Generating a BSP dungeon

All right, in order to start doing something cool I need a to navigate in. RougeBasin to the rescue! They have a really cool tutorial on a BSP dungeon (Binary Space Partitioning, simply put: a node tree where every node has two child nodes). Link here

First step: Create a child node of the entire area. Then randomly split it vertically or horisonatlly (offset the split by a random amount) and add the two inner segments as childnodes. Then repeat for each child node.

Second step: Take all the leaf nodes, shrink them a bit and move them around by some random amount.

Third step: Draw a corridor between every sibling node. Then move up to the parent node and draw a corridor between those siblings. This picture only has corridors on it's outmost leafs.

Fourth step (cheat): Turns out that connecting the parent nodes are a real hassle! In order to keep any kind of speed I did a cheat and drew corridors through the center of each sibling node. As long as I don't offset any room beyond the center coordinate the corridor will pass through a room.

This was fun, but getting step 4 up and running took way too much time. You don't want to lose too much momentum when dealing with hobby projects like these, and this is good enough for me to continue with the next exciting step!

Scrolling camera

Got a scrolling camera to work in tonights short session, showing a part of a bigger underlying map. Next up:

1. Generate Dungeon
2. Shadow casting/field of view

Pew pew pew. Part 5

Really quick dev today. Added a fourth shiptype that bursts out a ton of bullets. I have a good initial setup now! Time to start on spawning them in sequence.

AsciiBrain2

Today, by chance, I stumbled upon the free tileset section on Itch.io (https://itch.io/game-assets/free/tag-pixel-art), and I instantly fell in love with so many of them! I'm usually not a big fan of using random peoples stuff, but I think this made me change my mind!

I downloaded a few and started playing around with one of them, making ireggular semi-topdown floor tiles. I could easily integrate them since this is not a console at all, but a regular window I draw bitmap fonts into. Easy peasy!

But the very reason I started with this in ascii was to NOT having to bother with graphics… so even though it looks realy nice, it will have to wait for another project.

Pew pew pew. Part 4

Some more progress, this little VR prototype is going in the right direction indeed!

I needed a way to distinguish the different enemy types, so I just pasted different Trump faces on the cube. Consider it placeholder graphics (even if it is kind of funny) =D

Pew pew pepw. Part3

The controls did not “feel” right. Has been working on improving them for a couple of evenings now. Great improvement even if there are still some work to be done.

AsciiBrain 1

Bought myself a new hobby gamedev laptop. It's really small, and really neat. And kind of weak… So I needed a project that it could handle.

After trying haxe it was clear that compiling haxeflixel was painfully slow. If I did it directly in c++ instead it worked like a charm.

So c++ project it is! Using SDL and the base from my Ludum Dare code base. Got a dude moving and placing blocks. Good first progress =)

Pew pew pew. Part 2

Replaced the player ship with free model from asset store since the cube looked too horrible, even for me. Replaced player bullets with laser beams.

In this gif it's hard to distinguish bullets from enemies…

Space shooter prototype in VR, part 1

Got an Oculus Quest a few months back. Love the device, but I'm not overly enthusiastic about the games you can buy. Not to mention that they are very expensive!

So I started writing a small game of my own. A little space shooter/bullet hell with fast, arcade-like gameplay inspired by games like Geometry Wars.

This is the very first progress. Only an hour into the project… good progress for such rapid prototyping. Lots left to do (obviously).

Drawing an enemy animation...

Wanted to do a test to see how fast I could draw an animation for a game, to see if it ever would be worth producing. The answer is an astounding NO. This super simple animation took an entire evening.

Still funny enough to post though. Would you play a game with this kind of graphics?

Ludum Dare 45: Mad Mans Vengeance

Theme: Start With Nothing

Finally a console game with screen shake!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/mad-mans-vengeance

My second text-based c++ game, this time however not in actual console but in a fake window using SDL (porting a console program to mac/linux was too much effort).

Even though the game was submitted in time, I did not get any rating. In order to get rating you need to recieve 20 votes, and safest way to get those is to rate 20 games. Unfortunately - in order to do so in an honest fashion a lot of time is required, and I could not get any more time after these full two days.

Therefore this will be my last Ludum Dare entry. Getting a result, being in the competition, is the very reason I'm doing this! Seems I will have to try and find another game jam I can attend instead. I feel sad about this, but I have been getting the feeling for quite some time that Ludum Dare has grown more than is actually good for it.

Starting out with C++ and SDL

I've spent some time trying to port my text engine to linux and mac, with the following results:

• On Linux (also valid on Mac) I cannot detect keyUp. “Fixed” it by gimping the game a bit on those platforms…
• On OSX I cannot set colors correctly! The exact same sourcecode that works on Linux turns into dark blue text on semi dark blue background. Unreadalbe.

So I have abandoned that path for now. Instead started looking into the SDL library instead… and it is really smooth to work with! (at least on Linux). I have currently managed to get it to work on both Linux and Windows!

I can even work with this code on my old, very beloved, Asus EEE 1005PE netbook. A ten year old 10.1” computer that freezes if it tries to open any random webpage (Gmail? Just forget about even trying), however it has a whooping 250gb harddrive, a keyboard like a dream and a battery that lasts for an eternity. Writing C++ code in VIM (in a terminal window) works like a charm… like in the 70's ;-) Compilation is around 1-2 seconds, which is not only acceptable, but also faster than Unity compiles on my powerhorse workstation.

This looks very promising for the upcoming Ludum Dare competition!

Fight The System

This evening I managed to render tiles from an old Ripple Tilesheet to a runtime generated mesh, using a custom shader to map the tile values.

It does not scroll yet, but supports rescaling the viewport (although only to even pixels in height).

Ludum Dare 41: Dememtory

Theme: Combine 2 Incompatible Genres

View the Ludum Dare page

Using my partially completed text engine I've been working on in C++ I managed to get a top ten score in the category mood!!

Ripple Dot Zero

Lets cut it short! Ripple Dot Zero is my Magnum Opus! For five years me and my childhood friend, Simon Stålenhag, worked on this in our spare times. It's an action platformer, heavily inspired by our favourite childhood Sega Genesis game titles such as Sonic the hedgehog, Strider, Wonderboy in Monster World…