The army already breaks down the walls… You can see walls in different states of disrepair…
Now it’s time to get some actual gameplay going, add the cursor, mana bar and possession interface…
Archive for August, 2010
Advancing army…
21
Aug
Got some more game logic in the game: the army now advances…
The army can only spawn in grass-tiles on the left side, and it advances choosing randomly a direction (up, down, right), prioritizing up and down (to avoid having too many “straglers”).
Took me longer than normal, since I did an XML system to be able to customize any unit… so adding new units, is just editing the XML file (data-driven code ftw!).
The sprite is traced from Oryx’s sprite pack from the TIG Assemblee competition (really like that pack)… I zoomed it in Photoshop than placed all pixels by hand in a new image, adding the small feet animation aswell… Think this is allowed and it looks much better than something that I started without a reference… Going to do that for the rest of the graphics, since it looks nice…
Now to get some wall-destroying logic going… The army will only attack the wall if he can’t move forward anymore (the army never retreats!).
Lunch and tilemap ready…
21
Aug
Just finished my lunch:
Good chicken takeway… 🙂
Anyway, got the tilemap working, which is read from a text file…
The blue thing on the right is the castle… need to change the colors, looked better when I was drawing it… Maybe swap the rock for trees for “impassable” and use grey for the castle walls…
Anyway, now to get the army moving…
An idea!
21
Aug
Had breakfast (bread and liquid crack AKA Nestea Orange):
and inspiration hit me… I actually got a decent idea!
The idea is a mix of Bejeweled, Puzzle Quest, Possession Mechanics and Tetris…
An invading army is attacking your castle and you have to possess the right type of enemy to deal more damage to the surrounding units… It’s kind of complicated to explain without visual aids (hopefully, or else I won’t be able to do decent instructions and nobody will understand my game).
I think this is pretty simple to implement, so I won’t use my engine and go back to my old LD#17 framework to do the game… if I’m lucky I’ll be able to make the compo instead of the jam, let’s see…
Going to use placeholder graphics until I have a firm grasp on what I’ll need to actually draw…
Really excited by this one…
Just starting…
21
Aug
Just woke up… and I don’t like this theme… need to brainstorm for a bit to find something…
There’s lots of different options (since I can’t find any clever way to “corrupt” the theme):
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Possession mechanics
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Use the bodies of enemies as weapons
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Create new weapons from the body of fallen enemies
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….
Not terribly original stuff… I’m participating in the jam, so I got a bit more leeway if I can’t find anything decent to do.
Desk photo:
Now to have some breakfast and think about a decent idea…
Er…. I’m back! :)
20
Aug
Hey all!
I know, I know, no updates… Life has not been easy these last months… First I got a new PC (ooooh, shiny!), then went on a small holiday to Barcelona (beautiful city!) and then I had to take care of about a zillion things, with my new job and other stuff at home…
That left me precious little time to write on the blog, and to be honest, I was a bit lazy too…
Anyway, hopefully this will get more regular now, since things are apparently settling down…
Anyway, this weekend there will be a new Ludum Dare 48-hour game development competition… This time, there will be a competition and a jam (the jam has much more relaxed rules and extends until monday, so 72 hours); since I don’t have time to participate on the competition (family visiting…), I’ve decided to skip the stress altogether and participate only on the jam… that allows me to cheat and use my engine and any assets I happen to have lying around in my hard drive! 🙂
Hopefully I’ll have a good game idea and with the additional power of Spellbook I’ll be able to spend more time in game design/balance and polish the game more than I’ve usually done in the past… Or I might find a stupid bug in Spellbook and have to spend the whole time tracking it 🙂 That’s always what happens on these circumstances anyway! 😀
I’ll be posting here the game progress, and on the Ludum Dare site (and some pictures on Facebook aswell, I’m an attention whore!)…
Good luck all involved!