Archive for the ‘ludumdare’ Category

LD is comming!

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

Mini-LD is waiting! This time they decided to have a very free time constraint. You can choose 48h until the end of october to do your work. Actually I wasn’t so happy with that cause I think that coding it the same time with different people is most of the fun. So it might be some lonly rangers doing their work and noone really cares about it!? Nevertheless this weekend I wouldn’t have enough time to do it so this rule is time good for me as I intend to invest the upcoming weekend for that…. Now I’m curious about the theme and looking forward for the competition.

At the moment I’m trying to add normalmaps to the stencilmaped objects. Actually I haven’t much experiense with shaders yet but it seems that with the use of the shader I used it was not possible use different texturesizes. But I’m on it and hope to solve that today.

MiniLD

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

Actually I decided during the week not to participate at the miniLD. But I couldn’t stand it and just started…As always my plan is to use jMonkeyEngine(Java) and as always I have some problems with the Pipleline blender->jme. The exporter is on a very good way (Thanks to blaine) but because of heavy development things are changing quite fast!? Nevertheless after one evening spending with exporter problems I decided to switch to panda3d (python). Too bad I never did something with it…but let’s have a try. Here is my first character. As the theme is “Sandbox” this guy’s name is “Sandro Sand”.

This is a blender render and actually he doesn’t have eyes (yet).

Now with terrain and already “ingame” using the panda3d-engine:

Day2: Sandro Sand got a new terrain! Is able to jump, can walk backwards(!) can only walk on terrain I want him to move on. Now I want to check the collision-detection with running into objects other then the ground….until now panda3d is quite cool.

Wow,…didn’t think I could do it, but I managed to somehow finish the game! Ok,…it is still buggy with some issues. For example the whole camera-stuff is very fragile. There is one situation where the camera jump in “CLOUD”-mode. YOu can see the little Sandro in 2-3pixels! But that doesn’t matter now. For the ending I even have something like a “in-game-sequence” where little sandro is happy that he finally reached the last sandbox! :D

Here 2 Screenshot from the final version:

As a final conclusion I can say that developing in python was a quite astonishing experience. Everything just worked…hard to explain. Using panda3d was great. Like python everything was fine and more important the documentation of panda3d is just amazing! Actually I don’t know if I will start with something like debugging or just leave it as it is….Nevertheless I’m quite happy with the result. Still there is no real cool gameplay and not so much fun, but nevertheless it is going into the right direction…..

Bytheway. Here is a link to the final windows-installer

After LD is before LD

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Well,…this time again: I failed the LD! :( The theme was “Advancing wall of doom”.

I wanted to create an jump’n'run platform-game where you have to try to go high and higher the wall with the help of different helpers. e.g. moving object you have to climb on and stay on top. But that seemed to be too diffuclt for me! I tried to do it without pyhsics-engine. Well actually all I should have to do is send a ray from the feet of my player down the Y-Axis and look how far the distance is to the next pick….. That worked fine for the static objects! But moving objects had some problems here and my player was falling in between….Not good!Too bad I was too small minded to rethink my algorithm and well that’s was it!Sad but true!

The best I can take from the experience is that I started using blender as level-editor. During LD I exported to Wavefront .obj-Files and loaded in the level. Animations was handled by MD5. But again I had real problems importing it to jME…..

BBUUUUTT NOW as all is over and I regained power again I remembered a dotscene-Ogre-Exporter for blender and found out the the radakan-ogreimporter was able to load this. And it worked perfectly! Even animated meshes was handled! Ok…that came 48h too late! BUT it came! I’m really happy about it! And will write a tutorial to share that experience.

—> TO THE TUTORIAL

10 days until Ludumdare #14

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009


Well, lot happend since LD#13! Since then I am coding (for private purpose) nearly every day with lots of fun and full of will to learn more more and more. LD#13 activated me again so I am really happy I found that competition and I am still very sad that I didn’t find it much earlier.

Nevertheless my 2nd real LD is knocking at the door and this time my main goal is to finish. Not like last time where I published more or less a buggy demo.

To achive that I have to

  • keep the game simple and easy to understand for persons != me :-D
  • sleep enough and also leave home for some time
  • set my own deadline so it is enough time for packing the application

10 days 17 hours 1 minutes left means for me to get up at 5 am to start the compo. In order to be able to work until the last second I took holiday for the day after. Wouldn’t be healthy to go that day.

But one is already fix. I will again use JAVA, again use JMonkeyEngine for OpenGL-Stuff, using blender for creating 3D-Models and gimp for painting-works. This time I won’t have to learn so much basics during the compo and there will (hopefully) no brass band in front of my window (it was christmas-market and it took me quite some time to think about how I could mute them :D )

Can’t wait until the voting-period begins….

(And on Sunday 2009/04/26 the PyWeek will start where I want to gather first python experiences!)

Video-Tutorial: LD-Roads

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

Here a little tutorial how to survive the first 3 Levels of LD-Roads. Maybe that can help to make it a bit easier as the instructions are not powerful enough to make it clear how to play the game.

I still have to learn a lot!! :D (For example how to make a flash-stream flv instead of a swf! :D

TUTORIAL

LD-Roads finished!

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Finally I finished or let’s say closed the LD13-Project LD-Roads! It is really time to close the project in order to start with something new! For example there is still my “War of the cryptides” that I want to finish! :D Maybe I will be sometimes able to finish a LD-Game in the competion-time! :D

Infos and download:

LD-Roads

Ludumdare13 is coming (5.12.-7.12.2008)

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

LD13, a 48h solo gamecoding contest, is about to start upcoming weekend. As I always wanted to participate in such a competition I was pleased to hear about it 2 weeks ago. A good goal for putting myself under pressure for doing some basic groundwork so I am prepared for the weekend. I intend to use tje jMonkeyengine that I am interested in for about 2 years but never really done more than running the samples.

For now I made a plan about topics to know before the competiton starts:

  • Modelling a simple character with animation
  • Import that character in jME
  • move that character (left/right-cursor=rotate up/down=forward/backward)
  • collision-detection
  • terrain-creation
  • adding sounds
  • how to create sounds by myself
  • creating a gui for user-interaction
  • picking object in 3D-space
  • how to pack the project that everyone can use it at once
  • how to use textures
  • moving the camera

Well, actually I don’t know how the competition is going to end but I read some articles about it and everyone agreed that you shouldn’t think too big. I will try to keep that in mind.

The competition will start at 7pm PST what is meaning that I will have to start my competition at 5am on saturday :D!  Argh…ok! No Problem…

Mr Minimal 2

Mr Minimal 2