I had other things to attend this weekend, therefore I have set aside a few hours for LD. Thinking vaguely about the theme yesterday and coding now for about 4 hours, it’s my pleasure to introduce you Super Animal Friendship Club:

PLAY ONLINE

TODO:

• sounds and music
• difficulty

I call it Hardcore mode… but I think it may be a little to difficult…

(The skull boxes kill you, by the way…)

I went to bed early and woke up late this morning, so not a great start to Sunday. I’ve started hurriedly putting my game’s content together now, after probably spending too much time getting utility functions in place. I just about have enough to show a screenshot now!

Now if you’ll excuse me I have about 6 hours work to catch up on!

I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished very much today… so I’m going to take the time to list what I’ve done. Maybe that will remind me.

1. Finished the zoom feature (in and out via mouse wheel)
2. Added HUD
3. Added health / health bar
4. Added health regeneration via pickups
5. Added 5 additional inventory items along with HUD/counters
6. Added important set piece
7. Created Day/Night system (10 RL minutes = 24 hrs in game)
8. Created dynamic lighting for night
9. Constructed particle system
10. Changed tree / rock sprites to be more cohesive with the rest of the tiles / objects
11. Converted resource-hogging objects to static tiles
12. Tweaked player collision system
13. Adjusted layering system

I still have a LONG way to go if I’m going to implement all of the features on my design doc… especially if I’m going to make time for music/sfx… which is a MUST, imo. So here’s what I have left to do on the design doc…

1. Create at LEAST 12 more inventory objects (code + sprite + counters + player variables)
2. Create stamina system
3. Create tool system (hammer, axe, fishing pole, etc)
4. Create crafting system
5.  Create randomly respawning resources for DAY+1 events
6. Create title screen
7. Create death/lose scenario
8. Create winning scenario
9. Draw a very crucial set piece
10. Create SFX / Music
11. Tie it all together with a story sequence?

Yeah… that ain’t happenin’. I need to find out what features to cut and FAST. Tomorrow needs to be an incredibly productive day if I’m actually going to pull this off. I’ve never really ‘finished’ a Ludum Dare before… all of my games end up as tech demos or incomplete nothingness with no end / purpose. I want this to be different.

I will leave you with the latest screenshot from my game, AB-ALONE

So, after a good night’s sleep after the theme was announced, I scrapped my original crappy idea, and came up with a new one! Unfortunately, a final exam during the day, and a trip to NYC that took 4 hours slowed my progress and I’ve only just done any significant work tonight.

The premise is just to have a bunch of small rooms with variations of things that happen in life. The theme, alone, fits in with most of the rooms, such as repelling others, being completely alone, and even building (and breaking) relationships.

SOLITUDE: The starting room for every round.

All the rooms are randomly generated, and I’m currently spending the rest of the weekend just adding more and more types of rooms, to make each play-through unique.

For now I don’t what I’ll call the game, but I’m leaning towards Solitude (the name of the starting room), or Alone In A Crowd (another of the rooms).

With just 18 hours left, and the fact that it is almost 3:00 am here, I’m going to get some sleep, and tackle the rest of it tomorrow.

Finally removed the Googled photo. The photo I’m using now was taken by me. Now I’m legal

So far so good. I’m coding in new types of tiles and I’ve finally managed to get the light code working perfectly in all conditions. After I’m done implementing the various gimmicks, it’s time to start filling out the castle (and probably redo that character sprite, too cute lol).

Maybe I can program a cool distortion shader for the character sprite. Or use fog particles to indicate that he/she is ephemeral, like a ghost. And I’ve got plenty of time to make it all, after downing this Monster!

Going pretty well.

Braaaaaains!

So I finally have my zombie all rigged and ready for animations. I lost a lot of time in Topogun doing the low-res version from the ZBrush high-res sculpt. It was the first time I used Topogun and it was a really slow process :/ Also I had some problems with the Rigify auto-rigging thing in Blender, I’m not sure what happened but last LD it worked right away. Unfortunately I have not used it since then and I must have done something wrong this time. All sorted now but I’m far from having a game done. It already looks like I’ll have to do the jam instead of the compo.

26 ours in and I’m ahead of schedule.

Meant to spend sunday working on music, sound, menus and what not… but got a big chunk taken out of that today.

Have lots of balancing to do…  Right now, it’s kind of boring just shooting the crap out of a big green blob…

At least now it tries to kill you..

and kittens…

I think i have finished with almost all the gameplay elements. Now I’m planning the rest of the graphics and starting with the sounds.  So now the status is:

• Player –  Gameplay done – Graphics pending - Sounds pending.
• Columns - done!
• Floor - pending. (fix border tiles)
• Barrel – done! - Sounds pending.
• Spikes Hole – done!
• Spikes Hole filling with Barrels – done! – Effect pending. 
• Lava Hole – done!
• Arrow Shooters – Gameplay done! - Graphics pending. Sounds pending.
• Arrows – Gameplay done! - Graphics pending. 
• Boulder Dropper – Canceled.
• Boulder – Canceled.
• Save Points – done! - Graphics pending. Sounds pending.
• Exit Point – done! – Graphics pending. Sounds pending.
• Menu - pending.
• Intro screen – pending.
• Game Over screen – pending.
• Ending Screen – pending.

I have put the Alpha1 for testing purposes here:

After 24 hours, I have something that resembles the whole of the game.  The remaining hours will just be for polish and adding features.  Really happy with myself at this point

The latest demo can be found here.

Inspired by the shortest short-story ever written, by Fredric Brown.

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…

Closing my first day. The mechanics are in place, it is slightly playable. Tomorrow I’ll finish the entities and I will concentrate on the graphics and levels.

Hope everyone is doing well too.

Good night to everyone!

SCREENSHOTS ! Kinda.

I can’t decide myself on a style for the character, so I’ll eventually draw him as a big dumb blob. Damn, character design is such a pain.

My game is officially known as “EpiCat”. Why is it official just now? Because I started the title screen!

There’s a controllable character, but it’s not shown here.

Wow!

Our game looks very cool!

We still have to add some more levels, platform types and graphics, But the main gameplay is fully working!

Play The Game Here

Watch The Live Stream

Please Help Us Choosing A Name For The Game!

Are you sure there is no one there?

Slow progress on the environment…

Modeled in Modo, textures with Photoshop and FilterForge, rendered in Unity

I guess the first bad impresion about the theme was unfounded. After some thinking I found a feasible idea. I think the coding is going smoothly, even after some struggles with the typical problems of coding in C. The art is coming in nicely as well. Here is the first screenshot.