Category: Video Games

Ludum Dare 34

I’m taking part in Ludum Dare 34. I have started late. I need to respect family and social commitments. So the scope will have to be minimal.

The themes of this jam are Growing and Two Button Controls. I can pick either or both. I choose Growing.

First job is to brainstorm on paper.

My tool of choice for this jam is C++ with the Cinder Library, because this is what I am most familiar with. This is no time to experiment with new or unfamiliar tools. This limits my scope as my baseline is so low, but that’s fine. My platform is Mac OS X.

My approach for this jam:

Keep the scope incredibly small
Make it fun
Exercise
Protect focus (I will post updates on my blog from time to time over the next 48 hours, but not so much Twitter)
Use the tools that you know, this isn’t the time to experiment with your toolchain
It’s better to finish, ship and learn than to try to make something fun and end up with nothing

Thanks to everyone for the good luck messages. Let’s do this!

Reach for the PC

Screen Shot 2014 02 22 at 20 18 45

Finally then, here is the PC build of Reach for the Sky, my toy, soon to be I think, the world’s first Rocket RPG. Yes, that’s grandiose. Yes, that’s tongue in cheek. Oh and there is a Mac version too. Of course. And the Mac version has that lovely rocket sound.

Get the PC build here.

Get the Mac build here.

Remember, it’s just a toy, so muck around with it. I’ll be building a game on top of it.

You can fiddle with the JSON files in the assets folder and see what happens. The good news is that you can fiddle with them without restarting the game. After you’ve fiddled, just hit the Backspace (delete on Mac) key and all the changes will be reloaded.

You can change the sky gradients, the engine power, the atmospheric density at ground and at the top of the sky, the drag on the ship, and lots more. Please give me comments here, or on Twitter @shahidkamal with the hashtag #RFTS

Thanks to everyone for your help so far!

Reach for the Sky – update 1

Screen Shot 2014 02 16 at 19 43 50
I’ve done a weekend of work on this, but almost none of it is visible.

Internally, this is not just a toy now. I can play with the environment, background, rocket attributes, physics, engines and so on very easily. Instead of a single big file, I have classes for Ship, Engine, World, View, Particle, Emitter, RocketEmitter and so on.

This is the latest Mac build, watch out, this rocket is a lot more powerful. The gradient sky came about as a result of a nice tip from Paul Pridham (@madgarden on Twitter) – thanks Paul! I will experiment with this in later builds. The gradients are important because the object of the game will be to ensure that you reach the “sky” (the dark bit) and of course, the sky will become a narrower band as the levels progress.

Next week, there will be levels and more than one rocket to control. Eventually, you’ll be able to level up your rockets with multiple staged engines, but it will become like playing the keyboard, so later levels won’t be easy. You might need a friend when it gets up to 8 rockets on the screen with each of them having different attributes!

Download ReachForTheSky-0.02.zip for the Mac here.

Sorry I haven’t got a PC build ready. I’ve not had time to build the Cinder environment for my PC laptop yet.

Reach For The Sky

This is a toy that took me a weekend and a bit to get going. I’m using the Cinder library, which for the most part keeps itself to itself, and C++, very badly abused C++ at that.

It’s only on the Mac at the moment. I’ll see if I can get it going on the PC and upload a build here if I can.

Grab the Mac build here.

Unzip it, stick it in Applications or something and remember to sort out your security settings to allow running something by a nobody. (After you’ve run it, do remember to restore your security settings, OK?)