Giving up...

Although I was psyched with this compo, the fact that the theme is islands sapped my will to finish this game...

Nothing wrong with it from a technical standpoint... no bugs, no nothing, it was terribly easy to code, to be honest...

I did an island-based game last time, and bar remaking that one and improving it, I'm not having decent ideas for games, and there's no point in wasting a whole weekend on this if I'm not having fun...

Next competition I'll be back... :) And hopefully, I'll be able to come up with a better idea that I actually want to finish... and I'll practice my sprite animations, so I don't lose 3 hours making a stupid and terrible walk cycle... :)

Good luck everyone! Last screenshot for the road:

Cloud-shifting system done

Just added the gameplay system that enables the player to convert clouds into floating islands for a short period of time:

It works great, but I'm not seeing this game turning fun anytime soon... I'll persevere in the hopes that I have a moment of inspiration and I find a way for the game to work as a game (challenging and fun)...

Already thought a lot about scrapping this, but I like taking things until it's bitter conclusion... :)

Movement and collision detection

And once more I've done the most horrible collision detection system ever, a tangled web of ifs and elses, special cases and other horrible things... it works well, though, so I'll probably just touch it the least I can... :)

Player can jump and fall, move left and right and that is all animated... of sorts...

Going to add a nice gradient background (that blue is getting on my nerves), have lunch and then get to make our own clouds appear...

Ground sprites done...

At least my ground sprites don't look all that sucky...

Now I need to get the wizard moving on these, jumping and falling, with camera tracking... the usual stuff for platformers...

Why stuff always looks better on my mind?!...

Enough said:

Just finished the walk cycle of my main character, and it is UGLY! :\

Took me almost 2 hours to come up with something this horrible... I wish I could just steal art from some place so my games don't look so terrible!

Anyway, now to build some "island", "cloud" and "ground" sprites so I can do the actual game work... I'll get back to this later if I find the time...

An idea...

Got an idea... a sort of "Rainbow Islands" game, with some other things thrown into the mix...

The player controls a knigh/wizard and has to get to... somewhere... well, no matter, player will have to transform clouds into floating islands to be able to get to his destination, using the environment as well (floating islands already in place), which can have monsters and stuff...

Still need to clear up lots of details, but in the meantime I can start drawing and stuff...

First step, create the player character, so that I know what size everything will be...

First screenshot:

Impressive, I know! :)

Just woke up...

Just woke up and had breakfast, after a quick peek at the theme... Islands?

I won't say I hate islands, but I kind of did a game with islands on the last competition, which sucks...

No idea on what I'm going to do, but I'll try to stear clear of the exploration, Sid-Meier-esque thing...

Time to think about an idea...

Almost ready...

Well, almost ready to go...

Reviewed some details on my base framework, you can get it here.

My framework just features:

• D3D9 initialization and some helpers


• FMOD interface for sound


• 2d Sprites


• 2d Particle System (very rudimentar, 2 color one)


• Text (works terribly in fullscreen, hope I have time to fix that during the competition)


• 3ds file loading (only tested with 3ds generated by 3d Studio Max). Loads lights, meshes and cameras.


• Small simple math library (vectors and quaternions)


• Simple 3d camera handling system (just look at operation)


• XML loading/saving (might come in handy for configuration files, load/saves, etc. The XML loader was created by Frank Berghen, not me... the writer is all me, although the loader also has save functions, but I'm too lazy to figure out how they work)


• 3d particle system (based on the 2d one, so very rudimentary)


• 3d sprite system (quads that always face the camera)

This still does much less than the usual game makers, flash, etc, but it really shaves off about 10 hours or so work...

Still want some time to review my pixel-art talent (had good results on my last competition with some static stuff, want to see if I can learn how to animate a simple character... Really recommend this link: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/art/features/CoderGameArt/ , and this sheet for reference: http://pages.cthome.net/mnoni/webpage/finalfantasy.gif ).

Finally, I still need to go junk-food shopping... you can't have a 48-hour competition without tons of junk food... chips, drinks, chocolate... hum... chocolate....

There's some good themes for the competition this time around... Kind of rooting for "Pretentious Art Game", although I have no idea what to do with that, but it would be fun thinking up... "Forest" might also be nice, as well as "Collecting" (rogue-like, here I go!).

Anyway, I'll be updating my Facebook, my own personal blog (http://www.returnofthespellcaster.blogspot.com) and Ludum Dare's blog (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo) one throughout the competition, as usual...

So good luck everyone!