Lighting is important for my game, so I need an LOS algorithm. Unfortunately my attempt to implement Bresenham’s is not working on the Y axis for unknown reasons, and KineticJS and its lack of (clearly documented) layer blending is not helping me debug it. I think I’m going to have to switch to another one.

Here’s a screenshot anyway. As you can see, the ‘lighting’ layer is completely obscuring the placeholder player graphic as I’m unable to tweak its opacity.

Another argument in favor of learning your tools before LD starts, I guess.

Ok so I’ve got basic worker AI in place and I’m trying to calculate/balance the happiness factor next. I also realized that I may have to scratch my one-choice-at-a-time idea of forcing the player to choose what his citizens should do each day. I realized that this is annoying as I’ve to decide/click in a regular interval. I think a continues simulation will be more fun and probably easier to balance. I’ll sleep about this and decide tomorrow morning.

Here’s another good night screenshot

As always I’ll continue live streaming (http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose) tomorrow.

1:30 AM now and I got some basic npc functionality in place. You can build houses that spawn citizens which walk around randomly until a certain population cap. Here’s a screenshot:

Next up is coding of worker behavior. As always watch it all go down live on my stream at: http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose

Hi everyone ,

Let me introduce you my first work in progress.
My first idea was to create a God Game.

But then I figured out that it was going to be tough to make it great and funny. So, I decided to erase everything and start something else : Now i’m working on a Platformer. You’re going to telle me that it’s usual and not original ? Not really. In my game, you don’t have to control the hero, you must kill him…..

Here is how it looks at that moment.

A tiny snack to get  la gnaque

I decided what I wanted to do pretty quickly, which I’m keeping kinda secretish for the nonce because the narrative whammy would be ruined otherwise.

The plan I ended up settling on has left me setting up a simulation game… from scratch, since I had no base code. So it’s going to be text based, no graphics, using the Python console.

But it will have music! I can sing, by golly, and Audacity makes it easy to record things. Perfect quality? No. A nice touch? Yes. Now I just need to figure out how to make the music loop using Pyglet.

As far as how the game is coming along: quite nicely, all things considered. I just hit a stumbling block and am too tired to figure out where I went wrong, so it is time to sleep. But the simulation building progresses, and I have some of the commands implemented.

This simulation isn’t real time, btw — you set it up, look at the results, and then make a decision about how to proceed. Run the simulation again? Make your final decision? Then more story.

Edit: Oh! And I know exactly how I will fit goats (maybe just one goat) into the game.

After spending the whole morning brainstorming and writing game ideas I’ve decided to go with the following idea:

A strategy/simulation game with very limited interactions. You have been elected as the new king of a small kingdom and must bring prosperity by making the right decisions. The goal of the game is very simple, reach a population of X (to be announced). The grand issue tough is that no matter what you chose someone in your kingdom will always be unhappy and the bigger your population gets the more difficult it’ll be to keep your citizens happy. Eventually you’ll have to sacrifice your good will in order to reach your goal and win the game. But at what cost? because in the end you’ll have turned into the villain in the eyes of your citizens.

This idea is largely inspired by William Shakespear’s Macbeth.

Here’s the mind map I did while brainstorming:

And here are my other ideas I didn’t choose:

————————————————————
You’re the evil cube wishing to do XXX upon YYY in order to reach ZZZ.
————————————————————
Hero has to reach X, you have to prevent him from doing so by using all kinds of obstacles.
————————————————————
You have to fight the hero who is an increadibely bad and incompetente fighter but you have to let him win in order to receive the applaus from the audience.
————————————————————
You are a mountain the hero tries to conquer. Prevent him from reaching the top and getting salvation.
—————————————————————
You are the evil temptation in the form of sweets and must jump into the mouth of people who are on a diet.
—————————————————————
You are the god of sins. You get points by leading people to commit sins. The bigger the sin the more points.
————————————————————–

Now time to start coding. Watch it all go down live right here: http://www.twitch.tv/naughtyloose

  Waiting for a real game footage upload, a glimpse of the appartment activity at noon.

Took a break from content creation. It’s probably a smarter move to do some prototyping first anyway and worry about visuals & audio later.

I tried using JavaScript for about an hour or two and found out I couldn’t bear to program without tuples and list comprehensions (Python is my usual programming language of choice.) So I went hunting for alternatives and discovered CoffeeScript. It’s similar enough that it feels like home, though I did encounter an amusing case of… unexpected behavior where testing for “array.length = 0″ resulted not in the syntax error I would expect, but the array mysteriously becoming blank (in other words, length 0.)

I’ve successfully implemented a very lazy dungeon generator; it creates a maze and then carves some rooms out atop it, with the maze guaranteeing connectivity. It’ll do the job for what I have in mind, though the corridors with dead ends might be a bit hard on players.

My first time participating in Ludum Dare and I ask for advice in irc and I hear a resounding “Stick to what you know. Don’t try to learn something new”. So I’m basing my game around content creation. You create villainous content for your friends to play with. The development stack for me is php, mysql, javascript (keneticjs and web canvas). I’m starting with normal boiler plate code:

This is how it begins for me!!!

This Ludum Dare doesn’t overlap with Guild Wars 2′s launch weekend, so I’ll be giving it a shot. It does overlap with their holiday event, but I can live with that (plus all the events will be doable for weeks to come in Lion’s Arch anyway.)

Surprisingly, I came up with a solid idea right off the cuff this time. Due to my love for puns, my entry is going to be titled Dungeon Leaper.

I’ll be doing it in HTML5/Canvas this time. Why? Because LOVE2D had some issues, the last LD I participated in had someone going around and posting nasty comments on every game that wasn’t web based, and it doesn’t hurt to broaden my skill set. I should probably have made an effort to become familiar with it before the compo, but I don’t expect this to require any particularly complex programming.

Rather than plunge myself into the unfamiliar wilds of JavaScript right away, I’m spending tonight on content creation – I already have half a theme song and I’m going to try for a slightly less abstract look, despite my lack of any real pixel art ability. We’ll see how it goes.

this post is a direct mirror from my blog, I’ll be doing this a lot so as to not waste too much time (yours and mine)

Hoo Wow, This One’s Tricky!

I’m still brainstorming 2.5hrs after the theme announcement. This is a tough one!

I have a nine page bullet list of ideas, but choosing is a little harder than it was last time because:

• My favourite ideas are likely the favourites of many other people
• My least favourite ideas mostly fall under the following categories:
  • nice concept, but where’s the game?
  • how does that differ from the hero version?
  • nice game, but where’s the concept

Normally at this point I’d start work on coding up the basic framework and getting the generic skeleton going, but since I’m not sure which game I’m going with I still don’t know whether AS3/FlashPunk or Java/LibGDX are going to be more appropriate.

I’m leaning toward FlashPunk again simply because more is covered by the library, but that would instantly limit my chances of doing anything simulation-based as the VM (as far as I know) is not as well suited. Distribution is significantly easier though.

Another caveat if I choose Java/LibGDX is that less people will play the game unless it’s embeddable in the browser – outside of Processing I’ve never attempted this, which could either be deceptively simple or a waste of a few good hours.

More coffee, and standing in the sun before I choose.

I give myself one hour to choose, and a further hour to get whichever dev environment I go for setup and ready to go. If the setup is not yet done by that point I shall switch to a simpler environment.

Okay, so I didn’t expect You Are the Villain to come out on top. Definitely starting from scratch. xD

The good thing is that I’ve pretty much decided on what I want to do. The other good thing is that it shouldn’t be too graphically complicated. The maybe bad thing is that it’s going to involve simulation. We’ll see how coding that goes.

The game should be okay for what it is, but it will definitely be tied to the narrative.

Ready up! The Hack-a-Jam is back, and starting tomorrow!!

To join, you must create an account in the Posting section of the website, and then start posting! Note: All posts have been deleted since the last Hack-a-Jam, so that is why only I have posts there. However, I do encourage you to become social in the forums and ask questions.

The Hack-a-Jam is a regular game development competition/jam where you must create a game within a set amount of time. However, it is not like any other gaming competition/jam. In the Hack-a-Jam, there is an infinite amount of winning categories, and no overall winner. While winners still must have superb games to win, there are no set winning categories, and there will always be multiple winners. Also, the theme will be voted on by the community, after they are submitted in the forums (Posting section) under the topic Theme Posting, in the Rules and Announcements forum.

To prove how unique the winning categories are, these are previous winning categories and other possible categories:

Most Psychedelic Visuals
Most Deaf People After Hearing The Game
Most Angry Bongos Involved
Most Rage-free
Most rage-induced
Most Suggestive Content Without Crossing The Line
Shortest Functional Game
Most Random and/or Annoying Sound When Picking Things Up
Most Things On Screen Without Lag or Crash

Like most game development competitions, there are rules, however, the rules here are more laid back and simple:

1. All game content must be created within the set time. Note: You can use other music, placeholder graphics, etc. as long as you are allowed to!
2. Your game is not required to follow the theme, but would greatly improve your chances of winning. Unless almost every other game is not following the theme, it is almost guaranteed that your game won’t win anything.
3. You must work alone, and you must create everything included in the game.
4. All game creation tools are permitted, such as GameMaker, Photoshop, Flash, Paint, etc.
5. All game extensions/DLLs are permitted. If you want to make it multiplayer (if you are using GameMaker), go ahead and use 39dll.

What do the winners get?

The winners will have the opportunity to post a message on the Hack-a-Jam website itself, whether it be something random and funny, like “I LOVE banana chicken pancakes”, or an advertisement such as “Play my new game TODAY!”. The winners will also get badges to show off to their friends and the gaming community.

The official 4th Hack-a-Jam starts tomorrow (Friday), so ready up for a double game jam week (if you are joining to Ludum Dare too next week)!

Well, first of all this is my first Ludum Dare.

Lately I’ve been thinking about quitting my daily job and start making a living from my own games

I saw this October challenge and I said “It’s time!”

I’ll be working on a mobile game, I’ll try to bring it to these platforms:

Mobile HTML5/Sponsorship

IOS/Android

Windows 8 Marketplace

I’ll be using these tools:

Construct 2 (I’m new to mobile game development in general, so I have to use an engine that can export to the platforms I want to target)

Inkscape (I’ll be working with multiple screen sizes and resolutions so I’m going to make vectors)

Music (Still not sure)

I hope you like my game guys!

Introduction and special thanks

This was my first LD, and I came here fully expecting to faceplant from over-ambition or poor time management. But I submitted my puzzle game, ‘Additive’, polished and complete with hours to spare. It’s the first complete game I’ve ever done, and it’s gotten more positive feedback than I had dared to dream, and the process of making it shoulder-to-shoulder with all you other fine people (especially on IRC) was awesome.

Before I start the post-mortem, I want to thank ‘Cake’ from IRC for giving me a quick pep talk around six hours into the compo, when I was feeling particularly unprepared. I also want to thank all of the IRCers who complained that my first release candidate was too cryptic, and especially ‘Tau’, who played through the entire thing and deliberately found ways to break it. My game would be half of what it is without such playtesting. On with the post-mortem!

Part 1: The pre-feedback post-mortem

This is actually the second post-mortem I’ve written for Additive. The first one, written immediately after submission and before voting opened, can be found here. Its salient points are:

What went great

• I knew my strengths and weaknesses at the start of the competition, and this guided me towards reasonable ideas and goals.
• Making a puzzle game was a great decision because the very nature of a puzzle game works against feature creep.
• I used a notebook to organise myself and work through problems.
• I set some time aside to brainstorm ideas.
• I developed a quick way to make levels, which was more efficient and accessible than building the game board in Unity’s editor.
• I avoided crashes by limiting sugar and caffeine intake.

What went poorly

• It was very difficult to design puzzles.
• The game is not colorblind-friendly because I had a hard time letting go of the aesthetic I had developed. This is not the kind of developer I want to be!
• I didn’t have enough time to deepen the game’s mechanics.

Part 2: The post-feedback post-mortem

 More things that went great

• I decided on a feature lock after the first day. By the end of the first day I had a working game. The second day was dedicated solely to polish and level creation: no gameplay changes allowed.
• I did early testing. Sticking the game up on my Facebook delivered exactly zero constructive criticism. Posting the game on IRC for fellow devs to play got me immediate blow-by-blow feedback, and my time budgeting on Day 2 allowed me to work on every single one of the issues that were raised.
• I put a lot of effort into visual player feedback. I changed the buttons on the main menu at the last minute to make them look more buttony and clickable. There’s a nice marker to indicate the selected block. The marker and the selected block pulse with color. Blocks animate towards their new positions instead of just teleporting over.
• I spent even more time on aural feedback. When you click on a block, it makes a sound. Deselecting a block makes a different sound. You get a different sound again when you try to make an invalid move. When blocks combine, the sound they make depends on the outcome. Sound makes a game feel alive and reactive. Skimp on graphics before you skimp on sound.
• I think I picked a fairly cohesive style. The game is an exercise in minimalism (like I said in Part 1, I knew I was bad at art). Its presentation was informed by the effect of parenting a spotlight to the camera and tilting the camera 45° towards a plane. I felt that an understated look deserved an understated and elegant sound, so I used single piano notes in GarageBand iOS for sound effects. The game would have been a dissonant mess if I had used SFXr.
• Having the tutorial levels was a good idea. It gave me the opportunity to dress the game up with prose, and it also communicated the essence of the game efficiently and enjoyably. It became even better when I added explicit instructions on suggestion from the IRC testers.

The only other thing I can think of that went poorly

• The black squares imbalanced the game. It was intentional that you’d be able to walk the black squares around in the last level, gobbling everything up with wild abandon. I didn’t know that this was possible in the other levels, and the game’s difficulty suffered as a result. Some of the levels have black squares adjacent to each other because I was actively trying to avoid this exploit. If you poke through my timelapse and my source code, you’ll see that I actually did have other ideas for color combinations and win conditions (some of them were actually suggested by players in the game’s comments), but I knew that the game was already pretty good with black squares as they are, and I had no time to change the mechanic and playtest it to my satisfaction.

In all, I’m incredibly proud of what I made. It turned out far better than I expected, and the experience is invaluable. I am already feeling the itch for some rapid prototyping, so you know I’m going to be back in December. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to play Additive if you haven’t already!

A surprise for you, dearest reader!

I’ve uploaded pictures of the dev notebook entries I made during LD24 to Additive‘s page on my website. It starts the day before LD, and ends with the list of things I wanted to address in this post-mortem.

What Went Right

• Got all planned features in
• Better way(than last LD) to understand game
• Graphics(In my opinion)

What Went Wrong

• Sound(forgot about it, didn’t get that ‘ca-ching! sound in’. Resulted in BFXR)
• Music(non existent)
• Victory/Fail(The game still played after you won and you could Win/Lose again)
• Sleep(I slept in till 12pm(6 hours before deadline), without the graphics, menu, and help done. got it in 20 minutes before.)

Overall I have learned a lot, as I hope everybody else has to. I hope I’ll be available for the next one, and if not, I can alwasy do the Mini’s. Now, off to rating! Also check out my game HERE if you want.

Despite internet failing at (literally) 12 minutes until the deadline I’ve pulled through.

It’s not everything I had hoped for, but significantly more than I had fretted for.

I can’t believe I’m looking at this thing done! Now to go rate the others.. Or perhaps sleep first.

You can play it here

Due to work and slumber this ended up only being about a 23 hour compo for me, I look forward to attempting the full weekend some time.

I think I’ll explore the whole LD experience and do a PostMortem soon, too.  Perhaps more appropriate to do it for a fixed up Jam version so that the original idea gets across more.

Nonetheless, for the curious here’s a little run down off the top of my head (after the break):

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While my game didn’t do terribly well in LD 23, it got overall average scores, I did get quite a bit of plays and a lot of good feedback on it.  I decided why not, take it and expand it out further.  Well this has taken FAR longer than expected and I ended up developing a full cross-platform 2d game engine/library that supports Android NDK/Linux/Windows/Mac in the process, but as of last night the extended edition of my LD23 game “Tiny Defenders” Is available on google play

First off, a link to the free version:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raptor85.tinydefendersfree

And a link to the compo page!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7131

But that’s not  the primary purpose of this post!   I wish i had though of it sooner and done more in between but i’ve started doing video logs of my development so following this sentence i’ll have a few videos, starting with a video of the competition version, showing how the game evolved as i tried new things and added on to what I already had.  I actually think it’s kinda interesting to see how something starts from a tiny little ludum dare game and evolves into a full game.

Click the link to view the rest of this post! i’m hiding it under a “more” tag otherwise it’ll eat up the entire front page….it’s huge!

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OK, so here’s some development shots and various assets for our game, Kumiho

This is my visual reference chart, the visual references that most influenced how the game looks. Ikaruga has a prominent role visually, even though I did play some Jamestown, Touhou 8 and Xenon II to get a feel for things. I used a 21 color palette which grew organically as I added more and more stuff. It’s the strange shape at the bottom left of the timelapse. I also tried to keep with a vertical composition and Korean text, in its (less usual) top to bottom form, was a huge help in establishing the look. Korean and chinese drawings were also a big influence on the style.

I always like to have reference for everything before I start to work. In this case there’s background ideas, spaceship designs, photos of insects and stylized korean drawings.

Here is my timelapse.
I used one main photoshop file to draw new stuff, so that I could see them relative to other assets. Essentially, a mockup/overview of the game.

When something needed animating, I just copied it into a new file and went on from there. Cases in point:

Long explosion. Again, Korean and Japanese art influenced the shape

the flappy wings of the squid boss. I realised, from looking at slow-motion squid videos on youtube, that the movement is essentially a sine wave. Even so, this took about 2 hours

The ship was my first animating challenge for this game. I had chosen an asymmetrical design, so left and right animations would have to be different, and not just a flipped over version.

The tentacles. This took 3 hours. Sine wave movement again, but these were harder. The two right tentacles are flipped versions of the two left ones, with a time delay of 3 frames, so that the movement looks more organic.

Hope this helps,
Christina