My entry into LD17 got tarted up, fixed a bit, had sounds added, was lengthened a tad, is more girthy, and has just come out on the Xbox 360. It’s in the Indie Games section now so thought I’d pass on the information. There’s an 8 minute free demo, so all those who couldn’t play my entry because it was XNA can now not play my entry because it’s on Xbox!

Instructions on how to find the demo on a 360 here.

Some screenshots and a slightly wry (sly?) video that deliberately tries to misinform the viewer about the game here.

It costs less than a dollar to buy.

I went and wrote up a postmortem for Nieuwe Aarde, my turn-based strategy game, over on my main development journal.

That's my game

Welp, guess I should talk about this.

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I already posted a mini-postmortem in my submission screen, but here’s my expanded version.

First up, I want to give a big shout out to everybody who contributed to Ludum Dare, and to those who made this entire site and contest a reality.  It’s great to see so many people active a community focused on game development.  While this was my first Ludum Dare 48, I’ve participated in community-driven game competitions before and it’s always been a blast.  LD48 was no exception.

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Not great quality, and as you can see I spend very little time with art assets and level editor. The video is only 1:09 long

Huzzah! I’ve completed my real-time strategy game of sorts, and I just officially submitted it for the Ludum Dare 17 competition! The object of my game, Artillery Isles, is to destroy the enemy’s island encampments before he destroys yours. It’s a fast-paced strategy match of launching missiles at the enemy’s base or at his incoming rockets, redirecting rockets in flight, repairing buildings and expanding to new islands!

It’s better in action, but here’s how it looks:

Toward the end of a match. He's a goner.

Have fun, and good luck in the judging! I had a great time again this time around, and I look forward to trying out all the other island games for LD17!

Just got back home and am feeling optimistic about completing what I currently have. It will most likely end up with no sound or music but oh well! I just ordered Thai for dinner and am going to dive right in and try to get some work done.

One thing that I’ve learned between this LD and the last one I was in, is that rushing to get something done in a semi hackish way doesn’t really save you time. I’ve spent quite a few hours hunting bugs in my code because I quickly through something together without completely thinking it through. That’s time I could have spent doing sound or adding graphics. Next time, I am going to be more aware of this and endeavor to think out the design more instead of trying to change things half way through the contest.

and… Done!

The game’s entry is here.

I haven’t been able to work on anything this morning. I am headed to New Hampshire in an hour or so and won’t be back until about 6 or 7pm ET. I don’t have to drive so I’m bringing my laptop along to try and continue working. At the very least, I am going to stick in victory conditions (very easy to do right now), and some kind of title screen and game over screen. At least it than it will be a somewhat complete prototype.

Here’s this morning’s breakfast, bacon, scrambled eggs, and New England coffee.

Things are moving right along. More game functionality has been completed, as well as sound effects and some handy graphics enhancements. I hope to get things nicely polished up tomorrow, but I’m pretty happy with how I’ve progressed so far.

Dinner is a pretty important meal too. Ludum Dare is a pretty intense process, so I needed something hearty:

Mmm, good.

I’m liking some of the other entries I’ve been seeing too. They look promising, and I’m looking forward to trying them out. But for now, I’m going to get some sleep.

Again lots of progress.. Now there actually are two types of boats, reds and greens and 2 goal areas on the right. If the boat hits the correct goal area, the goal flashes bright. Otherwise it will flash dark. There is also a spawn system which will spawn more and more boats. Also tweaked the fluid dynamics and boat moving. Now the boats stop if they would hit something and also they try to steer away from close-by islands. So the boats act a lot better gameplay -wise.

Testing the game, it’s kinda interesting how the mechanics work. If you close off a section completely, because there is little/no fluid flow there, the boats will move a lot more erratically (currently there is a minimum speed for their movement but not sure if there really needs to be). So you need to keep the fluid flowing in order to guide the boats.

Not much to go in order to have a fully functioning game, btw. Just counting the score and lives left, menu screens and some instructions.. Then there is the question of sounds and such. But feeling pretty positive over-all. I think I’ll stop development on this for tonight and continue tomorrow.

Oh no, looks like diplomatic efforts have failed. Not that there were any real efforts to begin with, because people seem to like blowing stuff up. I’m not sure what the deal is…

This should be good.

There is now a decent computer player to fight against, and the core functionality is working just fine. Coming right along.

I have to head out for a few hours so I’m having an early dinner. My wife made me a lovely bbq pulled pork quesadilla from the left overs from dinner the other night. This thing is massive and I will probably only be able to get through a quarter of it!

More progress, yay! Now the islands can be painted and removed with the mouse (left button paints, right button removes). The fluids automatically adjust themselves to flow around the islands. Seems like the boats can still hit into them too easily, so I’ll have to fix that probably somehow.. One idea I had was to make the boats indestructible, but impose a time limit on how long they are alive. So if a player isolates the boats, they will still perish after some time. Would probably add more strategy as well so I think I’ll try that.

Also tweaked the fluid look a little better. The first image was from the fluid density, this one is from the fluid velocity. The whole system started acting a lot better once I added a bit of dampening in it. So far I’m quite happy with how well it works.

Next, colored boats and goal zones..

I now have a somewhat working prototype of the game mechanics worked out and a screen shot! It isn’t too much to look at right now, but what I have works pretty well so far.

Here is the screen shot, I will explain what’s going on below:

So basically the idea is that you are this penguin (white rectangle) and you must avoid the enemies (sharks or whatever eats penguins) here represented by the red squares. The brown squares are islands and while on an island, you can not be eaten. However, the islands only stay around for a short time before they disappear and reappear somewhere else. You gain points through a combination of how much time you spend off of the islands and how many fish you eat (the green squares) which also appear and disappear.  Oh, I forgot to mention, you have no offensive ability.

I still have a bit of work to do, like implement the enemy AI, figure out the score calculation and play with the mechanics a bit. I also have a really interesting idea for the graphics that I want to create tonight that will replace these rectangles.

After scrapping my original game idea, I’ve come up with something that’s a lot more feasible. I also think it will be a lot of fun to play, so that’s a plus. Progress has already been made, and here’s what have so far:

There be islands, my man! I have a pretty good idea of how I’m going to progress from here, so progress ought to remain steady for a while, which is a good thing. Now, onto food photos!

As we all know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day…

You know it!

Oops, spilled some juice!

Uh oh...

Finally some progress.. My experience with F# has been relatively smooth and I’ve been making good progress. What I have up now is a fluid simulator and on top of the fluid I can drop “boats” (those dots in the image) and they will float with the fluid. The fluid simulation is a fast implementation of the Lattice Boltzmann Methods (LBM) and it seems to work relatively well here.

The goal of the game will be that there are 2 colors of boats, red and blue. The boats start from the left and the fluid will push them to the right. There will be 2 goal areas, one for red, one for blue. Any crashed boat or boat that enters the wrong goal area will substract one “life”. Lose too many and it’s game over. What the player does, is that the player can grow and shrink islands (so the obstacles in this image are only for testing the fluid dynamics). By growing the islands correctly, the player can the steer the boats to their destination.

This is the best idea I could come up with (spent hours in thinking) and I’m sure there will be tens of games like this in this LD17. Oh well, can’t win ‘em all in originality..

So, I’m entering, but I’m not using Java as I had expected. I do not have too much time this weekend, so I decided to go for a simple web game and focus on making some content instead. We’ll see how that goes – didn’t make too much today, and I’ve got to leave for the evening.

Anyway, here’s a sneak peak of the title screen graphics. The game’s tentatively called “Islands: Through the Sweep of Stars”, which is a perhaps a bit more pretentious than I’d like. Any suggestions?

See you all again tomorrow!

Posting this a bit late, but here is my breakfast from local coffee shop favorite, Coffee By Design.

Double shot Cafe Mocha with a fresh locally made blueberry scone.