I’m taking a few hours tonight to go through the archives and put up some of my finished/unreleased/unfinished game jam projects onto github. Ludum Dare 26 is next weekend and I want to have a simple URL to send people to to try out my stuff.
Tag Archives: guelph game jam
Guelph Game Jam 4 Liveblog 2: Map Imported
It’s 45 minutes late, but the map loader now properly imports a level (converted from a Google Docs spreadsheet) into a Javascript array, then selects the proper tile in the tilemaps image to make the level.
Here’s an image.
Now onto actually designing the level and making the game.
On Game Development and Akihabara
Syrup Dispensers From Hell is coming along quite well. I’ve decided to use the Legend of Sadness base for the game, which plays and looks a lot like a Legend of Zelda title. Instead of having our hero travel into a cave, he’ll be travelling into a breakfast restaurant to save us all from horrid syrup dispensers.
This time around I’ve got a lot more experience working with Akihabara so I’ve been able to work harder on gameplay and graphics rather than learning how the game engine works. Designing tilemaps for a game, as a programmer, is tough work. It’s not that I dislike working on art or even that I’m not artistic, but what looks great in The Gimp looks like shit when it’s tiled a hundred times.
Doing graphics for a game is basically incrementalism combined with healthy doses of iteration. You tweak a pixel, test it in-game, hate it, go back, tweak another pixel, hate it, go back, and so on.
A neat feature that I discovered today was Akihabara’s ability to scale the size of the game display by a value that is less than 1, meaning that it does not need to zoom to an integer value. Currently I’ve got the game displaying at 320×240 with a zoom of 2.5, making that actual output 800×600.
Well, back to work :)
BastardBlaster Running on iPhone
Pretty neat! Still a few graphical glitches. Thanks goes out to my buddy Chris for the screens and test.
Play My Game – BastardBlaster
As of this posting it’s a very early version with still much of the stock artwork and enemy types. But, it’s fun and playable. Go Akihabara!
The story goes that you’re a BastardBlaster, conscripted to battle everything in the world that’s annoying. Flat tires, Blue Screens of Death, when you go to eat pizza and there’s none left… the list goes on and on. If it’s annoying, you shoot it.
Less than 40 minutes to go! Rush!
The game is coming together really nicely, but some stuff is unfinished! *gasp!* Time to rush!
Margaret Gissing helping with BastardBlaster artwork
I’ve got the anime-ish characters (Terry and Skylar) in, but since I’m a programmer and I’d like to spare you my attempt at drawing artwork, I’ve asked Margaret Gissing to help out with the 2D sprite pieces.
Will post once I have the work from her :)
Had a great bowl of pizza for dinner
Mm!
Everyone’s favourite.
Audio Conversion Love
I’m under a tight deadline for BastardBlaster, the game I’m building right now for the Guelph Game Jam, so I’ll share my quick and dirty way to convert audio files in Linux and using some Windows software with Wine.
The source music is music modules in the .it (Impulse Tracker) format. So, I used Winamp (running via Wine) to export as .wav files. From there, I used the MP3 to OGG conversion script on this page (modified a bit) to do:
./wav2ogg filename.wav filename.ogg
wav2ogg’s contents look like this:
[rocky1138@atlas Music]$ cat wav2ogg.sh oggenc -o "$2" "$1"
Hope this helps someone in the future :) Note you have to have oggenc (vorbis-tools) installed in order for that to work :)
Now to do mp3s….
Awesome! Just received permission to use DavidN’s Music
I love the music David K Newton makes. I can’t wait to export a few of his music modules to MP3 and OGG for use in the Guelph Game Jam game I’m making! Woot!