Day 6

Hello world, not too much to talk about currently. To-do list time!

• Make okay-ish animations for block and dodge.

• Get a "clang" sound in for a successful block.

• Work on AI some more.

• Test saving and loading.

• Find/Make some enemy graphics.

• More optimizing?

• Make sounds keep volume between saves/loads.

EDIT:
Evaluation:

So I'm approaching one week in. So far, mechanically I actually have almost everything, I just need to tweak the numbers a bit is all. I have some work on the sound front. The graphics front isn't going too well but I'll luckily be able to reuse my block/dodge/dash animations across the main character and enemies. And villager NPCs won't even need that. In terms of major technical features, the only things really missing are the amplitude-to-visibility function and improving the AI further.

I'm fairly happy with my progress into this event, sadly perhaps the slowest thing is making some graphics, because the LPC art jam didn't provide everything I wanted, but I suspected it wouldn't, and I'm generally okay with that.

So I think I'm going to write up a big list of remaining, "to do" stuff. So I can get a better perspective of what needs to be done. And try to focus more.

Day 5

Late post today. As I was out socializing last night. I did however get some programming done over the down while out in town with my laptop.

Plans for this evening:

• Add in block with place-holder animation.

• Add in dodge with place-holder animation.

• Optimize a little.

Day 4

Good morning world.

Okay, not too much to talk about other than today's to do list!

• Complete the main character walk cycle. (At least, the prototype is done.)

• Start work on main-character attack animation.

• Add in support for sprites being "dirty" into the render system.

• Convert various graphics from RGBA png to RGB png with Colour keys.

• Add an agility meter.

Away I go!

Day 3

Good morning, world!

So, now that I have some prototype gameplay, I think the plan is to work on some non-placeholder art and clean up the current code. I also need to add in "page" support to the entity and floor editor, as I never got around to doing that, and without it it'll be impossible to actually use a high number of ents/tiles.

• Continue work on Main character sprite.

• Clean up main character controls code.

• Add pages to Floor Editor and Entity Editor.

• Start work on amplitude-to-visibility stuff?

• Start work on enemy sprite art?

• Go over LPC art entries looking for art I can use.

EDIT:
Stuff I didn't plan on doing but did anyway!

• Start work on binary-visibility stuff.

• Edit the sword sound and when it's played to make it react faster to the player pressing the button.

• Improved enemy AI.  Enemies now can't see through boundaries, and walk to the last place they saw the player.

Wish me luck.

EDIT:

Well, another day down. Today I got about half of the main-character walk-cycle frames done. I hope to have it finished, or at least a WIP version on all the frames, tomorrow.

But I personally find working on art a lot less fun than programming game features, so I ended up side-tracking to start work on the visibility stuff and working on the enemy AI.

Going through LPC art entries, there wasn't an awful lot I can work with, but I took what I could. And honestly, I don't really need too much specific art work. So it hopefully shouldn't be a problem.

Anyway, progress is okay. Good night world.

Day 2

Good morning world! Time to get back to work on my project.

So, last night I decided I need to make some system for have irregular frame sprite sheets, but the more I think about it, the obviously more complicated it becomes, so for now I'll start using 128x128 sheets even when I don't need the space. I may have to program in support for cropped-frames at some point or something since this will mean I'll have a lot of useless pixel data.

So. New to-do list.

• Change animations to 128x128 format.

• Get a slash animation, probably take one from the progress pic thread, for now.

• Make a block animation?

• Get some sounds hooked up.

• Start work on my own player-character sprite set?

• Start work on Amplitude-to-visibility function.

• Start basic ai work?

Time to get busy.

EDIT:

So my connection died last night, preventing me from editing this post, yay.

Evaluation!

After the first 24hours I have a place-holder character who walks around, has steps sounds, can attack with an attack sound, animation, a cool down on the attack, and a place-holder enemy who can do all those as well.

I think I'll try to have my own main character sprite made before working on the blocking stuff.

The file for the player is a bit of a mess though, I'm going to try and simplify it.

But again, decent progress.

Dev post 1.

So, time to plan things out. First series of objectives. If I'm going to do on paper thinking, it might as well be here.

• Fork the github code-base of THM.

Done: https://github.com/Spummy/LPCProject

• Make sure forked THM is using 32x32 tiles.

• Get some LPC tiles in.

• Get an LPC character walking around.

• Get a slash/lunge animation in.

• Get a block animation in.

• Set up a dummy enemy, with health.

• Get the player able to damage the dummy.

• Get the dummy to "die."

• Start work on amplitude-to-visibility function.

Time to get moving.

EDIT: End of Day 1. Well, 6 hours in and I have 2 LPC tile sets in and working, a character who can walk around and lunge-dash-thing to cause damage (but no slash animation for it yet) on a dummy that disappears after 5 hits.

It's end of Day 1 my time, but still very early days.

Evaluation:

I'm pretty happy with how much I got done in this first day. There was some things I had to fix with THM before I could get developing, but once that was done, I felt THM showed that it has the capability to be all that I want it to be, a good rapid-prototyping dev kit.

However I've hit a near immediate snag, I didn't program THM with support for varying frame-size animations yet, which is going to make getting the slash animation in there difficult. I'm going to have to program that in THM tomorrow.

Good night, world.

So it begins!

So the LPC coding phase is about to begin. So I guess it's time for the first post.

My idea is, summarized as simply as possible, an Action game where you play a character who has been blinded, but due to divinely heightened senses, anything he can hear is shown on the screen, fading in and out of the otherwise abyss of the screen.

This is an interesting idea, but it also has it's draw backs.

Pros:

• Unique as hell

• A different area of game design to explore; the effect of knowledge on playstyle and ability.

• Visually Interesting

Cons:

• Difficult to design it to not be frustrating.

• Difficult to design it without being a total gimmick.

• Not THAT much area of game design to explore, and doesn't lend itself to obvious extensions of pre-existing ideas.

I will be developing this using ThisHackishMess, my Python-Pygame-Pymunk dev kit thing I have been making, and my participation in this whole thing was largely to give it a bit of a real-world test.

I will spend this first night, planning out some of my time I think.

Good luck everyone!