Just woken up… Hangover

Like the theme. Couple ideas, but need to sleep on them.

Tools: Visual Studio 2013, Paint.net, notepad++, monogame, coffee

Back to bed…..

Someone already made my game. And probably better.

You get psyched on an idea that you think is totally unique, and you start coding it… and bam, you see a video online, and someone already made it, and it’s better than yours (well yeah, ’cause you just started, duh).

Fuckers, dammit, fucking fuck, !$#@$^%&*.

Oh well, I’m’a keep going anyway… fuckers… stealing my ideas before I had them. ~sigh~

On the plus side, I’m learning a lot of new technologies (ones that I wanted to learn), like MVC4, and SignalR so that’s pretty bad-ass.

Anyway, as far as the “it already exists” thing goes, just *shush* don’t tell anybody, pretend it’s not there… and keep coding. XD

Good luck everyone, esp. all you LD48ers who are almost done for the weekend.

Well the theme for Ludum Dare 23 was Tiny World and for some reason, early Saturday morning the best I could come up with whilst trying to limit the scope was something based on the the Disney boat ride “It’s a small world“.  Now in retrospect this was probably not the best idea I’ve had for a game.

The concept

If you have been on the ride you will know its a musical ride with a very catchy and incredibly annoying theme song.  The concept was that being driven mad by the song, you have to attack the characters from the ride floating in your mind to reduce the songs volume and return to sanity.  See sounds great at 3:00 am

Have a listen to see what the song sounds like if you have not had chance to experience it.

I also planned to use a mix of images inspired by Mary Blare who actually helped design the rides look.  The “player” would be based on the Lost Souls from Doom.  No idea why I thought this would be good mix.

No idea of how to win really, I guess I just hoped that it would fun to an extent, but was pinning my hopes of the visuals being interesting enough to hold the attention of the player.

The delivery

Well I have very limited time to write code, so have to make use of the night shift when the kids are asleep.  To prevent all hell the next day I force my self to sleep rather than stay up all night with a target of at least 4 hours.  Its just not fair to inflict my grumpyness on the rest of the world for a bad game.  So this gives a very limited amount of time to code in over the weekend.

This coupled with taking on the challenge of Silverlight as a delivery medium resulted in very slow progress with the majority of my time spent fighting my lack of experience with XAML and not creating.  I do like Silverlight as a medium and may use it in future projects.

The audio, which I never actually got to record was to be myself singing/humming the theme tune.  Thankfully for all, I never recorded anything.

The game

I’m not sure I can really call it a game, but due to my lack of momentum and poor concept I threw in the towel early Sunday evening, for both the Compo and the Jam.  If you are still interested you can play/run what I have by clicking the image below:

So what I have I learnt?

• With limited time, stick with a technology that you know.  6-7 hours is not the time to take on something new.
• If the concept is not working, drop it quickly and try something else.

If you want the code, you can find it here: http://blog.codheadz.com/index.php/ludum-dare-23-tiny-world/

I’m going to use .Net and SDL.Net and I’ve gotten the startup stuff written.  What boiler plate code would you recommend one create prior to the contest and publish as a library?

Ideas:

• Font system (bitmap or truetype)
• Level editor
• Code to read Ogmo Editor‘s project and level files
• Logging system
• Highscore system

What I learned with this LD is that 12 hours is not enough to develop a game, at least for me. For first day the competition my only progress was that I had the idea for a game in the theme of “Advancing Wall of Doom”.

My toughts during innovation followed path quite similar to this:

• What is the best known wall of the world? – The wall of china!
• How it may cause DOOM? – Of course it would have caused DOOM for all mankind if the chinese people hadn’t stopped building it! Sooner or later it would have covered entire face of the earth!
• The construction material for the “uber wall of china” would come from other human made constructs (cities and protective walls in my game) . The player tries to protect his cities by building his own walls (inferior to “uber wall of china” of course). Too bad that the hard working chinese workers can also use steal protective walls for building material, thus making the construction of their WALL OF DOOM even faster.
• The gameplay would have been an hybrid between Amiga game Masterblaster (the advancing “spiraly” wall) and the game classic Rampart (building your own walls using wall blocks not entirely different from tetris). The gameplay should be rather hectic and emphasizing on intuition rather than logic.

So what did I manage to complete in 12 hours. A lot, if you look back:

• I managed to set up dev enviroment on my secondary Ubuntu Jaunty box, consisting of MonoDevelop, SDL.NET, GIMP, Audacity, ffmpeg and others.
• I got a world with advancing china wall, (for now) invisible chinese workers, dwindling cities and basic wall placement rules.

I’m missing:

• Protective walls for players and mouse controlled way of placing them in Rampart style.
• Animated chinese workers who carry bricks from cities and player walls to their own wall.
• Score counting. Every tick with cities gives you points, when all the bricks from the city have been stolen to the chinese wall, points are no longer gained.
• Menu, hi-score and some sort of winnablility.

Perhaps I will complete game project later this week. Well see.

Video of the “toy” version of the still incomplete game (not playable or winnable):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn-EVAtI2xw

Timelapse of my 12h:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80kwKIIYsCk

I decided to have a little fun today.

 I took the game engine I created for Simple Dungeon and created a new adventure out of it. This one is based on the TV series LOST. I don’t know if any of you are fans of the show, but I’m a big fan. 

 Anyway, the adventure is set on Lost island. You are Locke and the objective is to kill Ben. You’ll run into many of your favorite Losties here. Maybe even the smoke monster. You’ll finally get to see how that Locke vs. Jack battle turns out.

 Code is 99.7% the same. Mostly what I changed were the two data files. Fixed a couple bugs though while I was at it. It took a couple hours to design the new world and objects and monsters.

Have fun and let me know if you enjoy your adventures on Lost island.

 Game is here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/109829863/KillBen.rar.html

 –Note, updated rar. Forgot one of the files needed to run the game.

Been fun and got it done! My final version of Simple Dungeon.

Source is here: http://rapidshare.com/files/109092549/SimpleDungeon_Source.rar.html

Game is here: http://rapidshare.com/files/109092285/SimpleDungeon.rar.html

 I spent probably 12 hours or so on this game. It was a ton of fun. Hope to do it again. Love this contest. Can’t wait to check out other entries.

Use arrows keys to move, attack, pick up items, etc. It is really easy to figure out. Objective is to save the princess in the dungeon. If you die, game will exit, haha. Hope you enjoy!

 You need at least .NET Framework 2.0 to run. If you have problems, try the latest framework 3.5. I haven’t tested this on other machines but should work on all windows machines.

Now got to watch my lakers! bye.

 Note – one last revision -2:19 pst.