The entry has been submitted now. I didn’t feel too well today, waking up unrested and with a headache, so instead of overthinking it I finished the missing systems, added some kind of unbalanced funish gameplay tweaks and proceeded to hack some programmer art in less than a couple of hours. Given that my objectives were focused on what I could code than in making the game itself, and that part was finished last night, I feel quite proud with what I have.

You can find the entry at: Quest for McGuffin!

It’s been a good learning experience, the last time I got a game to this state it took me weeks, this time in ~30h I could get from nothing to engine to small game. The stream experience has been mixed, I accumulated at least 25 of those 30 hours streaming yet I got very little contact with the watchers, there were only a couple of them at a time and not much chat banter. I want to give a big thank you to the libgdx team for their awesome library and tools, to the guys at #math in freenode for saving half the project and whoever was watching, specially Ilovecars33, who was there the 3 days.

Hope I can motivate myself to participate again in the future, maybe in the jam format with a team to share the experience with

PS: You can find me any time lurking at /r/gamedev, do not hesitate to shoutout.

It’s 5.30am here, time to hit the bed.

The game is fully playable from beginning to end, now it only needs the system’s numbers to be tweaked enough to be fun to play. It’s been 11 hours streaming non-stop and I hope the few viewer enjoyed my cursing. Props to the guys at #math on freenode for helping with my facing vector issues, my guys can faceplant enemies at will now 😀

Screenshot  of the design doc and the todo list at the end of the day:

Design doc and todo list.

Today I’ve reached playable state for my game. You can see a full game with a nice intro and outro screens, enemies spawning, and HUD for a scoring and health system.

There’s still a couple of internal system to be fixed to make it fun, specifically making collisions while facing not damage the PCs. I’ve created some of the graphics but I need to replace the placeholders for hand-made characters, and make each of them have a unique skill 😉

Here’s a video gif of the current state: Quest For McGuffin

Follow my livestream at www.twitch.tv/mr_pakoito

Ludum Dare 30 is a-go!

I have already been streaming for a while and now have a viable starting point with an interesting control scheme. Now I need to fit the Connected Worlds theme in there somehow.

Have a GIF of the current state and join me at www.twitch.tv/mr_pakoito

Movement system for multiple PJ ready!

Another 5 hours of livestreaming coding later I have the foundations for the LD project. Everything that was setup in my last post seems to be working fine and the pipeline works just fine.

What I did today:

• Bring the whole render loop from my old project, along with bits and pieces of the Entity Component System (ECS).
• Fix some camera and projection problems that made android and PC behave differently.
• Add the ECS system for sprite rendering and HUD. Add debug text for ECS and FPS.
• Create my first component for those systems.
• Spent an embarrassingly long amount of time trying to be able to capture user clicks on screen to select said sprite. BROTIP: libgdx has inverted Y axis by default, and do not forget to camera.unproject the coordinates the touch listener spits you.
• Made a movement system for a control scheme similar to those in RTS games, but haven’t been successful so far. A small state machine in the input handler doubles as game logic, but my ECS systems are not capturing component changes at the expected pace.

Thank you to the couple of subscribers I gained today, I only wish this gets a bit more interactive because it feels like I’m talking to myself most of the time when I’m trying to explain what’s happening on screen.

This past couple of days have been interesting.

Yesterday I started setting up my streaming tools. My last contact with Twitch as a provider was right after launch, so it’s nice to see tools like OBS making everyone’s life easier. I had a second screen in the room that’s been unused for months so I went and bought an HDMI cable to get a double monitor environment for better coding.

You can find the stream at: Mr Pakoito’s Cavalcade of WTFs

So without further ado, I started streaming my initial project setup. My objective for today was getting from a fresh Android Studio install to having something on a screen and I must say it’s been a bit of a struggle but finally successful.

After some intense tinkering with Gradle and Android Studio I’ve been able to kickstart a prep project in Github that includes libgdx and artemis-odb running for windows and android on a click’s distance. I’ve also setup my fave color scheme (a heavily tweaked Vibrant Ink), a code formatter leveraging Android’s best practices, and an array of key bindings for faster development.

The guys in the stream were curious about my first external dependency, Project Lombok. PL is a nice library sitting in your compiler’s annotator that saves you hours of writing boilerplate code for POJOs. Using it is “free”, given that is not a dependency to include in your app, just an annotation tool.

To stay within the compo’s rules here’s a link to the repo: https://github.com/pakoito/ludumdare30