Hempuli's blog

I thought I posted this yesterday, but it appears that I didn’t!

So yeah, ESA got a really nice and positive mention at Kotaku.com, and as a result the game’s twitter followers doubled. Pretty cool!

Also LD24 was a total disaster from my part – I didn’t finish anything and the theme (evolution) left me completely uninspired. Boo! During the final hours of the event, I did work on something, but it was hardly worth submitting – I’ve been wanting to make a java roguelike for my cellphone to pass time with. Turns out it eats battery charge really fast so I can’t really use even the bare-bones RL I created, but I had fun working on it! Some screenshots:

yes.

So, that was a pretty neat christmas (my mother is the best chef everrr). Obviously couldn’t really work much on games during that time, although I did tweak some stuff for Incomitat (intending to get it working better). However, here’s The Plan:
– I’m going to update Masjin with mostly bugfixes soon. There were some weird things in the editor and the likes, and I’d like to get rid of those (possibly also add another item, we’ll see).
– I have a dare with Petri Purho to create a game in 7 days before 2012. Technically the LD game would suffice, but I think I want to prototype an older idea and see where I can go with it. We’ll see what comes out of this, but if everything goes right (wrong?) I may not be able to work on other stuff until the next year.
– Slowly working on Officer Alfred. I think the cutscene is nearly done, but I let my bro play the game and noted quite a few annoyances that I want to get rid of.
– SOPA sucks. A lot. If you live in the USA, go to the barricades or something.

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!

I’ve kept working on this LD game, hopefully I’ll get it finished in a few weeks. I’ve added a ton of stuff, but there’re still another five tons to add.

Here’s a small graph of the level structure I’ve intended:

Cliché? What cliché?

The Netherworld would be like a bonus area, something you’d sometimes find portals to. In the Netherworld you’d find a lot more portals, each either sending you further to the Netherworld or sending you to some level in the other areas. To avoid looping, it’d probably always send you to a later level than the one where you entered the Netherworld. In the end of the Netherworld you’d find some pretty difficult boss; I think that’d be pretty rewarding.

Each area lasts probably about 5 levels, the last of which contains some kind of a boss. There’d also be a chance to get some cool special areas, such as an ice area or an area with all the enemies brandishing a certain variation – currently I’ve implemented ice and fire variations of each enemy, but there’ll be more to come.

I’ll be blabbering about this here in the future, and below this paragraph you can play the game as it is currently; I’ll keep updating it. In case you don’t want to play the game in this blog, use THIS LINK

Herp a derp – I’ve been quite silent for some time but I can assure you that I’m working on stuff! Anyhow, Ludum Dare was this weekend and after some stressed pondering about a game idea I came up with one and actually finished the darn thing!
I made a silly little roguelikeish called It’s A Frickin’ Cave, and I think I’ll work it further since it plays quite nicely and just needs more content. The theme was ‘Discovery’, but I kind of forgot that during the action.

Play the game through THIS LINK! It’s all flash so don’t worry about downloading stuff!

I also made a neat timelapse of the game. There’s some gameplay footage in the end, too, so jump to 4:28 or so to see it!

Whoops, almost forgot a screenshot!

So a certain very awesome person called Looki (He’s helped me a lot over the years!) made me a nice bloom overlay that didn’t suck unlike the other bloom shaders for MMF. However, now that I have it in, I’m not sure if it’s the best choice. I’ve tried different combinations, and today has also been a nice lesson for me about shaders overall.

Of course, the ideal solution would be to get a similar blur as was in the desktop picture, but darn if I know what are the functions in Paint.NET’s “soften photo”-tool! So we’ll have to rely on bloom.

So here are a couple different choices. From left ro right & top to bottom: Bloom and shadows, just shadows, nothing, and just bloom. Sorry about the changing background colour; bloom brightens it up a lot so I had to alter it. And I’m really not sure what would look best!

Here are also some crazier attempts:

This picture doesn't give any kind of a clue of what is going on.

I started making a new, Dwarf Fortress-style control scheme for the 48-hour thingamajig. I just got felling trees working; it’s lovely to watch how the tiny guys hack down any trees you mandate, except those that are either out of reach or from which they can’t return.

So, this weekend I tried to create a game around that desktop picture I posted. My idea was to use a deadline to increase motivation, and I wanted to see if I could implement a nice platformer RTS mechanic, something I wasn’t able to pull out earlier when I tried. I guess I still didn’t quite manage it.

Anyway, since I have only 5 hours left and I’m quite fed up with the bugs of the engine, I’ll upload the thing here and let people see what kind of weird bugs they can exploit. I was left with the feeling that the engine is very clumsy and hard to use, what with the player having to do every little thing, starting from picking up/dropping items. Next time I try to approach this I’ll have to try to make the game action-based instead of character-based; by that I mean that instead of commanding every guy separately, the player would just make commands which the characters would try to fulfill, Dwarf Fortress-style.

worp

So, before linking I’ll make some kind of a summary of what I got working and what I didn’t, perhaps a pros and cons list.

* I got the base engine running, complete with felling trees, mining and simple building pieces. You can move the guys and perform everything there is to perform (which is not much, haha).
* The procedural generation part went really well, and I think it’s easy to get some really ace formations. I’m happy with my increased skills in PCG.

– From the things I planned beforehand, I didn’t get in enemies, swords, furnaces, ore and creating tools. Also I planned the characters to move with a balloon that you’d use in the beginning to select your starting place
– MMF’s bloom feature was seriously lacking so I left it out. Someone is looking at this, though, so perhaps I’ll eventually get a nice bloom and grain effect going.
– The thing is enormously clumsy and buggy. There are varying bugs with the characters being unable to walk to places, especially digging can break very easily, and trees/bushes can float in midair. Controlling the characters one by one gets tedious very fast, especially when the digging command can be applied to only one tile at once, per miner. Picking up items is hard because they’re so small, and it’s annoying to drop stuff.
– No effects whatsoever. Boo hoo, who cares.

So the conclusion is that if I want to continue this, I need to fix the bugs, and change the controlling system heavily. Currently the amount of choices available is so narrow that one can kinda manage with the clumsiness, but with a larger system I can merely think of the problems that would present itself.

Here’s the link

Controls:
Use left and right mouse button for everything.
-You can pick up stuff also by rightclicking straight to the object.
-Before doing any actions, you must select a character, so click or box-select them.
-You can also dig and cut trees by right-clicking, assuming you have the correct item.
-Mushrooms can be cut like trees (and they drop brown logs – herp derp).
-Remember that when building, the builder has to be close enough to the place you want to build – the range is about 3 tiles to every direction.
–In case you fall into a pit at the start, press F2 to retry!
-There’s absolutely nothing to do yet, you can just build walls and ladders and be cool. Try to dig through the bottom.

I had a lot of fun making this – hopefully I can fix the stupidities and get some real stuff going eventually!
What a great way to ignore my current, ‘proper’ projects! Hehe.

MEH! Apparently WordPress cannot do sticky posts, so let’s repost this:

Yes! SPRUCES