I came up with the idea of making a shooter based on drawing arrows after seeing a concept sketch for another arrow game by fellow LD participant Sparky. In the week before the contest, I entertained the idea and tried to think of ways to make it “themeable”. I came up with what I thought was a great idea for “Rain” – falling stars, that you would use as ammunition. When I saw the theme “Advancing Wall of Doom”, I decided to keep the mechanics from “Rain” and just work the actual theme into that. In retrospect, this might have been a mistake. Read why after the break.

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Here’s the timelapse for my LD entry this time around. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6TqFZE7Y14

The webcam flickers a bit due to issues with OpenCV but it’s mostly not noticable. It doesn’t include about the first two hours of drawing during which it didn’t work and I didn’t realise and it doesn’t include writing music/sound as I still haven’t been bothered to get it running in Windows yet. (I use Propellerhead’s Reason for audio)

Sadly there was a tiny bug in the final version of my game – the line “state = STATE_LEVEL;” was missing, so no pause screen would be shown between levels (although the code for layout and mechanics of that screen was already in there, as can be seen in the source).

I have fixed this and uploaded a new version to my site as both zip and webstart:

• Webstart
• ZIP file

Sorry about that!

UPDATE:

Sadly there was a tiny bug in the final version of my game – the line “state = STATE_LEVEL;” was missing, so no pause screen would be shown between levels (although the code for layout and mechanics of that screen was already in there, as can be seen in the source).

I have fixed this and uploaded a new version to my site as both zip and webstart. I realize that this may not be taken into consideration when judging the entry, but I thought I should at least upload the entry as it was meant to be (and as I was certain it was!)

• Webstart
• ZIP file

Sorry about that!

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ORIGINAL POST:

Okay, here’s the final version of “Sky Upon Us!”, my entry for LD14.

I tried to upload the zip file containing launch files for Windows, Linux and OSX to the blog. Sadly, WordPress wouldn’t accept it even if I changed the file extention. Meanwhile, the game can be downloaded or started from all the following links:

• SkyUponUs.zip (Including Windows .exe and Linux/OSX .sh files)
• Java Webstart 1 (Java 1.4+, retroweave)
• Java Webstart 2 (Java 1.5+)

While the game didn’t quite turn out the way I hoped, I’m still happy with most of it. However, the gameplay does get a bit repetetive; excuse!

As always, any comments are warmly appreciated!

A screenshot from the game:

I didn’t get much done last night,. I work best in the morning.  must be the coffee!

You can see the “wall” collapsing in the back,. and the loosely defined pac-”worm”, that is the player, runs toward the screen in an attempt to escape it,. . Here the Advancing Wall is an Advancing Collapse of Doom.  This is going to be a bit rought, but something will be done.  I’m going to add some good/bad objects to play with on the wall, and then synth some sounds and music,. .  this all depends on how much time I get to work today,. . fingers crossed.

So, I have another playable build of my work in progress available.

Play it here in your favorite browser

It now has an enemy ship wave manager so I can build out the Wall of Doom(tm) that you must escape through to rescue the last of your race.

I also took a suggestion to map the fleet pattern echeleons to the Z/X/C/V keys.. four patterns in all.

Give it a whirl if you’d like as I’d love to hear any feedback.  I’m trying to get absolutely as much of the gameplay done before screwing around with any graphics this time.  I think it is actually progressing really well for once!

The game just ends right now when all the enemy ships go by.  Also.. if you lose all your ships you have to refresh your browser to continue!

I started hacking around in Z Game Editor to see if I can get anything happening that I like,. .

So far I got some cube jumping around on a wall of blocks,. mostly working out the collitions handeling and looking for a fun mechanic for movements,. first game idea was just to shoot at an advancing wall,. but I will see how it developes,. .

I’ve made some further progress, but I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this:

…sleep. Though before that I felt like doing a little drawing to get the subconscious primed on the theme before sleep.  Here’s a quick 3 minute sketch of a possible doomy world: