You can play it here.  Source available there too.

One day left and I feel like I’m about 40% there, not good!

My jam game is turning into this weird mix of Alter-Ego and a Roguelike.  Unity really doesn’t support easily changing out sprites, ended up using AnimatorOverrideController’s for each “age” of the player (you go from baby to old with cane), but I still had to make unity anims again for each walk/stop animation.

Huh, there has to be a better way, I just want to replace Sprites globally in the whole controller and all anims, like cat1.png to dog1.png, not redo/override each anim.

Good luck fellow jammers, we can do this!

Well, there’s my random dungeon generator.  As simple as it is, it’s still the most complicated thing I’ve done in C# so far. I don’t know if it’s my Visual Assist or just Visual Studio but the syntax autocomplete stuff just seems to really be fighting me.

Took me a bit to figure out a vector array in C# is called a List.  Great naming, yeah.

After the maze generates you can use the arrow keys to run around the maze.  (actually you can move even WHILE it’s generating if you really want to get frozen in a wall somewhere)  It “feels” pretty good the way you can hug walls, it uses Unity’s built in 2D physics collision. (each tile has a collider, optimizations be damned!)

Akiko volunteered to do some sprites for me tomorrow if she has time, so this might turn into a Jam entry… still don’t know about gameplay really.

Wrote a .bat file to do the webgl html5 export and upload, you can try what I’ve got so far here.

I took a walk and thought about the theme and ideas for a while.  Here’s some stuff I’m considering:

Life Roguelike

A sort of homage to Passage, instead of a time limit you have age.  Age gives you different abilities at different times.  Old people can’t jump so far (the “chasm” obstacle will turn red when you can’t make it) but your wisdom level (from reading books along the way) may be high enough to solve a “puzzle door”.  That type of thing.   I think this is the coolest idea but would take a lot of work, needs random generation of rooms and stuff.  I may go with this because it sounds like the most fun to work on, if not to play.

Airport Stacker

Catch luggage with left/right movement ala Kaboom! style, but allow things to stack using physics – move to the left or right to have them vacuumed up, the higher on the stack the bigger the combo.  It’s truly two button (or maybe X axis on the mouse), but “stacking” isn’t really growing.  If it’s too easy, make the “catcher” have a dome shape so it’s really hard to balance.  Physics stuff always takes longer than you plan and I have no idea if this would be any fun or not.  Good one to get “used” to Unity but not that appetizing creatively.

Grow Golf

Imagine a minigolf course, but you push/pull vertexes to create lumps to control the ball. Some areas can’t be changed so obstacles can be placed.  Not sure if “Prepare the course and then start to see how you did” or live-manipulation as the ball rolls would be better. This idea with pushing verts mixed with physics is a bit technical, not sure if Unity’s out of the box terrain stuff can handle real-time deformation like that. One possible limitation would be you can only RAISE ground, making it more true to the “growing” theme.
Hot Air Balloon

2D upwards scroller where you move left/right to avoid obstacles.  The catch is you can also hold down an “air” key which rapidly inflates your hot air balloon making it larger.  Letting go causes deflation so you’re small and can fit, and momentum will keep you moving fast for a while.  So pump it when you’re clear of things. Bigger means more points but you’re more likely to bump into things slowing you down or killing you. I don’t know… not sure this would be fun, would need some extra things.  Plus, expanding/contracting isn’t really growing.

My entry is here.  Can you get on the global high score list?!

Here is how my day went:

• Hour 1:  Thought REALLY hard about the theme… but..
• Hour 4:  Still no ideas I like enough to do.  I give up!
• Hour 4:01  WAIT, IDEA!

So here’s where I’m at:

My idea is to make a mini-game using a Growtopia theme.  Not too technically tricky, so good for my “still learning Unity” brain, yet also fun and arcady enough to be interesting to work on.

If I submit it, it will be a Jam entry due to the stolen art and sound.

Ok, gonna hit the sack but here’s what’s happened thus far:

• Built a flexible CityMap class AI/utility toolkit that can “evolve” itself by adding socketed pieces, can rotate them if needed
• Yellow “turrets” shoot bullets if clicked, and they can damage and destroy city pieces. No anims or anything fancy though
• Realtime scaling support, so I can fit big maps on the screen if I want
• Flash target is working, but speed is questionable and huge maps really kill it, have a big update to proton coming though which will speed it up
• Title screen with my trusty old trick, have the game animating stuff in the BG for decoration
• It’s nothing but a screensaver at this point, but you can Click here to try it if ya want

3.5 hours in and still in the concept phase.

I can’t see the gameplay clearly yet, but I have a foggy sort of idea.  It involves me writing some dynamic level generation/growing which sounds fun though.

Making this mockup in photoshop was good though, I mentally ran through the coding stuff I’ll use as I laid it out.

I’ve learned my lesson though, not even going to attempt “real art” this time around due to previous mishaps… ahem.

Play my game here!

Finished my game.. sort of phoned it home though, just wasn’t that excited with what I had.

What went wrong:

• Bad art is bad. Should have chosen a more .. abstract look, more compatible with my (lack of) skillz
• Main mechanic didn’t work well with FP’s built in tile scrolling stuff, and I didn’t feel like writing my own, so instead of re-designing, I sort of just limped along with a simplified version of my idea and just kept the game very short
• I’m still not comfortable with AS3. Have a ways to go there.. but hopefully I won’t have to…

What went right

• My first flash game! Learned a lot this weekend. I like Flashpunk + TweenMax, scheduling functions to be called is something I’ve grown used to in Proton so nice to be able to do that easily here too.
• Made a game that has a story and is winnable. But somewhere along the line it turned into a weird psychological nightmare.
• Using Novashell as the tile editor worked fine, no fuss

That’s right, eat it, namco

I’ve decided to try Flashpunk/AS3 this weekend! By piecing together bits from ChevyRay examples I have a basic platformer system going.

I wanted the “Planet” (player) to be able to eat stuff and scale up sort of katamari style, but this is turning out to be very fiddly, and too easy to get the player stuck if he grows into a wall. Using Box2D or such would probably be a better idea.. hmm.

Anyway, the base puzzle mechanics sort of work but aren’t fun at all.

Name Change

First, I’ve switched my LD handle from mrfun to SethR to match my IRC name and generally avoid confusion. Hopefully nothing explodes by doing that.

LD World Map improvements

I’ve improved my LD World Map plugin a bit, it’s now larger and has a filter to only show people that have posted in the last year. What’s that you say, you’re not on the map? Well go add yourself now!

Ok, got off my bum and did a OSX compile. So try Looney Ladders today!

Windows – OSX

Zoomed out! Click for more detail

Can now actually win and lose levels!  Added a cheap-ass main menu with level select.

I’ll have a few hours tomorrow morning to somehow magically tweak gameplay to be more fun, do music, add more baddies.  (Design calls for three, only  have one, and I’m just using a tinted hero sprite at that!)

Want went right today:

• Whipped out really cool random level generation algo, it guarantees that each part of the building is accessible.  Really, I guess I made sort of a side-view maze generator.
• Added zoom settings per level – The screenshot above is zoomed way out.. I might leave a level like that just for fun, even though it’s hard to play that way.  An unexpected consequence of zooming out is it sort of minimizes the bad artwork.
• Main menu works, took a detour to make it all keyboard controllable so you don’t have to keep switching back to the mouse.  It’s the little things. Plus, this is going to be a Proton SDK sample eventually so I want its code to be usefully copyable

What went wrong:

• Bad art is bad
• Original design wasn’t much fun, dumped half of it.. better, but it still not there
• Behind schedule..  feeling bad that I skipped weekend ultimate frisbee with Cosmo (my kid) for like the first time in a year.. you’re a cruel master, LD.
• Still have no real cosmetic theme or name to tie everything together.  it’s just so generic and I HATE generic.  Dream self, please figure this out during tonight’s repose
• Connection to the “Discovery” theme feels weak

Well, I’ve got elevators up the yang.  I did some character “art” for walking and climbing ladders.  Yeah, that’s a walk frame above, what the heck ??

Maybe I can somehow explain the weird visuals by adding a story element about the main character having to deal with a deformity and back problems.  See, that’s how real gamedev works, kids.

The apartment building is randomly generated and I’m looking forward to trying some big ones with dead ends, enemies, and treasures.

Still have too much to do at this point to feel anything but iffy, but after adding some sfx it at least “feels” pretty good to run around the level.  When the character walks there is this donkey-kong like sound effect.

Thanks, sfxr!

Quitting for the night, will be back in irc bright and early to try to turn this into something.  (I’m SethR in #ludumdare)