Month: April 2012

I’m throwing the towel in the ring. Still ten hours to go and I probably could finish at least one room by the end of the challenge, but I have to prepare some stuff for next week, so I can’t go much futher.

So how far did I get? You can check it out here. I’ve spent most of the time yesterday working on a working rigging system to animate the characters. Today I finally could get started at simple interaction. I’ve implemented some kind of simple walking algorithm, but it looks aweful. However, with a little more work it could become something very acceptable.

I know all I did was make a very simple canvas implementation of features Flash simply has build in. And I also know there probably are frameworks out there that do whatever I made a lot better. But I wanted to start from scratch, so that’s what I did.

And well, maybe one day I’ll continue working on this tiny adventure game.

So we’re almost a full day into Ludum dare. I’m not sure how I feel about the project. On one side, you could consider I have made a few huge steps towards a working engine, but it’s far from being finished. The rigging system I wrote works … kindof. There still are some mistakes in transfering the desired angles to the “child bones”. The event manager kindof works, but due to the trouble with distributing the angles I sometimes get rather weird effects.

As far as level design, I have nothing yet. I don’t even have a system to create the rooms yet. I have the two first rooms ready in my mind, but without the proper system to implement them, I’m still nowhere. I hope I can develop such a system in the next few hours, so I can concentrate on content tomorrow. After all, this is a content driven game and without content it will only last for a few minutes.

Anyway, this is that status of the “game” as of 00:27 (Belgian time, of course).

To have complete control over my character, I have decided to go for a 2d rigging system. My main character will be composed of a number of sprites, each with their own position and rotation. Changing the position of one sprite should influence the position of all attached sprites, that way providing an easier way to program the animations.

I have no experience at all working like this and I haven’t found (and didn’t properly look for) existing libraries, so I’m doing all the math myself.

I still have until this evening to finish the engine and the whole rigging system. If I don’t make it, there is no point in continueing, so let’s hope I have something nice by then.

(Thanks to instragram the above picture is now worth 1 billion dollars.)

Let me introduce Ludum Dare. The challenge is simple: create a game from scratch on a given theme… in 48 hours. And I’ve known about it for a long time, and I’ve never ever participated because I had other things to do. And I’ve only learned about this one a few hours ago. And I hadn’t anything planned for this weekend, so … why not?

We’re 2 hours away from knowing our challenge, but my mind is already set on a concept. I’m not sure if it will fit within the theme, but well, I’ll make it fit.

I’ve decided to go for a html5 canvas game. I have some experience in that area, but not much useful for what I’m planning to do. My goal is to make a very simple “seek and solve” game, some kind of a small adventure game. I’ve decided to really start from scratch, so I will only be using my little text editor, gimp and my scanner. I’m planning to draw all the graphics myself, with a blue ballpoint pen. It’s going to be amazing! (And very, very ugly.)

So I’m going to work on 3 domains. For starters I need to have an engine. My estimate is that by tomorrow evening, I should have an engine that allows me to create my adventure. That gives me another day to manage the contest, being: a story, graphics for the story, audio and… music! Let’s see how far we get…

I’m a bit sick so I should also get plenty of sleep. I also have to buy a new pair of shoes tomorrow. I also have to Skype with a beautiful Spanish girl. And I also have to smoke, drink and sleep.

In 50 hours we’ll see how far I got. Let’s hope I’ve at least started something. But first, I’m going to take a bath.