Super Sprout's Time log

homepage: http://www.lexaloffle.com

Start time for me (Tokyo) was 2:00pm. I'll use Tokyo times for convenience. My convenience, that is.

Saturday

3:46pm I'm used to using my own in-house tools for pixel pushing and sound etc., so I'll try out some drawing programs. I'll be using SDL and Borland's C compiler for code. I don't have much time to work on this today but at the very least I'll try and get something on the screen. I haven't decided what the game will be yet. Maybe I'll think about it on the way to the supermarket..

5:50pm GraphicsGale it is, then. I still don't have a design, but I do have snacks and supplies.

8:03pm Argh, those first few hours without my regular programming tools were a bit painful. But I have a blank screen up handling keyboard input, so the boring part is over. Also I think I know what the game is now. It's basically the snake game, but the end of your tail stays fixed for the whole game, and you can choose to divide your head into two at an arbitrary angle. Except instead of a snake, it's a plant. The aim of the game is to direct the growth of the buds to pick up little balls of light. Each light causes the end of the shoot to change into a flower and stop moving. Once all the light are collected and there are no more growing shoots the level is completed.

10:36pm Drew some grass and a test shoot (yellow). The shoot doesn't move, but it has hidden potential. It also has no alpha channel, which is a bit spooky.

11:24pm It's growing now. Wheee, this is fun. The shoots are just a little sphere drawn over and over which gives it the dark underside and highlights.

01:42am It's quite vital that the player can see exactly which direction the shoots are heading in, so they should really be pointy at the ends. I tried a few things, and they all looked ugly so I'm going to leave it for now. It may turn out that the growing movement is a strong enough indication. The other cosmetic change I made was to allow for branch sizes getting smaller as the tree subdivides. Again, a lot of messy results and I'd like to make it look nicer, but it's time to move on to gameplay programming.

2:14am A test level with 4 targets. The game runs quite quickly, so it's not just a puzzle to figure out where to split the shoots and which way to turn; there is also a challenge in the execution.

Am sleepy but quite keen to see what the plants look like once they have flowers and more shoots. Ak, those orange balls make it look like a flash game.

3:15am Went to get some coffee. Had a new idea: the shoots should pick up leaves which don't terminate the shoot, but which are required to complete the level. This opens up a lot of level designing possibilities. It can be used to restrict the range of solutions the player has access to, or to guide them around the level. Also I think it will look good and add more character to the plants.

4:35am Argh - can't get the alpha channel to work with bmps. I can't be arsed looking into alternative image loaders so I'll just keep using key colour alpha. I'd probably spend too much time drawing alpha channels anyway.

Some pixel work on the two types of pickups - on the left is the leaf and on the right is the flower. I started designing levels by typing in coordinates for the pickups but I think it will pay off to save levels as images using magic colours to indicate the positions of objects. That way people can make their own levels too.

6:04am I spent some time looking at other people's games. There is some funky stuff coming out of the ludumdare machine! I'm looking forward to DrPetter's fully scalable world, the weird chest hair game, and Lerc's RTS thing.

A level file and the result:

Even simple levels like this are quite hard. Sometimes it really does turn into the snake game/tron at the end when there is just one flower left and one tendril, but the screen is a mess of shoots going everywhere. I haven't done the collisions yet though.

Time for some sleep. Tomorrow will be:

Finish drawing game screen

Do flowwer and leaf growing animation

Level completion sequence

Sound maybe.

Levels.

Level selection screen/title screen

Collisions + failure sequence

Sunday

1:56pm It's cold and gloomy outside, so a good day for coding. brain:moderate, inspiration:high, feet:cold.

Added a border for the playing field:

3:00pm Collisions are working now. I'm keeping a separate 8-bit image to record which parts of the world are solid. I'm using lots of different pixel formats now. Native colour format for the background for fast blitting, the bmp loader gives me 24bits I think, and 8bit maps for collisions. So there is a bit of scope for things to go wrong. I hope the assumptions I've made about colour conversion, locking/unlocking efficiency and the formats SDL chooses to use are safe enough. It feels a bit messy - I normally use my own 8bit, arbitrarily accessible bitmaps in software for absolutely everything. ok, I'm going to stop whining about not having access to my tools now. (:

Monday

9:53am This morning I added a flower growing animation for when a bud terminates. The game is playable enough now, so I'll spend the last 4 hours making some levels and a simple title menu.

11:50am My last entry. I just have to put a title screen on the game, and maybe put in some sound if I can come up with something fast enough. Here's a picture of the flowering and leaf growing that happens when the shoots hit the pickups.

1:59:50 It finished uploading with just 10 seconds to spare. I broke the mechanism which informs the player they have finished the level at about 1:50 and decided it was worth the bug hunt. I had to compile, test, archive and upload without missing a single keystroke to make it in time, I tells you.

Well, I'm quite happy with the way it turned out. I would have liked some more time to design levels, but I think the 6 I put in give a good taste of what the game could be like. I originally had 8, but instead of designing the last levels I found it easier to delete the [7] and [8] on the title screen. Also, no sound :-( It would have been nice to have some ambient sound effects but I guessed it would have taken at least another couple of hours to get them right.

Head over to the release page to download the finished product: http://ludumdare.com/wiki/index.cgi/JosephWhiteFinal