Howllo everyone!

Ok, I didn’t really post much (At all) on the journal pages, but that’s because I was hard at work making my game and not slacking my time away on IRC! (No really!)

Anyway, I’m owlfully sorry for not posting much but eh, whatcha gonna do ’bout it? Here’s a screenshot to distract you:

Anyway, you can download the game from:

http://www.deepflame.nl/ld12/tower_master.zip

Good luck figuring out how it works. It’s not that complicated though, even my little sister worked it out on her own. (/taunt)

Good luck to all those who are still crunchin’! (And don’t waste too much time on those howlribble owl jokes on IRC.. )

Ok, i couldn’t hold back.

Here’s the final version of Tower Collapse. I’ve added two more stages, fixed some small bugs, enabled window/fullmode switching and added the source to the zip file as well (forgot during the first preview-final).

Download from here: http://www.georg-rottensteiner.de/files/Tower%20Collapse.zip

If you take the time to test please tell me about any bugs! Thanks and have fun!

Edit: 20:27 local time, added a Compo Game Loader file for easier testing! It even works

Ok. So I’m done! Thanks to timezone, I’m early too.

This has been my first competition, and it’s been a lot of fun.

Download it: http://www.ingeniumdigital.com/ldimg/TowerOfDoom.zip

Readme it: http://www.ingeniumdigital.com/ldimg/readme.txt

With all hope (due to its lack of being tested) it’ll actually work. It’s written in C++ with SFML. I’ve licensed the source under the MIT license. If this is a problem, yell.

Stay tuned for a postmortem and perhaps a less broken build after I sleep.

I’m feeling pretty tired, so i’m not sure i’ll add much more. I’ll try though.

To be on the safe side here’s a pre final version. The gameplay is there, as are 8 stages of bombing goodnees and a editor.

The link for the pre-final version is http://www.georg-rottensteiner.de/files/Tower%20Collapse.zip. Anything else will be polish from now on.

Edit: Modified the zip file, this is now a newer version. Removed the final tag.

Local time: 02:58 AM

We woke up to see the theme voting results, and “The Tower” was not what we had expected. But in a hurry we turned an old idea, to fit the theme. Some kind of a smashup game, a clone of the SNES game “Super Smash TV”. You are in control of a random muscular character, and you’re goal is to kill all the enemies on the current floor of the tower, without dying, and then proceed to the next floor, with more and heavier enemies. We are planning an arcade mode, so you will be alive untill you are extremely outnumbered.

We began making a fast title screen to match the theme of our game, which looks a lot like the old gaming consoles Gameboy and SNES.

To give it some kind of relevance to the theme, The Tower, we made a cut-scene of our character moving on to the next floor in an elevator. This sequence, will be played every time you conquer a floor and move on to the next.

After the cut-scene you arrive to the actual game. A floor, that actual looks more like an arena, where you have to kill all enemies around you. The gates will open randomly, and spawn more zombies. If there’s enough time, we will add other enemies than just those zombies on the screenshot below.

We also managed to create sounds for the title screen, the cut-scene, floor doors open/close, weapon shooting and bullets hitting the wall. Besides that we created the animation of a zombie dying.

There’s still a lot of work to do.

• Zombie AI
• Zombie spawn system
• Balancing the game, adjust hitboxes
• Music

We are now going to bed, and looking forward to continue tomorrow morning. An upcoming journal of day 2, and probably a few comments and pictures of our workspaces and lunches will be posted later. Goodnight!

Almost time to turn in…

Most of the game is done, including sound and music… Just composed some stupid tunes on the acoustic guitar, recorded it, cleaned it a bit in Goldwave, and it’s done… Got a game music and a title music… even considered adding some lyrics to the title music, but I don’t have the gear to mix up the voice and the guitar and I can’t do both at the same time, because I suck! J

Going to wrap this up for tonight, get everything ready for my trip tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll be coding again in about 15 hours or so (which leaves me with about 7 to 8 usable hours left)… Thankfully, only things I miss are the Main Menu, the Instructions, some levels (which can be done pretty fast) and some gameplay tests)…

I spent the past couple of hours trying to get a simple spacial partitioning system working so ray/triangle intersection tests between game objects and the world mesh would be reasonably quick … or so I hoped.  On my machine the frame rate drops horribly with even as few as 10 intersection tests per frame!  I guess Python’s not a good platform to write a 3D engine in. 

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!

Well, I’ve something that’s working reasonably… and plays very poorly. It’s just too hard! The idea as it is now is to climb the tower using a limited amount of, uh, jumps? And touching as many walls as possible on the way up.

Explosions are done…

They even look cute… Anyway, now I have to decide on exactly the gameplay is… I can drop blocks from wherever I want and they explode if they come in 8-way contact with blocks of the same color… So now, I just have to decide between the explicit building (where the player has to place blocks so they don’t blow up, according to some pattern and as fast as possible – this option would have me change the 8-way collision to 4-way, I think, or else it’s just alternating stuff. This choice is also more work in the level design thing); or the implicit building, where blocks come out of the sky and the player has to change their color while they drop, so that they don’t explode when they land… This last option is much easier, since it becomes more or less random and I just have to design towers… I’ll do a break now and decide…

I should really REALLY have spent some time with Flex before attempting something of this scale with it.

Still, I’ve (only just) got the thing started now, and now I can maybe turn my mock-ups into something resembling a game, although nearing the 25% mark and with nothing to show for it is not encouraging…

Progress is going extremely well…

I already have level definitions, rendering code, some game logic, input, etc… Only thing that’s lacking is an actual gameplay idea… or better, a decision on the gameplay decision. My wife’s been helping me with ideas, and I have 3 or 4 possible gameplay paths available, I just don’t know which one is more fun/less work…

Anyway, here’s some photos and such…

At my desk, heavy in thought:

My cat ready to pounce the mouse:

48 hour salad (all done with tomatoes and olives by my wife):

Brain food for lunch: burgers, mediterranean salad, cooked mushrooms, raw carrots… everything the body and mind need:

And the game screeny:

The blocks of any color can be placed in the tower structure, and they’ll fall down until they found another block or get to the ground…

I am making a 3D game and I was thinking it might be easiest if I designed it to require an analog control joystick or gamepad.  Does anybody here not have a joystick of some kind?

Also, I might as well tell about my current progress.  I have a nice start to my 3d engine with loading .OBJ meshes and textures and correctly rendering them.  This is going smoother than I thought it would.

Dinner for night one. The Parmesan cheese should spell “LD”.

Meanwhile, the game progresses… The homework less so.

Woken up about 2 hours ago, and saw that the topic is Tower… Basically, it sucks… My wife came up with the basic idea of what I’m going to do: a brick tower building game… the game part is still unclear, but I probably will think of something… I want to try to have most of the game built today, since tomorrow I’m off to Dublin and will loose lots of time in travels and such…

Anyway… Here are the obligatory pics:

My office:

First food of the day:

And the screenshot:

Bit late I suppose, but just to make things clear I’m using a really simple template for Slick apps which does nothing but opens up a window and listens to key events, that I’ve done beforehand. You’re welcome to it, of course, but I doubt anybody will find much need for it :>

It’s 4:46 am here and I have a bit of insomnia.  Anyhow, I spent more time than I should have creating the main character for my game, since so much more needs to be made.  My original plan was to write a simple 3D engine, so here’s Castle Man looking at something that cought his interest:

I’m sort of a climber. And pondering about the teme, i stumbled upon Spiderman! The real one. Alain Robert.

You will not be Alain ofcourse, unless you finish the game. Then you get the Alain Robert award of stickyness. Or something.

The game will be something like this: You have to drag someones hands/feet to different position on the building/tower and if it’s good, he won’t fall down. During the climb there will be numerous hassles like birds, window cleaners, office workers, and policeman trying to stop your tour the force.

This might be a bit too difficult for a first game, but trying doesn’t hurt. It will also involve some physics i guess, and i wonder how good i am with that.

So this will be it. I wonder where i’ll be tomorrow.

Update: I might do something different altogether.

I’m new to Ludum Dare, so I thought I might introduce myself with a short post. The plan is to enter the competition when it starts in a short while, although I suppose it still remains to be seen if I can find the time to do so :>

I’ll be using Java, and probably at least one of the below libraries:

• Slick, which in turn relies on LWJGL. Slick is a 2D game library using OpenGL.
• Phys2D, a physics engine for java (port of the same engine as JBox2D).

As for the game, I’m fairly convinced that whatever I make will be simplistic at best. But hey, I’ve heard somewhere that it’s participating that matters Now, I’m curious to see the other entries – good luck folks!