Stellar Nurse premature post mortem

First thoughts. This is the first post I've written since I updated wordpress, and, what the fuck wordpress. You're going to destroy a good piece of software.

Why is this post mortem premature? Because we aren't done with it yet. At least, I'm not. A 'post-compo' version is on the way with some gameplay tweaks and performance improvements. I'm going to keep this short for that reason, and just dive right into the lists.

What went right:

Working with an artist and a musician. I couldn't have asked for better. Participating in the jam with a team allowed me to focus entirely on what I was good at and crank out code. It didn't hurt that they are both incredible at what they do.

Using libraries I knew. Flashpunk I've used quite a bit and I can confidently dig into it and hack things. I've got a deal of experience with Box2D, so when I needed a physics library it was the logical choice (And it made for quite good physics). The last library, GUM, is a gui library that I wrote. Can't know it better than that.

Not caring about how horrible my code was. Arne delivered brilliant art; but he didn't always deliver it in a sensible layout. This isn't really the best example of this (I'll give one of those in a moment), but I could have spent a lot of time re-arranging his tiles, or I can just hack some code to deal with it. I hacked some code to deal with it. I did a good job this time avoiding the itch to make it perfect, and concentrated on just making it work. Of course, without the time pressure, I have to fix everything now!

So what went wrong? Not having a clear idea of the goal. I don't think any of us really knew how we wanted the game to play. I experimented a lot with it, but some bits of it threw me for a loop. Like detecting completed planets. The method I came up with can detect any pattern at all, but I never actually got around to doing anything interesting with it. The post-compo version will, I promise.

Ambition. I bit off way too much with the world-tile-soup. Oh sure, it looks like it works, but I poured a solid forty hours of work into it over the weekend and it still doesn't work right half the time.

Play it now at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=rate&uid=418

World Generator

I'm releasing some SOURCE CODE for my metroidvania world generator thing.

LOOK HERE IS THE SOURCE CODE

Gum FlashPunk Demo

Hey look, this post has been updated with source. SOURCE CODE

Gum

One of these (incredibly simple demos) is using Flashpunk, the other is using Pixelizer. Okay, so, it's just a button ( I actually intended to duplicate the functionality in Pixelizer's equally simple GUI example as closely as possible ) but the important thing is that it's apparently identical.

How does SteelGolem manage to write everyday?

When he basically does nothing? Well, I basically did nothing, except improve the map somewhat (no demo here yet). It has panning controls and hilites the current room. I'm also displaying the whole thing, though in the final game that certainly won't be the case.

In semi-related things, I'm using Flashpunk. It looks like Flashpunk 2.0 will never happen, which is something of a shame, but my personal copy of Flashpunk continues to improve. I'm seriously considering forking the official Flashpunk distro on GitHub and rolling my improvements into it. It's nothing too big, but I'm worried that Draknek (who maintains Flashpunk now) wouldn't ever pull the changes.

I've also developed a set of simple UI components that only vaguely rely on Flashpunk, and I intend to release those if there's any interest from the Flashpunk, or Ludumdare, community. If I fork Flashpunk I'll include them in that. Actually I'll probably release them even if there is no interest, so long as I remain interested. I've written a lot of GUI component libraries in my time. One of them, Gum (I'm thinking of recycling the name) is found in almost all of my abandoned open source projects over there ->.

I'm also paying attention to a new thing called Pixelizer over at http://johanpeitz.com/ . It's a 2d game engine for Flash, focusing on a component architecture. I don't agree with some of the author's design decisions and probably won't be using it soon, but it seems to be put together well and has a promising collection of demos. I look forward to seeing where this project goes.

Pathfinding

Not too much to show here. Except for pathfinding.

Generating a single area

Press C to create the 'starting area'.

2-27

I reskinned this blog to match the logo I made yesterday.

It's replacing this thing.

It's an improvement, right?

World generation

I've been working on this world generation for a procedural Metroidvania. Unlike a roguelike, which by comparison is relatively simple, a metroidvania world generator has to take into account powerups that allow the player to reach new places. That understandably complicates things. The best attempt at this I've found on the internet thus far belongs to this guy.

I followed the same path as him, and I discovered that he had made one crucial mistake. He generated a room layout, and then he went about trying to generate rooms to fit. This was probably why he hasn't finished it yet. Instead, I've got a set of 'prototype rooms', which allow connections in various directions, and I assemble the world from them.

So far I haven't got many room types. This demonstration represents the first area the player will explore, so the player hasn't gotten many means of navigation yet. The map generated is rather flat, with almost all vertical movement accomplished by elevator shafts.

While this demo will let you keep adding rooms until no more fit, in practice this area would have somewhere between 10 and 20 rooms.

Testing flash embedding

Just testing some flash embedding. Ignore the generic platformer. Or.. don't.