Broken Cave Robot

Wow... I'm still shaking from the excitement of that final crunch. I worked on the game pretty much all day today only breaking for necessary bodily functions. Got it submitted less than one minute before the deadline. And I'm really pleased with how it came out! Yesterday I hated it, but today everything seemed to click together like a jigsaw puzzle.

And I had a BLAST making the music. I recorded and edited it all in Audacity. I performed it on a little quarter-size Denver acoustic guitar I bought a couple weeks ago for a camping trip ($100 CAD). I also used a Bluesband harmonica (just a cheap little thing). As for the microphone... it's just a crappy $40 Logitech thing from Future Shop I bought for voicechat in online games. I uploaded the soundtrack as a separate ZIP file as well, for anyone who's interested.

Overall I'm happy with all the weird little ideas I got to try out in this game. The first two days consisted of me dumping every idea I had into the game - today was me sewing it all together.

You can download the game on my games page.

LD15 - The Home Stretch

My game, now titled "Broken Cave Robot", is nearing completion. 2 hours left! Still need to do one more track of music, one or two more levels, and some testing. Getting tired, but must go on.

LD15 - Bah! Delays!

Bad news! Yesterday I had to help my aunt move, which took up most of the day. But I'm still slaving away, desperately trying to make this thing fun to play. I started off with just a random assortment of ideas and no real direction, so the final game will likely reflect that. Oh well, some of those random ideas are actually pretty cool! I'm excited to see what people think of them.

Anyways: new screenshot + music to show off!



Broken Cave Robot

LD15 - First Screenshot

Yeah! Lighting system done!

LD15 - This TRANCE MUSIC is PUMPING ME UP

This trance music has increased my productivity ten-fold: http://www.philosomatika.com/

So I’ve got a Super Metroid-style map system and a simple platformer engine running in Game Maker. The map system lets me have rooms of any rectangular dimensions fit together in any pattern and lets the player transition correctly from room to room.

Still no clue where I’m going with this, but it seems to be going somewhere! Screenshots as soon as I have something worth looking at (it’s all just colorful boxes right now).

Ludum Dare 15

I'll be taking part in Ludum Dare 15, which starts in 1 hour and 11 minutes from now. Ludum Dare is a 48-hour game development competition where the entire game must be created within the 2-day time period. The theme of the competition won't be revealed until it starts (it is currently being voted on).

I'll probably be posting a development log of sorts on here and my Twitter as I go. Wish me luck!

Get Pumped

Good news guys! I've finished up designing the last level of Runman: Race Around the World. I just passed the project back off to Tom, and he's going to go into turbo mode polishing and balancing stuff. Once we're happy with where the game is, we'll then do some play-testing with a small-ish group of players before calling it finished and coaxing it out the door.

To give you guys an idea of how big a deal this is to us, here's a little bit of trivia for you: this game has been in development since before An Untitled Story. I began development on An Untitled Story in 2005.

Get pumped.

Flixel

Flixel is a free ActionScript 3.0 (Flash) library for 2D, raster-graphics game development. I came across it recently while looking for tips to speed up my own Flash raster system. Flixel is by Adam "AdamAtomic" Saltsman, and is released under the MIT license (yes, that means you can use it in any project for free).

Flixel uses hardware blitting, bypassing Flash's vector renderer, to render raster graphics very quickly. It also provides a framework for animating graphics, game states, collision detection, text, buttons, tilemaps, and more.

If you have a basic understanding of ActionScript 3.0, you can get started pretty quickly. If you need help setting up Flixel in FlashDevelop, there is a tutorial on that here. I found the documentation a bit lacking in some spots. Perhaps to make up for this, there is a full game source included with Flixel for you to dissect and learn from.

Overall, the library is incredibly easy to use. However, the lack of any real "Getting Started" tutorial, to walk you through making a basic game and introduce you to the various systems in place within the engine, may make the engine too difficult to learn for beginner programmers. Hopefully, as the engine develops further, more tutorials will pop up to remedy this.