I’ve been busy painting HIB promo art and Yule shopping, so I missed this LD by a day. But I want to at least throw an idea down. An idea fueled by pepparkaksdeg (it’s a crime to bake it really) and a movie that I just watched: “They Live” by John Carpenter.

So, you play as a person in a city full of other pedestrians. The walls have company logos, ads and other things. In a trashcan you find a pair of goggles which allow you to see (or should I say discover) the evil aliens who have infiltrated mankind. However, wearing the goggles lowers your health. Taking them off replenishes it.

The aliens consider you a threat, so they’re trying to discover you, and then attack you with health draining beams. They can only do this if they get within a certain distance. So the trick is to only use the goggles in crowds, or to read the motions of people and move in the gaps. You might also have to remember who is nasty after you’ve taken the goggles off (like a game of memory) . The goggles might have a warmup/cooldown to prevent the player from flicking the effect on and off. Perhaps aliens spot you at a larger distance with the goggles on, making it more important to remember who’s who and then sneak by whistling with the goggles off.

The goal of the game is to gather up stuff around the city and head for a building where the aliens have hidden the device which is cloaking their appearance to the human population. The ads and stuff would of course substitute for OBEY/CONSUME/WATCH TV while the goggles are used.

I’d like to say that I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, but I’m all out of… well, time.

So, It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to finish on time. I’m not really sure how close I am to finishing. A lot of the mechanics and data structures are working, but it’s the little stuff which is the most time consuming, like bugs, adjusting values, chopping up graphics, etc.

Seen here is the refit hideout, which is pretty much functional. What’s left is… connecting this game mode to the half finished shooter game mode. While I don’t have any enemies yet, they already have some data structures in place.

Anyways, tomorrow is a busy day, so I won’t be doing anymore work tonight. Goodnight folks.

I might have to leave these really rough, because I’m already behind schedule. Note that some of the panels are failures.

The left title screen has some potential, although it needs to be 960×512. I can keep the game over screen really simple (top one).

The creature refit screen is the most complex one and I haven’t quite nailed down the game mechanics there yet.

The game/shooter screen is pretty simple, just a static sky background with baked in power meters for heat and health. Clouds can go in the foreground. I might just do 5 quick islands which will scroll in. The water… maybe some animated tile. Doesn’t need to actually scroll. Only the clouds and island would move. I drew some sea gulls too.

Also, I ate a Wienerbröd for breakfast.

I’ve been working on some the graphics. Not sure if I’ll have time to finish them. They’re pretty quick to make, but I have about half left, then I need to arrange onto sheets, load into the engine and make sure stuff animates properly.

The game mechanics are very simple, just a drifting blob which shoots on other drifting things. Not sure how long this game will take me to code. Tomorrow I might have to budget 6hrs for the code, 6hrs more for the art, 2hrs for tax declaration and 2hrs for surviving.

It’s approaching bedtime here. I’ll have to get up at 12 tomorrow… today.

After wasting most of the day, I finally got some code done. The ship/creature now fires different types of projectiles (accuracy, muzzle velocity, drag, damage type) from three different batteries (turret groups). I’m thinking of using a heat system similar to that used in MechWarrior.

Oh yeah, I ate a pizza slice. There won’t be any in the game though. The enemies will be balloons with little turrets underneath.

I was sleeping when the ‘Islands’ theme was announced for LD17, but now I’m awake and throwing ideas around. My first ideas felt too derivative, so I decided to go for something more exotic in the end.

Basically, you’re playing a large floating creature (an island of sorts) who raids islands. The creature can abduct human slaves which it uses for labor. The slaves can build factories, turrets etc on the back of the creature. As the raids go on, the island inhabitants get more and more upset, and defensive forces around the islands grow larger.

The strategy of the game is to figure out which islands to attack, since they offer different resources and different defense. A more developed creature will be able to grab more loot per raid, but the opposition will also be tougher later on.

The turrets could go in three groups (A,B,C) which can be fired individually. For example, the player can choose to put medium distance flak in one group, and long distance sniping in another. Aiming is done with the mouse. Each level (island) has a certain scroll distance to go. During the scroll, the creature is attacked by various enemies. They vary in terms of damage type (some might kill population), movement type, hit points, defense type, bullet trajectory, etc.

I just woke up and was able to play through my game. Here are a few things which went wrong:

• I spent too much time on enemy variants. I should have gone for more variants of the terrain tiles instead, to make the exploration more fun. Terrain tiles are faster to draw since they don’t rotate. A snow area and desert area could have been cool.
• The title/splash screen has a very flat landscape. I didn’t add any shadows or foggy background mountains.
• I could have avoided combat altogether and focused on stealth exploration, sneaking by and grabbing the loot. It’s difficult to do a satisfying combat system in just a few hours. I had no time to make fun AI either.
• The game gets too easy mid-end. I didn’t have time to play through it even once. Anyways, this means that it’s mostly laborsome to find the last treasures.
• I should have made a few sounds. Without sound, one feels detached from the game. It’s harder to understand what is going on (especially taking hits in combat). Music adds atmosphere too, of course. I had an idea where the tile map drawing routine would generate ambient sounds.
• I flipped two of the squid frames wrong. I didn’t notice because I had put most of them in a maze with high walls.
• The main character looks like it is ice skating because of the scroll focus, but drawing 2 walk frames * 4 angles * 2 stances would have been too much work for me. I suppose it would’ve been less of a problem in a game where you move less.
• Speaking of which, tapping the movement buttons is straining on the hand after a while.
• Str(ength) should have been Att(ack) in the sidebar. I was thinking of drawing a background for the sidebar, but had no time left. The treasure were supposed to do things, but I didn’t have time for that either.
• If Health = 0 Then FGameOver() … I guess this made sense at some point, but it doesn’t in the current version. I’m generally careful and put less than checks in because I know I might change stuff around or lose control of value ranges.
• It would’ve been simple to couple the stats-up mechanic with the player’s current def/att mode, giving the player a bit of a choice for stats development.

So, I’m done. While I did finish something, it’s not much of a game. I spent far too long on graphics. The characters just skate around and do simple damage. The source code quickly turned into a mess as I approached the deadline. I haven’t even played the game myself, so I’ll give it a go tomorrow. I think I need to do more unique landmarks, i.e. more graphics to make the exploration worthwhile… and an actual game of course. Although, I think I will still consider it a game for the sake of my new year resolution (promised I would finish something).

Like many people here, I’ve been awake for far too long. Good night!

I think I wasted too much time on this. I need to do a game over and victory screen too, although they can be simpler. Thankfully they are easy to integrate into the program, since they are just single images.

No progress on gameplay… I’m past bedtime too, head is getting woozy. I can do art when I’m tired (well over the 30hr mark if needed), but not code.

I didn’t think I’d get this far. The character can move around, collide with things, change stance/posture (def/off) and also collect treasure.

I only have 2 hrs until super tiredness assaults me, but hopefully I can make the enemies move, do a rudimentary combat system, some GUI cleanup.

Pronably no time for sound. My idea was that each tile when drawn has a small chance of making an ambient sound. This would make a huge on screen forest go fooosh, a grave yard wooo aaaaaauuh… I have no sounds for that though. Trivial to add the code though, I think.

Also, I only have the gameplay and editor mode now. Maybe a big non interactive splash screen is doable as a title screen, but I also need a game over and a victory screen (panties). For now I was thinking the game is over once all of the treasure bits have been collected.

I’m still making progress. I actually made a new year resolution this year that I would finish something. Is this it?

Here I’m trying out the new more silent terrain bits (less dots) in conjunction with the more busy ones.

I might skip making instances for the enemies and just make them terrain objects of sorts. They wouldn’t have any real stats this way. Instead they could die based on a dice roll. The player would have health though. This is a cheap way out just in case I don’t get to making the buckets and linked lists for the enemies.

I surprised myself and actually got some code done. I have made a simple Editor where I can select, draw, draw randomly and clear. Scrolling isn’t done yet. The map might be 128×128, I don’t know yet.

I’m thinking of replacing the shadow ellipse with a selection ellipse for the enemies and items. Or, I can do several shadows which work for different sizes of things.

Overall, the environment is a bit noisy and hard to read, but that’s partly because I crammed so many different objects onto one screen.

So, I spent the whole day on graphics. Not much time left to work on an engine now. I was thinking of doing something like Hydlide where you simply bump into enemies (grid based movement). Your character and some enemies can also be in offensive or defensive mode. Drawing the characters consistently in all angles and stances is a pain.

So what about exploration? I’m a fan of Zelda 1 where you could basically go pretty much anywhere on the overworld map right from the start. Here I’d like to do something similar to Dragon Quest 1 where the enemy difficulty partly limits your progression.

I might get the map drawing and scrolling done tomorrow. Perhaps player movement (and buckets). Probably not enemy instances or items.

Mr Magical wand will have to do the transparency mask for me. I haven’t really ordered the graphics in a sensible order. I don’t know if the stuff tiles well either.

Now I’m mighty tired. My slow start aside, I’ve been drawing all day and got a decent amount of graphics done.