Sometimes, games are as fun to write as they are to play.

What follows is an hour by hour breakdown of why writing this game was awesome.

(more…)

This weekend I created the base that I’m going to use for the next Ludum Dare.
It uses cocos2d-javascript for graphics, box2d.js for physics and a custom Audiomanager.

If you want to get started with cocos2d-javascript, a look on my source code might be useful for you, since the tutorials are outdated.

Physics
I have a custom PhysicsNode class that provides a simple constructor for box2d shapes and synchronizes a cocos2d graphics node with the box2d.body.

Preloading images
I modified cocos2d-javascript to allow simple resource preloading from javascript.
Earlier versions required you to use the cocos2d commandline tool that merged all your files.
Now you can just write this in your Application.js file:

registerResource("images/myimage.png", "image/png");

Audio
The custom Audiomanager first checks which codecs are supported,
when you give it an audio file to preload it will use the first url for a supported format:

Audiomanager.instance.load({
    "ogg": "audio/blub.ogg",
    "aac": "audio/conversions/blub.aac"
},"blub");

Then you can play it with using the given alias

Audiomanager.instance.play("blub");

The repository also contains a small bash script that converts all ogg files in the audio directory into aac and wav files using ffmepg.

Please feel free to use this base for your own games.
It’s licensed under the zlib license, which means: do WTF you want, just don’t claim, that you wrote code that was written by others.

You can test it here.

It took me an hour and a half to come up with anything to fit the theme of  ”ESCAPE” but once I forced myself to sit down with a marker and a piece of paper, I soon had a simple little thumbnail sketch of what I wanted to make.  I’m using an ultra-simplistic concept that fits the theme and I’m quite happy with it. As my first progress report, I’m happy to say that I’ve finished implementing the basic gameplay mechanic. I’m using HTML5 and box2dweb and am creating a physics puzzler for web, windows exe and android (compiled to .apk using PhoneGap). It took me about two hours to code the entire thing from scratch.  I’d never tried any work with box2d before, and I stumbled with bodies and fixtures and sensors but I’m really happy to say that my basic gameplay testbed and proof-of-concept is complete: we have a “main character” that can bounce around and the engine detects when you touch a “key” which unlocks a “door”.

This means that I am “done” the low level engine and have the rest of the weekend to make it look pretty!

So, Ludum Dare 19 is ending in less than ten hours. My game isn’t even close to being finished. I attempted to use this LD as a way to learn PushButton Engine. I feel like what I’ve learned is that PBE is documented poorly and is hard to learn. The current version has no tilemap support, which is quite disappointing as I was trying to make a platformer. I was able to grab code from a development version of PBE though for displaying tilemaps though, but I had a lot of trouble trying to make the tilemap work with the collision detection. The way I was able to make it work was to generate Box2D collision polygons for each tile, but using Box2D physics for a platformer like mine proved to be awkward as my character would get stuck on tile corners and bump off walls, which made wall jumping difficult. PBE does also have its own collision system that does not use Box2D, but I was not able to figure out how to make it work with the tilemap due to lack of documentation.

The one final approach for physics and collision detection I’m yet to try is to ditch Box2D physics, but just utilize its collision detection system, and write my own physics. It’s the final glimmer of hope for PBE, but it’s an uphill battle at this point.

August LD is LD I never miss. Was waiting for it since beginning of summer This year I managed to take a 2 week vacation around it meaning today is first day of it. Starcraft2 kind of eat big chunk of it though

I participated in 6 LDs so far producing something playable only 2 times. Have bad habit of trying something technically complex and new for me which ends up eating too much of my time… Kind of doubt that this time will be different but hope it will

Tools? That depends on the theme and my idea for it. Probably Flash for assets and interface, Flash develop for coding + my own code  snippets but majority being coded a new considering my programming knowledge/style. There is chance that I will decide to use some engine/library depending on the idea. They include Box2d/Flixel/Flash Punk. But I kind of doubt that as I do not have good enough knowledge of them to feel comfortable with them. Same goes for Unity 3D, started checking it out few weeks ago but since then interest faded a bit + did not had much time for it. Still chances are pretty slim as I find 3D games to be a hard thing to fill with content in short amount of time.

Checked today an Alchemy port of Box2D from here, from looks of it it seems easy and fun thing, a WYSIWYG physics tuning that allows seamless Flash animation and Box2D physics combination. But only from the looks of it. Still things to learn and code to write for each separate case of such Flash/Box2D binding.

P.S I sure hope Swords or Swordfights wins

Ok here is my final entry. It is far from being polished but I am up for 17 hours 12 of which were programming… My brains are messy now

So no sounds, no bunch of planed effects and sleek interface… And output codes may not be forum friendly… Not time to test and debug but mostly game works.

Also sorry for English don’t have willpower to go and check if I did some mistakes and ofcourse there are bugs and glitches

But at least I did everything I wanted from mechanics point of view. Enjoy this game and share bugs and replays here plz.

Image

Links:

EXE file

Browser version

Source FLA and AS files

Well source codes. Half of the time I was waging war with interface which resulted in really messy structure and some bad dependencies. Also I go tired of commenting so I am not shore if it will be of any use to anyone

Used Box2DFlashAS3_2.0.1 and some my utilities of my own