I wanted to finally post a link to a playable prototype of my flash game in progress.

Make sure to click on the flash game window to give it focus or the keys won’t work!

It uses all 8 control keys (1,2,3,4 & 7,8,9,0) and they are currently mapped to 8 random UFO actions right now.  WHY?  Because you are playing a slacker alien that wasn’t paying attention in your UFO Academy and now it is time for your 3 minute final exam to see if you graduate.  You slacked so much you have no clue how the crazy thing operates.  You’ll have access of four directions of movement, an energy shield, a death beam, and two different particle attacks.  You must try your best to figure out how to annihilate as many humans, cars, tanks, jets, and helicopters as you can to see if you pass.

Currently using boxes for object art, no collision detections or scoring yet, and I’ve only implemented humans, cars, and helicopters behaviors.  I’m quite happy with how they are moving around though.

Play and tell me what you think. Linux users should be able to build it as long as they have a c++ compiler, sfml2 and boost on their system. If you run into problems I’ll be happy to help.

I’ll upload a timelapse later this/next week as it’s 02.33(am) local time and I’m getting tired.

Hooray! It now functions as an actual game, albeit without win/lose conditions or multiple levels. But still, progress! And if there’s one thing I need now, it’s progress.

Hooray!

I’m actually quite pleased with the player and monster graphics. 16×16 means you can do really rubbish drawing and it still looks OK. Hurrah!

I made food and ate it.

Currently I’m enjoying this  brownie

and I’ve also added boots at the bottom telling you how many steps you more can take before your round is over

Now it’s time for the last bits…

Screenshot

So yeah here is first screen shot I am posting.You can see sun, two colonized planets, and 3 other planets that are not yet colonized + many moons

Progress

Unfortunately I am bit tired from long week + have many other things piled up from week so I had only some 8 hours to work on the idea… And it progresses very slowly   Also some technical parts of it gave me problems as I have pretty large maps that should be zoomed out/in a lot and still look well and do not lag… Ending up with pretty simple representation in vectors because of it. Also fog of war without lags took some time and looks very simplistic… Ahh… Anyways I almost finished minimalistic part and will probably switch to doing interface/start menu/game over/help screens soon.

Idea

As I wrote yesterday I went with space exploration theme based on my older idea for a game. It basically is based on single game mechanic of lunching rockets in a solar system with more or less real gravitation physics.

I picked this theme because it scales well and seemed as minimal part of it would not be that technically complicated. Well I was little bit wrong… Anyways at max this idea would give me kind of civilization+rocket physics combo. You have mother planet from which you can lunch satellites to find new planets and explore their environment and territories, then prepare colony ship for some territory on planet surface (say ocean or mountains or something) and start lunching probes trying to land them on the territory you want. When successful you lunch colony ship on the same trajectory, if you miss you loose the ship, if you hit you get new colony which you can then expand getting new lunch site + resources + experience etc etc. You can expand the idea in any direction like adding meteorites, aliens, etc…

And idea minimum would be some more casual game where you need in short period of time to colonize as many planets as possible without any resources/ship types/experience and level up complications. Well in the end I am going for this minimum Other things to do and damn how slow and unproductive I am this time Spending hours on some things worth 15 minutes…. Well at least I will have something playable this time.

Well back to work.

First, current screenshot:

Whoooo!

Yeah! In the last… hour and a half, I think, I got some player interaction in there! Oh, yeah! Things are going quite smoothly all of a sudden, it’s rather odd.

Finally had an idea of what the game will be about, and I might as well say it – a dungeon crawler, where the only way to get experience is by exploring. Plan is every tile revealed will give you 1 XP, though other exploratory things could help too – perhaps discovering interesting plants? Actually, maybe each time you face a new monster you get some, that could work.

The darkness has the added usefulness of partially disguising how bad the level generator is.

I ate lunch…

Closest to the camera is in Sweden called caviar, and according to wikipedia, called creamed smoked roe pretty much everywhere else(I am told it can be found on ikea when your not in sweden). On the other two sandwiches there are lettuce, ham, cucumber and garden cress. If you haven’t tried it it’s delicious

I also ate a few cookies, and all I got left is null, so here is a picture of that:

Finally I added a pirate treasure, in the shot below I’ve picked up two of them:

Now I’m going to add some more stuff!

It was something like 3 pm when I finally made it out of bed. Other half had just brewed some coffee, so here’s my breakfast cupfull with some rye bread with it. After drinking it, I have managed to get done highest score showing in to the game.

lunch time …

and we got a new player at home !! his name is Neskau distracting everybody including me LOL.

After some drawing hours got the graphics that I will use

and made lots of improvements to the framework itself, including the colision handling, and finishing the desktop implementation, that probably broke the android one hehehehe, but for now the target is finish the game and post-compo will make sure jaga can have both implementations working.

Breakfast…

mmmmm

And progress:

The steps/foots is calculated using a simple manhattan algorithm, if I got the time I’ll use a modified version of bresenham’s line algorithm making it look nicer and making it easier to move. Next up is treasures!

hahaha I do need to learn how to draw took me hours to do this one on inkscape heheheh

First some food…

delicious pie

yummy desert

Then some actual development, this is how it currently looks

That is not a horribly drawn santa, he’s a brave explorer with a backpack!

Next up is treasures, better movement and hopefully some computer/human controlled explorers, but now… sleep!

There is now a moving player, a health bar, and winning/loosing conditions. What is missing, is sounds, there are none whatsoever, and a wall of fame would be nice. Of course, polishing is what could be done for ever and ever.

Lambdas of hills and ypsilons of mountains. Basic map is generated randomly.

I’ll let the pictures (and captions) speak for themself…

food and candy

lunch

cookies!

Well after spending a short time putting up my new chair that can about an hour ago I’ve now got it set up and am working at a more comfortable chair

And here is what my current whiteboxing is looking like

It’s extremely early and basic. (more…)

first run

V

corruption

V

bloom & ssao

the wonders of graphics programming ;D

Then I tried it with 2000 unit’s 1000 a side and it kind of went a bit slow, turn based strategy anyone! ;o)

But did uncover the fact the the unit’s are extremely dense, but then I made them!

Anyway need to add a carrier or three and some LC’s to ferry them to the beach!

3:26.10 – hmm might need lots more coffee!

Cavern Tycoon Final Screenshot

Check it out here or at its page on my site here.

Let me know if there’s any problems not known, or just send an email if you like the idea. Thanks so much guys. I’ll write a proper postmortem later. But this has been an amazing experience.

Not nearly as far along as I should be, but getting there. I’m definitely not going to have time for art tomorrow. I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping I’ll be able to get the gameplay done. In its current form:

Biggest wastes of time today: trying to figure out how to do inversed masking in Flash (to draw a black rectangle everywhere except where there is light), and tracking down a slight error in my matrix math that was throwing off all the scaling. Doh.

Ok, end of the day for me. I’m going to sleep. If I wake up around 8 or 9, I’ll have 11-12 hours left to work.

I’m probably not going to finish what I originally intended, but I’m having fun anyways. I’ll definitely continue this project after the compo is over.

As for the game, I’ve got movement down and am nearly finished with digging. Plus, I’ve got a terrible menu system. I’ve never done a mouse-based interface in a game before, and I’m not very good at it. Anyway, after digging, I think I need to start adding more units, so that I can add attacking. That, plus bughunting and packaging, may be all I can get done, though if I have time I’d love a random/procedural level generator. The enemy AI, assuming I even get that far, is going to be *very* primitive.

Goodnight!

http://z-machines.com/zacs_files/youmustfinishtherace.mp3
I think that people will be pleasantly surprised by the sound effects in Cavern Tycoon.

I am at another coffee shop… and I am drinking cucumber soda. It is strange and delicious. Also, battery is almost gone. Heading back home to recharge and get some quiet.

I’ve made some progress, but not as much as I would like. Having a hard time getting gameplay down. I like where the current version is going, though it’s nothing to look at.

Got a unit in, can draw him along with the squares he can move to. Need to add an actual interactive UI, so that the player can actually select a square to move to. Gonna go with mouse driven, rather than keyboard like I did in Operation Lambda.

A digger. He has a movement range!

Lunch was leftover pizza, kool-aid, and Loaded Potato Skin flavored chips. Yum!

Yum!