So, this isn’t particularly fun, and it is horribly buggy, but you can play the game now. I should have tried to get to this point quicker, but I guess that is the fun / challenge of making games, that it is unclear on how to execute on mechanics. There is a bug where you brick dropper can get stuck off the tower, so you just gotta refresh in that case.

Instructions:

Press Z to drop bricks.

Protect the HQ.

Go Play! (flash)

So, now that I have that, I can start working on everything else, and ideas are starting to really flow. Here are some things that I want to do:

• Tune the aggressiveness of the missiles. Right now most of them don’t even come close to hitting you HQ. There is also no difficulty ramp.
• Have the brick dropper need to refresh before you can drop another brick.
• Make more types of bricks that can be dropped, including offensive ones that will attack the missiles.
• Have a brick dropper on either side of your hq so that you can protect the sides. The brick dropper would either get the next brick in the completed queue, or it would wait until a brick finished constructing.
• More enemies (the UFO, and possibly ground troops)

Now, the question is, do I keep hammering away at this, or do I go watch Thor3d…

I have this much finished. See if you can find the fan pack to jump higher!

http://megaswf.com/simple_serve/87754/

You can play the fifth build of AVOIDAL here.

If anyone has a minute or two I’d love any comments on the difficulty ramp over the levels.

New features this build includes:

• All game parameters are tuned and tweaked every 5 mines collected to keep increasing the difficulty
• All mines, seekers, and spikes have their own warp in transitions for cool visual effect and to let the player know safely where they are going to appear and activate
• Introduced a CHAIN counter for big points. As long as you don’t take damage or let any mines expire and explode on their own you increase your chain counter for every mine you destroy with an enemy

Time to get cracking on sound effects and music at this point and then keep playing and tuning the hell out of it to make sure it is as fun as possible.

Just need to work on the actual levels, graphics, sound and music (or at least try).

so, changes in enemy behavious since last time:

• enemies can like you/each other (they will follow)
• enemies can dislike you/each other (they will follow, and punch to death)
• dislike trumps like, and how much an enemy likes or dislikes stuff is determined by how many insults/compiments you use

other stuff added since before:

• spikes!
• buttons
• doors (effected by buttons)
• explosives (detonated by buttons)
• dummy ‘characters’

playable version embedded if you view this post in full

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Prototype number 1, playable in your browser. With music and a couple of teaser levels.

In this game, you entice block things to destroy each other, without destroying you. Use the arrow keys to move, and press Space to restart a level (which is sometimes necessary).

Enjoy, and please share your impressions!

Sincerely,
Hamburger

so how about a playable build this post? view the post in full to see it

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Good morning Ludum Dare!

Managed to catch about five hours of sleep–my regular nightly amount for most LDs.

I was thinking–if timelapses are fun after the compo to watch they are certainly fun to watch during a break while the compo is going right?

Before I head over to the Portsmouth NH Ludum Dare meetup I figured I’d render out the timelapse of me creating my first playable prototype (always an important milestone for me) in the first four hours of the competition.

Not sure if you can embed videos here so here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lR4MMAiA9s

This is my first playable prototype. This represents a little under four hours of work in Flash.

Try to draw the enemy orange spikes and red seeker boxes into the yellow circles for points by using your pink pentagon to lure the enemy in. If you hit the enemies you lose points. Basic proof of concept at this point is finished.

It is 2am here and I think I’m quite happy with what I’ve got down for the first evening to sleep on. I’ll be meeting up with 3 other LDers tomorrow over in Portsmouth New Hampshire to continue the game dev in the fun company of others. Sleep now!

Alright– finally have my initial proof of concept demo up and available for any curious souls to try out.  It isn’t too exciting yet but it will show you the initial inklings of what I’m going for anyway.  It’s Flash so you can run it in your browser.

Basically this is a test level here with 4 stalactites, 3 steam geysers, and 6 flying bats.  I am enjoying the bat movement at this point.  Each time you play the game the cavern levels will have the same configuration of weapons for your use.  What will change is some slight variables on the initial speeds and directions of the enemies in the cavern.  The timer will likely be going away as now each cavern level has a limited number of weapons for you to use.  You use a cavern weapon by clicking on it with your mouse.

I hope to support interesting combos and other funny events perhaps to help your score and experience of the game.

Today my main goal is still to get all the behind the scenes engine working with my levels, get all the enemies moving correctly in the various levels, and finish coding all the weapon functions and effects.  That way tomorrow I can spend as much time as possible on bringing the graphics up to speed beyond the rapid primitives I’ve made everything here in.  My plan is to have the game be fun before spending anything more then the bare minimum on graphics because the game is what matters in the end to me.  Especially if I want to keep working on anything post-compo I’ll be far more motivated to improve graphics and polish if the actual game is fun! 

Controls:

Click on the bubbling steam geysers or the stalactites at the top of the cavern with your mouse to trigger them.  Steam geysers work like a short range shotgun at the moment so wait for the bats to be near.  Stalactites fall so you need to time them right with the bats movement.  100 points per bat.  Max score of current demo is 600 points…

Here’s what I have so far, in source code form. I can’t be bothered packaging it up properly right now, so you will need Python and pygame to run this:

Click to download

How to play:

• Goal: Reach the exit
• Left and right move
• If you’re not holding anything, spacebar picks up crates from in front of you
• If you are holding something, spacebar drops it in front of you
• Don’t touch enemies
• Enemies die if you drop a crate on them
• Press a digit 1…9 to skip to a level.

If you die, the game will quit. If you win the game, it will also quit. If you’re running from a console it’ll tell you which was which, but otherwise you have to guess! Just my way of fighting back against the evil GUI oppressors.

If you need to restart a level (either ‘cos you got stuck or died), quit the game, restart it, and press a level skip button. I’ll code in a restart level feature later, don’t worry…

Obligatory screenshot follows. The Anonymous Game Hero (he isn’t E.T.’s Ugly Twin any more, I redrew him more simply – I mean, more minimalisticly!) is shown here holding a crate, waiting for the Not-So-Big Bad to wander over and offer itself up for a squishing.

Incidentally, and coincidentally, this game scores highly on the time-to-crate index.