Hi again all,

haven’t made many blog updates since last post, but this is mainly because I haven’t worked on the project much. The game is done now though; I think the dev time took something like 3-5h total (trying to keep it minimal).

Grab the game and its source from the games website.

In Typoworm you try to fly the worm for as long as possible. You give the worm boost upwards by typing the text on screen. Wrong text will be penalized. The game requires .NET 2.0 to play (and maybe a Windows PC) and C# + MSVC 2008 to compile.

First screenshot of my game. It actually mostly works. It’s a twist to the old worm cave idea (one button to accelerate upwards, gravity does the rest). In my game you type the text shown at the bottom to move up (false hits accelerate downwards). What is missing is wall collisions, scoring and menus. I’ve been doing the game in .NET 2.0 (no XNA) and using only letters. Not sure how minimalist this is but I’ve always wanted to make an ascii game without the normal ascii grid :).

Sadly I’m going to have to put the game on hold for today as I have the party to attend t. Cheers everyone, see you tomorrow!

Yawn, good morning everyone. Just got up and decided to check the compo out. A fun theme I feel, though sadly I have a friend birthdayparty today so that will eat most of the time from this weekend :(. But I think I’ll try to whip something up and running anyway =). Now to think of an idea..

My birthday is today, this image represents the fun of losing time you had..

Tech notes: This was an image to the 30 min graphics compo. No rules so I used an image I had the rights to. I also had to do R&D to the tool I used (GIMP). Didn’t have the time to buy Photoshop. I think they should award talent with free copies though..

LD10Tanks is ready (and yes, sorry for “LD10″ in the name; just felt bad calling it “Tanks”, especially as it has no tanks in it :). So in the game your goal is to make the cannons shoot every bullet they have. The first cannon you select shoots first and the rest shoot only if they get hit with a bullet. When one chain reaction makes all cannons shoot all bullets, the level is complete. You can aim every cannon and some have more barrels and ammo than others. Some you can even move (gray cannons). You can also shoot through walls (the terrain deforms freely).

Direct download link (4.4mb download):
LD10Tanks v1.10

Website for the game (in case the direct download fails):
Homepage for LD10Tanks

The game requires:

• Fast PC preferred
• .NET framework 2.0
• XNA 1.0 Refresh (included in the package; be sure to install the additional DirectX files too)
• Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 2.0 support (not really sure what happens on any other hardware except NVidia 8800)
• 32bit floating point buffers as render targets

NOTE! If the game doesn’t look like below, then this means that your graphics hardware doesn’t support 32bit floating point buffers as render targets (the game turns off the fake fake-SSAO post processing effect). The game should still be fully functional.

Screenshot:

Some technical details (more in the included Readme.txt file). All the meshes are generated using constructive solid geometry (CSG). A mathematical model is generated (currently out of spheres, boxes and cones/cylinders) describing the whole world. The a marching cubes algorithm is ran over the model to teseslate the scene geometry. This allows for deformable meshes, such as the terrain here (some volumes are solid, some are cutting volumes). I also wanted to try some sort of fancy post processing filer, and I came up with this fake fake-SSAO (ScreenSpace Ambient Occlusion). The basic idea was taken from some forum (found by google). I basically estimate the ambient term on each pixel by comparing the depth at the pixel with the blurred depth at the same pixel (so I blur the depth field). It’s not perfect, but for example on this screenshot you can see some nice shading in the small holes. I also made a level editor in .NET 2.0 (C#) and used that to craft these levels. The level editor is included in the package.

Alas, I couldn’t include sounds/music because for some reason XACT (the XNA audio authoring tool) refused to boot up on my vista.

I’m not done yet, but this is the first release of my game. I know all of you are busy as heck, but I’d appreciate if people tested if it even works. It requires a fast-ish PC, Vertex Shader 2.0 support, Pixel Shader 2.0 support. .NET Framework 2.0, DX9, XNA Framework (included) and some extra DX9 files (included).

Download link:
Direct link

If the link doesn’t work, a link to the page it’s hosted on:
LD10Tanks main page

Ok a lot happening and slightly less than 5 hours to go. The game itself is about complete. I tried to do sounds, but in XNA (1.0 Refresh) you need to do those with a Microsoft made audio authoring tool called XACT. Well it happens that it doesn’t work in Vista. Nice =). Also had a few “oh s**t” moments. One was where I realized the cannons can be placed to any place, including inside walls or other cannons. So I made a collision system for that (a simple 2D collision system, kinda like the data in the editor). Also when massive damage is done to the landscape, even on my new superfast quad core the frame rate went to seconds per frame. “Time to include multithreading” I thought, and I thought correctly. Now when the landscape is dynamically modified, the game starts calculating it in the background. Only the visual aspect hurts (it comes a bit later, depending on how fast your computer is) as the collisions for the bullets are done using the recent model. All in all looking pretty good. Now I think I’m gonna make some bats to make release packages (as the last minutes are always tough) and then make more levels. I don’t think 6 is enough. =) Here is a screenie with some damage in it:

No screenies this time, but I finally got all the logic together. This means you can now complete a level, it keeps score of your best time, you can switch between unlocked levels and so on. So I’m switching to level editing and polishing now. Of course I’m still missing audio completely, so meybe sfxr and some fractal music generator will find a home on my HDD later as well. Happy happy =).

Well it certainly took its time but I now got the first playable version of the game ready. Currently the controlling happens with the mouse and keyboard (holding keys changes the edit mode and mouse triggers actions). Here is screenshot:

In this image a few bullets have already been shot in a chain reaction and some wall pieces have crumbled. The last bullets are heading towards the last remaining cannon (the point is to start a reaction and use all bullets on all cannons). I’m also planning on adding a simulation time counter and a level specific highscore, so you can optimize each levels time for replay value. Also while testing this proto gameplay, it became apparent the game would be better if some cannons had more than one bullet to fire (so you’d need to make circular reactions).

Just woke up.. I think I slept like 6 hours or something.. Well back to the grind =). Because most of the progress I made during sleep was mental, here is an image of the current version. This one has the fake fake-AO effect turned off just to show how much of an impact it does.

Phew, it was a lot of work but I made a level editor from scratch and integrated it into the game. The editor is made for .NET and it allows me to reorder levels, place cannons and walls and change their types and attributes. All in all pretty swell for a few hours of work and the quality of tools tend to dictate the quality of the game (at least in bigger projects :). Here is a screenshot from the editor:

Those balls are cannons and the walls are pretty obvious. This is what it looks like in the game:

As you can see I can have different types of cannons too. Also holes in the ground are possible (makes it possible to make areas where you can shoot over but not place a cannon to). It’s pretty darned late though (6am local time) and I’ve been going hot for like 18 hours straight now. I will grab a few hours Z and then continue. Things are looking good and I may very well get a game ready =).

Phew it was a lot of work, but finally the technology from game side is about done. I haven’t made many shaders in my lifetime, so when I set out to do some sort of semi ScreenSpace Ambient Occlusion to my engine I was a bit scared what would happen. Well it ate plenty of hours that’s for sure, but I now have something I’m fairly happy with. It has some artifacts and it’s not perfect, but compared to no lighting or diffuse lighting only it really rocks. Here is a screenshot:

A few words about the game. I’m sad to say my imagination didn’t carry me further than explosions =). The point of the game is to have every cannon fire (the cannons see here have 4 barrels). When a cannon is first hit by an ammo it fires (only once) all its barrels. Some of the cannons are fixed to a certain position, and some you can move. All of the cannons can be rotated however, and the “starting” chain cannon can be selected by the player. Also hitting walls will make a small hole to the wall, so you can strategically blast a holy through a wall to get to a cannon.

What is still missing is basically the game =). I have the exploding  walls (courtesy or marching cubes level building), but I need to make the game logic (moving cannons, changing cannon directions, starting the game from a cannon, completing a level and choosing a new level to play). I also have to make some sort of level editor. I’m planning on hitting .NET and WinForms for that.

Now I only wonder. I use SINGLE as a gfx render target buffer (32bit floating point buffer, single channel). I wonder if that is supported on most PS2.0 hardware. Oh well, if I remember, I have to make a fallback to disable the AO effects if it’s not found.

I’ve got the first object up. This is a close up of it. The tank has been made with the marching cubes tesselator. I may have to tweak it a bit to get it look a bit better. But even this one has something like 67000 triangles :). Oh well. Such is the coders way (I cannot draw myself out of a blank paper).

Ok finally got some code down. I was planning on doing a plain C++ application this year (I haven’t made a C++ entry to LD48h yet) but XNA and C# got the better of me. Here is a screenshot of the first version. What this is, is 3 spheres defined mathematically (2 solid spheres and one substracting one). Then I run the marcihng cubes algorithm to the scene and this is the resulting mesh. It’s not perfect but probably good enough for my needs. I’m planning on adding boxes and capsules as well. The coloring is just a test that my shader rotates the vertex normals correctly.

Yay, nothing a long shower wouldn’t fix, it seems. I have got an idea, with all possibilities to include my marching cubes stuff and all. Though my current idea will require a LOT of work. I shall start right now and if it looks to be feasible, I will divulge some more details from what I’m going to do =).

Just woke up and noticed the theme was Chain Reaction. While, again, not too happy about the theme, I’m going to set out to figure out an idea for a game. Not sure what it’s gonna be, though. I was planning on making a marching cubes implementation (just for fun and profit) and use that for something. Still not sure how to make a chain reaction game out of it though :).