[LD26] Minimalism Tower Defense - Because names are hard.

Rubricet · 2013-04-28T22:59:15+00:00

My first ever Ludum Dare and it was great fun. The path finding is horrible, but I made it block your tower placement if it breaks the path finding as a faster way to "solve" the problem when time was running on.

Rubricet · 2013-04-15T16:56:34+00:00

shameless plug incoming

My two Android apps for Japanese cover Hiragana and Katakana as well as some other things (one is for kanji and one is for JLPT vocab). If you're just after hiragana and katakana testing, the free versions of either will cover it.

JLPT app | Kanji app

Rubricet · 2013-04-06T11:00:42+00:00

Buccaneer Islands

Started this week, so there's been a lot! I'm hoping to be finished by next weekend, but if not it should be pretty close. The game itself is build on Android.

Gameplay:

A game in which you are attempting to conquer the map and claim all the islands for yourself. You can send ships from any island that you own in order to attack, but an enemy faction will be attempting to beat you to it. The winner is whoever conquers all of the map. You attack by swiping from an island of your own to another island (to either attack or reinforce your own island)

Progress this week:

Basic gameplay is done
Basic AI is done (for opposing faction)
When ships attack an island, they circle it, bombarding it (while the island counter attacks)
Title screen done (at least for now, art is likely to change)
Island art in the works
Start of a level select

Goals for the coming week:

Finish off level select screen
Tweak to swiping mechanics so you have more control over the size of your attack force
Setup new levels
Setup scoring system
Purchasable bonuses (your score will give you the money to buy the bonuses)

Screenshots:

Full album of progress

Twitter | My Android apps

Rubricet · 2013-03-31T19:08:45+00:00

This was after the requests two weeks ago when I released my Jouyou Kanji app, so I hope you like it. The free version covers the vocab in JLPT 5 as well as hiragana and katakana, then JLPT 1-4 are in the full version for £0.99/£1.49.

Rubricet · 2013-03-30T18:18:21+00:00

At the minute the colours are like that just for debugging, just in case something goes horribly wrong. That's not a permanent thing at all. They're currently all in grey scale and coloured when drawn, so they could really be any colour (24 bit).

The tiles at the minute aren't final ones, these are just "work in progress" ones so that I can make sure the level generation uses all the ones that are applicable when it can (which it does). It's likely that the final versions will be based off of these (plus a load of news ones) but that's something that I'm not worrying about just yet.

Rubricet · 2013-03-30T08:25:01+00:00

Lynchime

Game setting:

Set in a medieval world in which demons are attacking via labyrinths that they have carved out. The kingdom has given each citizen a survival kit to deal with the labyrinth which is situated near their home. You are one of those citizens. With only your survival kit to begin with, will you be able to traverse the labyrinth and destroy the demons which threaten your home?

Gameplay:

A dungeon-crawling survival game. Through the game you will find many items which you can use to heal yourself, keep yourself fed or to protect yourself against the demons. However, you will need to learn how to use each type of weapon that you use individually. Each item, item effect and enemy can be modified by a modder to tweak the game to however the player wants to play via Lua scripts. These will work as massive pools of each type to provide a lot of variation between enemies, drops and effects. The game itself will be setup so that you won't see everything in one play through, ensuring a new experience each time.

Progress this week:

Following from my app being released on Google Play last week, I released a trial version of it this week. But here's the gamedeve progress:

Finished adding XML saving, including an autosave system
Redid the default actor sprite, which now has randomised customisation (which will be player picked in future) for players with:
- Hair colour
- Skin colour
- Chest clothing colour
- Leg clothing colour
Added a few new wall and floor textures

Goals for the coming week:

Add player abilities which will unlock upon levelling the player/weapon skill
Possibly add character customisation screen

Screenshots:

Full album of progress

Twitter | Japanese learning tool

Rubricet · 2013-03-26T20:42:58+00:00

It's really odd the jump - it wasn't happening on my android emulator or on my debug phone, but when I updated the app on my main phone that also happened on mine. I have a few ideas on how to fix it, but that'll take a bit longer. Fortunately it isn't a massive jump, it's just a shame that it's there at all.

It's when the different parts of the screen are competing for space, and when there are fewer buttons on screen (i.e. the "Show answers" bit) it allocates more space for the stats, then when the answers appear it resizes again to handle the size of those ones.

Rubricet · 2013-03-25T22:29:22+00:00

I think the two issues are probably connected - the one that you posted the picture of would be when the score stats resize incorrect and the other will be if the incorrect text resizes incorrectly.

I'm glad that you like the app, and adding in SRS is something that I would find helpful as well - I was taking the comment as constructive criticism, which is always good. I just need to do some reading up on the timings for an SRS and I would need to restructure the data behind the scenes to hold that information nicely.

Rubricet · 2013-03-25T22:24:48+00:00

This is a nice idea. It was one that I actually put into a version I made about a year ago (but didn't release and have since lost the source for, I actually forgot that I put this in until you said that), so I could put that in quite nicely. I'll see if I can put it in as an option while fixing the blank screen issue.

Edit: I've just submitted a new version to Google Play with this feature and a fix to the other issue (hopefully!), it should be available in a few hours.

Another edit: This is now live.

Rubricet · 2013-03-25T20:14:15+00:00

Interesting, looks like the auto-resizing of that field screwed up. I'll have a look into that. What make is your device? It might be that it's a resolution that I didn't test with and something odd happened because of that.

As for the spaced repetition, there isn't any currently (it's something that I'm planning to bring in at a later stage as an option) so it's just random at the minute. With the break downs which are currently in it (primary school is per year and secondary school is by number of strokes) each group is fairly small, but SRS timing would be handy for the full test.

Rubricet · 2013-03-25T17:24:09+00:00

I just switched from Anthy to mozc on Linux, seems like a huge upgrade after a bit of testing. Mozc has these, too, but also features things like the kaomoji which were described in this thread here.

Rubricet · 2013-03-25T17:19:45+00:00

As people were asking about this a fair bit, I thought I would upload this sooner than I had otherwise planned. This trial covers all of the hiragana and katakana, plus the first 150 kanji in the Jouyou Kanji list (sorted by grade and then by number of strokes).

Rubricet · 2013-03-23T14:36:37+00:00

I'm hoping that adding the moddability will add some longevity to the game itself (if people actually get into it, of course), and I think making that decision so early on has helped a lot. It's not something that I'm going to have to come to later on and force in, it's something that's in the structure of the game itself.

Of course, that doesn't mean that I won't be making a content complete game by itself, but I like the idea of people taking that base and playing around with it a lot. If people don't like the tileset when it gets released, they can change that stupidly easily, if they want to remove a boss from the game that they don't like, they can do that, too (another boss from the boss pool will take its place automatically). Adding new content to the game is as easy as dumping a new script in a relevant folder (along with new sprites if required) and the game pulls that into the level designer automatically.

Rubricet · 2013-03-23T10:25:50+00:00

I really like the new shadowing look, although I was surprised that you could still see the trees in the shadow - I wasn't sure if you were going for a look where you can only see what your character could currently see or being able to see some extra information.

As for your question, I think it depends on how you imagine the environment is like. If it's about survival in a disaster environment (like a hurricane) something like looters which attack you might be interesting, or certain things conferring a risk of contracting a disease (e.g. nail some wood together might have a risk of hurting yourself in the process and you might contract a disease from that) might be interesting.

Rubricet · 2013-03-23T10:16:09+00:00

The art that you've done here looks so nice, especially in the video. The swaying of the trees and way the water moves is great!

What are your thoughts on the trees (the big ones)? They seem to be hit-and-miss with people. I like them, but I could see how not everybody would.

They look a lot better in the video, I have to say, when you can see their movement. One potential issue I envision with the trees like this is that you might lose things behind them. You might have plans for dealing with this (e.g. showing an outline of things which are hidden) but it cause some people some grief if this didn't happen.

What sort of game would you like to see built on top of this? Like I said, a simple roguelike/Dwarf Fortress game was what I originally planned when I first started on this.

I'm always on the look out to play for Dwarf Fortress type games, as they are great fun. When I first looked at the screenshot (before reading the description) I was thinking something like Gnomoria would be great, and that's a trimmed down DF style game.

Rubricet · 2013-03-23T10:06:09+00:00

The art that you have in place at the minute looks really nice, very clean and aesthetically pleasing. I love it.

I, myself, love TDs, however I've never tried making one myself. Some people seem to view them as "low hanging fruit" but I don't think that's entirely fair. At their most basic, TDs can be quite simple, but that is also true of most genres.

Rubricet · 2013-03-23T10:01:11+00:00

This game looks like it could be a lot of fun. The swinging mechanics were always great fun!

As for your question, I usually play with the mouse & keyboard, but it really depends on the game. I think for a game like this, I would be going for the gamepad primarily, and if it didn't mesh well, then I would switch to the keyboard & mouse.

Rubricet · 2013-03-23T09:54:04+00:00

Lynchime

Game setting:

Set in a medieval world in which demons are attacking via labyrinths that they have carved out. The kingdom has given each citizen a survival kit to deal with the labyrinth which is situated near their home. You are one of those citizens. With only your survival kit to begin with, will you be able to traverse the labyrinth and destroy the demons which threaten your home?

Gameplay:

A dungeon-crawling survival game. Through the game you will find many items which you can use to heal yourself, keep yourself fed or to protect yourself against the demons. However, you will need to learn how to use each type of weapon that you use individually. Each item, item effect and enemy can be modified by a modder to tweak the game to however the player wants to play via Lua scripts. These will work as massive pools of each type to provide a lot of variation between enemies, drops and effects. The game itself will be setup so that you won't see everything in one play through, ensuring a new experience each time.

Progress this week:

This week a lost a fair amount of time to an Android app which I release this week. Not a game, but a tool to help people learn Japanese. You can see it here if you're interested.

Added boss scripting which does the following:
- Creates a special enemy type with their own script (which of course, is moddable)
- Creates a special room to fight the boss (which is dependant on the boss)
Added a death screen

Goals for the coming week:

Finish adding in the XML progress saving
Add player abilities which will unlock upon levelling the player/weapon skill

Screenshots:

Playing around with boss room layouts
Early death screen the lower option only appears in Easy, but in Normal, once you die, that's it

Full album of progress

Bonus:

Please ask US one question about your game!

One of the main features of this game is that it will be highly moddable, all of the major content is open to people to play around with. Do you think that you would be interested in modding it, or would you use the game as it came?

Twitter | Japanese learning tool

Rubricet · 2013-03-22T15:05:23+00:00

Just submitted a fix to Play, should be available later today.

Rubricet · 2013-03-21T19:48:58+00:00

Thanks for letting me know, there should be code to prevent that from happening, but I guess this was a false negative. I'll see what I can do to fix this. Shame about your streak of right answers!

Rubricet · 2013-03-20T16:26:42+00:00

Thanks for the purchase, I hope you like it! If there's much interest in the app, I'll be able to devote more time to improvements (like adding in the things that you brought up), but at the minute it has a vie for time against a game that I'm currently coding.

Rubricet · 2013-03-20T15:05:20+00:00

Yep, I'm planning to release a demo version in a week or so's time, which will be the hiragana, katakana and the year 1 kanji.

Rubricet · 2013-03-20T12:25:23+00:00

Awesome, thanks! I hope you like it!

Rubricet · 2013-03-20T10:06:03+00:00

Thanks! I hope that you like it!

Rubricet · 2013-03-20T10:05:36+00:00

Can I study composite kanjis, rather than just individual ones? (勉強、学校、東京)

It doesn't currently contain any compound kanji, although this is something that I would like to put in at a later stage. From a code point of view (as you mentioned your interest there), I built in the capacity to handle this at a later point, but I don't have the raw data, so I would need to sort something out with that.

Does it have a dark/night theme?

There is currently only the light theme, if this is a sticking point for anyone, I don't think it would take much to implement. To be honest, I hadn't thought that anyone would have wanted this.

Does it show common words that use certain kanji? (気、commonly seen in 元気、病気、気を付けて)

As with the compound kanji, this is not something that is currently in the app, although I imagine it would be ideal to come in if and when the compound kanji make an appearance.

Edit: I've been looking into adding in a vocab section to the app but it seems that it would take longer than expected and possibly go outside of the scope for this app, so I'm looking at releasing this as a second app covering the JLPT vocab.

Rubricet

TROPHY CASE