ok Ok.. so they are still rather stick figure like.. BUT they switch comically between running and walking and change directions too.  You can watch a gameplay video of version 0.2 here.

At this point I’ve implemented 2 different enemies (bats & cavemen), 2 different weapons (stalactites & geysers), a combo system, tracking of stats like base level score, bonus score, and reporting back on a level over screen.

Many things still to do of course but my plan is still holding so far of trying to get the bulk of all implementation finished before generating levels and upgrading the graphics.

You can play version 2.0 here in your browser too.

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…

Here it goes, Mac-only and without source so far:

http://www.raschke.de/julian/temp/ld14_demo.zip

This is my moment of triumph. I fear the level design will show that my concept is not THAT well thought out

Good morning friends!

For anyone who feels like playing a very unfinished game, here’s the state of mine as of last night. The beginnings of the gameplay are there: notice now as you switch between your senses, sometimes you experience portions of the outside world. That’s what the deathbed experience is all about.

I have like 10 things on my list for the next 12 hours, so I better get to work.

CLICK HERE TO PLAY THE WORK IN PROGRESS IN YOUR BROWSER.

[ PLAY CURRENT BUILD IN BROWSER HERE ]

Well.. grabbed some sleep last night.  Just played my game this morning to see how I felt about it’s progress and direction.  Time to make the short list of goals that is so important in these compos to trying and pull off a playable and hopefully fun game in time.

I find a good trick to use is decide what makes the compo version versus what I’ll save for a post-compo version.  I’ve been pretty good about actually doing a post compo version lately that I’m not too worried that I’m using it as a fake crutch.  You can learn so much from a rapid prototype like this that it is still worth it to finish a reduced yet playable game for many reasons.

Anyway, knowing that some of my favorite features will likely still see the light of day makes me more willing to cut them for the compo version.

It is with that in mind that I am thinking about the following design decisions:

Compo Version Features:

1) One formation only of your fleet ships… the long and lean horizontal one.  This is because I am not sure if I’ll have time to code enough of what I want to justify the other formations right now.  I may have to focus on just making this a fun space avoider with the twist of having multiple lives / health built into the number of your fleet ships remaining as you fly along.  As long as 1 ship makes it you have been considered to win in that you’ve saved some of your race’s people.  The more ships you save the larger the score multiplier probably.

2) Probably not going to implement player ships fighting the enemy armada of doom.  I’m really trying to focus on not making this a shmup but rather sticking to the fact that these are light and nimble colony transport ships that are trying to get the hell away from their doomed planet / advancing wall of the enemy armada.

3) I think that since I have a simple but functional way to hand code in all the enemy ship placements and movement speeds I have the ability to build an exciting armada progression that will have some fun surprises and such along the way for the player to fly through.

4) I am worried that since these compos don’t afford much optimization time I may end up making a version that in order to look as cool as I want will likely suffer performance wise on slower computers.  I may have to go the route of a simple button to: “play high quality” and “play low quality” to turn down all the beam / particle effects I want to use.  I think that is a fine compo compromise.

Of the 16 hours remaining I fear I may have some domestic duties to attend to as well unfortunately… laundry and the ilk.

Oh well.. it’s crunch time here at LD so good luck everyone!

Play in yo browser here…

Yeah– I’m excited.. so far… OK.. the two largest ships fire these purple beam weapons.  The largest ship with the chance of firing 2 of them.. the second largest ship firing one.

I also have doubled the level length but that will change as well eventually.. I just wanted a larger amount of ships to fly through.

Also.. I made it so if your fleet touches any of the screen boundaries.. they asplode.  Ideally… this wouldn’t be the case.. but after fighting collision detection logic (it is complicated due to fleet coords/ tweening patterns etc..) there were so many ways to rig the system to get your ships to hide.. that I just made them asplode…

Anyway— Beam weapons give you a tiny bit of warning via visual clue.. think any robotech episode when they are firing the reflex weapon.. there is always that .35 of a second where you can get out of the colorful path before you are so many cinders.

So.. recap: running into screen boundaries.. capital ships.. or giant purple lasers will kill your little ships..

Let me know if the effects are killing anyones computers yet.. i’ve done 0 optimizations.. (hey.. its LD)

Gosh, I’m moving really slow. I’m going to have to start working harder.

My game is sort of playable. The game is about being on your deathbed, and in this build you can experience yourself slowly dying. You can focus your energy on different parts of your body by clicking, which has no effect right now except clicking on the brain, which slows down your death.

I guess you guys are going to want me to make this more GAMEY now. Fine. I’ll add points and crap. That’s coming up next.

CLICK HERE TO PLAY THE WORK IN PROGRESS IN YOUR BROWSER.

So, I have another playable build of my work in progress available.

Play it here in your favorite browser

It now has an enemy ship wave manager so I can build out the Wall of Doom(tm) that you must escape through to rescue the last of your race.

I also took a suggestion to map the fleet pattern echeleons to the Z/X/C/V keys.. four patterns in all.

Give it a whirl if you’d like as I’d love to hear any feedback.  I’m trying to get absolutely as much of the gameplay done before screwing around with any graphics this time.  I think it is actually progressing really well for once!

The game just ends right now when all the enemy ships go by.  Also.. if you lose all your ships you have to refresh your browser to continue!

Well I spent a couple more hours and got the basic functionality in. It’s actually pretty fun. And the artwork is beautiful of course, because it’s Kandinsky!

I’m doing all the animation in the Flash IDE rather than programatically, which I’ve almost never attempted before – so it’s fun, but I’m an amateur.

Two playable levels are up at http://davidrlorentz.com/files/OndrianFordrian_v01.html.

Well.. my working title is evolving a little from “Monochrome Train”.   Anyway, here is the update:

I have been working like mad during this miniLD#6.  I worked 12 hours on Friday, 17 hours yesterday, and now I have a little over 5hours left to at least wrap up the gameplay.  At this point I’m going into triage mode again like many LD format competitions force us.  In a last minute rabid attempt to cram and adjust all the critical features that will turn a project from a demo into a  game.  This being my third LD type event I have yet to feel that I’ve suceeded within the timeframe.  Not sure this time will be any different yet but at least a big difference is that this time I have been able to play my game a LOT more during creation.  Probably to the detriment of the timeline a little.  I guess that is a good sign though.  Anyway, 8am EST is almost here and that is when my crunch time begins.  I have made a critical todo list to accomplish during this time and we’ll see how it goes!

CRUNCH LIST:

• score file handling to support matrins compo requirements
• detecting most primitive form of ‘you win’ condition when reaching locomotive at head of train
• enemies – spawning, moving, fighting, dieing, dodging (of some type)
• simple player / enemy animations for the logic I have coded so far (right now there is no animation)
• simple event sounds
• tiny train like soundtrack loop (update: DONE @ 9am)
• how to page?  I am confused on this because due to the matrin framework requirement– I was planning on using his idea of the 400×400 image in his framework to provide how tos… but I also want people to be able to know how to play if they just download this level from the blog without the loading framework.. so there is the connundrum of sorts.
• animations for train wheels and locomotive parts and steam cloud

Current screen shot above and current windows build here.  Use arrow keys (left/right/up) to move or gamepad stick with button 1 to jump.

Seeya all on the other side!

I thought I’d post the game in it’s current state as I’m heading for more sleep – I’ve updated the physics a bit and tweaked the game logic, but I have to make it tougher, save the scores to a file, add some kind of game-over screen, and dig out an old windows box to see if I can remember how to make an exe from python (py2exe?).

[same screenshot as before - except with lives]

Feel free to have a play and comment – You’ll need python and PyGame – then just run main.py

You can download it here…

It’s a simple idea, but I hope it’s fun (I’ll make it tougher to play by the end).

If you look closely.. you see the hero of the monochrome train!

I have now added three train car types of various heights.  You can now fall off or in between cars and die.  The train cars detach from the train when they hit the left side of the screen.  The velocity of the car is transfered to the hero so he drifts with them correctly.  He can now jump between all the cars with the jump from lowest car to highest being possible but tricky.  The game is over if you fall off and die or if you get swept off to the left of the screen.   You are supposed to advance to the head of the train but there are no enemies yet or win condition.  Only death…. and that is not handled gracefully.. if you ‘die’ the game ends abruptly.

For the brave, here is the current windows build exe.

Use arrow keys to move left, right, and jump! ESC to quit.

I just finished implementing parallax scrolling background objects for my game.  There is currently a nice cloud layer, a far plateau layer, and a near plateau layer all that move by in different speeds based on their distance.  I’m really quite happy with it so far.

I find I am not making much gameplay progress because it has been so relaxing for me to watch the train and dessert go by.  I have to start implementing some game play now!

Here is the latest test exe if any windows users wanna check it out! Left and Right arrow keys move viewport.  ESC to quit.

Well, things are getting off to a slow start this morning as I have been dealing / fighting with 20%+ packet loss on my cable modem…. *sigh*   Anyway– after a few hours it has cleared up for now.

On the monochrome train front, I have been sorta zoning out watching my current tech test demo.  There is no gameplay yet, but I like how it sets the stage for the coding yet to come.

I currently have a wide world of train landscape with cactuses, rocks and tracks.  Populated with a boxcar only ghost train right now.  The train chugs along to the right and will run for approximately 2-3 minutes (not locked down yet) before crashing.

The player (yet to be drawn / coded) has that amount of time to race from the caboose to the train engine to hit the brakes!  There will be obstacles of various types along the way (yet to be drawn / coded).

In this demo, you can press the left and right arrow keys to move the viewport back and forth.  When you stop, it keeps its slow advance.  My current idea is that the viewport moves just *slightly* faster than the train so that if you don’t creep along with it you will also get swept off the back of the screen and fail that way too.

Here is a win exe if anyone wants to see my monochrome train test.

Well, as the clock ticks down and I find myself with less than 22 hours left in the competition I am trying to keep my spirits AND energy up.  While I am pleased enough with the work I’ve done, I have worked much more slowly than I wanted.  Not sure what this will mean for the adventures of CoMuTor but only time will tell.

Here is a “tech” demo if anyone wants to check out my progress so far.  You can basically move CoMuTor all around and jump and perform his flip car attack though sadly there are no cars yet.

The win32 zip is here

And here is the screenshot for the sake of completeness:

Edit: Got a demo going! It’s Java WebStart. If you play it, let me know how it went!

Progress is going well. I have introduced an animation thread into my game so it’s not turn-based. The rendering is spotty – the player flickers just noticeably enough – but there is a lot of improvement I can make in the rendering code. Right now all sorts of things happen in the paint method, which should go elsewhere.

The camera switches direction every 1.5 seconds (it’s supposed to be a security camera). Collision detection still works, which is never taken for granted. Next thing I will do is package it up as a JNLP so I can put up a demo.

(more…)

I’ve gotten as far as having a demo to show. It’s Java webstart this time – will probably create an exe wrapper for the game before submission tomorrow. Try it if you like!

LDT + 1400

Local time: 19:00

Here’s a working demo. The collision code is still buggy though, and it’s rather ugly.

It’s written in python + pygame, so just $python run.py to play.

Also it doesn’t catch exceptions yet so if the sound isn’t available it will die.

edit: dead link,  get the final version instead

According to my To Do list, I’ve been late for the last four checkpoints, now lagging 44 minutes behind… panic panic panic! …actually I already ruled music out in favor of more levels.
If anyone wants to play a two-level demo version, it’s here. Instructions are given in the first level briefing, but of course there’s minimal need for them.
And for the record, here’s my breakfast and lunch:

Nom!