First I would like to say thanks to all who commented on my game, I will make sure to consider your comments when making my next game. So I guess some things I should do for next time are:

• Bigger game window size, perhaps twice the size
• Make the game have more puzzles
• Stronger plot

Finished my entry for the LD#15. It’s a pity I didn’t have enough time to include all the features (enemies, power-up’s, lots of blood, stalactites…) I thought at the design stage, but at least it is playable. I think I might continue the development, though.

I’ve had lots of fun! This was my first LD and I’m really satisfied. See you in the next one!

Title screen

The Evil Dark Cavern Which Leads Straight To Hell

So far, I have what appears to be a working game. I only have one level, but they are hard to make. Essentially it’s about a Leprechaun who get’s captured and must escape.

Celtic Cavern

I spent a hunk of time today hacking myself up a proper library and deciding on what I’ll be using for LD #15, should I not wuss out at the last moment.

I am leaning towards things which I have used for the longest, this is to reduce the amount of figuring-out I have to do.

As tempting as it is to use python/pygame/macos, I have one half the experience with that, so it is best to stick to ancient and familiar technology, despite its limitations.

To implement:

• C/C++, sloppy and mixed. The way I like it!
• 2d vector graphics where possible, otherwise rotated/scaled sprites.
• Win32 (though, I would like to have it compile/run on MacOS as well. This shouldn’t be a huge problem.)

Libraries:

• SDL (sound, graphics, and input)
• OpenGL (strictly 2D and orthographic, unless I drink too many trappists and decide otherwise)
• mmgr.cpp/mmgr.h by Paul Nettle
• vector2d and related math templates by Bill Perone (I can’t seem to find a link right now!)
• MT19937 Mersenne Twister random number generator

To create:

• Photoshop for Graphics
• SFXR for Sound
• SciTE for Text
• Visual C++ 6.0 for Code
• SVN for revision control / backup

To eat:

• Water
• Trappist Beer
• Cola
• Food with nutritional content yet to be determined

Random thoughts:

I have a feeling I may regret my choice to use a gamepad/keyboard for input. But for now I will.

• Con: Mouse games have a lot of instant-appeal. Easier to get interaction “feeling right”
• Pro: Keyboard/gamepad is oldschool and works on consoles.
• Pro: Leaning back in a chair with a gamepad is more relaxing then hunching over a mouse.

I can do sound. SFXR is freaking cool. I spent a few minutes playing with it today and fell in love. This saves me from making corny sound effects into a microphone during the last minutes of the compo! Thank you DrPetter

All of the libraries, save for my starting template are freely available online. None of them resemble a game library / engine, so they are squeaky clean.

At some point I will post my starting source up for anyone interested. Hopefully there is something useful in there to be pilliaged by others during this compo, or future projects.

I’m curious to see what other people are using, or who else is using a similar (fairly heavyweight, rusty, and old) setup.

Like a few other here, this’ll be my first LD. I’ll be using Construct for the creation of the binary if my concept ends up being 2D. For 3D, I have a variety of technologies I’d like to explore.

The first is Dage. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days now, and even though the odds of me getting to make a 3D adventure game are hard, I’d certainly embrace the chance to use my recent experience.

I’m also not above Unity, if the trial is viable.

No matter what I use to assemble the game, though, I’ll be using Blender, Photoshop, and Notepad++ for the majority of modeling, texturing/art, and writing, respectively. I know that I’m a bad egg and should use GIMP–but, hey, I like Photoshop’s interface better. If I wind up with Dage, I’ll also have to use Max in my pipeline, another evil, commercial program.

As far as my experience in other areas, I’ve tried a few compos, followed more than a few, but never made a real entry. I’m determined to sneak one into this LD. I’m pretty experienced with Construct, Blender, and Photoshop, and I’m just learning other techs like Unity and Dage. I grasp programming concepts pretty well (Event Sheets in Construct come almost naturally to me), but I fail pretty hard at actual programming (even XNA is beyond me). I like it that way. I like that in this modern day and age, there’s a bunch of technologies (Construct, MMF, AGS, Wintermute) that allow you to script an entire game without programming it. I like that many things are set up for you, and I like WYSIWYG. There’s nothing wrong with WYSIWYG in my book–if you can create something totally awesome, it doesn’t matter by what means.

Anyway, that’s me. Sorry for being wordy. I can’t wait to participate, honestly. I’m sure I’ll be dreading my decision in about 144 hours.

As the end of day one approaches dauntingly, I’m getting progressively more hopeful that I might have something to show by the end. Saying that, I have very little to show-off at the moment, as there is absolutely no finese to anything I’ve been working on – it’s all just a jumble of quads in various sizes and colours. FUN!

It took me ages to come up with a decent idea (I wasn’t particularly pleased with the ‘roads’ selection) but I’ve managed to cobble together some sort of LittleBigPlanet -vs- Tetris rehash. It’s very hard to explain, but suffice to say I’ve spent a lot of this evening getting Cars and Helicopters working to a decent degree. I’ll start doing some more regular posts over the course of tomorrow (this should be a good-time for time-lapse work shots!). Here’s what my project current looks like, go on. Laugh.

Anyway, my iPod is in the red (battery wise) – so when it dies, I’ll goto bed! Best of luck to those Brits/Europeans out there still working!

Defend the castle!
Click with the mouse to build a tower. Ctrl-Click to build a casino.

Download CrossPlatform 2.6Mb

Need Flash 9 installed

I felt like I picked up some speed, here is something remotely playable: http://enedahl.com/ld12/incomingfodder01.html

Going to bed now. Oh, the music is just a placeholder, a demo .mod file.

Im going for a Tower Defence with resource and upgrade trees.

Title screen working, and filling the screen with towers works also.

I’ve found out that level mode is troublesome on Vista system. Running my game in a browser solved that problem. However, performance goes down a lot in the browser. To get decent framerate shrink the browser window until it feels good. Here is the game

http://enedahl.com/ld11/final/exxon.swf
Same as the exe but online.

You are on a mission, decontaminate that oil! Instructions are in game. The name Exxon comes from a oils spill disaster in the USA.

Download in following flavours:

Flash 0.2MB – Requires Flash 9 installed
Windows Executable 1.5MB
Macintosh Executable 3.9MB

Running the game in a browser is possible, but cripples the framerate. I recommend running the executables or running the swf in flash player 9 not in a browser.

Edit:

There are two modes: Level mode and Free mode. Click: “Click to play” for level mode. And 600,1200 or 2400 for Free mode, where the numbers are how many oil spills there are. Note, if you by any chance run the game in the browser, the Level mode might not work and falls back to Free mode 600. If you see a lot of (N)’s around, you are in free mode. Go back (Esc) and click “Click to play” again for Level mode. (Xml loading issue)

Edit2: Those on Vista could not run the game in level mode. It turns out that running it in a browser worked. http://enedahl.com/ld11/final/exxon.swf
Same as the exe but online, will hurt perfomance though… keep the window small for better fps.

Ahhh that coffee was great!

Islands are temporary up, No collision responses yet and uglyishly(I made up that word just now), randomly placed. I made all islands fit a circle, to simplify the collisions a lot, fits the theme as well. I’m gonna put the islands in a separate sector manager. Next is collisions and neatly placed islands.

Closing the gap!

Ta da! The oil is gone! It’s magic!

Want to test download the exe (windows) or run the swf, although the swf is slower. Arrow keys to drive, space to deploy buoys.

That’s all for day one. I’m going to bed. (00:13)

Crazy buoys flying all over the place. I got them under control now though. Next step is to close the buoy divider and get points for decontaminated oil spills.

Hotdogs! Yeah, I forgot to buy the bread. Toast it is. Works.

Great, I had a tough bug haunting me for some time. When it finally was fixed I got the game up to speed. I can have 2000 oil spills at good framerate in flash on my laptop 2ghz centrino. Thanks to some dynamic sectoring.

Next up is to wrap the oil spills by dividers that will be dragged by the boat. And then some islands.

A sketch of the title screen.

This will be a 2d topdown boat game in flash. Isolate oil spills with dividers. All graphics and sound are kept minimalistic and simple. If stuff goes quick and I have a playable semicomplete game today I will try make it multiplayer.

The name Exxon comes from a oils spill disaster in the USA.

Finally I’ve ported it away from XNA to OpenGL, still got the (almost) same lousy controls, for your pleasure. Still needs .Net 2.0 to be installed though, but should be compatible with Mono, and thus playable on Linux. If someone like to try to compile it on Linux, contact me. Some things have been tweaked and added. But the game play is the same. Added ugly clouds for better sense of height movement. Updated the physics lib to the newest version.

Arrows: (over) steer

Z: Claw claw claw!

X: TURRRRRRBO

Space: Reset heli position

R: Reset level

N: Next level

Download now! 441KB Now with dependencies included!

A helicopter physics game, made with XNA 2.0 beta.

You will need a pile of shit to get this to work, here it is:

1. .Net 2.0 SP1 (we are currently uncertain if it ships with Vista)
   • Note you can also use the original .Net 2.0 but you will also have to install the C++2005 SP1 Redist (G4WL will also install this, so this is only needed if you are not also installing that redist)
2. DirectX9.0c
3. XNA runtime 2.0

I’ve had ppl not being able to run the game anyways, Im looking into the problem. Pls tell me if it works for you.

Anyways I hurried with the levels, Yay it was fun to make them I hope to release a map pack soon. Unfortunaly the editor is built within director, so I will have to work on it a bit to enable the community to build their own maps, unless you got director. All sound was made with DrPetters godlike sound effect app, sfxr. Kudos to him!

Game goals: make the red box be within the red rectangle for 3 seconds to go to next level.

Controls: (Xbox360 controller should work, not tested, buttons? test them!)
Arrows <- -> Steer

ArrowUp/Down throttle

Z – Open/Close the CLAW!

X- Turbo (For making panic manouvres)

R – Reset level (Yeah this key you will know by heart)

N – n00b?

Here is bin 440KB

And here is source + editor + bin + other useless stuff 3MB

Right. Didn’t get any game done this time, but I give you a fabulous non-entry called Evening Journey.

Download Evening Journey. It’s for Windows and comes with source.

How to ‘play’
Get ship (red beacon) to the jump gate (strip of green/yellow dots). You can add a thrust with right mouse button. There’s a time line at the bottom where you can select what state to do an action in (only action is the thrust). There’s infinite random levels.

What would have existed
A challenge.
Pickups.
More kinds of actions.
Actions limited by pickups.
Increasing difficulty on levels.
Levels connected so you can go back to previous level and get different pickups.

Stay tuned for post mortem tomorrow.

Yay! I have a working editor! Im using director and layout out sprites and rect at positions and various sizes.

And here is an ingame view of the map, after a little playing

I had some framerate issues, was only stuff intersecting at load (Phew)

Farseer physics lib woun’t play nice with my polygon collision meshes. I think I will have to redo them as primitives instead. Thus changing the chain-claw thing I had in mind, and perhaps make heli bowling? Man, I made my dev pipeline so awesome! Created paths in photoshop to define the collision mesh. Read the ai file with the object, all was swell.

Those pins just fall by them selvs, thats an easy win. Anyhow, Im off to bed, tomorrow I will be away a few hours on dinner. Yeah, I’ll bring my laptop!

Camera and sidescrolling implemented (not wrapping yet though)

Oh and I made a tripod, a bit small. Fixed the controls a bit by cheating. turning left n right adds forces in those directions not only changes the upforce. Up n down still needs tweeking.

The physics seems a bit unstable, (stuff act strange) I’m not sure my idea with chaingrapplings will work, perhaps I should revise the idea a bit.

I finally got a working claw on my heli! Yay!

The controls are really hard though. Its like… controlling a 1ton heli with a keyboard from remote that has a 1-2 sec response time. I guess I’ll have to fake it a bit.

Finally I have the Farseer physics lib working and showing the geometry of the collision objects.

Now I’ll have lunch and then play with some physics