http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eP3_gPoB70&feature=youtu.be

Progress! It is actually starting to come together to form a real game now on day 3. The main features added today were checkpoints, death, water, and some new art. Firstly I just wanted to mention that I now have somebody working with me on the project. Someone who read one of my posts about the game messaged me and asked if he could help me with the graphics. Since I am terrible at it, I’ve let him take over the sprite design front.

Now that I have art to use instead of my black and white placeholder images, the level actually looks like a proper level now. Not only does it look like a real game, but it is starting to have an objective to it. I added in blocks that can kill you now, so these will be things like spikes or lava, and if you touch them you are killed. Luckily, I also implemented checkpoints, so after dying you get respawned at your last selected checkpoint. The checkpoints come in the form of candles. If you walk up to a candle and press x, your character will light it and it will activate that checkpoint. The last thing I added was water, just because it was easy and added some variety to the level. When your character is in water, he is basically just slowed down, so he doesn’t move as fast or jump as high.

Today felt really productive because of all the foundation code I had set up in the previous day. It is now easy for me to add all kinds of new blocks with their own functions to the game. I’ve also managed to get this system integrated with the map editor I am using so that none of the levels have to be hard coded, but can all come from file. This results in much more flexible development, and allows the artist to test his art without needing to edit the source code at all.

In order to let the artist and testers play the game, I had to export the game in a runnable jar. This proved to be more difficult than I initially thought because of the way files are handled. The way a jar gets images and files is different to the way I was using before which took me ages to figure out, but now I know better for future projects.

A challenge I had today is that I spent ages trying to figure out a bug I am having with my character’s jumping. For some reason there is a combination of keys you can press you give your character a larger jump than usual. This is something I will have to fix tomorrow as I haven’t entirely ironed out this problem. Tomorrow, I want to work on a menu interface and/or implementing sounds into the game.

For updates and other posts, check my website: http://custardgames.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTAPrg4CArM

I’ve decided to try to make my first video game this week, and I’ve given myself the restriction of five days to complete this project. The usual thing to do is to have 48 hours like the Ludum Dare, but since this is my first game I don’t want to rush or lose any sleep over it. The goal is to make a short 2d platformer about a boy who falls into a well, and has to try to find his way out. The reasoning behind the well is so that the game takes place in a cave setting, meaning less art will be needed. Due to my lack of creativity, the game is named “The Well”. The engine will be done in from scratch in Java, as that’s what I have the most experience with. I tried to learn to use some libraries like Slick2d, but it took too much time, so I’ve decided to just stick to what I know.

Today, I’ve managed to get some of the foundation code set up. So far, the game loads a map and tilesheet (text files) and places a character for the player. So far, the player can move around, and collide with the walls of the level while the camera follows him around. I’ve decided to have three layers, a background layer, a collision layer, and a foreground layer. The reason there are three separate layers is to make the map editing more flexible, as there doesn’t need to be code for each type of tile possible. Another benefit of having separate layers is that each tile doesn’t have to be completely square. The collision layer and the foreground layer can have transparency without leaving holes in the level.

So far in terms of art, I am just using placeholder black and white tiles to show the background and the walls, but these will be replaced with proper tiles once I am done with them. I’ve also drawn a main character, but it is still a rough draft. For this project, the coding will probably be done first, with the art, music and level design done after all the main mechanics are in place.

The biggest challenge today was trying to structure my code. I spent so much time worrying about how object oriented the code is, and trying to make the engine really flexible. I realise now that it was premature optimisation that really isn’t needed for such a small project, so from now I am going to try to code quicker and just get as much content as I can done. Tomorrow I want to try to get done the coding for animations, some tight movement for the character, and a menu and options interface.

I’ll be making a blog post and video each day showing my progress and explaining a bit of my thought process behind my decisions. Overall, I think this project will be really helpful in terms of learning as I’ll have to use so many skills in such a condensed time frame. I am mainly a programmer, so naturally the coding is the most important part of the project to me, however making the entire game myself will force me to broaden my creativity. I’ll have to do all the drawing and music myself, and since I have very little experience in this I could really learn a lot from it. Another thing is that I am a terrible writer, I have always been terrible at English, so forcing myself to make these blog posts will hopefully help me work on that.

Check out my website for updates: http://custardgames.com/