Someone asked for a pelly. I made one. It’s simple and boring, but I suppose it’ll do if nothing better comes along.

Here’s a psd file with suitable layers for making variations to suit all the themes: pelly_layers.psd

(I’m too lazy to do them now)

Ok. Managed to upload and post the thing properly, so now I can relax and write some stuff about it.

This one was a shaky ride for sure. Throughout the first day I kept a laid-back attitude and sort of held a leisurly pace. Spent a lot of time on IRC and elsewhere, but still got a fair amount of code done. Second day started well, with some bugfixing and new implementation. Halfway through though, I started realizing that I didn’t really know exactly where I was going with this in terms of gameplay, and sensed a wall rising before me.

I was stuck for a few hours incabable of deciding what direction I should go with things and actually considered (briefly) forfeiting the whole thing… I came to my senses though and decided to salvage it as best I could by making some fun gfx and audio. As soon as I got a “living” player character and some sound effects in there it suddenly felt a whole lot better. I should have done that way earlier. With just one or two hours left on the clock I was all inspired again… dang.

The last hour was a blur of stressed music-making, panicked code-juggling to get it playing in the game, and some begging to get a few minutes to wrap things up in a respectable manner before making the final post. But it worked out in the end (sort of).

I just wish I could bend my sense of time/planning to actually fit reality a little better. I always act like I have all the time in the world until I’m literally running right out of it. THAT’s the point where I start doing actual work, and kicking straight into highest gear. If I had started working on the media 5 hours earlier (back when I didn’t do much of anything anyway) I would have had time to properly tweak things and maybe make a “good” song rather than a doesn’t-quite-make-you-rip-your-ears-off one.

Anyway, despite the little crisis and gloomy bughunts I will remember this compo fondly. I did have a lot of fun on IRC over the first day and a half, and the last pull-together of stuff for my entry made all the difference between a sense of failure and modest accomplishment. The final product didn’t end up being a proper game (as usual) but at least I’m not embarrassed of it.

I have an exam in 2.5 hours that I neglected studying for, so I’ll just sleep for a bit instead I think. Life’s tough, but you need to get your priorities straight… I’ll re-take it in March or thereabouts.

As for food, I don’t hold any sort of lightsource to the grand masters who have been posting here, but I did consume something like 10x the amount of sugar that I’d normally do over this time period. Lots of candy and soda, yuk. My tummy doesn’t quite like me atm. Also downed some chicken, pasta, vegetables and milk (which constitutes my staple diet) – and pilsnerkorv!

I kept a slightly more detailed/rambly timelog in my main.cpp which is included in the submission zip. Check it if you’re interested. Oh, also I forgot/neglected to put in some library code that’s needed for the game to compile… tinyptc, portaudio and playmu (which is my sort of in-development musagi playback library, used it for LD9 as well). I don’t see much point in uploading them at this point, but they’re available to anyone who might ask. I’ll have to clean up playmu at some point and upload it to my homepage properly.

Looking forward to checking out all the entries soonish, after some R&R. Congrats to everyone who joined/tried/failed/succeeded!

Thanks Phil, owe you one there…

Just the link for now, will write post-mortem in a bit.

DOWNLOAD!

It’s Q*bert!

…not really though, but you can sort of modify the landscape by raising or lowering tiles, and the rest adapts to remove any greater-than-two differences between neighbors (basically a hack to avoid situations my draw sort can’t handle :P)

I’m trying really hard to think of a way to use this for gameplay, but it looks like I might be drawing a blank. There’s another mechanic in there as well though, the chain reaction one, but it’s sort of shaky too.  It would be nice if I could at least come up with some pathetic game-ish behavior for all of it before I start digging my nose into gfx and music… but maybe it is not to be. I should probably start tinkering with gfx for now and see if something comes to mind.

I’m still spending most of my time hawking the IRC and tinkering with my playlist… I’ve managed to write a little todo list of the most important things remaining, but so far only one (out of 8 or so) has been ticked off. No signs of actual gameplay or chain reactions yet, but they’re next on the list. All gfx are still placeholder and will hopefully be entirely replaced by the end of it. If I spend more than another 4-5 hours without having the gameplay “pretty much done” then I’ll be in serious trouble. I need at least 5 hours for content creation and then a healthy bunch for final tweaking as well. Tick tock.

Yeps. Will try to get a bit of sleep now (a little bit, not too much!), before going at it again tomorrow. I’ve managed to put in a number of things for one day and I guess I should be pleased. Haven’t spent my time very efficiently but I never do. Done maybe 6 hours of work in total so far.

So what I have to work with for tomorrow is this little placeholder guy able to walk 8-directionally and jump/fall on an isometric map. All that’s left of the groundwork is to size the level up, make it scroll and put in some animation code. Then we proceed to game stuff and graphics/audio.

Preparing for the compo I intended to focus primarily on the gameplay and objectives this time around, before doing anything too technical or diving into graphics. So far… no. Will have to keep reminding myself tomorrow that priority #1 is to get it playable and fun if possible. But then again… if it’s still crap when I only have 5-6 hours left I’ll probably leave it like that and make some snazzy gfx anyway, ’cause pretty crap beats crappy crap!

It’s been another 4 hours almost, and not much has happened as it seems. I’ve wrestled a bit with drawing order for mobile objects in the isometric world, and I think I’ve got something usable now. It’s not as good as I’d like it, but good enough to move on. I might get back to it later. The main problem is probably that I handle map tiles and sprites similarly, despite map tiles having a clear 3D shape that allows more accurate Z ordering. Maybe I’m just stuck in a stupid line of thought here. My approach is to treat objects as billboards and apply a shaky offset thing to make moving objects from poking through the floor, but maybe I could do it in more of a cube/square fashion, using the isometric coordinate system instead of screen coords… I’ll give that some thought tonight, for now things at least look ok in most occurring cases.

Time to eat some and start putting in a bit of gameplay code. Ideal scenario would be to have the majority of code done tonight so I can focus on media and polish tomorrow (oh, and studying for my exam… but that’s a bonus for if I get some extra time left over ;))

There be more organized map elements and a placeholder player sprite with shadow. Topmost blue tile is broken, need to figure out why…. oh right, just struck me – I iterate from 1 and up in the drawing loop instead of starting at zero 😛

Ok, thought of proto-idea last night. Got a lot of sleep. Refined idea this morning in bed and in shower. Started work on framework code etc (kind of happy with it). Finished that after some 2 hours. Put in a few placeholder sprites and coded simple map drawing.

Prediction: Come voting I’ll get flak for blocky graphics and questionable theme adherence. Just the way I like it. At least this time it won’t be a sidescroller.

More info to come as I implement stuff.

Nice and spartan…

Motivational ornaments…

Midnight dinner & X-Files, prep prep prep!