Weekly Recap #120: Breakout and Ludum Dare 42 (Tetrolled) (Patreon)

This week I had to take care of a bunch of personal stuff, so I was a little less active than usual. But I still worked on the Breakout clone and implemented most of the power-ups in the game! And then on Sunday night I made an entry for the Ludum Dare #42 in two hours!

So yeah I've been working on power-ups on this! It's one of the last things to do, along with level progression, score, audio, and menus!

It took some time to get into the power-ups because I didn't really know how to go about it, but now it's coming along pretty well! There are only two unfinished power-ups in the works, and seven finished ones!

In the end I just went and modified the code of the different gameplay elements so that they act and look different when the different power-ups are active. It's messy but it's the faster way.

Also it turns out that I'm probably going to have to change the layout of the game a little bit to be able to display the score and which power-ups you have active. So that will probably take an hour or two to fix up. Unless I get a more clever idea... We'll see!

But yeah, progress was somewhat slow on this front this week. I was hoping to get the game done last week and now I'm hoping to get the game done this week. We'll see about that!

It is still going pretty well though, even with the slow progress. I'm happy with how it's coming together.

Ludum Dare started off on Friday night and the theme sucked. It always does if you look at it in just the right light. But besides that, this theme wasn't enticing me at all, which is quite unusual. The theme was "running out of space" and to me that sounds like a call for clever space management of some kind. That would be a good design exercise, but it's not what I was looking for at all here. I just wanted to have fun making something without thinking too much about it.

So I pretty much gave up instantly and went about my week-end, advancing some more on the Breakout clone. Until Sunday night.

Sunday night, 2 hours before the deadline for the LD compo, I get an idea for a dumb tetris clone that won't let you play like you want. This was going to be my third Tetris clone, I had a good idea of how to implement it, I set to work.

2 hours later Tetrolled was done! I had to scope down my original idea a tiny bit and my tetris implementation is a little rough around the edges, but fully functional!

Tetrolled is like Tetris except the game doesn't really care.

- Play it!
- Check out the source code!
- Rate it if you want!
(leave a comment too, I love reading them!)

I made it with Pico-8 as I said I would. I was struggling going back to Lua from C++ but it was ok! It felt really good to produce something dumb like this over two very intense hours. And I'm actually pretty happy with the result, it's really not that bad! ...for something made in two hours!

As always, thank you to all my Patreon supporters, supporting me in my wild adventures! Here are the names of all my 3$+ supporters!

Alan Oliver, amy, Andreas Bretteville, Andrew Reist, Andrew Reitano, Anne Le Clech, Austin East, berkfrei, Bitzawolf, Brent Werness, Chris McCluskey, Christian Östman, Cole Smith, Collin Caldwell, Dan Lewis, Dan Rees-Jones, Dave Hoffman, Finn Ellis, Flo Devaux, Giles Graham, HERVAN, hushcoil, Jacel the Thing, Jakub Wasilewski, Jearl, Jefff, Jeremy Bouin, Jesse Bergerstock, Joel Jorgensen, Joseph White, Marcin Majewski, Marty Kovach, Max Cahill, Meru, Paul Nguyen, Pierre B., Qristy Overton, Reza Esmaili, rotatetranslate, Ryan Malm, Sasha Bilton, Sean S. LeBlanc, Thomas Wright, Tim and Alexandra Swast, vaporstack, Zachary Cook

That's pretty much it for this week! It was ok!

This coming week I'll be hard at work on finishing the Breakout clone!

Have a great week!

Take care!

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