it’s noon here so i decided to whip up some breakfast.

I baked bacon and eggs with cheese on top to make these adorable breakfast puffs. We also have the most professional plates. Okay? Okay.

And breakfast for Machiavelli too!

Hope everyone is doing okay! I have some backgrounds to color.

So my initial idea, which was to make a top down escape from the bring your kid to work at the office style game, is not something I think I can finish in time. I currently had the player, walls (babies)  and enemies (fat kids). Back to the drawing board. I’ll let you know more when I know more.

Here’s what I had:

(idea)

Here’s the first Escape from Ludum Dare demo! Ludum Dares included: 0 (Indirect Interaction) – 1 (Guardian) – 2 (Construction / Destruction)

http://megaswf.com/serve/1163762

At the moment there’s no win/lose feedback.

So I didn’t update yesterday because I was, get this, sleeping. So, the real journey starts today. I’ll explain my concept when it hits me

So…..I knew in advance I’ll have VERY little time this weekend….. and I was also aware how many different things actually go into making a (playable) game…. so I REALLY had to think very well what I would do for the compo.

As I also knew I won’t have the complete weekend to work on it  (and since the theme was to be announced by Friday 10:00PM local time) my plan was like this:

• Friday night (after theme’s announcement): Think on the game concept. Shall I fail to come up with one,  I would abandon the competition.
• Saturday Morning: [Boring things to do]
• Saturday Afternoon (until 7PM): Work on the game (assuming I didn’t abandon the competition)
• Sunday Morning (until 14:00PM): Work on the game. Submit. (assuming I didn’t abandon the competition)
• Sunday Afternoon: [More boring things to do]

The critical point was Friday night…. Fail to have an idea and it’s all over…

Luckily… I think I have my idea now…and it’s not even midnight! (although the clock will probably hit 00:00 when I finish writing this).

Of course sidescrollers, shooters or anything too conventional in terms of gameplay were out of question. I wont’ have the time to do any of those from scratch (as I didn’t declare the use of any boilerplate code beforehand) so this is what I came up with……

You are the Escape Key (ESC)…. you are in a maze of rooms and doors (the keyboard perhaps?) and you need to escape from the evil Function Keys (F1….F12).

You will run into doors, and those doors will open revealing a key that is inside the room (any other key from the keyboard). If it’s a “harmless” and “friendly” key you should press ENTER to enter the room (duh!) and you will keep running until the next door… If it’s a function key you should press ESC to close the door and keep running until finding another door.

So, the game will be pretty much watching yourself approach to doors (first person view) and press ENTER or ESC according to whoever opened you the door and repeat until reaching the exit. You will have a “reaction time limit” that will be shorter as you get closer to the exit. The running speed will also increase as you progress through the game. A timer will tell how fast you managed to escape (if you succeed, that is) so you can play again trying to beat your best time (or a friend’s time if you dare to challenge a friend).

So it’s basically a reflex-testing game built upon the concept of ESCAPE and (hopefully) constraint to my current limitations.

I HOPE I can actually dedicate the aforementioned time to the game and complete it  in such time frame. Although the idea is simple I can still run into a few walls (so to speak) with it.

I’ll try to keep here a journal of any progress made into the game but don’t expect lot of updates since I’m a damn perfectionist b*stard who checks whatever I write dozens of time in order to make sure it makes sense … so making these blog entries consumes a hellin’ lot from my time. Also, I suck at writing, lol.

I’ll start working on the game tomorrow (Saturday) after I finish with everything I have to do in the morning…. so until that time comes I won’t worry about the game….. In the meantime…… STAGE ONE CLEARED!

So, the Dare starts in 1 hour, so I figure I’m gonna make my first post. During the dare I’m going to post every few hours, just letting those who care know what I’ve done and where I’m heading. As it is now I have : NOTHING (those are the rules). So here’s a screenshot of what happens when I compile my code as it is now:

Unfortunately, in trying to reach the maximum user base possible I decided to use XNA Reach  and thus had to remove my animated intro, even though it was awesome, because it was something like 39000 pixels wide, and Reach wouldn’t take it.

Just so you know, I’m going to be using C# XNA 4.0 for my code, Paint.Net for my art and probably my cello and logic pro for all sound.

Let’s do this!

Oh, and self-replication, I have voted for you, now win!

I dunno what to do, I have some ideas but none of them are convincing, and for now the project’s codename is Taken (no, I mean, that’s the codename)

Anyways, I am preparing my workspace and all necessary stuff for my project, here a photo of the first one:

Arielsan - Workspace

Breakfast? CHECK

Supplies? CHECK

Concept? CHECK

My concept I’m going to start fleshing out now is to do a tribute to Gauntlet where the player that plays alone gets a special item to help with the difficult levels that are designed for 2 players (tying in to the theme). This is probably more than my poor art and sound skills can manage, but its the best idea I can come up with that actually seems like fun to me – so here goes nothing!

Starting design work and timelapse capture now…

So… I don’t know what to do, and am looking for some advice from the LD community.  My original plan was to compete this weekend using a little SDL-based framework I’d been working on… it still needs some work to get things like sound going, though, and is a little clunky.  After looking at what a few other people were using, though, I found out about SFML and got really excited about using it instead of SDL, and went ahead and re-wrote most of my framework using SFML… only to realize that I was using an obsolete version (1.6), which doesn’t support a couple key things I want to be able to do.  I’ve tried for several days now to get cmake to run on my machine to be able to instal SFML 2.0, but it hasn’t worked for me at all, and I’m completely burned out on it:  I wanted to spend this week coding and warming up for the LD, but instead I wasted it on trying to install a dang library!  Now I don’t know what to do at all… I feel tired of dealing with these libraries… I could go back to my old framework, but I still haven’t added sound support to it, and at this point will probably not have time to do so.  Are there any other good options that I am just missing?  Is there an easier way to get SGML2 working?  Is there another C++ library I could quickly adapt to?  Or is Pygame simple enough that I can pick it up on the fly?  Any ideas are welcome!

Well, let me add myself to the giant list of new folks for the upcoming LD #20.  I dropped by the IRC room last night and got some nice advice on useful tools and whatnot… thanks everyone.  A snag though!  I realized this morning that I’m actually moving that weekend!  This might not be as big a deal as it initially seems, though, as I’m only moving to the other side of the same building I’m already in, and I’m already pretty well packed up; it just means some valuable time is going to be eaten up by lugging boxes.  I still plan to compete! 

I plan on using a SDL-based sprite framework that I’ve been working on lately… right now it’s in an unusable state though (being moved from using SDL blitting to sprites as textures in OpenGL).  Assuming it’s fixed in time for the competition, I’ll post the code somewhere for y’all so that I’m within the rules and whatnot.

Uuuhh… yup!  Nice to meet you all!  Let’s have us some fun!

EDIT:  Aaand… that SDL->OpenGL conversion I mentioned?  I think I’ gonna abort it and instead move to SFML.  I’ve been reading about it some today and it really seems like the way to go.  There’re benefits to working with SDL and learning how things like blitting work, of course, but if the API for SFML is as much better than SDL as people are making it seem, it would really speed things up for me… in addition to saving me from having to link in extra libraries for some of the stuff I’m doing.  I’m pretty sure this is one of the useful things someone told me about last night on IRC, but I never managed to get around to looking at it at the time because I was too busy playing with bfxr!  I should have listened to y’all better!  Belated thanks!

Following on from my first post mortem… I’ve uploaded pictures of the notes that I took throughout the comp.

My entry for Ludum Dare 19, Strange Lands, is complete! Here’s a hint: in the game, the land is strange.

I knew you would guess it. It’s a turn-based strategy game, but the twist is that the player has no idea where the enemy is, and is clueless about the layout of the landscape. That’s where the discovery comes in. The levels are automatically generated, and the player competes against an AI opponent.

Happy Ludum Dare everybody, I look forward to playing all the games!

Mr Head and the Journey of Discoveries has been completed. See the entry page.

Windows binaries | Source | Low framerate Timelapse (spoiler warning)

Controls are Arrow Keys and X.

Made in 8 hours, and written in D and uses OpenGL, GLFW and FMod. Sound effects (the few there is) from sfxr.

There was supposed to be some voice “acting” in there, but my microphone was really, really bad, so you managed to escape that. Sadly also lacking music. Would have been great with some light music, I think.

Main sprite is technically an old asset, but to match the last Mr Head game it had to be identical (see Mr Head and the Cow Drowning). I believe my entry is within the spirit of the rules.

I only have one level in place, and watching my girlfriend play through it demonstrated that it is deeply confusing, but oh well, here is a build.

osx only so far, sorry about that.

Having done nothing yesterday (thing got in the way, like Doodle God and various other activities), I have today a few hours ago decided to actually do something. It won’t be a very long or serious game, given that I only have maybe 8 hours in total, but it might be interesting.

The idea is you walk around and discover new things. Which sounds extremely generic, but I don’t want to spoil it too much. The guy walking around is Mr Head, which some of you might know from Mr Head and the Cow Drowning, a mini LD game from some time back. Anyway, here’s a screenshot of the current progress.

It pretty much got the look of the game down as it is. Dunno about sounds yet.

I’ve made some more progress, but unfortunately I had to battle with a vicious bug that cost me a bit more of my precious time. Bugs aside, though, I have this pretty screenshot to show you:

My awesome game of discovery is coming along nicely, and completely secret per my usual Ludum Dare fashion. I’ll give terribly tantalizing hints soon, honest!

Also, uh oh, Spaghetti (not o’s). But for real, it was delicious.

Delicious and Nutritious!

… sorta.

My game submission for Ludum Dare 18 is called Bouncing Bellyfloppers. The object of the game is to constantly and creatively rearrange trampolines to reflect bellyflopping obese guys back at the helicopters from whence they came. You know you want to play it. It looks a little like this:

One thing I learned during my development for this competition is that my own framework is rather limited. It’s pretty good for 2D games, but as soon as I considered doing something 3D, I found that it would take quite a bit of time to implement, and time is short. Hopefully I can implement some basic model loading and such before the next Ludum Dare rolls around. I was happy that I picked an idea that allowed plenty reasonable time to create, though.

My last update before submissions are due.

Working tile map

This is my tile map that I got working last night.  I can create new levels in TilED and easily import them into my game.

Collision boxes

About 20 minutes ago I got the collision box generation working.  You can sort of see how my tile graphics are designed in this shot.

I obviously won’t have a working game done in the next 35 minutes, but it was a valiant effort I believe.  What was missing before I would consider this a game:

• Collision detection and response.
• Enemies with some basic pathfinding / AI.
• The main gameplay element: mind controlling the enemy.

Let me do a re-cap on what went right and what didn’t go according to plan:

• The Spartan framework along with Slick2D was great for getting a jump start on the simple stuff.  In a few hours I had a game shell with splash screen, moving player, camera focus, and mouse rotation.
• TilED was great for designing levels.  I had a basic arena map done in a matter of minutes.
• GraphicsGale saved me when GIMP was repeatedly crashing.
• I hadn’t thoroughly used the Spartan framework, so I was unsure how to go about creating new modules for game Entities (Actors).  When it came time to add enemies and pathfinding, I was completely stumped.
• I hadn’t ever used Slick2d’s TilED loader before.  It took me some time to figure out how to use and manipulate the tile map once I had it in my game.
• I hadn’t ever drawn tileset graphics before.  I wasted a bunch of time drawing and redrawing tile graphics to get something usable.  Also GIMP crashed on me quite a few times, ruining my work.

The moral of the story seems to be: know your tools and libraries.  Much time could have been saved if I didn’t need to fumble around with the tool or dig through the API docs.

Maybe next time I will put together something playable!

So my ADSL router decided to stop working this weekend. I spent a while trying to fix it, but in the end I gave up and bought a new one. As for my game, it’s called “Killer Knife-Robots from Knife Planet K” and I have a demo available for download (requires Windows). It’s not playable yet, but it does have spinning blades of doom. I am probably going to make it so that you can take control of the robots and use them to destroy the other robots.

Spinning blades of doom!