Hachoo! is my game for the Ludum Dare 48-hour game programming contest. When there is progress, it will be given here.
Time left: 10hrs 47mins 43secs
Well, even if I don't finish, I've hammered out an awesome game framework that I can reuse. I've been spending probably well over a year designing a framework in my head, and so many of those concepts got introduced here, in places where I really should've been rushing through =D Ah, well. I'm pretty sure I'll have a game, but it'll be really ugly and have terrible levels.

I suppose I should explain my concept really quick: You are a bacterium who is trying to find his way out of an office building and into the world at large. The inhabitants of this building are rather mindless; they just wander back and forth, toiling away at their boring jobs. You can cause the person you are infecting to either cough, which slows them down briefly, or sneeze, in which case, you are expelled along with your host's excess mucous. If your sneeze lands on another person, you'll infect them; if you miss, you'll have to start all over.

It's really too bad that I'm going to have to end early; I've got a family gathering this afternoon. (Contest ends at 8:00 my time.) So I've got, at most, 6 hours left; probably closer to four.

Best get cracking!


Time left: 7hrs 51mins 51secs
Argh, I am going to beat MINGW/GDB into a bloody pulp right about now =P

I can't do any reasonable debugging because "this" is apparently nearly always an incomplete type. Thanks a lot. Not to mention the fact that breakpoints don't always stick.

So, I'm almost at a stage where (good Lord) I have a simple tilemap up =P But, I've also got all of my game logic written, so once my framework stops crashing on me, I simply write level-loading code and I'm good to go. Oh, and make some levels.

An hour or two left for me. I think there is internet at the family gathering, but it isn't wireless, and my iBook's ethernet port is busted. And my battery only lasts like a half hour (it's been neatly halving its capacity for a while now), so working on it in the car is out anyway.

Blarghglyjl!

And it's going to be ugly, too!


Time left: 7hrs 32mins 20secs
Oh, man. Been so long since I touched Allegro that I forgot RLE sprites were different from BITMAPs. My face = red.

The First Screenshot!


Time left: 6hrs 18mins 40secs
So, I imagine I'll be whisked away to my family gathering any moment now. I'm so close to playable, though! I just wrote a level loader and I've already got the game logic in, so I'm very close indeed. Of course, no time for actual levels, which means the game itself will suck. Still, check out... The Second Screenshot!
Real time left: 30mins
My brother just called - they will be here in half an hour. My fate, therefore, is sealed! Whatever I can make work in the next half hour is what my game is going to be!

Crazy bug right now -- three blocks which are clearly marked as walls are being interpreted as infected people; but only when I'm not running the program in the debugger. Waaaugh.

Oh, just fixed it -- was reading some random garbage past the end of the level file.


Real time left: 15mins
So, I guess I'm not gonna make it in time. My timers are broken --
Okay, writing things here really helps. I wasn't scheduling my timer task. Fixed. Lesse -- collision detection is broken -- hah, <= instead of >=. Fixed. It crashes when you switch between the title screen and the game screen too much. People don't start back up after you make them cough. (Oh, timers are still actually broken. Fuck.)

It would be neat if I got home before 8:00.


Time left: -1hr 30mins
I lose.

I think my concept has some merit, though, so I'll finish it up eventually. Plus, my framework is great. All the code I wrote is clean. That's why I didn't finish =]


Time left: -12hrs 19mins
Just poked at it for another 45 minutes. My timer problems were due to problems that I was having with the STL. I decided to use the STL to save on development time, neglecting to factor in the fact that I haven't really much used the STL before.
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