LD has claimed its first victim

He’s been keeping me company for many hours already, but he finally fell asleep

Combat system is ready, random encounters too, little things here and there to get a gameplay-complete build. Next up, make some graphics and music!

Not sure if it’s going to be something.
I did not prepare at all compared to the previous contests.
I’ll copy one of the following repositories as basecode:

Html5, Javascript: github-repo
C SDL: github-repo
Rust SDL or OpenGLES: github-repo

Obviously I will throw away the existing games and only use the technology utils part of the code.

If I feel like it I might use SFML and C++ without any basecode except from my eternally unstable monster of a serialization library.

Other Tools like always:
Gfx: gimp, inkscape
Editor: gedit or Eclipse (might try emacs for Rust)
Sfx: that flash tool everybody uses, autotracker.py
Timelapse: neosam’s scripts, his ld-profile

Set sail for fail!

the game

SO…. the game is “complete”. You can select between 3 different animals to play as with 3 different powers. The cat can cough up furballs, the skunk can drop smelly bombs and the labrat get extra evolution points for being experimented on. You fight of scribbles/spaghetti monsters and sometimes they drop bombs that explode. If you kill enough enemies you can evolve gaining faster moments, better powers, more health etc. However, to keep on surviving as a species you must mate with other animals and get children.

the evolve menu

Now I need to spend the rest of the time to polish it up and make the menu system comprehensible and intuitive and not ugly.

delicious food

new graphics

I’m trying out a new look on my games. Thanks to artrage it’s pretty easy to get a artsy look. It’s a shame that the character pictures doesn’t look as good when scaled down (from artrage images) as the level do. Oh well…

My idea

The basic idea is: select a animal to evolve, survive enemy waves, find a mate, reproduce and evolve. Different animals will have different powers, haven’t decided on the final amount of animals and abilities but I’m kicking around a few.

saturday breakfast

yummy.

Here is our workspace!

We have lots of cakes and cookies provided by the Dancake Factory.

My Cat on top of my Workspace

In case you haven’t heard of my recent obsession with kittens, click here.

Good luck to all, let’s have a great LD!

P.S. That photo’s from a few years ago, here’s an updated deskphoto:

A lot more cluttered, eh?

Meet Chii! He has been performing a support role in the team since last Ludum Dare. Here you can see him PURRFECTING our art!

We are currently working on our idea, but we don’t feel like lifting the veil, yet.

Tune in for more updates in a while!

Here’s the command center, that’s right I code in a storage closet and that’s my cat Jack.  His hobby is to keep me from using the keyboard or mouse.

Mr. Phil Games Earth Headquarters

I also wanted to share this snippet of AS3 code that lets you choose a color and then convert pixels of that color to transparent pixels:

public static function MakeTransparent(source:*, color:uint = 0x00FF00FF) : BitmapData
{
// Get the bitmap data so we can fix it
var bitmapData:BitmapData
if (source is Class)
bitmapData = FP.getBitmap(source);
else if (source is BitmapData)
bitmapData = source;

// We aren’t use the transparent feature, hence the color
var bitmapDataNew:BitmapData = new BitmapData(bitmapData.width,
bitmapData.height, true, 0×00000000);
var pt:Point = new Point(0, 0);
var rect:Rectangle = new Rectangle(0, 0, bitmapData.width,
bitmapData.height);
var transparent:uint = 0×00000000;
var maskColor:uint = 0x00FFFFFF;
bitmapDataNew.threshold(bitmapData, rect, pt, “==”, color, transparent, maskColor, true);

return bitmapDataNew;
}

Covers about 20 hours of actual work, most of which spent with a warm cat on my lap.

Post-mortem coming soon!!

Edit: thanks Galman for helping with the embed!

Just a reminder, don’t forget to add a cat to your game!

And Bob the Kitten is not really helping much

It’s all coming along pretty well, I’ll have some screenshots to show in a little while, but all the physics are finally cooperating… using a full 3d physics engine for a shmup might have been a bit much, but I think it’ll allow for some cool effects when I get to the polishing stage.

Muffins!

And since everyone seems to be posting pics of their cats:

Ok, I have a window that opens and closes. It’s not that amazing, but it is a lot of boiler-plate code. I probably should have declared that I will be using some existing code to, you know, render a window.

Anyway, on to lunch. That’s right! It’s time for my award-winning peanut butter and pickle sandwich!

I also had carrots, broccoli, grapes, and a peach.

Also, my cats are dealing with my LD-induced schedule fairly well:

Ok, here’s a screenshot of the single graphic I have drawn and the window I have got it appearing in:

I tried to get Felix to design me a game, but she hates the theme.

i’m having cat troubles as well.

So this is where I start… about 5.5 h to deadline.  Right now I have one sheet of paper with gameplay plans, 0 lines of code, some gfx made and a cat to help me betatest when its done. Wish me luck

Because of that, I had to move to the living room.  So my new desk pic is:

Much assorted junk on the table including Wiimote and Gamecube controller.  PS2 controller on floor.  Just kidding about the cat – Huzzah always sits on my lap, it did not make me move.  Though it often makes my legs fall asleep.