going to be a fun one!

Yah, so I might not have a game, but diving into the wild world of OpenGL all the same!! Look at my peachy fire effect:

Oh yes, I’ve finally reached the spot where screenshots make any sense. Huzzah! To celebrate, here’s a screenshot:

As you might see, the goal of the game is to catch the dropping cows, and bounce them out towards the water. You press the 1 to 5 keys to select which slot is bouncy. Next up is probably to implement some fancy scoring system with combos and whatnot, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, because it’s sleeping time.

Well, end of day 1 and I’ve quite a lot done but not as much as I had hoped. I have a game that allows the player to fly around a psychedelic tube controlled by the mouse and bounce off the walls. Currently, there is nothing else to do which is the next thing that I need to deal with.

The basic premiss is that you have having the weirdest day of your life. You’d just got a job at a research lab as an ‘Inventory Controller’, half way through the tour you were cold-clocked and when you woke up you found out that the ‘inventory’ you are to control is in the labs Synchrotron and consists of exotic elementary particles that they need shunted in to different storage rings.

Not the best match for the theme I’ll admit, but I thought that it was a really weird idea for a game so…

So we are halfway through the event, but I dont think I’m halfway through what I need to do. with any luck though I should have something that at least remotely relates to the theme. and if not at least I’ll have some pretty looking pixels for ya

Here is what my game looks like right now. Some fractal trees, some guys and a ladder. You can knock the head off the other guy with a spear if you like. Oh, and by the way, it’s just a coincidence that he is looking happy. He actually is terrified.

I’m not sure how this happened, but we seem to have managed to democratically voted in a theme which is unanimously hated. Last night, after about an hour of developing and throwing away bad ideas (too much content, dead boring, and lame, respectively) I finally came up with what I’m now going with.

I came to this idea through a roudabout manner, but what it really boils down to is asteroids. One difference, though, is that the asteroids have behaviour. Instead of simply coming apart when hit, the asteroids react in a (surprising!) manner. Some retaliate, some just act silly, and some in turn shoot at the other asteroids. You don’t know which is which until you try shooting at them, so you’ve got to be careful!

Of course, now for the long part, implementation. So far I’ve progressed to the point where I can move around and shoot:

I hope I’ll have time to finish, I’m going out for dinner tonight and tomorrow my family is eating out to celebrate my birthday (which, strangely enough, is today).

This theme was horrible to think up ideas for, I mean, games usually rely on the player expecting what happens. However, I did write a small platformer with just one level which tries to incorporate this idea of having something unexpected happen, so that the player then has to think up a way around.

I’m not sure i’ll continue working on it, as i’m not terribly excited about the game idea. Meh.

It requires .NET2.0, XNA 2.0, shader 1.1 and updated DirectX dll’s ( )

Try it here

So here it is, what I’ve been working a bit on. Only spent about 2 1/2 hours of actual coding, art, and planning on this one. Will hopefully have collision-detected objects, jumps that launch you way into the air, and a timer & map at the bottom


Woot 1970 Cutlass Extreme!

Well, I spent day 1 playing WoW, watching TV, and trying to come up with an idea with no success.  Now it’s day 2, and things are coming along really smoothly:

There’s more functionality done than you can see in the shot.  You can move around the (two-room at the moment) maze.  If there were items, you could use them, drop them, and combine them, but not pick them up yet.  So as you can see, there are doors leading off into space.  If you go that way, you actually stay in the room you’re in, but an edit section will pop up on the screen for the room you tried to enter.  I haven’t done that yet, but you’ll be able to make your own description and layout there.  Then that place is marked “pending” as it’s emailed to me for verification (to check for language and such).  Pending areas can’t be built in or entered, and there’s a “nifty” graphic indicating them.

This is going to be a sight to see!  I can see great potential for impassable situations, but that’s all theoretical right now.  If I didn’t include items and just had riddles, we’d be good, except for one thing – I just know shortly after startup, we’ll end up in a state where all possible paths are blocked off.  But I can always manually throw in doors if that happens.  I could just verify that there is always at least one door leading into the void, but that’d be a very heavy database churn to do.

I finally have an idea of a game. And not only that, I have an intro for the game ready. So now I just need to make the game!

The idea is that you should drown cows. They come flying in from one side of the screen, and you must catch them, and make them bounce into the other side where there’s water. Otherwise the cows will die as they hit the ground, and we don’t want that, now do we?

The intro is a bit weird as to fit the game and the theme well. You can try it, but maybe it’d be better to wait for the rest of the game, too, so you can enjoy it all together. Here’s an image of it to inspect while you wait:

Version 0.2 source code is available here:

http://pymike93.googlepages.com/IOB-0.2-src.zip

Here’s a screenshot of the boss:

Here’s the first source release of “Invasion of the Blobs”:

http://pymike93.googlepages.com/IOB-0.1-src.zip

Here’s a look at my new menu:

Here are all the things I can remember of the million I considered for this ridiculous theme (Weird/Unexpected/Surprise):

- Plan a surprise party. The challenge is getting it all done and everyone hidden before the victim returns from being kept out

- Whack-a-mole variations. One of them a surprise party one (wife’s idea): Kids you have to keep whacking into place so they aren’t visible when the surprisee arrives, as they constantly fidget and want to get up.

- A mountain goat hopping around on a mountain, trying to scare birds. No, I don’t know why. I just thought controlling a mountain goat that hops around would be fun.

- A stealth game where your goal is to sneak up on people and give them presents or some other surprise. I realized after a moment that this is that one Burger King game.

- A web version of Scattergories. You’re given a letter and a topic (“Actors that start with A”). You can enter 5 things that fit, and you get points for each one you pick that nobody else did. See how that fits the theme? It’s quite clever. The real challenge here is incorporating peer review so that you can’t just enter “GHJDKHS” and win.

Anyway, I have settled on a web game, sort of similar to Andy Schatz’s conversation game. It’s a text adventure where you roam around a maze, and when you get to an empty room, you can add your own on. That will undoubtedly result in weird, unexpected surprises. Each room can contain a riddle to open one of its doors, the content of which is entirely up to the room builder.

Obviously, verifying the appropriateness of submissions will be a high priority.

Well, I was rather disappointed with the theme, but I managed to get a game going. It’s called “Invasion of the Blobs”. Earth is taken by “surprise” when a mass of “weird” blobs have been spotted by a high-range space satellite orbiting Earth, and “unexpectedly” a top-secret spaceship fighter is deployed to take them out.
Screenshot is below. Enjoy!

While trying to think of a decent game to make for the Weird/Unexpected/Surprise theme (a theme I had voted for, but never expected to win, so I never thought about any real game ideas before start), I sat down at wrote Banana Ship.

It’s not meant to be a real entry, but yet follows the theme quite well. If anything, it lacks in that it’s not much of a game, you just have to figure out what to do, and it’s not much of that either. It’s more like a short story, really, but you might enjoy it for a minute or so before it ends.

You materialize out of nowhere, and have no idea who you
are, or what you are expected to do.    

You are wearing a pink sheet cut into a really ugly robe.  

All around you are filled with nothingness, except for a
small, yellow banana, floating in the air right in front
of you.  

>

Ok! I’m here. I’m ready. I made it.

My goal for this weekend isn’t so much to build a game, but to do a Lua implementation. I powered through the literature and some articles earlier in the week, so I know what I want to do with it (object specialization scripting and an experiment with cut-scene scripting). And if I’m lucky, my test scripts might turn in to a mini game, for the compo.

Fun fun!

Only around 24 hours to go before the warm-up, so now is a good time to know that the blog works.

Everyone ready?

I hope the theme is moon mice.

Nooo! How dare you be Wednesday already Time! I’m not ready yet! Noooo!

It’s all your fault Time! Blamed is you!