So I’m entering Ludum Dare 22. So’s my brother and friend. The plan is to live stream our desktops (or the primary screen of them at least) , take a photo every 5 seconds for a time lapse, and record the information we place on out whiteboards. And here’s where I’m insane, I’m coding in a language I only decided to start learning today: Java. In about half an hour I set up a development environment, scripts to compile and run and a base program to do my logic loop (which I won’t be using come this weekend).
My set up is as follows:

• Intel Core i7 950
• 10GB DDR3 RAM
• 2 x 22″ 1080p LED Monitors
• 1 x 19″ 1440×900 LCD Screen in Portrait.
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64

And here’s a pretty picture of it all.

Languages:

• Java (Main Client)
• PHP (High Scores or anything web based I want to implement)
• Game Maker (Fall back if Java ends up being insanely hard)

Programs:

• Paint.Net (Pixel Art and Touch Ups)
• Fireworks/Photoshop (Vectorising Drawn Art)
• Notepad ++ (Programming)
• Open Office (Documentation)
• Game Maker (Fall Back Programming)
• VirtuaWin (Desktop Management, 3 Screens isn’t enough)
• pixie (Colour Selection)

Plan is to use mainly black and white, and maybe a red or two for colours.  I’m going to be drawing and scanning my menu systems in, and then vectorising them. As for game ideas, I have a few, some that I won’t be able to do easily due to the lack of knowledge of Java, and some that would look epic and take virtually no time. Worst comes to worst I’ll make a text based adventure game and make a single nice piece of art for it.

~Mitch

Click to play

LD Page

The Good

Fun tech. Not only does some tech idea stuff you want to try out make it fun to actually program the entry, it can also makes the entry interesting. Or so I hope it did. There was two things I tried out: Destructible landscape rendered with marching squares and some sort of fluid simulation.

I’ve wanted to try out destructible terrain with marching squares for some time. Mostly when thinking about doing Blastup 3, though I’m probably more for doing pixel perfect (with alpha) stuff. But still, wanted to try this approach out. It worked pretty OK, though it requires more work to be anyway close perfect. As a note, the collisions just uses bilinear filtering of the nearby grid points and checks it against the threshold, so the marching square output is just for rendering here (which really simplified things).

The fluid simulation pretty much just happened. I had a world which was a grid of values of 0 to 1. There’s a lot you can do with that. I’ve thought about similar things for earlier LDs, for the theme flood, but that theme never won. Basically, it’s like those old water simulations where each pixel is a water particle, and it can either go down or to the sides if there’s room. I just had float values instead, so the whole of it didn’t have to move. Then marching squares on top. Anyway, the lava seems to be what people liked the most, so I’m glad I did it.

The actual game idea. With the destructible terrain etc, I sort of wanted a game in between Worms/Liero and Lemmings. Which I think is what I got. It’s lacking things though (see below). Overall, I think it’s a good game idea.

Once again used the D programming language, which was good and makes most things easy (except in one place where a thing I did in a loop became very slow, which cost me some time). Also used OpenGL, GLFW and Fmod. Stuff that works pretty well and that I’m used to.

The Bad

Time, time. Lack of time. Or too ambitious project, perhaps. I spent 4 hours away from the compo helping some people to move, but I’m not sure those 4 hours would have made a lot of difference. The time issue had most impact on the level design, I feel.

The level design started out sort of OK. I wanted to introduce every new element by itself in a single level, then start combining them and creating puzzles.

Well, to start with, not all elements that I wanted to introduce got introduced. There was only one weapon, there was only one enemy type. I had planned for more there. And I had planned some cool movement tools, like a jetpack (and if I really had had some extra time, a ninja rope).

Anyway, as it were, I did get the elements that existed introduced in the way I wanted (though some levels was a bit too long, making them annoying). But then suddenly I didn’t have time to introduce more elements, yet I didn’t have enough materials or ideas to make good puzzles. So that first lead to a platform/jump level.

Then there was the last level. It got too hard. A little too busy. Even its name gives it away, it was named: A little bit of everything. Basically it had become apparent that it would be the last I had time to do, so wanted it real, if you know what I mean. Nothing tutorially. As a base there was a single good puzzle. But after making it, there was lots of room left, so got another semi-puzzle, some jumping, some digging, and some kill things. Too much. But maybe it suited as being the last level. I can tell you, even I have had trouble completing it sometimes.

That’s not the only bad thing with the last level though. The last level’s win condition check is bugged. So you only actually need to reach the star to win. I realized this bug existed after having gone to bed after just submitting my entry. So I got up, “fixed” it, and re-uploaded (it was within the deadline, don’t worry). Only the next day I realized the check was still bugged. I had added the correct check, but I had also left in a call to the base class update function, which just checked the star. So that was a waste of time.

Graphics. They turned out rather bland and boring. And dark. Noticed today that even just making the game 50% brighter helped a lot. But I’m not good at creating good textures or animate stuff, so perhaps it’s OK given the time available.

The Other

Sounds. It’s thanks to sfxr that I got any sounds at all. All in all, it might have taken 15 minutes to get all the sounds in. It was a great improvement over no sounds, but beyond that it was lacking. In addition, it seems that the sounds cut out for quite a few people — I have no idea why.

Heads up

I really recommend maximize the window to get a look at the whole level (if your screen is big enough). It’ll look bad that the level just cuts off if you have too large a screen, but even then it’s well worth it.

There’s a skip level cheat — it’s pressing F1 and F11 at the same time (as in most of me entries with levels).

I used a bit of base code and some utility code for rendering, fonts, and sound. Not really a library, just some random stuff (it’s what’s available in stdf in the source folder of the package). This is probably bending the rules a little, but I hope you guys are OK with it. Absolutely not game code.

Also, it’s not like I came up with marching squares during the compo. I’ve written a few application using it earlier, and actually adapted some old code. Writing it completely new might have cost me extra 15 minutes or so but it seemed pointless. The idea is really quite simple: For each square in the grid, start making a polygon. Check one corner, if it is within the threshold, make a point. Check this corner against the next corner — if one is out and one is in, find the point in between. Then do the same for the three other corners and edges. And that’s it.

Outro

There were probably some other things worth mentioning too, but none that I can remember now. Think I’ve responded to most stuff that I’ve got comments on as well. Overall, people seems to have liked the game, so I’m pretty happy. It’s been a good LD.

Since last post… I first worked on creating a player character, including movement and collisions etc. It’s a tiny ninja, because everyone loves tiny stuff and ninjas.

Then I worked a little on weapons.

Then I helped people move four almost four hours. This helped the LD progress a lot.

Then I worked a little more on weapons. And added making holes to the dirt.

Here’s a screenshot showing the tiny ninja charging his first weapon, the digger only weapon.

It’s done! It took longer than the alloted time by quite a bit, not to mention I massively cheated (about half the final code is from existing work, not new). But it’s fun, in a weird and weird, weird way. It’s a goofy game. But it’s got skills and leveling up, so that makes it good. it’s also very hard with most of the maps I found, but they all seem winnable if you got ninja skillz.

Enjoy Ninja Kitty’s neverending battle against the horrid Nukebots.

Download: Windows EXE (660kb)

Here’s a screen! You can’t actually get hurt yet, but I can tell it’s nearly impossible so far. Kitty is a ninja in the shinobi style – that means he can teleport dash through the air freely. And he clings to walls and ceilings and throws stars. The only controls are left mouse to dash to cursor, and right mouse to throw stars.

Nukebots, of course, contain nuclear explosives inside. So killing one will cause an explosion that will hopefully help you, but might kill you too. And all those yellow blips are the absurd amount of firepower the robots currently have. They also have way too much life, or you do way too little damage. The color of the Nukebot tells you its abilities. The less green it has, the faster it moves, the less red, the more life, the less blue, the faster it shoots (I know less is weird, but there’s logic to it, I think).

This design supports absolutely any colors you want, not just the official ones! Of course, black=walls, white=space, and FF00FF=player start. But other than that, it’s all robots. And those big colorful blocks make for an awful lot of robots.

I was quite pleased with how this one worked out, The game only has three levels and I was quite worried that the last level might be impossible. As time was running out on the clock I was trying to figure out if it could be done, I finally got a single ninja home and went “that’s it! ship it!”.

playing post compo I actually managed to figure out how to get all of the ninja home on that level by using a few tricks.

I also liked the look of Teeny Tiny Ninja. I got the stars idea from a previous Bluescrn entry. Adding a bunch of stars does indeed liven up the look of things. Also The ninja home came out surprisingly well for programmer art. I thought the sound worked well too, but the scores the game got suggested I was in the minority. when a ninja goes ‘Hut!’ every time he jumps it’s cool, but people found it less so when there were a couple of hundred Ninja doing it, serves themselves right for picking swarms as the theme I say.

The game used a homebrew physics engine made during the 48 hours. this worked quite nicely, Ninja were all implemented as tiny triangles

See. There was no Line to object collision detection so it was possible for Ninja to get stuck on corners by impailing themselves on a point and having their triangle points go either side. There were alsdo a few other little quirks that caused th ninja to get stuck. The solution worked brilliantly. I checked to see if a ninja hadn’t moved for a while and if so just added a huge random vector to its movement. A lot of people took this to be an intentional behaviour because it looked very ninja like. sometimes a ninja would jump to a wall or point and stick there for a bit then jump away again.

Once again the controls were a bit unintuitive. But I thought the use of a mousewheel worked well.

Download the game

LD48 #8 theme was “Swarms”. It also occurred right around the initial release of the Nintendo Wii. Thus, you get Wee Ninja, a game where you are trying to beat an insanely large horde of other shoppers to the last remaining Wees in stock during the holiday season. It’s fun to play, simple, and includes achievements to unlock bonus abilities. One of the more complete entries I’ve ever done (possibly because the gameplay was so incredibly simple!).

LD48 #2 theme was Construction/Destruction, with a minor theme of Sheep. As such, I created Hitsuji: Shears Of Fury, a game where you destroy construction equipment as a ninja sheep. It featured a really cool tweening animation system I wish I had used since, as well as some lovely use of very default Allegro fonts. It also included zombie construction workers, and pelicans. Pelicans appear often in these games.