It seems crazy that more than a year has passed since we released the first playable version of Alun Hevel. And while there have been unregular postings here, not much seems to have moved forward. And indeed, as we are slowly inching towards another release, we cannot really hype that much new content.

Sure, the maps we are going to include in this version will be new ones, the music has changed, and a couple of visual change will appear here and there, it will seem as if it was the work of maybe a week or two. And not something that would take a year.

Apart from bringing an awful pun to your eyes, here is a quick update of what is going on in the team.

In a video game like Alun Hevel, we need to store information inside files.
There's two types of files:

Hi there! Seeing how dead this blog has been for a while, I thought I'd give you a quick overview of what we are busy with at the moment.

I know I said I said that I'd write a post a week...
But, you know, the hazards of life, work and Murphy...

Yet, as demonstrated by this post, I've not given up on my gelatinous friend.

I added a scroll bar for small resolutions so that the entire level can be displayed on their screen (which by the way allows me to have a version of the code on my netbook and code on the train :D).

The flask reappeared, with the idea of recovering the essences (and mixing them), even though I have not yet implemented the action of each color.

One comment that came up most often concerning the LD version of Bloboy (except the extreme difficulty of the game) is the unfortunate choice of controls.
The most obvious solution was to leave this choice to the user.
I therefore took upon myself the coding of a menu allowing the user to choose the controls that he deems most appropriate.

For last April's Ludum Dare competition, I had decided to do something a bit different than what I'm used to : a 3D game. Sure, I had played in the past with a couple of engines, but nothing I had done came close to a full-fledged game. So I took the opportunity to just dive and try to come up with something using the open-source Panda3D engine. With it, I knew I could create games writing only Python code, and I already had a good understanding of the engine's inner workings.

Under the Ludum Dare 20 competition, I produced Bloboy's Journey (available on this website under "games / prototype"), this article and those that will follow shall be devoted to the development of this game from the LD20 and the until its final version.

I'll try to have the regularity of a metronome and publish every Wednesday.
In the meantime, here is the first article :

After quite a bit of work, we are pleased to announce that we have released not one, not two, but three playable games !

Two of them are Ludum Dare entries, found on the prototypes page, while the other is a playable version of our still in development tower defense games, Alun Hevel.