My game is done and submitted!  The last hours were hectic, both in terms of trying to finish the game and because I had some stuff going on in “real life” of great urgency… so unfortunately I wasn’t able to do a lot of updating.  Ah well… I’m here now!  Here’s the entry link!

Brief summary and screen shots are included with the entry, of course, so I’ll use this space to mention some other things:

First, what went right:  Most everything!  I made a lot of lovely art, got most-all of my intended game mechanics implemented within the time limit, and got a playable game out of an already otherwise very busy weekend!  I learned some new useful programming tricks and now have a MUCH better understanding of how to effectively use SpriteGroups in pygame, which helps greatly with streamlining code.  Hooray for me!  Also it’s my damn birthday, so double-hooray!

What didn’t go as planned?  Well… I didn’t have any time for sfx/music, which would have been nice.  I also wasn’t able to add all the text screens I wanted for a narrative, but that’s actually less than 10 minutes additional work there, so I’ll have it for a post-judging version.  A few other little details: Cars on the road, maybe some time/score mechanism, possibly even predators?  Hadn’t put any thought into that last one really… just an idea that existed.  There’s also still some awkwardness with people’s movements that wasn’t fully polished and makes the games slower and more frustrated than it’s meant to be… I really want to redo some of their pathing logic when I get more time.  I also didn’t have time to add a few little in-game decorations I was considering adding… wouldn’t have really made much of a difference except visually… and without the improved navigation it would have made things slower, so maybe it’s for the better.

OH YEAH!  I also need to mention!  Did you notice?!  All the maps in the game are procedurally generated!  Isn’t that awesome?  Yeah.  I’m bad-ass like that.  Random roads, trees, buildings, ponds… people navigating between them… it’s pretty dang awesome.  Sometimes you start out right next to Mommy… sometimes insanely far away; I would like to make that less random and perhaps make it something like a difficulty setting?  Changing the map size and the number of each thing in it is trivially easy, so I could easy adjust for desired complexity.

Anyways,  yeah.  Please play my game if you haven’t yet!  And vote on it!  And more importantly, give me some feedback!  I want to make the best games possible, so comments and constructive criticism are incredibly helpful for me.  Thanks

Woohoo! Got it done and submitted on time! See my entry HERE!

This is my 2nd LD, and the first one that was really complete, so I’m quite proud of myself! I was going to do a full write-up, but I’m just too exhausted. Maybe tomorrow?

A few comments though:

The AI needs refinement. There’s only so much you can do under the time limit… and even less when you don’t actually know the game well enough to have a good strategy even for yourself, no less for a machine.

That said, the AI is pretty competent at Defending, despite sucking at Attacking.

I forgot all about running the whole screencap video thing this time! Eek!

Most of the sounds are me screaming or bashing things into my desk.

I am going to look into what it would take to refine this for an android/apple app!

Aaand… yeah! Good job everyone! I look forward to actually being able to participate in the judging this time; something I completely missed out on last time. Hundreds and hundreds of games to review! Eek! Too much fun!

Gettin’ that polish going!~  I’ve added a title screen, as well as a way to control if a Human or CPU controls each of the two sides.  Also my AI is getting smarter!  It’s still quite beatable; my search depth is… next to nothing really, so it only gets as far as predicting your next move and making some vaguely intelligent guesses as to what kinda of things improve its position.  I’ve still got about 6 hours though, and pretty much the only thing I’ve got left to do aside from AI improvements is adding some movement animations to help see what’s going on.  I’m actually at a point where I’m about to ask some IRC peoples to help me test.  If you’d like to help with that just let me know; I’m Luthwyhn in IRC.

Here’s a shot of my title screen!

I hope everyone else is getting done too!  I’ve been too busy to keep with with chat more than occasionally.  Keep up the good work, though!

Yes, you heard right, folks!  My game is a completely playable implementation of Tablut as of about 9 hours ago!  There’s a few minor things it doesn’t do (warn you for Check/Mate), and plenty of places that can be polished (Movement animations?)… but the game can indeed be played!  Currently, though, it only works as a 2-Player game.  My goal with the remaining ~15 hours is to implement a mildly competent AI system who can play as the Attack and/or the Defender, at your own choice.  Currently the AI moves at random until and unless it has a move that will allow it to win immediately, in which case it takes that move.  It’s not much, but it is indeed a start!  The visuals have changed just a little since my last update, so I’ll post a new screenshot as well:

I GOT MY GAME SUBMITTED!  WOOHOO!!  I think it was technically 1 or 2 minutes late, but that’s because I was having upload troubles.  At any rate… I did it!  It’s not complete!  It’s not perfect!  It IS playable though!  I had to disable a couple half-finished things for the submission version, but there’s still enough there to see where I was going, I think.

Also, I’m entirely too exhausted.  And I have work in about 9 hours.  I’ve gotta go to bed, which sucks… I’d love to hang out with the festivities on IRC and here on the blagosphere.  Tomorrow, though, I’ll start looking at everyone’s stuff!  Good job, y’all!  It was an amazing experience for sure!

The official time is up, but if you haven’t even started yet, now’s the time! It’s a long weekend for those of us in the US, so take as much time as you need on this. I’ve tried a few of the entries and was super impressed; can’t wait to try more. Thanks for playing and I hope you found this as enjoyable as I have!