So....I've changed the story of my game AGAIN.  I think this one makes more sense.  I'll post it in my description shortly.

General life-related things have gotten in the way of working on the game harcore this week.  Though I have buckled down the last day and half and done a huge amount of work.  Things are almost done!  I still have to write a bit more of the "story" though, and process some of the free pics I got from opengameart.org.

Day 5 was a low point, which is why I didn't add a diary entry. I felt that the thing missing from our day 4 screenshots was light. The spells look strangely false, disconnected from the world. So I decided to play around with GLSL shaders to do per-pixel lighting. The reason it was a low point is though I managed to set up a light accumulation buffer system with a sizeable amount of help from internet research, I hit a wall trying to get the lights to appear in the right positions in space.

I salvaged one screenshot of the light accumulation buffer even with the wrong light positions:



This buffer contains the contributions of a red light and a green light. By adding more passes I can sum an arbitrary number of lights. Then there is a pass to draw the textures multiplied by the light buffer, then a pass to draw in the particles, unshaded.

After about 4 hours of banging my head against the wall, I cracked getting the lights to appear in the right places, with the help of pencil-and-paper sketches, a lot of thinking, a lot of trial and error, and finally some nosetests. The nosetests are what broke the back of it, but the thinking and sketches were vital too, and I implemented camera movement and various other things to help get a handle on the problem. There were a succession of breakthroughs:

1. To use normals in shaders they have to be transformed with gl_NormalMatrix. Duh.
2. Shaders are all about converting to eye space. Don't try to convert backwards to world space. Duh.
3. Euclid's Vector3 instances aren't multiplied correctly by a Matrix4. You need to use Point3. Fuuuu...
4. The documentation for gluLookAt() contains at least one mistake - two if I understand the modelview matrix system correctly. Fuuu...

Anyway, with the satisfaction of having cracked the lighting problem, I rebuilt the spell effects with light:

Pretty, no?

These are per-pixel effects so in principle they could be modified with normal maps. I've thrown away the specular component in the original shaders, it didn't suit the subject matter.

So we're behind on writing a game, but with one big day left we might get something playable. I've learned a lot, in any case.

I've been looking for bugs in my code to make sure everything worked well.
I accidentally  left the game running for a couple of minutes and when I came back it looked like this:

Apparently when the bullets get too far they loop back! :)

It seems like we have one day left, and a couple of monster drinks too (5 on the table btw)

It's been a menu and physics afternoon, discussing about geometry and acceleration... Yes, there is a good work here.

We planned programming on alcohol or on caffeine... After some arguments, here is the result.

Here you are, ladies and gentlemen, a mobius version 2, with some scumbag controls, and... 2 players yeah!

(Sorry for the badass menu: 'n' to play, and ESC to quit. Execute the main.py)

Sneaky

Fairly good going today - think game may be a little short tho :-)

Some things score off the feature list. Main jobs are 3 bad guys for tomorrow. Should be achievable!

Today has been epic, but still some stuff to do; one day left!

Revisiting my TODO from yesterday:

 - Display cash and the assets + their price. DONE
 - The graphic of Dr X and Dr Z (and their evil space stations!). DONE the doctors, not the space stations.
 - AI opponent. DONE.
 - Animations when using the assets.
 - Sound effects.
 - Win / lose.
 - A HUD. DONE (kind of).

Other stuff missing:

 - Game screen bg music.
 - At least one more tile.
 - Options screen (not sure about this; disable bg music?). DONE.
 - Intermediate screen before starting the game to select difficulty.
 - Cut scenes.

The AI part was difficult but it has been very useful because I made it play vs itself and it helped me to find 2-3 bugs that I wouldn't have triggered playing myself. I've added a "demo" mode in the menu so you can watch the Dr X and Dr Z kick some ass!



I don't think I'll add one extra tile (no space left in the HUD!), and I tried the difficulty levels and I don't like it, so my list is down to:

- Space stations.
- Using the assets: animation, shield up/down, etc.
- Win / lose screens.
- Sound effects, bg music for the game screen.
- I'd love to have at least one cut scene, but let's finish the important stuff first.

Tomorrow I need to spend some time drawing the space stations and then start programming the animations. Most of them will be easy (although I'm not sure what to do with the cow!).

Finally It's quite interesting how the code has evolved from "I have a plan" to "oh my! it is alive!". Hopefully a game, tomorrow is the last day!

Okay, so I haven't spent much time thinking of writing journal entries. Between working a full time job, getting extremely sick yesterday and trying to squeeze something out for this week's competition...I just haven't had the time or motivation to do one. I figured I would at least do one quick before I continue to hack away at the code.

For this week's entry I decided to do a theme around a sea turtle named "Penelope." My wife helped me come up with the idea, and then I looked up information on sea turtles to make sure it would fit the theme. Sea turtles are quickly being wiped away, and their biggest "nemesis" is actually us. They do have other predators as well, such as tiger sharks. I decided to make a game where you need to avoid sharks and nets, and eat things like jellyfish and sponges(2 different types of sea turtles eat these) for points. The goal for each level is to make it to the end beach to lay your eggs so the sea turtles may continue to live another day. I may change the end goal a bit but the concept remains the same. Oh yeah, and you need to surface every once in a while to regain your breath. :)

And this is what I have so far. All the graphics and programming have been done by me thus far. For not being an artist I am pretty happy with what I have been able to do. Animating my sea turtle was interesting. :) Most all of the framework has been done and the mechanic is almost complete, I just need to add some other interface elements such as points, add some more entities and get each level to end and move on to a harder difficulty appropriately.

A decent amount of progress today, but from the looks of it I won't end up with something that resembles a game by the end of this. So far I basically have a top-down toy where enemies spawn and run into you until you die. You can click to "swing" a sword (I gave up on making b2RevoluteJoint work for now, so it doesn't actually swing yet...) to defend yourself. The graphics are just a whole bunch of flat rectangles, and there's no such thing as a UI. Definitely doesn't resemble a game.

I think I'm struggling a way more than I should be with Box2D, and that's taking a lot of time. Looking back, it would have probably been wiser to go with a more abstract game so I'd spend more time working on actual game mechanics instead of figuring out how to use that library.

Despite all that, I feel like I'm learning quite a lot from this experience. The end result is guaranteed to be terrible, but I've definitely had fun. I think I've spent a total of ~8 hours on this so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing how much I can hack together before the deadline.

This game is causing me some trouble. Have you ever had a game idea and then spent days implementing it and when you finally get it done you realize it's way too hard? And the mechanics don't lend themselves to easy simplification, like tweaking the speed or gravity or anything. That's what happening here.

I made a couple last-minute changes to the fundamental mechanics that make the gameplay much less overwhelming. It's still too hard, but hopefully it's within range now that I can balance it just by adjusting some numbers.


I'll have to write a post about my thoughts on the fundamental mechanics of this game. Suffice to say, this is why you make prototypes, because not every idea actually makes for a good game.

the first 2.5 Spaceships and some stars