Timelog for 48 hour contest #3

Quick Link to the latest version: HannibalReleaseVersion.zip 1.3 MB

Links to other people's timelogs: (Qux has a nice timelog browser here, so just go there. I'll stop updating this list. :)

• LordCovenant
• Balooga03
• ShaolinMan
• ynohtna
• qux
• LoneCoyote
• KeshTath

Apr 4, 18:10 Prepare

The contest has started. This is the only theme I didn't have an idea for. That's okay, it seems like a good theme. I'm sure I'll come up with something.

Apr 4, 18:48 Starting out

Ok, starting out. I've switched out the font library in my template with my new font library. I should have done this before the contest, but oh well.

I am thinking of something like the last level in the undead campaign in warcraft, where you build up defense for a while, and there are waves of attacks.

Apr 4, 19:03 Idea!

Ok, I have an idea. There was this old amiga game where each player would take turns setting up a base and then try to drive a tank into each other's base, It was really fun. I'll do the same thing, but with a better theme... :)

The game is called Hannibal's Cannibals. Hannibal, risin from the dead by dark magic, leads an flesh-eating undead army with zombie elephants, oh yes, across the alps. Your small village in a mountian pass is all that stands between him and the takeover of all all of asia. Will the rare mix of medieval engineering, ancient magic, and martial arts be enough to stop him?

Apr 4, 21:58 Tiles

Yay, I have some tiles displaying now, and the rudiments of a tiled map class. I still haven't removed the spinning texture from the framework example.

Apr 4, 23:10 More tiley goodness

Ok, some pizza (Lanesplitters) and some coffee later, and now I have some code to color-key tiles so they can be stacked, and have revised the tile drawing to actually draw these stacks. They're all upside down for some reason now, but you can't have everything...

Apr 5, 00:44 Hos-Tile

Ok, really it's saturday but I am going to refer to day boundries by when I go to sleep and wake up. For me it seems like friday.

Lots of changes to the tile code. I was drawing them wrong and they weren't overlapping right. I think it's pretty much settled now. Here is a shot at several zoom levels with the temporary graphics. The wall tiles are stacked on the ground tiles, some even have three levels, ground, snow, wall. :)

Apr 5, 02:38 Mouse Movement

Ok, i got the mouse projecting and unprojecting going. Not earth shattering but very important for a working game. In the screenshot you see, the cubes live in the map coordinate system. The blue cube follows the mouse pointer (not captured in screenshot) and the red cube is on the map, and the red circle is drawn around it in screen space. Not rocket science, but I put this off until the end in the first compo, and it really bit me.

Apr 5, 03:55 redraws

Ok, added primitive "camera controls" so you can zoom and scroll, am working on culling so that it can support larger maps, but I might just forget about that because it works fast enough on pretty big maps.

Apr 5, 10:30 freakin' huge maps!

I just needed sleep. I got up about an hour ago, and made some coffee, and it didn't take me long at all to work out a better way to draw the map. Now I'm back up to 60FPS on a huge map (500x500), as long as you don't zoom out too far.

Apr 5, 11:50 Title Menu + font goodness

Added a title screen with a menu, and made use of my new FontPack tool and a nice free font from FontFreak to get a better font in the game. It is at three pxl sizes: 200 (title chars only), 75 for menu text and 25 for in-game text.

I also added a fullscreen mode which is fun.

Apr 5, 13:10 Walls and towers

Not much change, but heres some walls and towers.

Apr 5, 15:10 Maps!

You can now select and load maps. Maps are just ascii text so Notepad (or emacs in this case) is my level editor.

I am going to take a break for coffee and lunch.

Apr 5, 18:45 Halfway mark

Well, this is the halfway mark in the contest and in my game's feature list, so I guess that's a good thing. Now you can select tiles, lines and ares with the mouse, and place walls and towers. All of the walls and towers in the screenshot were added in gameplay.

Now, i just need to add UNITS, and I'll have the basic game working... Of course I hope I have more than just walls and towers in the final game.

Apr 5, 20:45 Zombies

I made a bigger level but I realized that I had better stop messing with the map code or I'd never have any zombies. So here is zombie #1, maybe I should call him Gumby. He is a zombie of the roman legion.

Apr 5, 21:30 Zombies Party

It's Zombies! And they're having a party! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! But they just stand there, because, well, they have no brains.

Apr 6, 01:27 Zombaphants

I have a Zombaphant sprite. Soon it will be revealed. I wasted a lot of time trying to make zombie AI, and I realized the game would have to change a little. Less RTS-like than I origionally planned, but I think it's a much better design...

Apr 6, 04:00 Goodnight

Ok, it's not as late as it sounds, daylight savings time appeared.

I added a bunch of game mechanics, little stuff that I had been putting off. Now you actually have to pay to build stuff, and it can almost handle both one and two player modes, and lots of little stuff. I'm starting to lose the ability to focus on the screen, so i figure that's a cue to go to sleep.

Apr 6, 11:45 Last day

I've been up for about an hour. Man, i needed sleep, I was just wasting my time last night. It's now nearly playable, the "Prepare" phase is done, and it goes into "attack" phase, swaps out each player's map, etc, but there is nothing to do in attack phase yet. No screenshot because it doesn't look too much different.

Apr 6, 12:45 Zombaphants revealed

You control the Undead Hannibal, and your zombie legions follow you and destroy nearby stuff. Right now, you can move hannibal around but he can go right through walls and stuff.

Apr 6, 13:45 Collisions

Collsions work, and i had to fix the zombie drawing code so they would actually line up with their location.

Apr 6, 16:24 Argh

It's been a while since I updated so i figured id throw in a screenshot. I think, yet again, that I will not finish on time. You can shoot now, but they don't do anything and the zombies still dont work. The idea is that you have a spell to summon them, but it's pretty hopeless now.

Apr 6, 17:30 Blast of Evil

I'm so screwed.

Apr 6, 19:00 Game over, man

Ugh.. at least I got the towers to shoot before it was over...

Apr 6, 19:30 Horrifying

When you run it out of the debugger it looks all wrong. It uses the wrong tiles for everything. I guess I should have tried running it once or twice outside of VC6, doh. I uploaded the broken version with source, and hopefully i can fix it and upload a fixed version

Apr 6, 21:00 Chinese Food

Ok, I fixed the problem, I passed the wrong Id in Tile::Tile but for some reason it worked in debug. I got it to release-build by turning off optimize.

Here is a link to the fixed version. This one includes the fixed source, and another small bugfix to the victory conditions. HannibalReleaseVersion.zip 1.3 MB

Time to eat chinese food, now. It will be a fun week of game testing.