Drew a bit of a blank on the theme, so decided to write a fairly traditional stealth-’em-up. This time I have mostly resisted the urge to make it pretty, and have got the core mechanics working instead!

You can turn the torches on and off, collect loot, and I have a sinister capsule patrolling a series of waypoints, coming after you if he spots you, and returning to patrol if he loses you again. Title and pause screen are working.

Day 1 progress

Day 2 is all about making gameplay from those core mechanics, and tarting it up – although one important thing I haven’t yet done is factor shadows into the visiblity code. But I know how that will work, just haven’t done it yet. Just done a last-minute stress test to see how many dynamic lights I can get away with, and the answer is “not many”. I may burn a lot of tomorrow optimising…

Uplighter was my entry for the Light & Darkness theme. It was a puzzle game centered on lighting up levels to certain percent by, among other things, placing lights, breaking down walls, and removing light sinks.

It’s was my first entry to feature 3D, although all gameplay and lighting is really in 2D, and it was also my first entry to not use Allegro. Instead it used GLFW, which is more lightweight, and I really didn’t need all the extra stuff from Allegro.

Uplighter is probably my best and most innovative LD entry so far—it placed first in ‘innovation’, second in ‘fun’, and also won the ‘Best In Show’ award.

You can get the compo version of Uplighter. It’s for Windows, but there’s a shell script (kindly provided by alar_k after the compo) that will fix stuff so it will compile for linux. You’ll need GLFW, GLFT, FMod and FreeType2.

Small notice: After the compo, it was reported to run very slowly on 3.0+ GHz machines. I’m still not sure what that was all about, but it has been reported that this can be fixed by compiling it in VS. If this is still much of a problem, I might get around to fix it myself.