You can watch 36 hours of my game development on Angry Caverns compressed into 3 minutes here in my timelapse video on YouTube.

It was my first year doing a timelapse and I think I’m hooked.  So much fun to see the creative process!

Time to sleep soon too…

LoneStranger's Caverns

I finally got my entry done.  It’s not nearly what I wanted it to be, but that’s ok.  It’s ok because it’s still a game.  Most of the time my entries end up being tech demos or proofs of some concept at the deadline.   This one is different though.  The engine itself is complete enough that you can create levels for it and actually play them.

If you’ve ever played the Kroz games, you’ll see the similarities.  I used it as massive inspiration.  I tend to forget about it when I think about my favorite games growing up, but there’s no denying that I spend hours upon hours playing it.

I can see myself working with this afterward, making the engine more robust and fixing some of the things that can be done in a more efficient manner.  There are plenty of new objects and mechanisms to create.  I only created a few of them.  I could create other monsters too.

Right now there is only one level, and it doesn’t have any kind of ‘campaign’ code to link more of them together, but that would certainly be in the cards.   A level editor would also be a must, as I did this first level using just a text editor and about twenty minutes.

For now though, I’m going to go spend time with my family who I have ignored this weekend.  And hey, maybe go to bed early.  There is work tomorrow.

Have fun with LoneStranger’s Caverns!

I’ve used the snazzy new uploader tool to submit my final version of Angry Caverns with 10 minutes to spare even!

You can play Angry Caverns here in your browser.

Main menu

Level 5 of the final version

You can play Angry Caverns here in your browser.

ANGRY CAVERNS – by HybridMind – August 28th-30th, 2009
Created from scratch for Ludum Dare 15′s 48hr game competition

Concept:

You are the angry caverns. You awaken one day to find many creatures living inside of you. This pisses you off. Destroy as many as you can.

How To Play:

• Click on the stalactites and bubbling vents to trigger your attacks.
• You will have limited time on each level
• Chain attacks for big combo points
• Glowing creatures are worth more bonus points
• Bigger completion bonuses for more creatures killed
• Supports online leaderboards!

Tools used:

Coded in Flash / ActionScript 3.0 using the Flash CS4 IDE and using Dr. Petter’s sfxr for sound effects. I composed both music loops in Reason.

Got Feedback?

Feel free to email me at dave [at] hybridmind.com or visit my blog and leave me a comment.

I’ll be working on this game some more so any thoughts or suggestions while be taken into consideration for the post-compo version! Thanks for playing and I hope you have a good time with it!

It’s been done for a few hours now, but I needed to sleep.

Page is HERE for your enjoyment.

Have fun ^^

-Devlin

I think I have everything in there I need to now (including a second trick). I just want tohave a go at redoing the character and fixing up the UI a little before I call it ‘finished’

backflip alongside lava at really fast mph... how did I even come up with this?

playable after the link:

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I’ve finished plugging in a bunch of sound effects for Angry Caverns and you can hear and play the result here (Flash)

Now I’m off to use Reason to compose a quick main menu loop and at least one level loop…

Then it will be time to generate some more levels than 1  !

EDIT: If anyone plays and the sounds are too loud / soft / annoying.. feel free to let me know!  Thanks 

I’ve got another playable billed uploaded along with another gameplay video for the passively curious:

Play version 0.3 here (Flash)

Watch gameplay video of version 0.3 here (YouTube)

A suitably themed main menu

Concept:
You are an extremely angry cavern. You awaken one day to find many creatures living inside of you. This pisses you off! You have a short amount of time on each level to use your cavern weapons to destroy as many creatures as you can. Kill multiple creatures with one attack to earn combo points and kill rare bonus creatures for extra score! Compete online with global leaderboards.

Controls:

• Use your mouse to click on your weapons (stalactites, geyers, etc.)
• Kill as many creatures as you can within the time limit.
• Kill all the creatures for a big bonus!

A few more screenshots with captions after the READ MORE…

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its not much bit its actually been the biggest headache so far this LD =/

hopefully the game will be done soon and I can add more ticks and rejigger the player art.

playable after the link:

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yeah baby we have artifacts !! =)

Glaucon lost in the cave will have to search for some artifacts so he can open the door, and look for some enlighment at the next cave…

Combos are working, though there is still only the 1 ‘trick’, you can add to your combo by doing air jumps, and getting *really* close to lava (best to try when in slowmo).

Lava in games is always cool right?

playable after the link:

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Cavern Club Screenshot 01 - Just text and a background image.

I’ve been up for a few hours now, after a rather lazy yesterday evening (too much Batman: Arkham Asylum riddle finding, and Professor Layton puzzle solving) and I’ve got my first graphic in the game!  Woo!

Above you can see the basic layout for the game – the top strip of the screen will show the side on view of the Cavern Club, complete with little pixel Goths, Rockers and Metalheads.  They’ll hopefully move from place to place as their needs dictate – from the tables to the dancefloor when they want to dance, from the dancefloor to the bar when they want to drink, and from the bar to the toilets (to the far right) when they…. well, when they’ve drank more than their plumbing can handle.

Unfortunately, all that happens at the moment is that the time in the top right hand corner advances (at *150 speed), I print out some sprite fonts to show what’s going on with a starting group of ten punters, who wait around for 10 in game minutes and then either pay to get in (if they have the money and the door price isn’t too steep) or they leave in disgust.

I’m not going to get this finished, realistically, but I’ve already learned a hell of a lot (for my first proper go at XNA).  To those other people stepping down, or thinking of stepping down – I’d like to offer my encouragements.   You’re close to the end, what’s to lose in just pushing a bit more and seeing what you can get at the finish line?  Everyone else, who doesn’t have time to read this – keep going, and best wishes!

Morning LDers,  added board sounds, the begginings of a combo system, and I’m playing around with lighting so my lava pieces will look cool hopefully.

I've run out of onomatopoeia to type here, thats the real reason I added sound in this build =p

playable after the link:

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My folks came over and I haven’t had much time in front of the computer since then.  We went swimming for awhile and then grilled some burgers.  The doofus I am, I forgot to take a picture of our picnic out in the back yard.  Burgers with bean salad and pork and beans.  Wow, did we have enough beans there?  Anyway, my mom had a few cake mixes that were getting close to expiring so she brought down a cake.

Cake!

So where am I in development… I’ve got a hero that moves around the map and collision detection works great against the walls.  I’m putting the finishing touches on the gem tile type and have begun the monsters.  I still need to do more tiles, but I think I can wait until I get enemies done.

Screenshot showing gems and the updated tiles. Player is left of the gems stash.

Most of the work is all behind the scenes, which I hope means that the rest of it will start to fall into place at a faster pace later.  Hopefully the next screen shot will show some monsters, even if their AI isn’t ready.

Thanks to some help from Gilvado I figured out this whole CamStudio business and uploaded my first ever gameplay vid to YouTube! 

It’s 20 seconds of the current state of Angry Caverns

I’m tuning some of the bat physics now.. which reminds me– ya know one thing I love about doing game development?  It’s getting to say things like “I’m tuning bat physics…”

Hopefully I’ll be back soon with more exciting developments.

Alright– finally have my initial proof of concept demo up and available for any curious souls to try out.  It isn’t too exciting yet but it will show you the initial inklings of what I’m going for anyway.  It’s Flash so you can run it in your browser.

Basically this is a test level here with 4 stalactites, 3 steam geysers, and 6 flying bats.  I am enjoying the bat movement at this point.  Each time you play the game the cavern levels will have the same configuration of weapons for your use.  What will change is some slight variables on the initial speeds and directions of the enemies in the cavern.  The timer will likely be going away as now each cavern level has a limited number of weapons for you to use.  You use a cavern weapon by clicking on it with your mouse.

I hope to support interesting combos and other funny events perhaps to help your score and experience of the game.

Today my main goal is still to get all the behind the scenes engine working with my levels, get all the enemies moving correctly in the various levels, and finish coding all the weapon functions and effects.  That way tomorrow I can spend as much time as possible on bringing the graphics up to speed beyond the rapid primitives I’ve made everything here in.  My plan is to have the game be fun before spending anything more then the bare minimum on graphics because the game is what matters in the end to me.  Especially if I want to keep working on anything post-compo I’ll be far more motivated to improve graphics and polish if the actual game is fun! 

Controls:

Click on the bubbling steam geysers or the stalactites at the top of the cavern with your mouse to trigger them.  Steam geysers work like a short range shotgun at the moment so wait for the bats to be near.  Stalactites fall so you need to time them right with the bats movement.  100 points per bat.  Max score of current demo is 600 points…

Turns out my folks aren’t coming down until after lunch, which means probably an early dinner… so early lunch it is!

Just some left overs from the other night:

couple of tacos with beans, rice, ground beef, cheese, lettuce, salsa and sour cream.

An update on the game front… I’ve finalized my two wall tiles and am getting ready to start with the player character sprite and code, and his movement around the board.  I did some more code work to facilitate the transition and change of the player based on reactions of the tiles.   Also in this time I took a shower, did some pool maintenance, and tried to ignore the TV before it was shut off.  So here’s to a good work effort over the next hour and a half!

second screen shot, showing the two tiles and some more test map.

6 hours of development so far and progress continues on my game…  thought I’d post a few early screenshots.  I’m working to get the first playable level done so I can continue messing with making the mechanics fun.  Doing bare minimum art as the lumpy bats will testify to:

Stalactites, Geysers, and Bats now spawn.  The bats have a funny animation right now which I think will make them enjoyable to watch flap around as you try to eliminate them.

Rough working main menu too.

Well, I’m stalling out on productivity right now because I am starving.  I have a chicken pot pie in the oven cooking but it won’t be ready for another 30 minutes so I’m powering on best I can.

I’m really trying to focus on getting the earlier playable and fun parts of this game coded.  Building out primitive menu systems and game framework logic so that I won’t have to mess with it later.  I have implemented the timing bar, level counters, and scoring widgets.  My hope is that once I get the basic ‘level format’ working I can do 5 rough levels with very basic art today.  Then tomorrow can be spent on improving the art and adding music and sound.

I did some more work after last night’s post.  I worked on the tile map classes and scanned in my sketches, then created a couple image files to load in the tile map.  First shot, blammo, it displayed the map perfect on the screen.   I did a little tweaking of the map size so that it would take up more real estate on the screen and was left with this:

First screenshot of my caverns themed game

Not much to see, but the designs are all mine.  They’re loaded from a text file with some level metadata and the grid layout.  The space on the right will be the status area.  The graphcis are not text, like my Kroz inspiration, so they will get better than what I have above.

My work this morning will consist of making more sprites for the tiles, and of course, the hero dude.  After that, I’ll work on moving him around.

Well I remembered that JayIsGames is running another casual game desing competition with theme Explore. It is only for browser-based platforms so it may not be of interest to everyone but to some it will.
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Yes.. plural.  Been refining my idea a little.  I think I want to keep it more fun and interesting by making hopefully 5 different cavern levels.  Each with a slightly different theme and weapons and targets.  Each level will have a short time limit (1 minute?) in which you’ve tried to use the levels weapons (stalactites, steam vents, rock falls etc) to take out any life forms.  It will be a score based game tuned to encourage compelling replays and leaderboard competition.

I am thinking of some various themes for the cavern levels which are like 1920s bootleggers, 1700s pirates, 2000 teen hangout, 20,000 BC cavemen/critters, far future theme.

Potential Targets in the above themes:

• creatures (sprinkled throughout all themes…?)
  • bats
  • centipedes
  • lizards
  • fish
  • bears
  • wolves
• humanoids
  • teens (doing drugs? hanging out? contemporary theme)
  • cavemen (20,000BC theme)
  • explorers (going from A to B? contemporary theme)
  • pirates (after their treasure 1700s theme)
  • criminals (whiskey bootleggers (jugs / barrels with xxx, 1920s theme)
  • spacemen / aliens (future theme?

I’m excited about this game so far.  I think that with the variety of each cavern level having a different configuration of weapons layouts, path layouts and creatures with a unique theme it will be an amusing and humorous game.  Now I just have to see how much content I can pull off in the compo time limit.  I will attempt to get one playable theme first in case that is all I manage to pull off.  I’m thinking I’ll go for 20,000 BC wrapper first because I can do many cave creatures as well as humorous cavemen for targets.