Now I’m sure about it ! my wife is a cannibal !! she wants to make me fat so I can be more tasty, look how much food she is cooking for me !!

yeah baby we have artifacts !! =)

Glaucon lost in the cave will have to search for some artifacts so he can open the door, and look for some enlighment at the next cave…

Combos are working, though there is still only the 1 ‘trick’, you can add to your combo by doing air jumps, and getting *really* close to lava (best to try when in slowmo).

Lava in games is always cool right?

playable after the link:

(more…)

Cavern Club Screenshot 01 - Just text and a background image.

I’ve been up for a few hours now, after a rather lazy yesterday evening (too much Batman: Arkham Asylum riddle finding, and Professor Layton puzzle solving) and I’ve got my first graphic in the game!  Woo!

Above you can see the basic layout for the game – the top strip of the screen will show the side on view of the Cavern Club, complete with little pixel Goths, Rockers and Metalheads.  They’ll hopefully move from place to place as their needs dictate – from the tables to the dancefloor when they want to dance, from the dancefloor to the bar when they want to drink, and from the bar to the toilets (to the far right) when they…. well, when they’ve drank more than their plumbing can handle.

Unfortunately, all that happens at the moment is that the time in the top right hand corner advances (at *150 speed), I print out some sprite fonts to show what’s going on with a starting group of ten punters, who wait around for 10 in game minutes and then either pay to get in (if they have the money and the door price isn’t too steep) or they leave in disgust.

I’m not going to get this finished, realistically, but I’ve already learned a hell of a lot (for my first proper go at XNA).  To those other people stepping down, or thinking of stepping down – I’d like to offer my encouragements.   You’re close to the end, what’s to lose in just pushing a bit more and seeing what you can get at the finish line?  Everyone else, who doesn’t have time to read this – keep going, and best wishes!

Morning LDers,  added board sounds, the begginings of a combo system, and I’m playing around with lighting so my lava pieces will look cool hopefully.

I've run out of onomatopoeia to type here, thats the real reason I added sound in this build =p

playable after the link:

(more…)

Well, it’s a tentative name. I couldn’t come up with anything better than that.

Anyway, I’ve made some progress, as shown below. There’s also a little webstart demo if anybody wants to try. It’s not quite what I’d like my game to be, but it’s better than nothing.

Play the demo

Been coding for almost 18 hours. (with breaks of various sizes, but none too long)

Game is progressing well. I now have a player, and he can shoot. And there is enemies, and some of them shoot. And player can pick up stuff, and the player can die in different ways. And the player can win the game. And there is a highscore list. And stuff.

The plan tomorrow is to create an intro, a you-won-the-game-outro, credits, make pretty graphics (can’t get much worse anyway), fix the music so it doesn’t sound like crap (it’s generated on the fly by the computer, and it doesn’t do a good job). I have a TODO list here somewhere between the windows, but I’m too tired to check if I forgot to mention something.

Here is a picture of Mr Monocle riding his penny-farthing on some railway tracks, and an Evil Gnome shooting at him. And there is also a ruby. Collect it to get $500.

I’ve been meaning to try out Adam Saltsman’s Flixel API for quite some time, but haven’t found the motivation until now. Spent the morning hammering out a shmup engine.

It obviously needs a lot of tweaking, but below is a link to my current build. Fly with the arrow keys, shoot with x. There aren’t any enemies yet, but you can knock down the stalactites, and destroy the stalagmites. Hitting the floor, the ceiling, or a stalagmite/stalactite destroys your ship. Restarting isn’t implemented yet.

http://realnoyb.googlepages.com/LD15.swf

aha, the char is moving around with the light folowing =)

Not sure if I’m going to finish anything playable at this rate.

Eventually there will be creatures in the caves.

So, got lots of scribbles out, and lots of ideas on how to first progress – the only problem being, actually progressing!  I’ve not used XNA properly before, so this is a bit of an interesting learning experience.  Thankfully there’s shed-loads of documentation, and if I get really really stuck I know a couple of people I can ask for advice.  Heck, the last time I did any kind of serious programming, it was in DarkBASIC!

Anyway – I’ve got a project up, got a font in, and making a ‘punters’ class for all those Cavern Club patrons to be.

Bovril toast and orange juice breakfast

So!  Woke up at half 7 this morning, took a peek at the theme, and then went back to bed for a while to think about it.  Caverns, eh?

Eventually got up properly and made bovril toast and 200ml of orange juice for breakfast!  Yum!  Liquified cow.

Been doing some brainstorming on the pad you can see to the left there – I’ve got an idea I rather like:

Alternative Club Tycoon: The Cavern Club

You own and run “The Cavern Club” – a struggling nightclub for the goth/metal/rock community of your town/city.  It’s up to you to choose the tracks, price the drinks, and get everyone happy (well, keep the goths poetic, at least).

Plus Points:

• The graphics will be gravy.  It’s going to be  a number crunching game, or at least a number balancing game.
• Any graphics I do make for it will be heavily stylised and hopefully ‘cute’.  Look forward to cubic metal heads moshing!

Worries:

• Music.  Huh.  I’m going to see if I can get away with being sneaky here, because there’s no way I can create ‘generic goth track number 17′ and ‘generic metal anthem 8′.

Oh, and I discovered that I can’t use the ‘play and charge’ cable to make an XBOX 360 pad work on the PC.  Doh!  I’ll be getting a wired controller some time today – but if it’s a sim game, mouse control seems best anyway!

aha ! now I can go to sleep… I have the ideia to dream on Glaucon after a boring class from Plato fall in a cave and have to escape from it, but in order to escape will have to find the sequence that opens the door of the cave, the keys are around the cave, but you cant see all around because the light dont go too far … and watch out the monsters of the cave Glaucon !! throw fire on it !!

here are the drafts

lots of vitamin C =)

My friends are ready to go with me on this LD15, and so these others:

• Java 1.5
• Eclipse
• Jlayer (yes still alive)
• Gimp
• Inkscape
• SFXR (my new best friend)
• some unknown installer friend (will decide tomorrow)
• lots of water
• random food (this time will take pics)
• some good music to cleanup my brain, remove old ideas, and leave room for the new ones.

edit:
more friends:

will use this to record my screen each minute and build a video – this one I tested hehehe
http://www.athanazio.com/2007/06/02/screen-capture-2/

planning to build the video using this
http://www.snapfiles.com/download/dlssmm.html (didn’t test yet)

edit2 : will use this java classes to help me
vacavitoria-engine-2009-08-25.zip

Hello everyone,

First time LD’er here, looking forwards to seeing what odd combination of themes combine to inspire us to greatness this time!  I’ve got a long weekend free (it’s a Bank Holiday – woo!) and nothing to get in the way but my own procrastination.  I’m intending to do my entry in XNA/C#, if that’s allowed, using SketchUp with a .X exporter for any 3d graphics I may happen to need.  Of course, never having used XNA or C# in anger before, it should be a hell of a learning experience – hence the title of this post!

In real life I’m a professional Level Designer – which usually means I know a bit of scripting, and a bit of art – but not that much of either!  Wish me luck, as I wish you all the same!

I’m pretty excited about the compo. I’ll definitely be entering, and using my regular tools: Slick, LWJGL or possibly Java2D. I’ll also be using my SlickTemplate again.