First off: Many thanks to PoV and phillhassey, and others who donate their time to this event – Seriously, they don’t get enough credit.
LD is great partly because it’s so well organized – thanks to having the infrastructure and so many people involved it’s easy to get and stay excited about the idea – I think this is a major component of the fun in LD, and it wouldn’t be possible without a lot of effort on their part. (besides of course, what fun would going insane be if you weren’t alongside 150 of your closest friends? )

So, on to a postmortem of my game…
(more…)

I tried to make the timelapse app better this time, but only managed to rewrite the features I had last time – ah well. Next time it will be better, really!
If nothing else, the current framework can be extended, whereas the previous one was rather very hacky.

Here’s my timelapse video:

I got my entry far enough “done” to submit, and have kicked it off – not to be touched again

So this competition has been rather entertaining this time around – I didn’t have any real solid ideas for what sort of game to make so wound up with something not really very game-like; I’m pretty happy with it though – the tech is good; the game could have been better, but ran out of time and motivation.

I’ll probably post a proper postmortem within another day or 2, but need to do something other than the computer for a while now :>
See you all later

Duplicating combo submission stuff:
Download: Win32 Binary | Source

Hi!
So, this has been going pretty well, I think. I’ve pieced together something reasonably interesting and playable – while not really constituting much of a game yet, I think I have time to remedy this.
I’m uploading an exe here if you would like to check it out, please let me know what you think
Given that I have almost a full day left, I’m intending to add gameplay of some sort, integrate my audio lib, and revisit the cavern graphics, hopefully make them more cavern-like.
Download: ld15_CavernGhost_1.zip (Win32 Binary)
Screenshot:

I’ve built a cavern generator, and then put together a simple space partitioning thing to fill a world with caverns Next come the interconnects between caverns!
Here’s a shot of what it looks like – this is a lot smaller than it will be, the world is only 800×800 pixels in this image. The procedural generation will produce approximately the same set of caverns regardless of scale though – I’m pretty proud of it.
(I’m using my desktop rendering windows for debug windows in this entry 😛 ah well, maybe next LD will give me an opportunity to use them to their full potential)

Ok, a lot of fundamental stuff out of the way, I’m now going to dive into getting my procedural cavern generation working.
But in the meantime, I took a screenshot of my current progress:

I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and now a bit of time coding – I came up with several ideas but ultimately thought the most doable and flexible one is the idea of exploring caverns.
To that end, I’ve started putting together an engine to procedurally generate a cavern. Once I get a bit further I need to answer some additional questions like “Will I tack on a collecting minigame or RPG elements to this to give it more depth?”, but for now I have a pretty clear idea of the rendering/generation tech I want to develop, and will just work on that.
I’m not much of a graphics sort, so I’m sticking to graphical elements that will be completely procedurally generated or simply hardcoded in a geometric way.
As such, my entry will be called “Cavern Ghost”

Everyone will want to know what my workspace looks like!
I’ve actually moved since LD11, so things have changed around quite a bit – I’ve found an arrangement that works well for this new space though, and have set up my additional stuff for LD15

See desk: (uber-high res if you click)

In the interest of not starting -completely- from scratch this year (as I’m very much a from-scratch enthusiast), I’ve put together a very basic win32 rendering and audio library, in the hopes that I’ll be able to easily extend it and do what I need to during the competition. The code isn’t 100% complete (I ran out of time), but this should be a step or two above what happened to me in LD11, when I spent half my time just getting rendering to work
This includes various gems as a C++ template driven generic triangle software renderer, and super-easy desktop rendering support.

For your enjoyment, my LD15 library code / win32 binaries:
ld15_lib.zip

So, I’m very excited, it’s been a few (last was LD11), but I am planning to enter LD15 now – Currently throwing together a C++/win32 lib that I’ll be using for my entry (will release wed or so), and working on a new display app for timelapse v2.0 >:)
Looking forward to it!

I’m alive! I expected otherwise! And, as I begin the early stages of my undoubtedly slow recovery, I will first post the timelapse video I recorded:

And, in case that doesn’t work or you want a higher resolution: The original, 720×480 Xvid w/ mp3 audio, 76.21MB

Ah, I’m done. I wish my entry were more polished, but I’m pretty happy with what I’ve managed to accomplish.

Desktop Rox is an asteroids-like game, which was based closely off an idea I wanted to play with, specificly rendering the game on top of the desktop, rather than in a window of it’s own. In hindsight, it took a lot of time to get  all of the lower level rendering functionality I needed, so I wasn’t able to complete it to the level I wanted to. And, while I still have time, I’m really in no shape to be doing anything else with it at the moment 😛

Next time I will assemble/write some sort of library to reduce the workload, but for now I’m very glad I finished a game, and that it’s actually pretty entertaining to play – and it’s nice that the core design isn’t that bad, I’ll probably refactor it and stash it somewhere for future use. It was very rushed however, many things I wanted got left out completely or half supported and not really doing anything (sound, antialiasing, multiple rendering modes) and the UI is a very very hacky job (hope you can read the font)

Download the game (and the source) here: http://akkit.org/ld48/desktop_rox_final.zip
Also, if that one runs too slow or doesn’t work, I have a test mode build that you may be able to use in this archive: http://akkit.org/ld48/desktop_rox_final_alternate.zip

I’ve been pretty secretive, not wanting to show off my tech, but it’s occurred to me that it doesn’t really matter that much; So, here’s the current status of my game:

I’m very happy with the tech, it’s performing admirably with even dozens of  sprites on my system – I’m basicly making an asteroids game, but  I think this counts as minimal (it’s so minimal it doesn’t even have a background, ha!) – Just finished the majority of the asteroid code (creation / movement / collision), and I’m now going on to make a ship and a way to shoot. Which I expect won’t take too long. I’m expecting to complete sound effects but I don’t think I’ll get to music.

So, I got some sleep, but forgot to take the sun into account; and since it got a little warm outside, it got pretty annoyingly hot in my nice insulated room full of computers. So I’ve been not getting much done. I did however take the opportunity to examine the following chemical reaction in detail; Here are the reactants:

And with the judicious application of heat, and careful attention, you can expect to see results such as the following:

I must say that this specific reaction does take a lot of time and effort to ensure success; But the results are delicious, and certainly worth the effort.

Now,  my game’s tech is still done, it’s severely lacking in gameplay though. So that’s what I’m doing next   Then I’ll even post a screenshot!

So, I’ve worked a bit more and implemented some more backend stuff and some hacky quad rendering. If I have time, I’ll replace it with an antialiased version later. Why software rendered? Well, mostly because I’m a bit crazy, but there is another reason that will become more clear later 😉

I think I might try to get some sleep pretty soon- Remember; sleep is for the weak!… and we’re all just weak. …weak… puny… humans… won’t deserve to live when the robot uprising comes 😛

Alright, so after much working on backend stuff and much slacking off I have enough of my system in place to render stuff! Behold my lines of doom, and tremble! Well, not really. More to come soon though

As it turns out I hadn’t eaten in a while and that was making it hard to focus and continue; but pasta to the rescue!

Mm, breakfast [while everyone else is] in bed. I’ve got most of the core graphics engine design issues resolved for now; proceeding blindly ahead to get the rendering code I want now, and then I’ll be building gameplay.