I have written hex picking code, so now I could add some kind of interaction. Might be fun. Also been to the store and bought some microwave food for tomorrow. I really should have prepared yesterday, but you know what they say: “If you work all day and play all night you don’t have much time to prepare for LD48″.

Also bought some cheap low quality donuts.

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…

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 have spent way too much to create a rather crude world generator. Well, maybe not so bad really, but the output does not always seem to make any sense. Guess I can improve Mr Parameters when I got a game.

I’ve finished with the laundry, and also had a bit of lunch. The famous Salmon and Stuff dish.

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:

Except for doing such unproductive stuff as showering and doing laundry, I’ve drafted out the intial idea. Thought I’d share it with you.

Base tile types:
Clay – together with water and a worker gives bricks
Moutains – together with two workers gives stone
Forest – together with a worker gives wood
Field – together with a worker and water gives food
Water – nothing, but provides water to nearby hexes
Sea – together with a worker gives food

Created tile types:
Fundament – created from stone, allows for building tower, on rock it doesn’t require stone, on water it requires two rocks, and on sea three.

The tower:
Building new levels costs a bricks or stone and half that in wood per level already built, plus food for each worker, and as many workers as levels are also needed.

Workers:
You gain workers by area of influance. Area of influence is decided per tower level. 1-5: radius 1 (up to 6 workers), 6-10: radius 2: up to 6+13 workers. And so on.

Workers actions:
Workers can either build, produce or do nothing. Building costs food. Produce costs nothing.

Roads and channels:
Channels gives water to distant hexes. Roads makes it possible to transport goods. Costs nothing but a build action per hex. Can be built beyond influence point.

Ships: Allows fishing further away.

Alt. 2: Must build quarry, lumbermill, farm, brickmaker etc before getting resources from them. Or else have them as optional bonus givers? Could also build/work beyond influence, but at half speed?

Perhaps a bit too much stuff, but it’s just so I have where to aim.

So it has begun! The theme was among my favorites as it’s an open theme. Lots of games can be made with a tower theme.

I have an idea of what kind of game I’d like to make. The gameplay details are still fuzzy but I have enough to get started so now that the caffeine is slowly starting to work I’ll start the coding.

I’m not using a fancy pre-made engine library so I have to do the boring stuff again. I hope I don’t waste the whole day just to display some 3D objects, so that I can start working on the interesting parts. It’s annoying to have to code stuff like texture loading or a timer in every compo but at least we’re not using the insane “mechanical cat” rules where you weren’t even allowed to look at code you had written before the competition (apparently the poor people competing in PyWeek still have to do that). I remember losing hours because of that stupid rule during the making of my Lightstream48 and Ring48 games.

First I had breakfast.

It was toast with butter and water.  Yum yum! Taste like ghostmas.

Then I tried out basic hex rendering.

I’m up an about, and while the theme wasn’t something as good as say ‘pacifist’, it’s still very decent. Compared to the theme of the last LD it has super mega combo greatness. Only drawback I see is that there could be about 50 tower defense games, and 10 x-jumpy games. So I have no interest in making that, at least.

No, instead, the first idea I had was kind of like Civ., but instead of cities there are towers, and all players have only one tower. Then they need to expand the towers influence to gain more land, and then by exploiting the land keep adding levels to the tower. First I thought like these could by 20th century skyscrapers. Then I thought that perhaps it’d be better to set it in older times and make it like the Tower of Babel. First to reach the sky wins. So that’s the idea so far, yes.

For now, I’ll start by writing some hex playing field code, I believe, and do some test art. I think I will use the D programming language this time.

I now have a scoring system, combos, and lifes, so you can get game over. And announcements. Here’s a screenshot:

What’s missing yet is some effect for non-bounced cows, lip sync for Mr Head up in the corner when announcements are made, and some balancing.

Things that would be nice, but aren’t top priority yet, is a highscore table (for scores, most drowned, highest combo etc), a nifty pause feature, a skip intro thingy, and possibly web scores, only that probably won’t happend during this weekend anyway.

Oh yes, I’ve finally reached the spot where screenshots make any sense. Huzzah! To celebrate, here’s a screenshot:

As you might see, the goal of the game is to catch the dropping cows, and bounce them out towards the water. You press the 1 to 5 keys to select which slot is bouncy. Next up is probably to implement some fancy scoring system with combos and whatnot, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, because it’s sleeping time.

I finally have an idea of a game. And not only that, I have an intro for the game ready. So now I just need to make the game!

The idea is that you should drown cows. They come flying in from one side of the screen, and you must catch them, and make them bounce into the other side where there’s water. Otherwise the cows will die as they hit the ground, and we don’t want that, now do we?

The intro is a bit weird as to fit the game and the theme well. You can try it, but maybe it’d be better to wait for the rest of the game, too, so you can enjoy it all together. Here’s an image of it to inspect while you wait:

Sunday 19:07
I don’t think I got around to writing it down but I earlier considered the case with static vs. non-static planets and sun. Thing is that sun and planets wouldn’t really move if I used a realistic time scale, but on the other hand, it could be much more interesting that way. At the time, I decided to stay with static, but I’m think I will experiment with non-static (as that would push more important but more bothersome into the future).

Sunday 20:04
Has eaten supper. Can also report that non-static planets are tricky, because of how easy it is to not get stable orbits. However, with some math and physics, I got stable paths. Or path. With just one planet it worked anyway. With many they interfere with each other. I could make sure they’re longer from each other I guess. Oh, and there’s the ship too.

Sunday 21:21
Been a bit social.

Sunday 22:31
Been battling with multi-planet system stability and haven’t really reached a good solution, but I’ve reached ‘stable enough’ for up to three planets. It’s kind of big distance between them then, and the third planets aren’t even on screen most of the time. So, that’s a lot of wasted time. Yay etc. I don’t think this will work out, because I can’t really work that much during the night. I’m pondering whether I should just turn it in as it is as a non-entry, or just add something gameplayish, but if gameplay is just a boring hack then what’s the point of the gameplay?

Sunday 23:54
Been away a little while. It’s really like 4 hours until deadline but I’m going to try shut down now. There won’t be an entry. There will be a non-entry that you can play around with for a few minutes if you want to. I’ll just get the final stuffs together for it.

Sunday 18:47
Just writing to give you another screenshot really. You can now ‘win’ a level (you can get the ‘next level’ button, only it doesn’t do anything yet), and you can run the simulation if you want to. Yeah, and the buttons are all new. Next thing would be to actually have real actions you can do to achieve the goal.

Sunday 15:33
I’ve done a few things. For example, I’ve eaten food, which was nice. More related, I’ve created a time line where you can select current state and to try things, I can set the ship velocity at any point (which can be seen in screenshot below), which is kind of cheating, but it’s just a test. The game would have less pointless actions you can do.

Sunday 13:40
Had breakfast, and added the prediction. So now we can see the path the ship will take. The good thing about this is that we can see in real time what any action we try will do for the complete path, we don’t have to wait and run it (which often is bothersome on this kinds of games). Idea is it’s also going to be possible to select a time in time when to make an action etc. Just select it on a timeline, kind of.

Sunday 12:20
Done sleeping. Tried to think last night on how to make this gamey and chain reactiony enough, but didn’t come up with something. So I need to decide if I should scrap it and do something else, try for it and see, or just give up. Giving up is the far easiest choice, but not very fun.

Been looking a bit at the progress of other games, level of completeness varies quite a lot it seems. Though most are further ahead than me, obviously.

Sunday 12:55
Worked a little, added some planets and the appearance of a jump gate. So took a screenshot showing this minimal thing.

The red thing is the ship beacon, the blue things are planets, the big yellow thing a sun, and the strip of greenish lights are the gate.

Saturday 21:19
Back from lots of cake etc etc. Was a bit distracting, even though a lot of fun.

Been thinking about my idea. I think it could be a fun game, but I’m not sure it’s actually chain reactiony enough. Need to come up with something for it. I’ll just get on coding and see what happens, I guess.

Saturday 23:19
Been coding. Have the basic structure. And gravitational forces. Most advanced so far is the ship circling the sun. I also have state cloning and so, so can probably do the path thingy without much of a problem. Is pretty tired, so will go and sleep now. Not really sure I’ll have time to make a game of this tomorrow, but we’ll see.

Saturday 12:17
So, haven’t really done much more then ending last entry, but I’ve ideas about the second game, and I want to write down. OK, idea is, you see the estimated path at all times (for the current level anyway?) and you can use your equipment at any point in time. In addition, there’s pickups available, so you don’t have everything you need to complete the game at the start, you must pick some up on the way. And… maybe I could randomize the levels. But then I wouldn’t know if they were possible to complete. Worth investigating maybe?

[insert time here]

OK, had some time wasted on running updates etc (I’m at my parents place, using their computer) so there’s some dead time. More about the actual game idea: it might be too complex. But maybe worth trying it out a little. Not sure I will have time for it today, but we’ll see.

Saturday 13:30
Got init code up. It’s actually old init code, but it’s nothing game related. Just setting up GLFW, printing text, drawing quad really. I’d just rewrite it the same anyway. Also drawn a glowy particle sprite thingy, but I think I’ll have to redo it as it’s not that great. Anyway, need to take a break now for shower and stuff.

Saturday 15:10
I’m off for food, and the off for longer (family party thingy). Has written a bit on the state stuff, and also some utility code (ptr_list / ptr_vector, kids of std::list etc that owns their content leaving memory management easier. With a another language with a gc (say D) this wouldn’t have been needed, but decided to use C++ that I’m used to, and it doesn’t take more than say 10 minutes extra anyway, and I can think about the game during it). Also ‘cheated’ a bit more, using an older vec2 class.

After having relaxing sleep and relaxing breakfast and all that, I’ve investigated current situation. The theme that’s won is Chain Reaction, and it’s won by quite a lot. It’s not the theme I most wanted, but then, whenever do you get what you most want?

So, I really don’t have very much time today to work on things, just a few hours, but with some luck I have the whole of tomorrow available.

I’ve so far made two conclusions about the theme: It’s extremely easy to come up with a non-innovative game for it. Could be a tetris/columns/pool/TIM (the list goes ever on) game. So it can be easy. But how fun would that be? But if I can’t come up with anything else decent …

I do have two ideas so far though, that’s half-way innovative. Almost. Not quite though. A bit innovative to be sure. Not a blatant rip off of existing games. Much.

So first idea I had was an explosion chain reaction game. You had different kinds of explosives and maybe something else. The explosives had different explosion radius and critical explosion radius. If another explosive is within the explosion radius (but not within critical radius) it goes off too. Then you can get a chain reaction. Goal would be to blow something up, I suppose. Thing is I’m not sure it would be such a fun game really, and I’m not sure I could keep the goal tasteful. It would be too easy to make it all goreish. Not sure I want that, even though it probably would be popular among some.

And second idea I had was you have your space ship stranded in space, without any fuel, and you need to reach your home bay. Problem is, the home bay is several jump gates (or whatever they’re called, think like in Eve) away. So in each star system, you need to get to the gate that takes you to another star system, and so on until you eventually reach your home bay. Each system is a level, but ultimately, they’re connected. In fact I could allow revisiting of star systems, and multiple paths if I were to allow multiple gates per system. Anyway, in each system, you would need to get your ship to the gate. To achieve this you can make use of your initial momentum (not much), gravitational forces from planets and the sun, and hi-tech gravity modules and explosive weaponry you can launch from the ship. Or maybe just place. Dunno for sure yet. Then the idea is to plan a level, then let it go, get to the next level, and so on. In the end you’d have the full path through all the games automatically traverseable. I’m not sure if this is enough chain reaction… and interesting enough.

Well, that’s my thoughts so far.