I’m just not feeling this for some reason. The theme rocks, especially the limited palette and fixed window size — but I’ve completely lost interest in the thing I’m building.

The title reflects my soul-crushing lack of creativity this weekend...

The game is in as3, and is, if you like, quite playable.

Thing is done. Last few hours were intense. I haven’t played the whole game yet, so it may be totally off here or there. Let me know of any major trip ups, if you decide to give it a try.

Game is about navigating a maze while running along the ceiling. Or something. Play it.

Grab some tiny pixel font here.

Sweet, I managed to complete my first Ludum Dare! I was thinking of learning Push Button Engine for it, but after going through a couple of tutorials I decided I’d go for straight-up Actionscript instead. PBE has some neat features, but I need more time to get my head around its component-based programming model.

Anyway, SEEK*TOR is a game where you’re trying to locate the enemy by firing search flares from turrets. You have limited flares, and turrets have a limited range, so you need to carefully choose where you aim. It’s in Flash.

SEEK*TOR Voting page

Incidentally, I’m annoyed with Audacity because it added an initial silence to all the mp3 files I encoded with it. So all the sounds come in late. Also, I just realized that I forgot to have the background music loop…

I uploaded my entry, even though it isn’t near complete.  I figured it’s worth getting feedback on what I have for future reference.

I’ll probably write a post-mortem in a day or so, but I know the number one thing that I did wrong was that I didn’t organize properly at the beginning.  I didn’t know where I was going to end up, exactly, so I didn’t know how to get there.

Here’s the screenshot.

The compass isn’t linked to anything in this version, since navigation wasn’t completely implemented. The arrow keys aren’t supposed to move the ship.  The plan was to let the user select a direction, and then sail that way for a few spaces.  How far they traveled would depend on which direction the wind was blowing, and whether or not any events happened, like finding land, meeting pirates or running into hazards. Unfortunately, I never got the planned movement implemented and so the compass sit

Head on over to the entry page to check it out.

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!

Once again, I seem to have made a game which only I will able to play.

You can play the current version online here.

It desperately needs collectables of some kind to give the game some objective. I can probably get away without much more level design, since it’s already fairly confusing with a non-massive level.

But first, I think it’s time for some food.

Cool. With 5 hours to go, I’ve completed the gameplay for my entry. It’s extremely basic – you just have to collect all the treasures from a giant labyrinth – but I’ve got my title screen and ending screens in there and everything. Here’s a screenshot demonstrating my line-of-sight stuff:

Now I need to get started replacing all the placeholder graphics. Ack! Then again, maybe I should just call the game “Title Screen”…

If I get all that done, I’ll add some sound effects and then think about extra polish. But at this point, I’m not going to be adding any more gameplay elements.

Seeing as I expect to be somewhere over the Atlantic in about six hours I’m going to have to call this short and submit what I’ve got. Fortunately, what I’ve got is a reasonably complete (if somewhat slim) roguelike: …Deeper. Download it from the submission page and give it a go.

Hex Roguelike! Huzzah!

The game is a teensy bit lackluster, lacking several significant roguelike features. I’m pretty excited about the tech though — my goal for the weekend was to come up with a solid hex-based map and associated utilities that I can use in another project, and I think I’ve succeeded at that.

Ok, guys — thanks to the awesome doohan (tester extraordinaire) I now have, in my possession, a fully working build for both Windows and Linux. I’d really love some testers, since my score submission system could use a shakedown (who am I kidding? The whole thing needs a shakedown…) — so I’m proposing the following bargain:

You give my game a quick playthrough, submit a score, then leave some kind of feedback in the comments here. Leave me a link to your builds and I’ll download, play, test, and generally try to break ‘em, generating needlessly detailed bug reports in the process. Sound fair? Together we can improve the overall bug-free-ness of LD16 — download the Windows or Linux build of …Deeper and leave me some thoughts.

A beautiful, animated, working title screen.

...and a gameplay screenshot. Did I warn you it was a roguelike?

In the meantime I’m going to go off and try to hack together an OS X port — and, oh yeah, pack for the plane I’ve got to catch in seven hours. I love LD.

just a few hours left, still some features I want to add.

Leaving Satisfactoria.

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.

This is what happens when you don’t add delays in your generators. (If you can’t tell, there’s no interaction with asteroids and the player yet. :p)
And yeah, I added a cursor.

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’ve got my tilemap rendering with some placeholder graphics. Here’s a screenshot:

Busy busy busy…. back to coding!

Starting to see a little progress!

Had cereal for breakfast, more chips and salsa for a midday snack and then a Subway sandwich and baked BBQ chips for dinner.

My wife then left to go baby our neice and nephew, so I got to play the music loud for a few hours.  When she got back, she surprised me with a nighttime snack.

A Wendy’s Frosty Float.  It was yummy.

As far as coding goes, I’m not sure I’ll be able to have the entry I wanted to have.  I spent a lot of time on stupid things, like math.  I do have a ship that moves by the arrow keys (just for testing, that won’t be in the final game) and a compass that reacts to the mouse-hover and click.  Next step would be to implement navigation, which includes setting a direction and an interval.  I also will be implementing fog-of-war because part of exploration is having to go somewhere in order to map it out.

I’m not using a traditional full-array to keep track of the tiles.  I’m using an image and I’m reading the map data from that image’s individual bit mapping.  I’m going to implement the fog-of-war using a similar method, with a second image that starts off with each pixel being off and they get turned on as you go.

Navigation is going to be direction and time based, so you’d pick one of the 16 directions on the compass and sail.  The ship is locked into the tile coordinate system to make things easier.

I fear there is way to much to do before the deadline tommorrow, so I’ll have to go with the essentials and just add on with whatever time I have left over.  I hope to have a real game to submit, and not just a demo.  I lost a lot of time trying to get my printer to print out a map so I could trace it, draw on it and scan it back in, but I ended up not even using that.  I just created a new map by myself and Photoshop instead.  The compass math stuff was a pain in the rear, though in the end pretty simple.  I always end up spending extra time trying to do whatever it is in an abtract way, which can either be a killer or a timesave, depending on if I end up using it for anything else.  For example, in the last compo, I spent extra time on the basic tile properties, which let me add new types of tiles in a matter of minutes later on.

Anyway, I think I’m done for the night. See you in the morning!

a screenshot of my game so far

I thought I would make a explore the asteroid field game.

collision is working but all it does so far is show a BAM! image when you hit the asteroids so I need to work on that and an way to score points and a way to the show points I guess. So far I have amazed how much I got done. It helps having low standards I guess.

Bedtime Progress

A few more steps closer, but it still isn’t fun.  I’m tired now, so off to bed.  Goodnight Ludum Dare.

The instructions told me to eat the brownie first. Sort of.

Dinner Progress

Functionality has improved a lot, but I’m feeling discouraged about how much is left.  I’m also feeling a bit burned out, so I’m going to take a break.

So, I complain about Gameplay… and what do I do instead?

PER PIXEL DIFFUSE POINT LIGHTING….

Yeah

So… This will be fun to watch, probably!

Here’s a screenshot.   Right now there is zero interaction, but the idea is indirect control of your little explorer.   I’m not sure exactly how his is going to work, my original idea was like Magestic (Or whatever that game is) where you attract explorers then send them into the dungeon.  I don’t think I’ll have time to fully implement this, but we’ll see how I do.

Hopefully I can find some gameplay to implement…..

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.

We has some stars.

Pesto Pasta with The Wire

Lunch Progress

I’m not as far along as I liked to be fuctionally, but things are still on track according to the plan.  I’ve yet to come up with a name though.