Click for a gfycat that’s bigger, prettier, and has a smaller file size.

I can now control four tentacles independently of each other and attack/grab/toss enemies to their dooms.

I still need some more enemy types, enemy movement, and enemy attacks. Naturally some sort of actual scoring and dying would be nice, too.

It took me a strangely long amount of time to get the tentacles looking reasonable from a first person perspective and I’ve obviously got a lot more animation work to do for those things, but I’m pretty pleased with how it’s coming along so far.

The idea behind Arrow is that Note will beat enemies into a stunned state and then finish them off with her one magic arrow. Enemies go to a different height depending on your last attack. The main features remaining are the arrow and enemies that aren’t spheres. We’ll see if I manage to add silly details like “dying” and “scores” in the next four hours, too ;P.

Good luck everyone! We’re close to done! Even if we’re not close to finished.

I plan to at least finish the different melee attacks tonight after getting back, but we’ll see how available I am. No arrow yet :'(.

Our little devil guy can bash farmers over the head with his pitchfork and throw skulls in a portal to summon golems, but most of the actual game logic isn’t there yet. We’ve got a plan to get a decent amount of functionality in before the Jam’s done, but I doubt we’ll consider it complete.

Poor Angie ran into some rather ridiculous bugs with her models in Blender that were fixed, in the end, by completely blasting all animation data via exporting and reimporting only the mesh and redoing animations. I was hoping she’d be spared such pain on her rookie lap :(. Oh well! She made some pretty great farmers and knights to battle in the end and is working on sounds now.

We’ll only be able to spare a few hours tomorrow! It’ll be tight.

Well there’s an art test with the assets I made today! It’s… okay, I guess. I need to work on other things now.

My wife (who’s doing OO programming for her first time for this!) got the movement and camera code down today and is currently animating this sweet knight dude in Blender (another first for her):

This all took a fair amount of assistance on my part, but I did my best to make an educational experience where I didn’t drive for her. I’m very impressed! Unfortunately, my lungs have insisted on filling themselves with fluid for most of the day. That makes speaking a generally painful experience, and this all required a fair amount of speaking. I guess we’re doing this on hard mode!

The Hobbit was really good, and really long!  Today kind of disappeared. We won’t be able to work much on this on Monday, so late Sunday night is probably going to be as far as we go with this. We’ll see what we can do!

First, a moment of silence for my wife’s phone, which we failed to retrieve from the canal after the dog did a sweet spin move and kicked it in there. I like to think that our attempt was inventive, at least.

In a similarly genius move, I’ve convinced my wife Angie to jam with me for this. She’s well versed with MATLAB and I explained “what the dot does” yesterday, so this’ll work out great! It’ll probably be quite a bit slower than otherwise, but it’ll be great to work together on something. Or horrible. Probably great!

We’re doing some tabletop gaming with friends right now, but here’s our plan for a “You’re the Villain” themed game that we’ll start tomorrow… eventually, after The Hobbit, I guess:

A beat ’em up base expansion game where you expand outward while defending your base and building walls/bombs/golems out of your defeated enemies for fun and profit!

It appears I’ve made a grass growing simulator disguised as a game.

I’m okay with that. (more…)

I spent a lot of time tweaking the performance of my plants.  Hopefully the game will be hard enough that you won’t have a world this full of plants very often, but I don’t want performance to tank just because you’re playing well :P.

I definitely burned a few too many hours on art today.  Cities and plants are fully animated and looking pretty decent.  I’ve got quite a bit of logic to work on still, but I’ve got plants growing and spawning new seeds.  I’m pretty enamored with how pretty that process looks.  My biggest challenge will be avoiding staring at them for the rest of the compo.

My game design is much more concrete than it was earlier today even; hopefully I’ll be able to get something close to that vision out tomorrow.  Good luck everyone!