So much for regular updates!

Anyway, where are we?

Err.. nothing on the screen yet, but the design’s been thrashed out a bit better, so let’s go over that.

In Little Quirks you play a Wizard, gazing into your Crystal Ball, and guiding the Little Quirks around the land to keep them being eaten, squished, burnt, splattered, or otherwise mangled. Your energy can be used to remodel the ground, or it can be used to build contraptions and traps. Contraptions directly help the Quirks, and you activate them by touching them, whereas Traps are more for keeping other beasties at bay - but won’t differentiate between Quirk or baddie so you have to be wary of them.

This can give multiple ways of completing a level - you either use all your energy to remodel the land as best you can to help them, or you create contraptions to manually shunt them about the place. There’s a clue there in what you do with the contraptions - you can manipulate them. So, for example, with a catapult contraption, it won’t activate till you touch it, so you can be rather selective in what you use it to fling - be it a Quirk, or something else! It also gives you a bit more interactivity than just setting out the world to play while you watch the Quirks go from A->B.

Of course, as I’ve mentioned, there’s a strong nod to Lemmings. In fact, Quirks has a bigger nod to Lemmings than it’s bigger brother Tiny Critters does. Tiny Critters is more influenced by the rather stunning Lemmings-clone, Troddlers, one of my favourite games that came after the Lemmings phenomenon. But one major point in which both games differ from Lemmings is there is no direct control over the creatures themselves. Quirks has you creating traps and contraptions, as well as manipulating land and contraptions ( but not traps! which will operate themselves. ) Critters gives you an actual character in the game world - much like Troddlers - where again, you influence the direction of the creatures in the world by magic walls and directional arrows, but don’t really directly control what they do like in Lemmings where you give them unique jobs.

Anyway, next time, I’m hoping to have something on the screen.. while I doubt I’ll get much done in the twelve days remaining ( especially seeing as next weekend is effectively taken again, ) I’ll give it my best shot. I’ve still got to implement physics ( going with Box2D, ) audio ( OpenAL, ) and support more than just Linux.

Well, it’s Friday, so what have I managed to get done this week?

Sadly, not much - I still haven’t started on the actual game logic, nor have I even finished the Renderer changes. It’s not that the Renderer changes have been difficult - all the rendering logic was there, it just needed moved about a bit, it’s that things have just been too stressful to concentrate much. The plus side is I should have the Renderer fixed up and running again “soon” - and I’ve also done some fiddlings to Resource so it can act as a shared_ptr in it’s own right, as well as allow it to recast itself into other types where necessary ( for example, passing a RenderWindow into the X11 Event System and recasting it to a X11RenderWindow while keeping it within a Resource object so it dies properly when there are no more references to it. )

None of the engine is thread-safe in the slightest at the moment, though I’m not too bothered about that for now.. there are a few sync points that will need dealt with ( Resource being a key place, for example ) but there aren’t too many at the moment. That and I don’t particularly need that for Quirks so, that can be ignored for now.. what I DO need for Quirks is the Renderer fixed up - at the very least the Fixed Function pipeline - so I can get stuff drawing again. I then need to add Sound ( which should’ve been done last month! ) and support for more platforms than just Linux and Pandora - specifically Android, iOS and Win32 with the possibility of OS X. I do require a bit more than that, but that’ll at least let me start the game logic which I’m hoping to have the majority of done for next weekend. Hah.

Yes.. next weekend.. that’s going to be fun. That’s a major point of stress just now, and I can only hope it goes well else things are going to be up a certain creek without a paddle. That said, if it goes well, then effectively all that stress effectively disappears! Well, for a couple months at least; as then I move.

Anyway, off to work!

To save utterly spamming the LD blog with things, I shall be writing most of the progress reports here, and any big major milestones will be effectively cross-posted.

This one’s a boring one, as I’ve nothing to actually show yet!

So, what have I done to actually warrant a post?
Well, I’ve decided on the game that I’ll be doing “Little Quirks” and I’ve almost finished the Renderer rewriting that I was meant to be doing all last month.

The previous couple of maddeningly long posts cover the engine details I’ve been working on, so they won’t be repeated here.. your scroll arm will no doubt hurt enough from reading them all anyway ( especially as I’ve decided to bump up the post count to 3 per page now, while working on Little Quirks to force me to do more small posts! )

But yes, I’ve decided upon Little Quirks. This was something I started for Mini LD11 - but sadly never finished. In fact, I never publicly released it, nor really saved much of the code, and there’s not much left of it anymore. This is partly why I never went back to it - most of everything I had got lost! However, the idea is pretty solid, and condensed enough to work out in a month, I reckon. Yes, it borrows heavily from Lemmings, but it does go off at an interesting tangent in that you can’t directly manipulate the Quirks - you can only create things within their world for them to interact with. This creates some unique design challenges as do I allow Quirks to have special abilities or not to keep things interesting? Something that was in the original design ( each colour had a specific purpose ) but perhaps that’s something that should be removed for a possible sequel? Either way, there was a multitude of devices to create - some to help your Quirks get about, others to keep nasties at bay ( but weren’t above having a go at your Quirks either should you let them wander too close! )

I’m aiming to get most of the game done by the second week, which gives me two weeks to look for a portal or two to push it on, and then perhaps integrate achievements and gubbins like that for each portal that is mad enough to take it, before spending the final week actually doing the submission process and waiting for approval/rejection/etc… The game itself is being aimed at Android and iOS devices, but should also run on at least Windows and Linux as well.. Mac’s a bit of a funny one as I’ve not yet sat down and really plugged away at it yet, but we’ll see :)

Interesting oddity; I wrote and read-back this post as if it was a sine-wave scroller on an Atari ST demo… perhaps that means there’ll be a good infusion of 16-bit styling in Little Quirks?