I did make some updates to Xue after the compo, which I spun into my “game of the week” for this past week.

I’m not really super pleased with the result (in the end, I think the game still has too much “oooo… parallax” and not enough “wow, that was fun!”), but I also don’t have a clear direction that I’d want to push the idea in at this point, so I’m letting it stand as is for now. Maybe someday when / if I get a better sense of exactly what I want people to do in those caverns I’ll spin off a different game based on the entry.

Anyway, heres an updated screenshot (once LD was over, I immediately and shamelessly plugged in some graphics from LostGarden.com):

It’s playable online here: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/play-xue/

As Kobel suggested in the comments on the entry, I did use a color matrix to tweak the background layers (actually, the original entry did that too, but it only darkened them, so it wasn’t much of an interesting effect). There are a few different “atmospheres” that the game uses for the caves, each of which fiddle with the colors of the background layers in different ways.

Gameplay-wise, I added some fireball spewing monsters, along with items that restore fuel. I also fiddled with the controls for the player’s ship (and actually I’m still fiddling with them, even with the game already released online), and adjusted the way the crystals spawn.

The map is also completely enclosed now, so there shouldn’t be any more invisible walls, and there’s no longer a way to fly off into space off the top of the map. Technically the map generation got tweaked a bit too, but nothing terribly interesting (the maps start out at half size and get scaled up, which both speeds up the generation a bit and cuts down on some annoying small-scale features).

I’m always happy to get feedback (though on this one, like I said, I’m not sure if I’ll stick my fingers into it again for a while unless a really compelling new direction for it comes up).

I also realized when I was getting ready to write this post that I never posted the updated version of my LD14 entry — so I hope nobody will mind if I tack it on here!

That entry was Crushing Pressure, and it turned into this little Flash game:

You can give it a whirl here, if you like: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/play-crushing-pressure/

The original entry for LD14 had the same basic goal (rescue the little people while avoiding the walls), but it didn’t have any other obstacles to avoid (the updated version adds the DoomCubes and WhizBlades). The released version also added music, and little extras like an honest-to-goodness score counter and some quick transitions between levels. It’s still a pretty simple game, but there are a few minutes worth of gameplay hiding in there, I think.

Thanks for the feedback everyone left on both the original entries!

Behind The Dumb Episode 6 is out at last!  It’s the first half of my timelapse and journal for LD14!  Check it out.  You don’t need to rate it, because while I did FILM it all during the weekend, I certainly didn’t have it all edited and ready by then.  And the second half won’t be out until voting is over anyway.  Still, it should be amusing to some.

EtherGrind Timelapse

Music is “Do You Know Squarepusher” by Squarepusher.
Annotations so you know what the heck is going on.

Ok, guys. It’s that time of the weekend. Download Put the Ball in the Basket and give it a try. Windows executable only for the moment; linux and possibly OS X builds later this week.

I swear, the hardest part of LD is naming my damn entries. Of course, that’s usually because they’re not worth naming. Here, though, the problem is different. What do I call this thing?

I also tried very, very hard not to use the phrase ‘build the level’ anywhere in the help text. Because by total accident I did LD #9 instead of LD #14…

Finally!

I will need to do the title screen, game over screen, and so on, but not just yet. It’s 5 am and I need to catch a quick nap first.

Hopefully there will be time for music (I have a track almost complete) and possibly even sound.

Back in a couple of hours.

So this is my final entry. Alas I didn’t sleep too well and couldn’t work very much on my entry. Here’s Doom Runner, available from my homepage: http://www.georg-rottensteiner.de/files/Endurion_LD14_DoomRunner.zip

Run for your life (and money) in a deadly game show. Grab prizes and try to reach the goal before the Advancing Wall of Doom crushes you!

There’s only a meager four levels included.

Have fun and Good Luck! 

My distribution. That is a sticky link to the latest version; I’ll probably be updating it throughout the day.

Changes since last night:

• Figured out py2exe. If you’re stuck, download my distro and check out setup.py.
• Added the stuff the LD judges want (gameinfo.xml, screenshot.png, license.txt, readme.txt). Not that I really care whether this game gets judged, but I want to go through the formal steps of submitting an entry, regardless of the game’s quality.
• A tiny bit of game polish.

Finally.

The circles that make up the wall will absorb same-coloured enemy bullets. If you move into the circle and shoot, it will reappear (after a brief period) as the colour of the shot you used.

Enemies who hit the wall are immediately killed, but the circle they hit will be pushed back towards you! If the circle is pushed back too far, there is a chance that it will disappear. After three circles are gone, the entire wall disintegrates.

Currently there’s no way to regenerate the wall other than dying. However, once I implement the bomb/super attack (the next item on my agenda), the player will have a way to regenerate the wall.

Also, have an advancing wall of sickeningly cute.

Been having a bit of trouble with matching up bitmaps to physics objects, so I re-wrote all my renderers to draw wireframes and solid colors instead of gradients and bitmaps. Solid 40fps, and you can switch between quality levels on the fly — a nice side-effect.

Bugs fixed, everything’s in place. Time to start whipping out some gameplay.

Unfortunately, I just spent the last hour reading up on the history of Texas’ annexation, because our sly governor just dropped the word ‘secession’ in a public forum. omgwtfbbq. He’s clearly floating the idea for personal political gain, but still…the phrase “We have an excellent union, no need to dissolve it. But…” hasn’t appeared in serious American political discourse in, what, 150 years? An odd notion to even entertain.

I made some delicious shrimp fried rice.

Frying the veggies and shrimp.

Rice ahoy!

Om nom nom.

Also, this.

Well, I sort of have a design planned out for my game, so I decided to take out a pen and start drawing. Here’s what I sketched up in the past 5 minutes.

Notice the beautiful asset list: brainwave, eyes, hand, mouth, and nose. A more delightful art asset list I have not seen!

I’m currently working on the levels, and trying to make the game harder as you progress up the building. I find making Fancy Footwork be even fancier is hard.

This is also the first screenshot to have cracks in the ledges. They of course, break on touch.

Physics objects working, courtesy of the awesome Chipmunk library. You can’t see it in the screenshot, but the level spawns about halfway up the screen, each piece just in time before you reach it, and falls down to the bottom.

Gameplay? I said I had physics — you want gameplay, too? Jeesh.

I’ve made some further progress, but I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this:

In case there’s any doubt, the blue bullets are going downwards.

Only one problem: I haven’t implemented collision detection yet, so no shooting enemies and no getting shot. And the framerate is already acting funny for some reason. -_-; I have to force myself to concentrate on making the gameplay work first…

I am so very uninspired this weekend — it looks like I’m going to fall on that (trusty) old standby, the sidescrolling platformer. Having some fun playing around with the visual style, though.

Wait — you don’t see the game in that screenshot? It’s right there! No? Aww, comon:

Yeah, you can really see where my priorities lie. Or at least my ability to prioritize.

Anyway, it’s a wall. It’ll kill…anything on the stage. Too bad the stage is empty. Sigh.

Man, it’s too early for this. Morning apple pastries, with apple juice for fuel. Apparently I’m going for the GBGames style of LD nourishment this time around.

Did some concept art last night, which I really don’t remember — things got a little bleary around 5am. Still no good ideas, so I guess I’ll just go with a dumb one. Hey, you work with what you got.

I’m making a classic-style shooter, heavily inspired by R-Type and Gradius.

There will be many advancing walls of doom, although I haven’t really decided what direction they will be advancing from (most likely ALL DIRECTIONS, CRUSHING YOU BETWIXT THEM LIKE UNFORTUNATE SPACE JAM).

I spent a good few hours cranking out a nice motion blur effect. Here it is in action.

Well, it’s not much so far, but here’s what I’ve been working on: