Long long ago ( in a galaxy far far away? ) I started a game for Mini LD 11, called Little Quirks.

Sadly, I didn’t get it finished and it highlighted all manner of issues with my engine at the time, and made me realise it was on it’s way out ( though considering this was 2009 it took me another year or so to actually act on it! )
It also crucially gave me the kicking I needed to start using source control for Ludum Dare projects, as a lot of Little Quirks’ code has been lost to the God of Hard Drive Crashing.

I always meant to go back to it, as it was a nice simple game and was fun enough even just to watch the little guys clamber over things. Granted it perhaps borrowed rather heavily from Lemmings, but my original design did differ in that you could never directly manipulate the Quirks – you could only manipulate their surroundings. This meant modifying the insides of the cavern itself, creating helper objects like springboards, and traps to deal with the nasties lurking about that’d do harm to your Little Quirks. It also opened up a few other interesting ideas that I’d have loved to pursue within the same context.

Well, now I have no excuse!
My October Challenge will be to resurrect the Quirks, and get it in a sell-able state, and explore these other ideas that I had!

Now to figure out a platform…

“Hold on a minute… ” I hear you cry, “that game wasn’t submitted!”
Indeed it wasn’t… for if I had not been chasing imaginary rendering bugs two hours before the Jam deadline, it would have been.
There’s logic in restarting your machine now and then…

Anyway, the curious can still play it, as links and stuff will be provided at the end.
For now, sit back and listen, for I have quite a tale to tell….

(more…)

Well, we’ll see.. I haven’t had a great track record the past few LDs so let’s see if I can get out of my slump and get something done!

Tools of the trade this time shall be my new and untested engine framework wotsit – GLESGAE ( I’m in the process of sorting a svn out for the LD version just now, main version is here for your viewing pleasure: http://xp-dev.com/svn/glesgae  ) using OpenGL/GLES depending on which platform it’s running on and C++

For Graphics, the usual GIMP

For Audio, likely the wonderful sfxr and perhaps Milkytracker or LMMS … if I *cough* ever get that far… hah

One slight hiccup is I haven’t put any Windows support into the engine yet.. I probably should do that in the next few days and do general tidy up and commits of what I’ve got lying about.

Looking forward to it though Be a nice break from work!

Paying no attention to the fact that I’m likely to be exhausted by the time LD20 rolls round, I’m going to have a go anyway!

If LD19 was anything to go by, I can certainly pull something out rather quickly when my back’s against the wall.

So, I have just over two weeks to get some engine framework code sorted, or attempt to do what I was upto in LD19 again. Seeing how chaotic that turned out, I should probably just concentrate on my own code!

I may build upon my current framework thing here: http://svn3.xp-dev.com/svn/glesgae which I probably should add Win32 support to at some point; so I shall declare that now even though there’s really nothing at all in it yet.. otherwise, I’ll either be hacking as I go or jamming with the other engine.
I also intend to use GIMP for scribbling as per usual, probably sfxr for some sound effects, and it’ll be a toss up between MilkyTracker or LMMS for music.. if I ever get that far – which is not bleedin’ likely!

Looking forward to the usual weekend outburst of creative madness

I’ve just fixed a rather peculiar bug that I didn’t catch as my main dev machine is 64bit Linux, and my Windows build laptop was running 64bit Windows too… seems that my timers are a bit iffy as under both 32bit Linux and Windows, the game runs at double the speed! Well, technically, it’s the 64bit versions which are running at half speed, but as I wasn’t aware, I tuned the game for this speed.

Seems that being lazy and depending on SDL_gfx’s FPSManager wasn’t wise.. I’m assuming it relies on the size of an int since SDL_Timers are unsigned ints – which is obviously different across 64bit and 32bit architectures. Though it’s my own fault for not testing in the first place!
Granted, it was done in seven hours, and I guess these can be considered “ports” to 32bit platforms as the only change was a modifier to the infection countdown to double it’s response time.

The original one has now been marked for 64bit platforms, and a 32bit version uploaded on the Germies entry page, here.

Speaking of those seven hours, here’s the postmortem after the jump.
(more…)

How I managed it, I have no idea.. but in the past ten hours or so, I managed to build a game from scratch, with just SDL, a C compiler and my trusty GIMP by my side… that’s the art package of course

I also literally hammered some buttons of SFXR in the dying hour and got some rather disturbing sounds from it, so they went in as well.

WARNING! You're about to fail!

Doesn’t look particularly spectacular, but there is a game in there somewhere!

The theme link is so tangible it’s unreal though.. as most of the scoring is a bit hidden for you to discover.. I was going to have the infections just appear and have them the “discoveries” but that made it much more stupidly difficult than it is!

So go cultivate some germs, and earn massive points
Link to Germies comments and download page

Source is included.. it’s a one file jobby of close to 900 lines of “C” .. it’s nasty.. enjoy!

Congrats to all the participants, Compo and Jam alike
Here’s to the next one! where I might be better prepared ( hah! )

Only really been at this since about 4:30pm GMT ( it’s just past 7:10pm GMT now ) but I’m making some quite good head way already!

It’s a simple game now.. coloured “germs” get pushed onto a dish. You need to group them together to clear them, before they start to rot. You then need to manage those buggers to stop them infecting the rest of them!
Some germs are better than others, of course! ( and worth more points to clear! )

Ironically, it’s been a game idea I’ve had for a while, just never got round to doing.. though the link to the theme is a bit iffy ( discovering which germs are better to keep on the dish longer than others.. *cough* ) but it’s better than sobbing in the corner.. again..

And yes, they look like Splodge with no .. err.. feet, I suppose.. bit pressed for time art wise now

Obligatory screenshot:

Lots of little Germies!

Might actually get a game submitted after all!

So, this looks like the second Ludum Dare where I might not finish anything for.
Certainly not for want of trying this time though; however I never really made it off the starting line!

With about twelve hours left of the Jam, I have two choices:
1) Drop what I’m working on and start afresh – and ignore what I’ve spent all weekend banging my head on the table with.
2) Hope that I can fix it/work around it quickly to carry on with my original plan.

Somehow don’t see (2) working out that well, so giving myself a final five minutes to have one last root through this issue, and going for option (1) .. which means a MUCH simpler game.

Oh and failure is of course, not an option!
I’ll go down kicking and screaming with keyboard in hand, if I have to

Haven’t quite got anything on screen yet… scary thing is, I have been coding all day and have quite a fair bit of code to show for it too!

Turns out taking the engine and stuffing a prototyping layer on top of it ended up being a bit more work than I expected… so while my initial idea was to abstract pretty much everything, the past few hours have had me refocus specifically on what I’ll need to get a game done over the next couple of days. And a few words of wisdom… Lua and heavily templated and inherited code can cause some major headaches! Be careful where you abstract from, or you’ll be going in circles and creating some rather spectacular dependency diamonds

So, with one day down.. I have to re-plan a few things. Originally it was: Day One – core code, Day Two – gameplay code, Day Three – asset fix up and tidying loose ends/porting fun. So it looks like I’ll be cutting into the asset time to get something done.. but once I have the core code done though, it should be fairly plain sailing so I’m still quite confident at this point.

No doubt that’ll change around lunch time tomorrow, should I still not have anything on screen!
But for now, some sleep is in order…

Discovery, eh?
I probably fell into the same trap as others when I originally saw it, and thought of it in the literal terms of discovering things – which sounds much like Exploration, really.
Then I started to see outside the box a bit, and how open the theme actually is!

So, after a few hours of brainstorming a few ideas out on my graphics tablet, I’ve come up with Splodge!

You control an alien whose ship has malfunctioned over some random planet, and fallen to bits and crashed. You’ve to find all the bits of your ship, avoid the local nasties, and get back home.
Unfortunately, your bits of ship have managed to scatter pretty far and have landed in some rather difficult to reach places. Luckily for Splodge, he can absorb things to mimic their properties and get about the hostile environment a bit better.

Also, bit late with this, but here’s the obligatory desk pic – each machine has a dedicated purpose; graphics, audio, code, source control/IRC! Seems to be working well so far

Now for some sleep, and see if my idea still makes sense in the morning….

After abysmally failing LD18 – by falling asleep and not waking up for quite a while – I’m going to make a bit more of an effort to do LD19!

I didn’t get much done at all for LD18.. a very simple little Entity/Component System which worked pretty nice, and some chain physics to link object together. Then I fell asleep. That’s what I get for jumping into LD to do something from scratch, not long after a milestone, and without much time to catch up on sleep. Let’s not do that again.

This time, I’ll be taking part in the Jam, as I’m not using my own engine, and they’re not particularly wanting the source given out. Fair enough, if I can produce a crap game in 48hrs like the previous LDs I’ve taken part in, surely a not-quite-so-crap game can be produced in 72hrs with an engine that’s not utterly mental! I do have to do some work on it though as it’s geared up for 3D games rather than 2D games; so I need to add support in for that. I also want to wire up bullet instead of the propriety physics engine that’s there. So, it’s not like I’m coming in with a fully complete engine for LDing, there’s still some work to do – just I can’t give out the source, and I get an extra day due to Jammin’ it ( where most of the engine fixing will be done in the extra day, anyway ) .. other than that, I’ll be following standard LD competition rules; so game logic code written in the time frame, all assets from scratch, and working solo.

Should be fun!
Course if things go south, my back up plan is to “from scratch it” again.. but we’ll see.

So, just woke up about six hours in and saw the theme – Enemies as Weapons.
Very nice

I’ve had the idea of doing a top down scrolling shooter for a stupidly long time, but never really sat down to get it done. This shall be the weekend it gets a prototype at least!

Think of Uridium as an 8-way scroller, where you additionally have a grappling hook to swing yourself around the super structure if you wish, or to smash enemies into one another, or collect pickups, or any number of useful maneuvers a grappling hook affords. That’s pretty much what I have in my head.

That means the main proponent of the game will be this sodding grappling hook, so I best get that done as soon as possible, especially as I suffer from “math fail.”

As LD18 has now started, and I have zero framework/engine available to work with, it’s going to be a “from scratch” entry with my trusty GCC, and SDL providing the brunt of the back bone.. and I may have a look in seeing how quick I can get some Lua scripted action going.

Now, for breakfast and work!
Good Luck, Everyone