A couple busy weeks put me a bit late with my 1v1 PvE platformer, but I'm back on track!

Throughout the month I have managed to complete all the basics & structure required to make the game playable, leaving this week-end to actually develop an interesting AI. All the iterations of that AI are actually going to be in-game as various levels. I hope to get at least 5 levels done:

• Level 1 (DONE): Almost idle AI
• Level 2 (DONE): Jumping around the map
• Level 3 (DONE): State machine-powered objectives
• Level 4 (IN PROGRESS): Pathfinding
• Level 5 (TODO): Tactics (health management, human movement anticipation)

I'm currently hacking together a waypoint system… and hoping it won't be too hard to build movement on top of it, so that the robot can actually jump on platforms correctly.

The GPU skinning I've been working on is going well—but not that well. I decided a couple of days ago that I need to prioritise finishing something for the Kajam, and then continue working on the OpenGL stuff. So I've started working on a new game in Phaser, but trying to reuse as much as possible from the other game (mostly the artwork).

I re-rendered the model from before, and did some tidying up in GIMP to produce this instead:

So I'm making a traffic light programming game for Kajam 4. I thought it would be fun to look at the cars zoom by and respond to the lights you've so cunningly set up.

The first thing I wanted to set up are the roads. Because I plan to make a bunch of different levels, it would be neat to have a little road drawing algorithm, so I easily have various layouts.

First I started with a basic horizontal and vertical road, like this:

Now of course, the next thing was to try to have an intersection, because that's where the traffic lights come in. So there we go:

Hmm… that doesn't look entirely right, does it. So I added some special intersect drawing code:

Pretty sweet, if I may say so myself :D It doesn't just support 2 roads either:

And it also supports more than 2 lanes :D

And that's it for now. Next up: adding cars!

My project will be called BDSM (Bomb Defusal Squad Machines)
A level (which is mostly the one I used while testing to make sure everything is bugless) is operative!

Is the UI understandable, even without tutorialisation? Please, if you want and can, try the level and tell me if you managed to beat it (deactivated the bomb) and if you understood everything or misunderstood anything. Thanks! :)

https://raindrinker.itch.io/bdsm

I'm about to embark on coding the animation stuff; but first I needed a nice animation to test it out with, so here it is. Originally I was animating the arms too, but it seems to look more (or less, perhaps?) natural this way; it's a robot, after all :D

I expect that adding animations to the game will take a couple of days, but once it's done my crappy texturing the sky is the limit for the graphics in this game!

All hail Wingardium LevioJam!, the new incarnation of Alakajam!

After launching this website back in July 2017, we quickly realized its name wasn't completely effective, as a lot of people didn't get the pun between "game jam" and the "Alakazam!" magic word (which it definitely is). Because of that, we have finally grown tired of the Alakajam! name and decided to retire it.

After long debates and dozens of rejected names, including "Code Prog-jammers", "World Jam-pionship", and "OSWALD" ("OSWALD Surely Wasn't Another Ludum Dare"), we unanimously praised the discovery of the awesome pun: Wingardium LevioJam!

Sure, we feared for a moment that the name was a bit long and forced, but then we remembered this great quote:

"Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself" - Albus Dumbledore

Inspired by these great words, we have eventually decided to stick with the name and launched this new version of the site. We hope you'll like it!

UPDATE: Our lawyers suggested we retire the "Wingardium LevioJam!" theme & name, due to similarities with an existing license. It only lasted for April 1st, too bad!

I got my model loading working today. It's been a bit of work but my OpenGL understanding has increased massively. I've also learned what happens if you specify the wrong image format ^^

I'm in (somewhat obviously)!

I'd like to make something top-down and tinker with some adversarial AI. I've been hacking around with OpenGL quite a lot in recent weeks, and would love to turn my delicious spaghetti codebase into a game for this jam. Time might be a little tight as it's very rough and incomplete, so if that fails, my back-up plan is to use Old Faithful and whip something up in JS.

Would also be nice to turn my abysmal 1/3 attendance record into a pitiful 2/4. We'll see!

I love Artificial Intelligence, I actually just finished computer engineering, and did some things in that department, but I almost always end up disappointed when I try to really go deep with AI in games.

A project I had in the backburner for some time is a game like the ones by Zachtronics, where the player is asked to "program" the solution of a puzzle, with a lot of freedom. I once tried to envision a game where you design the "orders" for a military squad, almost programming without noticing, and they follow them and hopefully end up victorious. Gladiabots does something similar with quite a success.

I'd really like to make a game like that, a game that is thinking-heavy, but you're not solving puzzles, you're solving problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1_zmx-wU0U (Mark Brown's video on that)

Ill decide a genre (puzzle platformer probably) and design an interface so you can "program" the player character/s. Let's see how it goes.

Good luck to all! :D

Hopefully today's not yet the day I will break my achievement of entering all Kajams. Here's a quick look at my previous entries:

For this new event I'm currently thinking of the following:

• Pixel-art platformer on a unique, single-screen level
• 1-on-1 fight against AI with a variety of items
• Randomized weapon/heal/buff spawn

In short, something close to a simplified Super Crate Box with a nice opportunity to have fun with the AI. I don't think I'll do too much technical research on AI in general, I'll just have fun with a finite state machine.

EDIT: First progress gif (red is an AI jumping around randomly)

EDIT2: I have created a page for my work-in-progress entry as Robot Duels