October 2012 challenge, Day 20

Well, I failed.

I got the core mechanics and everything done in just a couple days but I only had a few hours a week to work on music, sounds, graphics, and extra content. That just didn't happen. So, as tough as it is for me, I've admitted that I should cut my losses and stop worrying about it.

Retrospective time!

I should start learning the language, tool chain, graphics, music, and sound before committing to a project. I hadn't used haxe before (but I'm somewhat familiar with Actionscript) so the language, libraries, and compilation process and quirks took some time to get. Despite 6 or so years of piano lessons, I don't know anything about making good computer music either. Pixel graphics wouldn't fit the theme and good looking graphics are beyond what I can do. I had some good luck with procedurally generated plant graphics, but couldn't quite integrate it with my game code due to how the rendering code worked.

I should stop planning on spending all of my time working on a project with so many unknowns . I have less time than I expected and it's not sustainable. After a week of nothing but work, sleep, and this project, my place was a mess and it was hard to stay focused. If I picked a smaller project - like a platformer or turn based strategy - then I think I would have had a better chance of finishing. I can do old-school graphics and sound effects so that's what I should stick to.

I should continue writing well factored code and trying short term projects like this. Breaking it down into pieces that I could prioritize and implement in a couple hours helped me get started and make early progress. The simple and clean code meant that I could change my mind, try something different, and generally make progress much faster than some of the messier code bases I've crapped out.

If I follow these simple plans, then I'll be much better equipped for the next ludum dare.

October 2012 challenge, Day 10

I only had a few hours to program over the weekend but I managed to get saving and continuing to work - which took much longer than I expected. If you're looking for advice on how to save objects to the SharedObject with Flash or haxe and nme, I ended up relying on the Memento Pattern.

Here's the relevant part of the Fruit class:

public function toMemento():Dynamic
{
 return {
  x:x,
  y:y,
  vx:velocity.x,
  vy:velocity.y,
  maxSpeed: maxSpeed,
  maxAge: maxAge,
  type: type,
  plantType: plantType,
  age: age,
 };
}

public static function fromMemento(o:Dynamic):Fruit
{
 var c = new Fruit(o.x, o.y, o.type);
 c.velocity.x = o.vx;
 c.velocity.y = o.vy;
 c.maxSpeed = o.maxSpeed;
 c.maxAge = o.maxAge;
 c.age = o.age;
 c.plantType = o.plantType;
 return c;
}

One place where this was tricky was with the creatures' needs. Each creature has a list of needs that implement the Need interface. Since I don't know the real class at design time, it has to be handled differently. When creating the memento for needs, the class name is included and when converting the memento to the real object, a separate class takes the memento, looks at the need field, and has a switch statement that tells the appropriate class to create an instance from the memento. Here's the relevant part of the NeedToEatFruit class:

public function toMemento():Dynamic
{
 return {
  need: "NeedToEatFruit",
  target: target == null ? null : target.toMemento(),
 }
}

public static function fromMemento(o:Dynamic):Need
{
 var n = new NeedToEatFruit();
 n.target = o.target == null ? null : Fruit.fromMemento(o.target);
 return n;
}

Apart from that, I made some simple placeholder graphics for the plants and got the basic plant lifecycle to work. There's twelve species of plants. Some float to the surface, some are buoyant enough to float around, and others are planted in place. The simple ones are just a sprite but the more complex ones grow separate leaves. They can reproduce by budding, spores, seeds, or fruit. When a fruit-eating animal eats a fruit, it will wait 5 seconds or so then drop a seed of that plant. And that's why the Creature class has a pooCountdown field.

Next up is animal graphics, lifecycle, and more needs as well as changing the world structure. It's currently Perlin noise but when targeting the mac, it runs out of memory trying to make it. Really odd.

October 2012 challenge, Day 5

If you look at it a certain way, then I'm almost done. If you look at it the real way, then all that's left is the stuff I'm not good at.

After some late night work, pre-work work, and lunchtime work, I've got the core ideas working so now it's mostly a matter of adding content (graphics, sound, music, more game objects, etc) and fine tuning it. I'm sure there will be a round of performance optimizations, a round of cross-platform hacks, a round of feedback from beta testers, a round of panicked hacking, and a round of October 30th surprises. But not today. Today is good.

I don't want to give away too much of what the game is about (October is only 17% done after all) but here's the AI for other creatures:

package;

class CreatureController
{
 public function new()
 {

 }

 public function update(creature:Creature):Void
 {
  var lowestScore = 1.0;
  var lowestNeed = creature.needs[0];

  for (i in 0 ... creature.needs.length)
  {
   if (creature.needScores[i] > lowestScore)
    continue;

   lowestScore = creature.needScores[i];
   lowestNeed = creature.needs[i];
  }

  lowestNeed.update(creature);
 }
}

And here's a screenshot:

It's hard to see but there's two different background colors. The large squares are plants, the medium squares are animals, and the tiny squares are fruits. The green bar is your happiness. Later the squares will be things that look like what they are.

October Ludum Dare challenge accepted

"Make a game — Take it to Market — Earn $1"

I'm in. I just got haxe setup on my computer and I'm ready to start working on an idea I've had for some time.

Things I still need to do:

1. Make the game.
2. Make it not suck.
3. Make it look good.
4. Make it sound good.
5. Make an attractive website for it.
6. Make sure it works on iPhone, iPad, and Android.
7. Submit to the Apple App Store.
8. Submit to the Android Market.
9. Submit to some flash game site.

That's only nine things. I can do nine things in one month.