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

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

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…

Where is all this time going?

Collisions, shooting and what not are now working…

It can get quite hectic for it’s simplicity… just what I was going for.

My progress so far:

There’s a level with solid tiles and tiles you walk through.  Enemies use basic pathing to find you.  The player has a weapon, which fires bullets.  The sprites onscreen are sorted by depth, so they don’t have that nasty sorting hting where you;re in front of someone and on their face.  But I disgress.

Tomorrow: bullets kill things.  Enemies are spawned.  More weapons.  An artist friend is stopping by to help finish the music my brother made and to do art.

Sunday: I expect the basic game works by then.  More weapons, finishing art, testing.  Probably score stuff, menu and title, maybe more enemy types.

Monday: Testing, testing, testing!  Then testing of the distribution to the only other Windows machine in the house, which went badly last LD.  Sorry I use XNA, all.

Got the basic game structure up and running, input, gamestates,  basic camera and skybox.

Made the last minute decision to go 3D….   Sounded like a better idea at the time than it probably will in 44.5 hours…

Kitch's Game

Now ladies and gents, pleeeeeease be nice.

<rant>

This is my baby. My cumulative game developing experience distilled into one sugary goodness. My 1/8 complete Mona Lisa(M?). I’ve developed more than a few finished games, and abandoned WAY more games than I care to think about. This .dll contains solutions to problems that haunted me for literal weeks.

And now I share them with you. All I ask is that if you do use it, PLEASE TELL ME WHERE I CAN IMPROVE IT. Like I said, this is nowhere near finished. In fact, it will most likely change by the time Ludum Dare gets here! In fact I can guarantee it will, I still need to add in my flexible animated texture stuff…

</rant>

What it does:

-Circle and Convex Polygon Collision

-Rotations

-Complex transformations

-Pathfinding

-Common texture stuff (animation, atlases, particle engines, etc.)

Have questions? Ask. It is very well commented, and has all the appropriate XML documentation for Visual Studio.

Happy Game Dev!

EDIT: The link was incorrect, but has now been fixed.

I’m going to have an… interesting LD this time around.  First of all, this will be my second LD compo and my first LD48, as I did the Jam last time.  Additionally, I have finals the two days leading up to the compo weekend, so I will have literally seven hours between taking my semester finals and starting a 48-hour game.  But hey, it’ll probably be all right.

Language: C# using XNA

Platform: Windows (I use XP still, btw)

I plan to make the sound effects myself with a mic and sound editor, so my game will either have bad sound effects or literal onomatopoeia ones like “bang”.

My first post-mortem for my first finished game for my first LD (entry here). Those are all stand-alone firsts. I have never actually finished a game to a point where I post the .exe for others to play. It’s just never good enough for me (we’ve all heard that one before). Anyway, post-mortem:

Idea

Not much to say here really. My first thought was — who wants to escape the most? Well, trapped souls from the depths of hell, obviously. In retrospect, that being my first answer says something about me. I also knew I’m not doing a platformer. From then on, I just kept adding random ideas/features with a promise to not go back and redo stuff.

I think the idea/concept turned out fine (or at least we’ll see after ratings ^_^). I didn’t expect to come up with any groundbreaking ideas and I didn’t have all day to think of one either. I saw a few people bail out and rewrite their code, so I’m happy I managed to stick with mine. I also saw too many people going “need more levels”, “need more level ideas”, “I only have 524 levels, help!” One of the reasons why I did not go the platformer route.

Schedule

Day 1
10am (5h in) — wake-up
10am-5pm — code
5pm-6pm — break
6pm-8pm — code
8pm-9pm — blog post
9pm-1am — Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

Day 2
10am — wake-up
10am-3pm — code
3pm-330pm — break
3:30pm-4:30pm — code
4:30pm-7pm — beach
7pm–12:30pm — code furiously
1am-1:30am — blog post, submit

That’s a total of 9h+11h=20h out of 48h. Sure, I could have spent more time coding. But if my overnight Uni reach-the-deadline coding sessions have taught me anything, it’s that I don’t like them.

Gameplay

I think I oversaturated the game with features, especially since they all are accessible at once (if not usable). I didn’t think it was possible to have too many features for a 48h game, but there you have it. I have a nice tutorial screen to introduce everything though:

Only now do I realize this, but there are 600 games and finishing every game is near impossible. You have to keep it simple, stupid! Who has the time to read all that verbal diarrhea? I foyu skip the “help” button, you have no idea what you are doing. That said, there is nothing bad with complexity, in fact many games are known and praised for it. But you have to take it step by step. Introduce gameplay elements as the player progresses and plays, not throw everything at them at once. I think this may have be my biggest design flaw (besides lack of music). But then again, an in-game interactive tutorial in 48h? Moving on…

“Art”

Let my art speak for itself! (more likely growl out “kiiill meee”) Here’s the entire sprite-sheet:

I’m not an artist, I’m a programmer. All my units are either static of flying, so my “move” animation is 1 frame One thing I did wrong is make all the terrain colors too dark. Units and props stand out OK, but the terrain itself has too little contrast, and it really shows in screenshots. My Holy Light could have been more impressive too. I wanted a magnificent beam of shiny and awesome, but all I got is this lousy flashlight.

Audio

I’ve done very little with sound and games, so this wasn’t my strong side. I did decide to try out sfxr, which was a super-easy and quick way to produce relatively awesome sound effects. Ended up with 8 different sound effects. Obviously, I have no music and I couldn’t make any myself anyway. I’ve played around with Fruity Loops or whatnot in my day, and concluded I have no musical hearing. Not that my music teacher hadn’t made that perfectly clear back in grade 3.

Dirty code

Spaghetti code! Argh, my eyes! Not a single useful comment, dirty inefficient hacks, integers instead of constants or enums, … That’s K.I.S.S. and time limit for you! *shudders* I don’t think I could go on working with this code much longer. Then again, I’ve seen much worse too.

What I do appreciate in my coding style is the object-oriented design. Even with the number of classes spanning into second dozen, I didn’t get any game-breaking bugs that were more than careless copy-pasting.

In conclusion

Can’t say anything went terribly wrong. I probably would not have done much better with any other themes anyway. I could have spent more time coding/drawing, but then I would just exhaust myself beyond “fun”. I’m proud of myself for sticking with this till the end, even if my first thought was “Escape? What bollocks!”.

I love C#, XNA, and ReSharper and the speed at which I can chunk out code/features. I also know how many raters I’m losing by not having a “Web” play link. It would’ve been better if I had a Flash or Unity or something entry. But then I would have had to learn it first

Ludum Dare has been great so far, I love the community activity, and I can’t wait for the super-secret-October-make-a-buck type challenge.

My game for this compo was Black Hole, a game where the objective is to escape both the horde of Drones who cornered you, and the black hole which they cornered you against.

Fortunately for you, a long-dead alien race left a platform here, which feeds off of the emissions of the black hole and broadcasts energy to all nearby ships. You have moved in close to this platform and the black hole itself, and thus avoided the gigantic Drone Mothership which was chasing you. However, the smaller Drone forces can and did pursue you, so now you must hold out against them to recharge your Jump Engines, allowing you to jump to beyond lightspeed and escape to your home.

The coding process was quite frantic. I had to write the entire game engine, and at one point ended up re-writing and re-integrating the entire collision engine, as I had failed to discover that my method of detecting overlapping rectangles was not accurate if they were rotated. Fortunately, I’m quite skilled with circle based collision, and it only took about 20 minutes to switch and integrate.

Another thing to note: I was high on Oxycodone and other painkillers the entire time, having gotten my wisdom teeth removed on Thursday. This caused many dumb mistakes, the majority being simple math related. I persevered through it though, and ended up coming out with what I think is a fun game!

Plans for the future: to continue to develop this game. I want to add more enemies, powerups, and new game modes.

Timelapse Part One is here.

Timelapse Part Two is here.

I’ll be writing a Post Mortem at some point… Thanks for the fun times all! Cheers!

Edit: 1814 lines of code, for those of you who care.

I have spent a little short of 20 hours on active development. This is roughly two fifths and not quite the 48 hours. Then again I haven’t broken my 1am-10am sleep routine and did take a break or two (or more).

Since my first post, I have been partly polishing the existing features, partly struggling to add new ones. New large ones include a few more objects, a minimap, lighting, sounds, and tutorial and menu screens. In the end, I rather go for a finished, brief game, than a feature complete, but too rough-around-the-edges game. Then again, I went for a “sandboxy” gameplay, so you cannot really tell something is missing until you try it first. Here’s a screeny:

You can download it here (Requires XNA and .NET):

http://blog.capdb.net/SoulHellscape2.zip (my LD48 entry)

P.S. sfxr is awesome, I did not expect to have any sounds in the game, given very little prior experience with sound effect creation and total lack of musical hearing.

Hey everyone!

I’ve submitted my game to Ludum Dare. If you want to check it out, here’s the link. Screenshots:

Anyway, my game is submitted, but not done. I’m sure there will be code that needs fixing, which I’ll do during the last few hours. I’ll post my post-mortem after the 48 hours is done.

This is the first Ludum Dare I’ve actually completed with a game that resembles finished. Ah, that first time feeling Technically, I did attempt LD 20, but that failed miserably.

After the 48 hours is up, I’ll call my game finished. Until then, I’ve got everything covered so can spend the last 8 hours with the code. And maybe some caffeinated drinks.

I was planning to do the Jam this time round, but my team are all over the country right now on holiday

See you on the other side of the 48 hours.

Well, now that the server’s up, I can post a progress report on our game: http://i.imgur.com/kPVcU.png It looks bland right now because it doesn’t have blocks, powerups, particles, enemies, or soundtrack. But since it’s a Jam entry, we’ve got it all planned out for the next two-ish days and we’re right on schedule.

Good luck to all fellow Jammers and you hardcore Compo programmers!

It’s been roughly 11 hours since I got up (silly Europe timezones). And I think my progress has been pretty steady so far. I was most worried about not liking the theme (it’s OK, if a bit too broad), but more importantly not being able to think of any decent ideas. But I think I like what I came up with:

You help damned souls escape hell. I call it “Soul Hellscape” You play the game by placing a “Holy Light” beam that attracts nearby souls and thus lets you guide them to the gate of hell, where they can escape. All while several types of baddies attempt to nibble on the delicious, innocent souls. You can zap them with a “Divine Lightning”. Plus a few more details and mini-features. Here’s a screenshot of the game:

You can download it here (Requires XNA and .NET):

http://blog.capdb.net/SoulHellscape.zip

Contrary to what I had planned, I spent very little time with a sketchpad. Call it an “inspiration”! Then again, my programmer “art”work is as good as it’s gonna get so it all balances out ^_^ Although I will expand on the variety a bit tomorrow. Oh, and no sound.

P.S. And let me tell you, #ludumdare IRC channel is a serious distraction.

This is the second Ludum Dare that I’ve attempted. I’m blogging about this one because I think I’ve got a hope in hell of finishing on time.

The obligatory desk photo:

My desk - Windows laptop with the code on, Mac mini with the social networks and the entertainment

And a screenshot of my code so far:

Some of my code - in my puzzle escape game thingy, there are 6 chambers you must get through. This is the code that loads the chamber graphics.

I’m coding in XNA. I’ll learn Flash one of these days. Or Java.

So we’re getting somewhere. See you on the other side.

I’m going to create a ‘simple’ evade all enemies and get out of some place game, with stealth and all that. 2D, top-down view, nothing fancy. The first step was to render the world with line of sight. I’ve just finished that, but there are some unforeseen issues with it. Here’s a picture of what it looks like right now:

You control the direction you’re looking at with the mouse, and you can’t see behind you. I added a few blocks in the room, which you can see. Well, you can’t. You only see the shadows cast by it. Because I want the game to be 2D and not 3D, you cannot ‘see’ walls (like in the old GTA games). At first I thought that would be ok, but now I’m having doubts. You see, when moving around, those shadow cast by the geometry look like 3D pillars that go up in the sky. So, accidentally, it looks like the old GTA games but with black buildings instead of textured buildings. Oops.

So I’ll have to figure out a way to make it look like it’s 2D (which it is), while still keeping shadows like that. Any ideas are welcome, but I’m going to try and add an offset to the shadows so you can still see a little bit of wall before it goes black.

Now it’s time for food, and then I’ll try to fix that. If I can’t get it to look decent in a few hours, then I’ll just keep it as it is now and work on the gameplay. When that’s done, I can always revisit it if I want to. Still, I’m very happy with the result.

First Screen Shots!   Not much to look at yet, but I have a strong base for 3 hours of work.   Now, to Dlrrp.

Hi all,

This is my first post, first message of intent to participate, and generally first online game programming competition I’m signing up for. It seems that everyone is doing an “I’m in” post, so I might as well; you know, so twenty years from now my humble beginnings can be traced back once I inevitably become a billi… moving on:

Actually, I do need to declare my base code: http://blog.capdb.net/wp-content/uploads/XnaBase.zip . This is the default XNA new project spiced up with a few custom classes/structure. There’s a simple rendering loop to draw a cursor and some text, a simple input processor for mouse/keyboard/controller, and a simple game state machine (playing/paused/menu). Just the basic stuff I’ll need to code for any XNA project anyway.

I’m using C# and XNA (Visual Studio 2010 + ReSharper). Photoshop for sprites. May be Maya for 3D rendered sprites if I feel masochistic. And, of course, Notepad for a TODO/TONOTTODO list.

Cheers.

This is the first game programming competition I’ve entered, ever. I’m doing the Jam with a friend, we’re going to get together and program the whole weekend! I’ve been programming all summer anyway, so it’s nice to have an official excuse.
Nervous!

We’re using XNA 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010, with a healthy dose of Paint.NET. See you at the end!

This will be my second LD (my first being LD 20). I might not have all day on saturday, but on sunday I’ll have enough time for sure to hack an awesome game together!

I’ll be using C#/XNA again, and I sort of made a promise to myself to not create a platformer, unless the theme is perfect for a sequel to my LD 20 game Heroic Cat. But even then I’d like to try something else if possible. We’ll see. Next to XNA I’ll be using bfxr, audiotool, paint.NET. I won’t use a game engine or other 3rd party libraries, probably, unless I really need one.

I can’t wait!

(Also, I read the post about tags earlier today, but C# turns into C++ so it’s just XNA for now)

This is my first time, I’m already excited.

I’ll be using XNA, bfxr and gimp/paint.net and my self written Map Editor (uses a Tile Engine from the library I’m going to post).

I’ll be using my own engine-library to create the game. Since it’s required to post the source beforehand I uploaded it to mediafire.

You can download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/?v71dv51drxnz2fa check bottom for new download link!

EDIT 19.08: I decided to use xTile Engine library and tIDE for my Tile Engine instead. I’ll still be using part of my old engine and another mapeditor I created.

I’ll post the source for the new adapted engine-library soon (still fixing some bugs)

EDIT 19.08: DONE, yay! Here’s the new Engine-Library-Download: http://www.mediafire.com/?xxex5cirjij1a5f

I’ll be using this version of the engine in the competition. It’s possible I may make changes to it during the 48 hours but I leave it alone till then.

Now to get some sleep…..