Art that is slightly less placeholder.

[attachment=17553:23.png]

So not much progress since my last update, I've been otherwise busy and progress has been slow, but I've got a few new things done:

• Granny can now shoot in the direction of the mouse
• Dino has health, takes damage from shots and will eventually die (by abruptly being replaced a bloodsplat sprite, without any transition at the moment).
• Granny also has health, and her death is detected but currently nothing happens when she dies.
• Fixed a few physics bugs and granny can now only jump if she's grounded (no mid-air jumping) - This took way too long to do!

I have a bit of time this evening so hopefully I can pick off at least some of the next few things on my todo:

• Infinitely auto-generating flooring
• Auto-spawning dinos.
• Gameover gamestate
• Scoring & score-counter

Once those things are done then I actually have the bare minimum requirements for the game, so I'll have a contest entry to submit even if it's really basic. Everything else is just polish: more guns, more dinos, health-bars, highscore table, sprite animation, particle-systems, etc.

Screeny:

[attachment=17562:day-3.5.png]

Very nice :)

Since it's about half time I finished up all the menu and done screen, so that the last phase is dedicated to the game itself again.

I tried to make some not-completely-crap grouping AI, which raised from utterly bullcrap to not a complete failure. Now to get some more stages and challenge in there...

• Movement system
• Interaction system with NPC's and talking
• Item pick up and inventory system
• Door system / Teleportation
• Start of the music
• Background art for 4 different areas complete
• First sequence of the game complete

That looks awesome, Ecker.

I finished my game today, because of Ludum Dare.

Two features are missing for now, but I intend to implement them after next Monday.

I liked what I did.

Download here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/t96ue0jshzi46p2/Extract_Dinorace.exe (Windows only)

Volcano! The lava in the crater burns you if you get too close to it.

[attachment=17576:27.png]

I finished my game today, because of Ludum Dare.

Two features are missing for now, but I intend to implement them after next Monday.

I liked what I did.

Download here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/t96ue0jshzi46p2/Extract_Dinorace.exe (Windows only)

Love it ... the races are AWESOME!

blunders, close calls (phew)

... some surprises. Nice.

Awww, a limit

Guess it is a little too rewarding.

The amount you get should probably be related to the ratio (why would anybody bet on an underdog) and GoneWithTheWindSaur is a little OP ... there were a few unpleasant surprises though.

My experience: GoneWithTheWindSaur > Barney > Godzilla > Rex > LightningSaur = Road Runner in most cases.

Got some time to post an update on where I am from last nights progress + bits here and there from today. It's finally looking more like a game:

[attachment=17594:day-4.5.png]

Dinos spawn periodically from both sides - At the moment it's a fixed 5-second frequency so I still need to balance the spawn rate and it needs to get more rapid as Granny progresses.

The terrain is now infinitely generating and granny can only progress towards the right. I've even been a good citizen and cleaned up the resources once they get clipped off the left hand side. Although since the dinos spawn off-screen they do need some kind of ground to land on so there is actually an entry-ramp created for them. Preventing granny from travelling left-wards is done just by adding a large invisible wall to the left; it'll only block granny, the dinos can pass straight through.

I seem to have fixed all my physics related bugs. I had to change to using smooth capsules for granny & the dinos because box2d is not happy to let squares (characters) slide over sequences of squares (the terrain). I gather box2d supports the notion of edge-shapes with "ghost vertices" to support this use-case and I actually wasted some time going off in that direction but it turns out libgdx doesn't currently support the ghost-vertices on edge-shapes, which is a crying shame.

I also had an occasional crash which I worked out through trial-and-error occurred because I was multiply destroying box2d bodies when a bullet collided with >1 dinosaur at once. Since the problem would emanate from within box2d (which is native code wrapped in JNI) it would just completely topple the JVM, seemingly with no exception details or anything - I don't know if there's a good way to handle or debug this kind of thing in general?

You'll also spot I have font-rendering (not my font though but I'll ship the license - free for personal and commercial use). The score calculation is currently just: distance + 10*kills. That probably won't do, better to promote right-ward travel and have the dinos be a hindrance to that so maybe it should be: 10*distance+kills. I'll have to think a bit more on that one.

One final thing to do before the game is bare-minimally complete and that's to handle game-over. After that I'll look at adding soundFX, music and better visuals.

Since weekend is LD time for me too here's my game. I might be able to squeeze some more stages in, currently it's seven of them.

Drive the human herd to the designated spot by scaring or roaring at them. Avoid them being killed by all the dangerous things about.

Default controls are keyboard and left control, can be remapped.

The download got a bit huge for all the music (ca. 10 MB), sorry about that!

[attachment=17595:humanroundup.png]

Get it here: http://www.georg-rottensteiner.de/files/Human Roundup.zip

System requirements: Windows, DX8. It should work on pre XP too, but couldn't test that.

If you're stuck (the cliff level is hard!) press N to skip to the next level.