UPDATE: Fixed bug where the second level wouldn’t let you start play. August 12, 1pm EST.

Finished! Play through Java WebStart here:

http://codebynumber.com/projects/ld12/Game.jnlp

There are two levels, and you can win or lose, depending on your skill in (dun dun DUN) snatching the owls! Think of yourself like a bird-loving Indiana Jones and it all makes a little more sense.

It works in the Compo Game Loader, and you can pull down the zip that includes the source, screenshot, thumbnail, gameinfo.xml, etc. at:

http://codebynumber.com/projects/ld12/towerzip.zip

To play it, go to the link at the top of this post, don’t use the zip. This zip doesn’t include the bugfix of August 12, so the second level is not playable (sorry!).

It’s been lots of fun, thanks everyone! Can’t wait to play all these games!

OK, I’m back from a Pug Meetup, where my happy, happy pug partook in some made for dogs peanut butter flavored frozen yogurt:

As for the game, I think I am adding locked doors so that the key can go to something next.

Added a pre-rendered Game Over image to the game, plus the animation now stops (so dying is now worse than being notified of your death, it actually stops play). Next up: winning!

I woke up a little late, and I have a thing to go to in an hour. When I left my computer last night, I stupidly said “I should see if I can get my resolution higher on my monitor” and went in and mucked things up big time. After 20 minutes, nothing worked and when it rebooted, I was in 640 x 480. I went to bed and tackled it this morning, but nothing was working. Finally, I realized the KVM switch was probably interfering with the autodetect or something, so I routed it all to my linux box and it now works. Unfortunately that means my Windows box is now headless, and that’s where I keep my Civ IV! Maybe I need a better KVM switch… Maybe a need a bigger apartment so I can have two monitors and keyboards.

Edit: Got a demo going! It’s Java WebStart. If you play it, let me know how it went!

Progress is going well. I have introduced an animation thread into my game so it’s not turn-based. The rendering is spotty – the player flickers just noticeably enough – but there is a lot of improvement I can make in the rendering code. Right now all sorts of things happen in the paint method, which should go elsewhere.

The camera switches direction every 1.5 seconds (it’s supposed to be a security camera). Collision detection still works, which is never taken for granted. Next thing I will do is package it up as a JNLP so I can put up a demo.

You lose the game when you get spotted by the camera:

But there is no way to win it. The key is going to go to a door. The premise is something like “You wake up in a building, not knowing why you’re there.” And so on.

In other news, it turns out poblano peppers are hot and the oil, which I now know is called Capsaicin, feels like liquid fire on your skin. Not when you’re handling them, mind you. Hours later, when you’re sitting, typing at your desk, for instance. And not fire like smoking fire. More of a smoldering, starts little and grows gradually until, 20 minutes later, you realize what’s happened. I did wash my hands thoroughly, but I think I had gotten oil on the dish towel, which then stayed on my hands. So that’s a new hurdle for me, coding while my fingers are burning. Thankfully, it’s gone now, and with any luck, I will never do that, ever again.

13 hours in, and I have something! It’s not much, but it can at least conceptually be seen as a building (see the levels?). The brown things are stair cases between the floors, which should probably end at the latitude where the next level up starts. But those aren’t things you think about until you try explaining it to someone.

First Screenshot

The little stick figure is the player, and right now it goes back and forth and up and down, with reckless disregard for walls and viewable areas. Next up: collision detection.

Read on, for more trials and tribulations of the first 13 hours…

I wasted about an hour trying to get Java to handle the transparency of a color key, and learned quite a bit about image filtering, but it looks like that wasn’t the way it would work. So I regrouped and figured out that I could say the transparency in the image using a GIF, thus saving myself the hassle. I think it’s fair to say that this is lesson learned #1.

Also, I suffered my first keyboard fatality of the weekend. Well, I guess it’s more like keyboardslaughter, since I willingly popped off the keys to get some gunk out that was sticking the arrow keys. The keys are those fancy scissor keys, so I think I broke a plastic tab or two in the process, and by the time I realized it had happened, I broke another tab on the same side. So the down arrow is about 3 mm higher on the right than on the left. That, and some splotching backlighting (it’s illuminated) after a cider spill a few weeks ago, and I think it’s time that it be retired.

And here’s my pre-grocery snack. I’ve started in on the caffeine already…

Edamame beans, yum! And FreshDirect better get here with my groceries within the hour, or I’m going to be eating raw spaghetti squash for lunch.

Last night I made some notes and drew a picture of my idea, and I felt ok about it. This morning I woke up and felt a little lackluster about it. Part of the problem is that I don’t particularly like the genre of puzzle, plus I don’t like games about timing (i.e. pacman, avoiding your enemies by timing your moves). And I ended up making my idea both of those. I think I can redeem it from timing, and add some sort of weapon, so if you don’t want to time your moves with the guard’s patrol, you can just kill him. But that is definitely far off in the future.

I think I will go ahead with my current design, because I’m committed to not being tied to it when I want to change stuff later. I will try to reconsider the game after each feature, so hopefully I can push it towards a better design without spending a lot of time up front. Also, if I finish all the features today, I can always dream big and keep going, right?

And now, for the breakfast:

Yogurt, granola bar and juice for me. Wellness Super 5 Chicken for Max The Dog.

Ended up on the phone for about an hour, and went to the grocery store for a few small things. Came back and made homemade salsa.

The game is coming along. The lines that make up the tower all behave like walls, and the staircases finally behave like staircases! Meaning that you can use them to get between floors. This is great progress, and I’d be really happy if only I didn’t know all the hacky stuff that’s going on behind the scenes. I’m actually thinking about writing some unit tests for the collision and game logic code, since it was a really touch and go process to get the stairs working correctly.

My dog is dying for some attention, so we’re going for a walk, and I’m going to consider what to do next. The easiest thing would be to add items to pick up (keys for locked doors, I’m thinking). But the most technically difficult would be enemies patrolling the floors, since it’s entirely turn based at this point (I only draw when a key is pressed). So I would have to add an animation thread to get something moving on its own.

I, too, am a first timer. I have the place to myself (and my dog) and a grocery order delivery scheduled for Saturday afternoon. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

I am going to go with out of the box Java, using Java 2D for graphics. That will let me focus on gameplay and design rather than battling with the graphics. The themes to vote on aren’t up yet, but I quite like the “Meanwhile…” theme. I’ll be spending Friday before the compo cleaning the house, installing time lapse software, preparing food and cleaning up my desktop (physically and virtually). Oh and working the day job, of course.

Draw a picture.

He did show a project dependency graph, but I find it’s really best to draw a simple picture, not even in UML, just in whatever comes naturally to you. On this picture, keep the real names of the classes, but then give them useful names, or small summaries, and describe their general responsibilities.

Use this diagram as your map, and don’t complete it for perfectionism, but only follow interesting paths. Invariably you’ll end up pruning paths as it’s clear that it leads to property holders, or utility functions (which is part of classifying the objects, as Alex writes) in which you’re not interested. But in particular, when you draw your own diagram, you have a bread crumb trail to look back on, so when the names don’t make sense, or you can’t remember the big picture, you’ve got your notes of what you’ve already seen.

Besides, if you’re drawing a picture, then the next developer who comes along will need to draw a picture too. So you might be able to do a formal diagram and put it into the project, helping others pick up on the architecture that much faster.