27/12/2010 1352
I have updated the game to run on Windows XP.
T + 57 hours
I decided to actually play the game through and noticed there was a very nasty bug where the game would crash after beating the first island! I have now fixed the bug so you can play the game through to the end (I can now confirm this is possible).
T + 48 hours
Done.
T + 43.25 hours
I have a fully playable demo. I will now try to polish it up before the end.
T + 39.5 hours
I now have an almost-playable demo. You can move your ship around and use helicopters to attack and take over the islands, although there is currently no way to lose (or win for that matter). Download link is at the top of the page.
T + 37 hours
My game is slowly starting to take shape. It's currently 4am and the caffeine has kicked in
so hopefully I can stay up for the rest of the compo. Anyway, I now have a screenshot of the
combat mode:
T + 29 hours
So I've hardly done anything today. I had lots of ideas yesterday and have had to throw most of them away (aka. the realisation phase of Ludum Dare). What I have done is implement map generation (the map consists of a bunch of randomly placed islands) and made a boat that you can move around.
Next I'm going to implement combat which I think might be too ambitious. Luckily I'm not planning on sleeping tonight so hopefully I can get something done.
No cats turned up at my house today. It has been raining so maybe they stayed inside. But I
do have a screenshot of my actual game:
The red squares are islands. Red means they are owned by the enemy. They will turn green
when you take them over but I haven't implemented that part yet.
T + 10.5 hours
It took me a while to get started on my game and I've come up with a bunch of ideas, but I
keep changing my mind about things so I really don't know what the finished game will be
like.
At first, I was thinking about having the combat be strategic and make it so you can build helicopters
(like an RTS), but that might be too complicated. Instead, I'm thinking about something
simpler and more actiony.
It will be a story-driven game so I can make lots of badly drawn graphics on my new
drawing tablet. Such as this title screen:
The title screen is usually one of the last things I do, but this time I decided to do
things differently and make it first.
Bonus photo of some more cats that showed up at my house.
Let us in, or I will kill you with my magic powers.
T + 3.5 hours
I decided that I probably needed better font support in my library so I spent the last 4 hours making a program to generate a bitmap from all ASCII characters in a Windows font and modifying my library to be able to load these font bitmaps. For the last 2 LDs I created each character manually which was a pain, but I only used it for digits so that made it a lot easier. I probably should have done this before the competition, but oh well.
I haven't though much about my idea but I'll probably do something like Carrier Command but probably less 3D and maybe more RTS-like.
Also one of the neighbourhood cats has been sleeping around outside my house all day:
And here is a photo of my desk that I took yesterday:
