I promised a lengthy post and I guess this is it…

This is a screen of my post-compo game, a few things changed. Play, comment and read the full list of changes here.

Today I spent most of my day sleeping and making the post-compo version with a few bugfixes. Next compo, december probably, I’ll use my own chronolapse that will rock, and will be out of my way. I’ll also write a tool or two that compensate for actionscrip not having templates/generics, and add a few base classes that make the flixel game development even faster.

I’ll probably do food shopping on thursday/friday instead as that is taking up too much precious time

The only other bad thing I did was not making the graphics at the start, and instead used temporary graphics for most of the compo. The good thing about this is that I focused on gameplay early on, the bad side is that I spent too much time tweaking and playing the game. With these changes I might have a showable game earlier, allowing me to get feedback from irc/other people instead of post compo feedback; and this good folks, really is the only thing that I want

Food photo times, you know you want to hit more… (more…)

I got to Iteration 3 by scrapping some of the art and animations I had planned for Iteration 2. Those story points go back into the backlog.

Iteration 3 was a bear. It was where a lot of the advanced AI had to be implemented. I’ve never done A*. Most of my AI was very simplistic, which went with the simplistic games I’ve done before. This game was going to be different.

Or at least I hoped it would. Entities would bumble about, get stuck, and fly off the world map even though I explicitly told them not to!

I had a quick lunch which was easy to make while I continued to work.

Unfortunately, the deadline for the main Ludum Dare compo passed when I finally figured out the A* algorithm (it turned out that there was a greater-than sign when there should have been a less-than sign, which is why the entities were moving so strangely). After the pathfinding, the entities still had to interact.

I had the Hero moving toward targets it sees nearby, although every so often I see that he gets stuck in a certain tile for some reason. Enemies seem to have trouble moving to the Hero like I expect, but they find him soon enough.

But with Iteration 4, they fight!

Do you see how the Hero’s health is down?

That’s the first time it has been like that outside of arbitrary tests being conducted. One of the dragons did that! Good job, my babies!

Since the main compo is over, the only option I have left is to continue on. I can still try to enter the Ludum Dare Jam, which gives me an extra 24 hours before the submission deadline.

For now, though, I’m going to bed. These last 48 hours have been grueling, frustrating, and exciting.

The time pressure is starting to worry me.  It’s getting close, but I’m having issues with routating the tracker beam and I’m not sure what the problem is!

LD18 Game Over Screen

So…. lunch

Grape tomatoes, smoked gouda, asiago and crackers.

Updates since the last post include boulders falling from the ceiling, fungi which shoot at you, various particle effects, and wee story/tutorial messages from your command base.  A picture:

I have a few more things left to do still.  With a bit of luck I’ll submit some time around 9 (GMT).  Dinner pic’s below the jump.

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I went to bed after 5:30AM after getting some rudimentary AI in. I don’t know why the ground-based characters have no second-thoughts about going through the trees and mountains. If anything, they should want to avoid them. I’m sure there’s a bug in the implementation.

I woke up feeling fairly crappy, but I know what will fix that!

Yeah, OJ! Oh, and, yeah, sure, I suppose Banana can come along, too.

9.5 hours left!

Still got a long-ish list of stuff to do, but I think I’ll finish with something reasonably game-like.

Got textures and some simple particle explosions going:

Breakfast

Diet Pepsi (that’s less than half the cans I’ve drank this LD…):

TOAST

Good morning Ludum Dare. I had one bite of my toast before I snapped out of it and realized I NEED A PICTURE OF MY FOOD!

Made my coffee.  Opened the window blinds. Eating my toast.

Got 5 hours of sleep again last night and am trying to stay both calm and pumped for the next 15 hours that remain. My game will hopefully change and improve a lot over this day.

FLASH GAME HIGHSCORES TUTORIAL

One thing I wanted to post about that I remembered last night as I finished dropping in online highscores into my Flash game was that with such a large and new crop of LDers here there may be a few that use Flash and haven’t got an easy highscores option to encourage some friendly competition on their score based game.

Well have no fear! One option is to check out a tutorial I made here a year ago about how to drop MochiMedia global highscores into your game. You don’t have to use their wrapper or ads or anything–you can use just their highscore widget.

You can check out my tutorial here and feel free to ask any questions that may come up if you are using Flixel or FlashPunk I know people here have used it with those though sometimes you have to adapt my tutorial a bit I think.

Plus you can see how they work in my current LD entry here.

Up I get and enjoy a healthy bowl of Frosties! Today I’ll be coding at home in Wiltshire instead of at Cambridge, where I was yesterday. This means, instead of gorging away on biscuits and Kick, I’ll be getting proper home-cooked food. Thanks, Mum!

These infinite bowls of cereal will take a while to finish…

The game is almost in a fully submittable state, however I can’t really show you guys and gals anything since I’m temporarily using graphics from my No More Sweden entry. That will of course change in the following few hours. I’m aiming for a happy coulourful character in a black/dark “full metal alchemist” inspired world that plays sorta like super mario, hopefully I can pull it off

Hit more, for images of what I have eaten this far during the event and (more…)

It really took me a while to come up with an idea for a game that I thought was worth making. “Enemies as weapons” is not an ideal theme. Nonetheless, I’m making good progress now that I’ve decided on a reasonable and doable concept. It’s got it all… helicopters, belly flops, and trampolines. Wait, what?

Yes. All of those, and more. Maybe a visual aid would be helpful.

I’ll let you make of that what you will… for now. I will also make you all very hungry by showing you what I had for dinner in order to sustain myself during this quite difficult and daring among competitions!

Deeleeeecious.

You got many of your main food groups (sorta?), with such great foods as noodles, salad with Caesar salad dressing, and a delicious homemade garlic pesto on rolls. Just what I need to keep working on my project. Onward and upward!

I had some fig bars as a snack as the evening wore on.

My fantastic and amazing girlfriend made me a taco dinner, which was so delicious that my taste buds were fist-bumping each other.

I went to a party my friends were hosting so I could take a short break and get some much-needed social time, but I came back home shortly.

Looking at The Big (Cork) Board, I can see that I’m almost done with the first iteration of work.

Unfortunately, I still have 6 more big iterations to do, and a lot of it is doing AI path-finding and other AI things I’ve never done before.

And the deadline is looming.

I’m feeling pretty screwed.

Wait a minute. I think I have some Red Bull shots in my fridge…

I don’t drink caffeine usually, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Let’s roll.

I’ve gotten http://code.google.com/p/physics2d working with my code, and bullets flying around.  Now collisions.

Just ate this.