Growth Spurt's Time log

Growth Spurt

A log of my progress, with the most recent entries at the top.

Sunday, 04:40 GMT : Finished! Everythings done! I've just got to upload the whole lot and make my wiki page for it. And as it's almost 5am here I'll be off for some much needed sleep before I do some kind of postmortem on the whole thing.

Sunday, 00:30 GMT : A Fresh New Build Theres a fresh build on my test page now, which should work for Windows, Linux and MacOS. Also fixed a few small snags, including accidentally having a non power of two texture which silently worked on my machine.

The main addition is pulling out a bunch of hardcoded data and instead retreiving them from file. At the moment this doesn't do much except let me tweek without recompiling, which is near useless given that compiles take less than a second. What I need to do now is come up with a bunch of settings for a variety of levels and the progression though them.

Sunday, 19:15 GMT : Plant Drawing After putting it off for as long as I dared I finally sorted out the plant drawing. It's basically just textured quads, except that vertex colours give me more variety than just textures alone, and I added lots of (carefully controlled) randomness as they're growing to make it even more chaotic.

Time for a break, and to try and figure out how I'm going to get some kind of level progression in here.

Sunday, 17:10 GMT : The Final Leg Well with the LDClock showing 12 hours left, it's time to settle down for the final stretch. I have to get proper plant drawing in, some kind of level progression and a whole lot of polish.

Sunday, 14:30 GMT : Menus I've started working on the front end to the whole thing - all very simple stuff, basically just text and pressing a button to advance. Tedious work but makes it feel much more like a complete game.

Also added flowers as level targets, picking up the needed amount means you can advance to the next level. Except at the moment all the levels are the same, different levels is still on my todo list...

Sunday, 12:00 GMT : A Brand New Day I've spent the last hour or so trying to do some more sprites but not having much luck. I do have a good enough flower now, so I can start adding in a level end after lunch.

I still have no idea how I'm going to draw the plants though, I certainly don't want to leave them as lines.

Sunday, 2:45 GMT : Minor Improvements

Lots of tweeking here and there, changing the speed and balance of the gameplay. Also got a working webstart build available for people to try (see the link at the top), which should work in both Win32 and Linux (and Mac as soon as I build that version too).

Also added in font drawing, and used it for a simple score. Still can't actually complete a level, that'll be the first thing on the list tomorrow morning.

Sunday, 00:20 GMT : Time Wasting I've just spent far too long trying to draw and animate a pulsing sun for the background. And it still looks rubbish. Oh well, time for a break before something more constructive.

Saturday, 23:23 GMT : Some Proper Sprites

Since one of my aims this time around was some proper graphics rather than abstract vectory stuff I thought it was about time to add in some sprites.

The plants are still just lines though - I'll need something more fancy than just sprites because of the way they grow. Tweeked the camera so it behaves properly at the bottom too.

Saturday, 19:40 GMT : Splitting Plants Took a break so I've only added a little extra code, but I have got plants with more than one stem now.

Stems will randomly 'die' and existing stems will split to maintain the same amount of growth all the time. Makes easier some of the time, as you've got double the leaves to jump on, but if the one you're on dies you've got to change stem sharpish. Also added double jumping to make things a little easier, and made sure plants couldn't grow out of the playing area.

Saturday, 17:31 GMT : First Actual Growth

Centering around the theme I'm going to have a rapidly growning plant, and the first (very) rough draft of that has now been added.

It's not very obvious but the green thing in the middle is the ever growing plant, and the black cross is the player. The rest is just junk testing/debugging stuff. I've also made the camera follow the player around, and both the camera and the player is restricted to the game area properly.

Saturday, 16:05 GMT : Player Movement The player movement is done - it works nice and smooth and hopefully I've got rid of all the glitches too. With any luck it won't need any tweeking later (other than speed/gravity/friction balancing).

Still visually the same, except with thicker lines.

Saturday, 15:20 GMT : Time To Resume We now return you to our scheduled programming...

Saturday, 13:50 GMT : The Basics Favoring speed rather than elagance, I've cobbled together a quick app with display creation. On top of this I've added the first bits of gameplay, which is totally not obvious in this rubbish screen capture:

Yes it's rubbish, at the end we'll see how much it's changed from here. But first some Real Life stuff to take care of.

Saturday, 13:00 GMT : Project Started After a combination of indecision and sleeping in, I'm starting a little late. Time to get cracking!

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