Good morning! Well I guess this is a pretty late start even for us GMT’ers…

“Advancing Wall of Doom”?!

Last night when “Yo Dawg” was in the top 5, I started planning for the worst case scenario and actually came up with a pretty good idea for it - some kind of Warioware mini-game affair where our protagonist must race against the clock to make a game with a “Yo Dawg” theme and halfway through realises that he can make a game about making a game about making a game about…

But anyway, I sort of have an idea for the Advancing Wall theme. I’m about to start scribbling on paper and flesh out the design.

So, here are my weapons of choice this time around:

• Python 2.6 - such an awesome language
• PyGame - really does take the “C++” out of game development
• pythonutils - a library I have lying around with some basic utility classes
• Eclipse IDE with PyDev plugin - people tell me to learn Emacs but having written Java for so long I just can’t part with my IDE
• Graphics Gale - best thing I know of for creating animated sprites
• GIMP - for any CG artwork I might need
• GoldWave - for editing sound effects
• Cakewalk Sonar - if I actually get time to rustle up some music for this one
• SFXR - Dr Petter’s incredible sound generator tool - like MsPaint for sound effects
• Pen, paper, food, maybe even sleep!

I had breakfast, it was mostly toast. I would have posted an image, but you can just check out all the others, and you’ll get a good idea. Though there was a cupcake too. Nom nom.

Anyway, some ideas
You use an advancing wall of doom to crush cities. This could either be a puzzle game (use your wall in the most optimal way!), some sort of RTS (gather resources etc, expand your wall), or RPG-like, you only actually control one character, but it’ll need to go out and gather power to advance the wall. Or something.

Also had the idea of not crushing cities, but rather have two elements that fight, one being for example a jungle and another the desert. The edge would be the ‘wall’, and both strive to doom the other. Would probably work best as some sort of RTS.

Then there’s of course the tower defense sort of thing, but it’d be wall defense. Could sort of work from either side — either you build the wall (wall defense!), or you need to defend against the wall.

And there’s a lot of ‘run away from the wall’ kind of games, but I’m not interested in those because I don’t usually find that kind of games fun.

Don’t yet know what I’ll do, the RTS ones sounds most fun, but would probably require a little bit too much work. So I’ll ponder some more.

shall advance to the bathroom, avoiding any confrantation with the walls. Swift doom is lurking in the shadows here. I hope my antics will give me enough of a boost, to spawn some ideas.

So, the compo has started. The sort of ideas I have:

• HUD editor/library. Basically, this would be a GUI editor/library with no support for direct interaction, mostly just pretty ways of displaying data.
• Start work on a multithreaded scriptable game engine. I kinda want to learn some multithreading and scriptability, so I’m thinking maybe I could start building an engine that does those.
• Library for making replays of a game. This requires close integration on the game’s part so I’m not sure if I could quite make this into a reusable library, but I think this would be an interesting feature to implement. The idea would be that this would be useful for both debuggin and as just a nifty feature on its own.

Stuck with no ideas to roll with? Not enough whiteboard in your life? Uncle Brian wants YOU (points finger through your screen at your face) to make the games he wants to play. Or see played. Or read about in the news. In a bad way.

Don’t blame me for that one, blame the person at Walgreens who sold me the red expo marker.

If you’re still stuck, you’re kind of screwed. You might as well give up. But if you really, really need more inspiration:

get up teh tower (via wjordan)

The creator of this video’s non-ironic video comments include: “me working on anew one with music ok” and “well ur face if crappy i was only begginer so shut the hell up”

Well, I spent all last night thinking up VS ideas, then watching TV and thinking of more, then when TV was over I said, “that’s it.  I’m going with Schrodinger Vs. Pavlov”.  I thought it’d be cool, an army of dogs that you can steer around with a bell cursor, vs. a guy who can place boxes that contain pop-up cats that may be alive or dead.  Then I was thinking it would be like a board game, where the Pavlov guy has cards with various dogs and bells and things, and the Schrodinger guy has dice with 3 alive-cat faces and 3 dead-cat faces.  The closest I got to an actual idea was that Schrodinger could commit his dice to various battles, and hope they were enough when actually rolled.  It didn’t actually make a game, though.

So this morning I woke up still with no ideas that worked, and finally decided it had to be the very first idea that struck me as solid.  I didn’t want to do a platformer, but here I go anyway: Miyamoto Vs. Yamamoto.  You’ll hop from ship to ship, bouncing on their various parts to sink them, then hop off before you sink with them.  It won’t be Mario, because you’ll be dodging fire directly aimed at you by the cannons and other oddities, and the ‘defeat each ship’ motif is a little different.  Got some ideas, anyway!  Time to build a ship editor!

I made a list of the probable theme winners yesterday and I pretty much had ideas for all of them.

Except Minimalist.

So I’ll probably just take one of my other ideas…. and minimize it.

Oh well.  Time to get crackin’.

So, I had a premonition that this theme might win, and have been thinking of games that would work well in it. Not going to reveal much yet but I have a very clear direction and I’m looking forward to being able to put this game together!

So for now I’m going to write up all the things I think the game should do, and come up with some scheme to ensure they all get done. Onward!

I got nothing but ideas… Well, I also have a black screen that you can press ESC to exit.  But anyway, none of the ideas are really kicking it.  The most unique one, but one I am not at all sure I want to do, is something like this: You’re a old prospector type guy, carrying a keg of gunpowder.  It has a hole, as they always do, so you leave a trail behind.  You’re in a place filled with explosives.  After a set time, the end of your fuse lights and begins chasing after you.  It blows up any explosives it gets near, and of course if it gets to you, it blows you up too.  You can put the keg down any time, so the goal is A> blow stuff up without getting killed (put the keg down and hide before the flame gets to you), and B> blow up as much stuff as possible.

The chain reaction is that obviously all the explosives blow up other explosivs near them.  So the strategy is in putting your fuse down well without getting blown up along the way.  Seems kinda fun, but I don’t know about actually making it… well, after writing it, it’s strongly considered.

Other ideas include a Bangaio-style shooter where guys who explode blow up other guys near them, so you want to cluster them up and destroy them.  Also, a guy with a chain who smashes enemies, sending them flying into other enemies for a chain-based chain reaction (but chain physics scares me).  Another is  something along the lines of pool, shoot out a ball that hits enemies, and they go flying and hit other enemies.

But behind all that stuff is the idea that I kinda wanted to make a turn-based thing, like a board game or card game.  I don’t know, though.  So many ideas, so little interest in them… maybe the prospector thing.