Hempuli's blog

I didn’t really have a good idea of what I was going to do in today’s stream, but in the end there was plenty of stuff to tinker with. I spent most of the initial stream implementing a somewhat complicated lua code for the map generator (which will need some further looking at!! (Except I just now implemented it, hehe)) The rest of the stream was work on ESA 2 without any specific aim but with some really nice results; 3 new rooms were added and I had some time to refine the general idea of how things will work. I also reserved one room for a puzzle of some sort – it’ll be interesting to try to figure out how to approach those in this project.

In the end of the stream I also tinkered with a silly little colour-manipulation thing. It might be too inefficient to turn to use but it was fun to make!

Work was done mainly on the map generator tonight, but ESA 2 also got its share of new stuff, namely a new room and a new enemy! Needs more work but I’m happy nonetheless.

Today’s stream was pretty slow in terms of development, but I still added a couple new things, such as a new trap and the basis of a new room. Decorating the jungle-like area has turned out to be really hard for me, and I’ll have to figure out some kind of efficient plantlife decoration that could be used to make it more junglelike.

The end of the stream was spent on working on a little sideproject, of which I will talk more a bit later. Progress on it was pretty sweet, though!

A bit more productive of a stream! I a new enemy and these weird cocoon things for spawning certain other enemies; a new room was also added although it’s very bare-bones right now. I’m still toying around with the player’s physics, and it definitely feels like they will need more work before they’ll feel really properly nice. Getting closer to a new boss and the first real powerup of the game; it’ll be interesting to see how long it’ll take me to get those implemented, seeing how little time I’ve had for my game projects.

I also worked a bit on the snake game, fixing some bugs and adding a feature that’ll allow making better cutscenes; the game’s still a bit hard to work on on-stream because the engine is pretty complicated.

Also did some early touches to a little side-project; hopefully that’ll become properly streamable soon!

Well then, Ludum Dare 22 went past quickly and silently. The theme was “alone“, which I didn’t like too much. I had a coupla nice ideas, but as often happens in games of mine, the one I chose eventually proved out to be too ambitious.
My concept was to procedurally generate an island, and then put the player onto it and allow him/her to wander freely, trying to explore and find cool stuff. A concept like this quite much *cries* for feature creep, and that’s quite much what happened. I lost my motivation/inspiration towards the end of the compo, but managed to get it back in order to add some more meat to the thing. In the end I was left with something called “Incomitat”.
As it stands, the game is kind of confusing. There’re surprisingly many things to do, and I enjoy playing around by myself, but for anyone else it’s probably a thorough mystery. For example, there’s a hunger meter in the game that the player can fill by eating things. However, due to the time limit I managed to cram only few foodstuffs. The result is that any normal player will probably starve due to not realizing that they have to find a gun from a random abandoned house, then some ammo and then go shoot some bunnies or birds.
The concept is something I’ll absolutely want to return to later on; it fascinates me and I’d really like to make a game where the island was genuinely full of cool stuff to find. However, as it stands, I’d have to tweak a lot of the code and try to make that cool stuff available for all players instead of those who manage to think the exact same way I do.

Go play the game!

Whooaaa

I like that! But unfortunately, such huge maps take about 3 minutes to generate (10 seconds map itself, but rivers are roads take exponentially longer the bigger they are, due to the pathfinding). Also this big a map quite reveals some of the weak spots of the generation; there are some formations that repeat themselves.

Also, I had some fun and created a planetary display (with a 3D program, MMF can’t do even bad-looking 3D like this):

It's ugly but I like it

I think it looks pretty nice!
Some of the roads are hollow because I made the roads be the more transparent the less they are used. Just to see if that kind of thinking works at all.

The rivers don’t quite care about the climate, but otherwise I think it is quite neat! :)

I’m currently multitasking several different games at once. I have no problem with that, but I should actually be reading to exams which are going to take place next wednesday. Oh well.

Anyway, I’ll list here some stuff I’m currently working on and tell a bit about their progress.
Firstly, there’s the world generator I made a couple posts about earlier. After a longish pause, I got around to add rivers and roads to the world. After a lot of struggling with getting the rivers look good, I think I’m getting somewhere. Next I should just make the generation automatic instead of manual click-to-create, and then start working on roads.

They look nice, don't they?

Earlier attempt.

The next thing is of course Beyond the Black Hole. I don’t quite know what I’m going to do with this, since I don’t think I can bring myself to create all the planned 35 levels. A possibility would be to finish the planet currently at hand, and then the last planet to get 20 levels. I continued working on level 13, as you can see in the post below, but currently I’m a bit stuck with the puzzle. For once it’s not just about motivational problems!

After making that Excavatorrr idea I became sad because I realized how much potential was lost in that one: I myself think that the game was really neat, and that it was positively addicting once the player got hang of the controls. That last bit was the problem, of course: Most players don’t want to take their time to learn a random game, much less if the game isn’t all that big and doesn’t take long to beat. So, last night I started pondering a bit if a remake/sequel to the game could be justified. With my new knowledge, I’d be able to create a much better engine, make a flash export, and possibly connect the game leaderboards to things like Kongregate and so on. That’d be kinda neat. Also the slowness and controlling problems of the original could be taken care of.

There’s also a fourth thing I’ve been playing with, but I wont say much about it yet because I’m quite sure it’ll fail like most other projects I’ve started. So pics will come once I know more!

It has been annoyingly hot lately, ranging from 25 to 30 degrees celcius (ok, there are warmer places but to me it feels annoyingly hot). The air has also been rather humid, leading to sweat. I therefore justify my lack of working on the second incarnation of this map generator. Er.

Anyway, cities are in, and although one of them accidentally ended up in the middle of a mountain, they usually try to locate themselves near shorelines and plains. Also, some reworking managed to bring the generation time from 9 seconds to about 2-3 seconds. It’s kinda funny: if it was merely about the colours, I could generate the world in a second. However, because I have to also determine which earth type each colour represents, the generation becomes way longer. Ok, not quite funny.

Next there shall be roads, and this time I’m actuallt working on a game engine to go with the generator. Hopefully we can someday see the rise of an adventure game. Hopefully!

Now it looks a bit better. Still hard to read, though.

Also, here’s how stuff looks when I treat the height literally:

I also made a simple Mode7 visualizer, but it didn’t work too well:

It’s so much fun just playing with this map that I’m kinda derailed from my original objective. I guess I’ll add cities today.