Why buy your kid toys when you can make ‘em? Fun to construct and play with - and no guilt when you chuck ‘em into the trash!

Cosmo and I have a moderately cool town going on:

Of course Akiko saw what we were doing and totally put us to shame with a super detailed 9 page fish-market design she found:

All you need is the right paper and a color printer! All the designs are free.

Man, I can’t wait for 3D printers to make it big…

PS: My LD48 entry won! I want to put together a post-comp “special edition” and do the things I ran out of time on, hope to get to that soon. Damn my laziness.

Alert!

I’ve added Mac and Linux builds of my game Strong AI so all the world can enjoy the fun of indiscriminately killing!

Youtube timelapse video

Too fuzzy?? Try the high quality version here. (24 MB)
Music is a game remix of an amiga game, title: Nikamota - [Nicky Boom] Coming of Age(In the Club)

One of many robots standing in a steamy room assembling devices, you suddenly drop your tools and walk away from your bench.

Who are you? Why are you here? Where are you going?

Without help of any kind you’ll have to figure out how to survive in this strange mechanical world. Your best clues are the ominous messages over the intercom from “The Master“.

Recommend controller: XBOX 360 pad, or similar. Keyboard also works though.

UPDATED: Now with Linux/OSX builds too.

Download for the system of your choice:

Windows - Ubuntu - Mac

Timelapse: youtube, high quality (24 MB)

PS: A big thanks to my wife and kid for letting dad ‘play’ with his friends all weekend

Description:

One of many robots standing in a steamy room assembling devices you suddenly drop your tools and walk away from your bench.

Who are? Why are here? Where are you going?

Without help of any kind you’ll have to figure out how to survive in this strange mechanical world. Your best clues are the ominous messages over the intercom from “The Master”.

Intrigued? Of course you are! I can’t give away any more than that, as part of the fun is starting completely ‘in the dark’ and figuring out what is going on, without text/story, etc.

I was messing around with resolutions and everything is working smoothly, so if you happen to have a 1920X120
monitor you’re in luck, as it will allow you to view more play area at once.

Well, I’m hitting the sack now.

I’ll have a few hours before the deadline after waking up to fight with musagi and see if I can get some music going. G’night.

PS:  You might think I was trying to do some kind of visual minimalist thing but uh.. that’s just how bad I draw.

While it doesn’t compare to mountain climbing and concert performances we had some outdoor action too… today we had to walk our dogs down to the park to get their shots.

Success!

Time to start working on enemies, hoping to have some that crowd you (touch damage) and some that shoot, turrets or something.

The day is over already?!

I’m sort of doing Bezerk meets Portal - trying to take what made those games fun and strip it to the core. After hours of fiddling with my sound recording stuff I ended up doing text to speech for the 15 riveting ’story points’.. now can I get them all into the game tomorrow?!

Btw, I’m using this neat 2D gamemaker that some cool guy made.   It’s higher level than what I usually use for LD (vanilla Clanlib) but it’s really nice being able to focus on story/gameplay without worrying about little crap all the time.  Although I did spend like 3 hours adding some missing joystick stuff, erm.

Homemade gyoza and some Sapporo beer, cheers to GB.

Hmm.. what could it be???

Akiko decided to make a traditional Japanese lunch. About half the things on display are edible by my standards (stay faaar away from those bean things), so I’m still hungry.

It’s that time again!  The ludumdare 48 tests your game making mettle.

Well, the competition just started and the theme is “minimalist”.  Hrmmm.

Akiko is providing logistical support in the form of delicious meals which will also be documented.

You can watch my (lack of?) progress in real time here!

Breakfast!  That’s my “science cup”, I can’t start the day without it.

After all the metagame of LD, desk, food, timelapse, etc, will we have enough time to make any games?

The cans are black coffee, a new technique I’m trying for dealing with ‘downtimes’.  Hmm.. we should contact these companies for sponsorship.

Last week my mom sent me a picture of a ’surprise’ her dog did that had a suspiciously interesting shape. Not to be outdone, I sent her a few of my own. I mean, my dog is even more special.

Ok, if you hadn’t guessed, these we not exactly totally natural. I used 3dsMax and a font called poo. The text was extruded, a smooth modifier applied, then a material with ‘noise’ applied to the bump and displacement properties.

The possibilities are endless! Well.. I guess what I did is pretty much the end, actually.

A while back I wrote a freebie utility that checks a series of images and then crops them all to the smallest enclosing rect.

In my BREW phone game making adventures, I had single-image horizontal sprite strips that were wasting a lot of space and added features to handle finding the smallest enclosing rect and writing out an optimized version of the image.

8 bit support, color key support (can be used instead of alpha) and some examples were also added.

Download SmartCropper V2.00 with source and examples

What do programmers do to keep their game programming chops up to snuff? They get together with friends and see who can write a complete game (including making the sound and art) over a weekend in the Ludumdare 48!

The game I made is sort of Bomber man but instead of bombing, you dodge and disarm bombs while saving these sort of nasty looking girls.

Only download this if you’re comfortable with using files from a .zip and won’t get angry at an occasional expletive.

Download the full ready-to-run game (with C++ source code also included) here. (1.6 MB, for Windows)

You can see my development log here.

If for some reason you want to compile it (like to get it running under linux or OSX, you would need Clanlib)

Hero School is an arcade game that forces you to nimbly avoid, disarm or block bombs while navigating terrain to rescue alarmingly ugly girls who tend to say snide things to you.

It’s sort of Bomberman with new play mechanics, you don’t throw bombs, you avoid/disarm them.

Each level has different rules or items in place.

Heroes can’t cross water but fire sure does.

What a good looking hero!

Download game with source for Windows
(will think about doing a linux/OSX build too.. hrm)

Postmortem comments:

This was a really difficult competition for me because my brand new computer arrived RIGHT BEFORE it started and I had to constantly fight the urge to go set it up! Yeah, that’s dedication.

Have made a lot of progress, today has been mostly boring to code stuff like a level selector and GUI and few fun things like designing maps.

I’ve setup five test levels, each with vary different parms so I can get a feel for what works and what doesn’t.  For instance, bombs with flames spreading fast or slow, being able to build/destroy walls, diffuse bombs, and so forth.

I had numbers counting down on bombs and counting up on people (protect them for a higher score) but removed it because it was just visually distracting.  Now the bombs have a sequence of fall, blink red, blink fast.  Same info, easier on the brain!

I’m sort of burned out now so I’m done for tonight, hope to look it over with a fresh eye tomorrow before uploading the final.

Quote from my wife: “But will my dinner beat Hamumu’s?” (she saw his dinner pics… I think she just made this personal. Very personal. Be afraid.)

Hmm, after I told my wife that we were sort of having a food competition too, suddenly the meals got fancier.

Nabe with shimifuri Kobe beef!

This beer should help me code better!

Fresh baked cookies for dessert.

After all that, now I just feel sleepy…!

Here is my “schoolgirl” sprite.  Not too shabby!

Well, it’s the end of day 1 for me so here’s where I stand:

• Bombs explode
• Player can run around
• Using sounds made with DrPetters awesome sfxr app like oh, 99% of the rest of ya bastids!  Hope to augment this with some mic stuff later.
• Need to add the items, walls, win/lose, levels, etc

Goodnight and good luck!

Ok, bombs in and smoothly chain exploding with Bomber-man-like mechanics.  It’s sort of mesmerizing to stare it.

But wow, isn’t that five frame explosion anim I did crap?

Lot more to do to turn it into a unique and possibly offensive game though.

Yes,  a game screen consisting of a boring-ass grid.

I think I’m going to be really original and base my idea around… BOMBS! Erm, yes.

The idea is to cross bomber-man style chain exploding (tweaked to be slower though…) with saving children from fire by building walls and things.