Finished LD14, started LD18 but didn’t finish, had work on that weekend.

This weekend is looking clear, except maybe a few breaks for Christmas shopping. I’ve been getting into Processing, so I’ll probably try using it this time. It’s super-quick to get things up and running so I find it very motivating. And it’s suitable for my new netbook, serious 3D seems to be out of the question.

Tools may include Paint.net, sfxr, musagi, and anything else I need.

It’s been a fairly shitty year of professional game development for me, just need a politics-free creative weekend to get the love back.

…HERE I COME. So original.

Following my success in MLD#22 (yah), I shall be going for LD#19. The time is (as for many) just right – end of the year, no stuff to do…

Also, let’s keep up this random tradition of saying what tools shall who-ever use, shall I?

• CODE – AS3.0 – Flash CS5
• GRAPHICS – Vector – Flash CS5
• GRAPHICS – Bitmap (maybe) – Photoshop CS5
• SOUND – … digital? – sfxr / as3sfxr / MICROPHONE (yeah, I am a beatboxe… oh whatever)
• MUSIC – ambient – Logic Studio 9 (if I will have enough time for that)
• IDEAS – neural – mHEADmod3.599 (meannetSim)
• NOTES – verbal – Text Edit 9.5321.12348g (MOST RECENT)
• COMMUNICATIONS – cut – EVERYWHERE
• COMPUTER – good – iMac
• okay, i will stop

Timelapse is coming, but I wonder if I will continue using that lame Gawker… It crashed trice the last time, so I lost like an hour or more of material… I HAVE iShowU but I can not find any way to make it record time lapsing… Ideas?

Okay, so now I need just the music and… LOTS of puzzling levels.

Gotta love sfxr and his child, as3sfxr.

Also – the ladders:

This !!! is !!! LADDER!!!!! *kicks*

By the way, there IS gonna be a time lapse, although not a complete one… That annoying software I use to record it crashed trice, so I’ve lost more than an hour (a PRECIOUS hour) of memo… making of … video.

Um… So I guess I am one of the few people here who actually HAVE something fully playable

Anyway – I’ve changed the title from Code Runner (running on code) to Code: Runner (yeah, you’re the runner). Such a big CHANGE isn’t it?

Screenshots + TODO after the BREAK.

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This was a really strange LD for me. I had no Internet all weekend – it was like the eighties, except with Flixel. Without IRC and blogs, making a game by oneself is very lonely; I don’t recommend it.

I learned Flixel over the weekend, and I now know that my brain is the Flixel-compatible type. The whole thing makes very good sense to me and feels familiar. It’s interesting that everyone seems to fall distinctly into one of two camps, people who get Flixel and people who get FlashPunk. It would be interesting to investigate how these two classes of people are different, in ways other than programming. For instance, do we all like the same movies?

My game is called Intercontinental Drift, and it’s posted here. Please play it and come back here to leave comments. The game and I have been in isolation all weekend, and we both thirst for a little human contact.

I think the game is kind of interesting, though it is unpolished and pretty incomplete. I never got a chance to make music or expand the levels very much. As usual, I didn’t start actually churning out chunks of gameplay (levels) until the last few hours. I need to work on this for future LDs, because it’s the most important part.

Cheers!

Hamburger

I just finished porting sfxr to Haxe, but as a library instead of an app. Instead of generating a WAV file in sfxr and storing it in your SWF, you can now generate it while your program is loading, or the moment you need it. Why? To save space in the final SWF and to provide more flexibility, like being able to vary a sound a little depending on something in the game.

http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/ld/sfxrhx/

There are several ways to use it:
- you can start with making a sound in sfxr and save it as a .sfs file and use the load() function
- generate random sounds in your program and simply save the random seeds of the ones you like, use create(), randomize() and mutate()
- if you need to fine-tune a sound, you can also edit the individual parameters in your program
- use generate() to create the wave file in memory
- finally, use play() at any time to play it

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.

I’ve finished plugging in a bunch of sound effects for Angry Caverns and you can hear and play the result here (Flash)

Now I’m off to use Reason to compose a quick main menu loop and at least one level loop…

Then it will be time to generate some more levels than 1  !

EDIT: If anyone plays and the sounds are too loud / soft / annoying.. feel free to let me know!  Thanks 

Anyone notice this yet ? jSfxr: a Java applet by eigenbom, inspired by Dr Petter’s sfxr.

This could turn out to be a handy tool for those last minute sound effects (although for me, sfxr does just nicely) .. except it seems to lack a save-to-WAV function …

Get your weapons ready! Get equipped with:

Tools I’ll be using partially, wholly, or not at all..

blecki’s jileed (mapping)

http://jemgine.omnisu.com/

drpetter’s sfxr (sound effects)

http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/project_sfxr.html

drpetter’s musagi (music)
http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/project_musagi.html

keeyai’s chronolapse (timelapse)
http://keeyai.com/projects-and-releases/chronolapse/

someone else’s paint.net (image editing)

http://www.getpaint.net/index.html

Thanks to pekuja for compiling Balloon Game! It should work for everybody now. I also included SDL.dll in the zip. No changes have been made to the code or graphics. Get the new version here.

See old post at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/01/10/balloon-game/

It’s amazing! It’s wonderful! It has potatoes.

Get it here. Uses C++ and SDL. Written & compiled in MSVC++ 2008 Express edition. MS Paint & GIMP for graphics. SFXr & Musagi for the sound & music that didn’t make it in.

Note: this is the Debug build because for some reason the Release build refuses to compile.

EDIT: See new post (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/01/11/balloon-game-update) for version that should actually work.

I got back to work about two hours ago (although I did stay up for an extra hour or two last night after saying I would sleep), and the game is coming along quite well.

Most importantly, I have managed to add some of the extra gameplay ideas I had yesterday. The gameplay is now some kind of mix of asteroids and puzzle bobble – with an infection theme, and in glorious monochrome…

I’ve also added a score (as you can see in the screenshot), and some basic sound effects – my musical skills are best described as NULL, so I’m not sure I’m going to add much more, but perhaps I’ll generate something with DrPetter’s sfxr if I think it’ll fit in (I found the debian/ubuntu binary package here if anyone’s looking for one as I’m getting unmet dependency problems installing libgtk to compile from source at the mo.)

Still to do – lives, deaths, writing the score to the file, and some better physics – but it’s come along.

I put up an article on basic sound synthesis yesterday. It had been requested by some folks. Touches on fundamental aspects of sound in general as well as more specific details relevant to classic retro waveforms and the kind of stuff sfxr does.

Well, after waking up and just drinking some juice, I fixed my music song and tweaked the difficulty levels a bit. So, Framed! is complete!

It’s pretty exciting. I think I’ll make an installer later and post it permanently on my website. For now here are the links for downloading:

Framed! v1.1 Final: (windows) (src)

The windows version was tested on XP on two separate machines, let me know if there’s any trouble.  The source requires Python 2.4 or Python 2.5 and PyGame 1.7.1.  Enjoy!

You can see a recap of my progress log, after the break.

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Everyone, don’t forget about drpetter’s amazing sound effect making.. thinger, SFXR! A must-have for any LDer! its over here: http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/project_sfxr.html GET IT

Shrapnel!

Downloads (both have windows exe + source code and Linux makefile):

• Compo version
• Post-compo: Smaller zip, sound latency fix (no code or data changes) (new)

Uses SDL, SDL_mixer and SDL_image. I used kate for code/text, gimp for graphics, sfxr for sound effects (thanks DrPetter!), and pxtone to make music.

If the Linux version crashes when you run it on 32-bit x86, use this SDL library (contains a fix for a bug in SDL_SoftStretch)

Edit: Figured out the Windows sound latency issue! Seems the SDL.dll I used was buggy. Replacing it with one from libsdl.org fixes things.

A helicopter physics game, made with XNA 2.0 beta.

You will need a pile of shit to get this to work, here it is:

1. .Net 2.0 SP1 (we are currently uncertain if it ships with Vista)
   • Note you can also use the original .Net 2.0 but you will also have to install the C++2005 SP1 Redist (G4WL will also install this, so this is only needed if you are not also installing that redist)
2. DirectX9.0c
3. XNA runtime 2.0

I’ve had ppl not being able to run the game anyways, Im looking into the problem. Pls tell me if it works for you.

Anyways I hurried with the levels, Yay it was fun to make them I hope to release a map pack soon. Unfortunaly the editor is built within director, so I will have to work on it a bit to enable the community to build their own maps, unless you got director. All sound was made with DrPetters godlike sound effect app, sfxr. Kudos to him!

Game goals: make the red box be within the red rectangle for 3 seconds to go to next level.

Controls: (Xbox360 controller should work, not tested, buttons? test them!)
Arrows <- -> Steer

ArrowUp/Down throttle

Z – Open/Close the CLAW!

X- Turbo (For making panic manouvres)

R – Reset level (Yeah this key you will know by heart)

N – n00b?

Here is bin 440KB

And here is source + editor + bin + other useless stuff 3MB

Wayhaaaay a final submission.

It’s flash so just go play it now at

http://screamingduck.com/Cruft/BoomShakalaka.html

source is here

Yay done!

Hero School is an arcade game that forces you to nimbly avoid, disarm or block bombs while navigating terrain to rescue alarmingly ugly girls who tend to say snide things to you.

It’s sort of Bomberman with new play mechanics, you don’t throw bombs, you avoid/disarm them.

Each level has different rules or items in place.

Heroes can’t cross water but fire sure does.

What a good looking hero!

Download game with source for Windows
(will think about doing a linux/OSX build too.. hrm)

Postmortem comments:

This was a really difficult competition for me because my brand new computer arrived RIGHT BEFORE it started and I had to constantly fight the urge to go set it up! Yeah, that’s dedication.