I don’t even know what that light is but that is what we shall find out this weekend, together.  Let’s see whose light turns out the brightest, shall we?

This is where you need to pretend to hear really resonating reverby evil laughter as if it were coming out of the walls and into your very berry soul.  That’s my laughter.  You better had make it good.

(In other words, I’m in.  I’ll be using javascript in some form or fashion, that’s bout all I know so far in regards to tools.)

Today has been interesting.  I made the decision to go with CraftyJS as my platform, which means … I needed to learn CraftyJS, get a thorough refresher of javascript, decide on the game, make a bunch of assets, and do a bunch of code.  I did everything minus the last one – after all the coding I did learning CraftyJS (on a demo project) I felt like doing asset production.  So that’s what I did.

You are a legendary warrior dog hero on a quest to stop the evil wizard from destroying the world.  Or perhaps I should say, you will become a legendary warrior hero after you stop the evil wizard from destroying the world.  If you don’t stop him, you won’t be much of a hero.

I worked a bunch on a basic tileset (I’m really bad at pixel art so it takes me forever) AND I LOST the BEST wizard sprite I have EVER done (closed photoshop without saving on accident).  Also, due to my total lack of competency as an artist, I made the decision to not do animation.  It’s a nice touch but it would take me the entire time to get the worst looking animations you’ve ever seen, so, screw it.  Here is what I am currently at:

Tiles

You notice there is a distinct abundance of this “one of a kind” plant.  It’s probably just a glitch in the story.  It shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but well now that it has we just need to move along and pretend we never saw it.  Really, you only get one.

Thankfully I’m entering the jam since a friend of mine (an amazing composer) has offered to do some music for it, although he is time-constrained this weekend studying for finals.  The other major assets I finished (loosely, I need a few more sketches done) is the intro “video”/voice over.  It’s done in a sketchy style and I need to probably double the amount of sketches I have, but those go by pretty quickly.  I just haven’t decided what I want to show on screen during the voice over.  Here’s the imgur gallery with it and a link to the voice over on soundcloud:

Intro Sketches

Intro voice over

It’s been a long journey.  But you finally did it!  You made it to the evil wizard.  Considering how difficult just getting here was, and let’s be frank: it was literally a walk in the park, I’m not sure if there is anything you could possibly do to stop the most powerful evil wizard that has ever lived.  If only dogs had larger brains, you might be able to think of something.  But we both know, and it’s quite clear, you are just a stupid puppy with big dreams.  Oh well, I suppose you can throw yourself at one of his fireballs and delay the end of the world for a few more mere seconds..that’s heroic…right?

Implementing the theme has been difficult for me.  I feel like everything I think of is too broad and vague.  At the end of the day I’ve more or less settled on this idea of a branching storyline where you only get to make a single decision at each branch, and then you just have to live with it.  The only problem with that, the obvious problem, is the amount of content something like that requires…  From what I can tell, it looks like it should be feasible given how powerful CraftyJS seems to be.  I’ll have to make do in a lot of cases, reuse the crap out of the art assets (or perhaps use some cruddy place holders, pixeling just takes me too long) and figure out a good way to achieve gameplay that is mostly independent of the story – while maintaining the feeling of each story arc having an impact on the gameplay experience.  . . . Yeah, I’ll probably fail getting this all done 😛

You are hopelessly lost in this cave.  I warned you, I really did.  I said, “that is not the way the game wants you to go.”  I told you at least three times!  But no, you didn’t listen to me.  And now we’re here.  In a cave.  You haven’t forgotten about the evil wizard out there killing untold amounts of innocent people, have you?  I would hope not.  But what does it matter… it seems you will never get out of this cave.  You will fail, alone in a cave.  Oh, quite right – this is where I take my leave.  Farewell would-be hero, you stupid mutt.

I almost forgot, I also decided on a title:

Superly Major Questing Adventure Fun Times

Yep.  I think that about covers day 1.

Yep, that’s a spoon.

In the rush of my last minute Ludum Dare shopping (getting the basics, you know laundry detergent, bleach, stain remover, starch, an iron, that sort of thing) I picked up salad stuffs and forgot to buy forks.  I’m making a mess trying to eat this with a spoon 😀

Well this is what I have so far.  It’s using my game engine (that’s not very much of a game engine.. but it saved me from writing a bit of code) and a wizard from an earlier project.  I’m stuck working on the camera right now.  Once that’s done I’ll optimize the resources a bit (so I don’t reload tiles 100023535 times) and then implement: player jumping, player basic attacks, enemies, basic enemy AI and attacks, the menu screen.  Hoping to get all of this done tonight (the camera part is the hard part, argh.)  Then tomorrow really working in my ideas on making it fit with the evolution theme (the player/enemies evolving, gonna be fun.)

All of this resides on getting the camera to work though…. OR…. giving up and just doing single-screen game play (which would be pretty depressing, but, sometimes you just gotta make do!)