As for the game, I haven't gotten back to it yet from when I last posted. School started again and I've been much busier since, but I'm hoping to either do some work on it this weekend or, at the very least, next weekend.

I have had trouble in the past with one of your other games. I can install click once applications that I personally create.

I'm in the process of moving, and haven't had a lot of time this last week, so sorry about the delay in replying. We are in transition right now. When I have some down time I'll try a third party click once application.

Hopefully work is continuing well on the game.

I downloaded game. It finished installing, but then the game wouldn't load. At first it was giving me a box saying there was a problem. I tried restarting my computer. Then when I attempted to load the game, nothing would happen. I tried an uninstall and reinstall with no luck either. Using Windows7 64bit with XNA installed. Since it won't start at all I don't even have a message or log to give you to look at.

Perhaps someone else could try installing and seeing if it is just my machine?

-Brett

If you do happen to try it, I'd appreciate any thoughts, but most importantly, I'd like to know how it runs on your computer (like if there's visible lag or your computer's fans consistently turn on as soon as you open the program) because calculating how dark/light things should be is sort of complex and it borders on lagging for me.

Happy New Years Eve! See you all in 2016!

In the last couple of days, I have:
- Drawn a basic backdrop (just a simple wood floor).
- Added a fade-in effect for all lights, as well as improving light-blending in particular situations.
- Set the camera to track the player.
- Improved the player's animations (I added a ToWalk animation, which leads into the walking loop and also allows for a static position, plus all of the code controlling when to do what with transitions between it all, as well as making a simple image showing the flashlight being held).
- Placed a low-power LightOrb over the player to function as a really simple "night-vision" mechanic … Basically, this is just so that you can see yourself and what the player character is doing.

I hope everything's going well with you all and whatever you may be working on. See you guys later!

First of all, the player now draws on the screen with a simple walk animation and can move around in the window, in and out of the various light sources. Unfortunately, I ended up ditching the original 3D model I was using after I'd already gone through the entire process to animate it inside the game and got a new one, redoing the entire process, so a lot of time has actually gone into this relatively simple task. Oh well. I've also added the control for the player to turn on and off its flashlight.

Additionally, I've done a lot more work on the lighting. As well as reworking how each "dark cell" finds a light source to determine its transparency so that light sources can blend better (basically, I fixed the problem from the screenshot in my last post), I also completely rewrote how the flashlight beam is calculated to fix performance issues that ended up making it look a lot better, too. Oh yeah, and it moves to the player's location and points in the right direction.

Currently, I'm working on the artwork for the background so that there's actually some stuff to illuminate and trying to get a fade-in effect when lights are turned on, rather than instantaneous illumination. After that, I may put out a download before moving on to more feature implementation.

See you all later!

My first goal for this morning was to get the flashlight working, and while I've mostly done that (it's not quite finished, but close), I've come across a slight problem …

Last time I checked, two independent light sources don't interact like that, haha! Well, time to claim the Happy Accident achievement.

Although this isn't exactly what I had pictured in my mind, it's not bad. The light will follow the mouse right now, and there's a really nice fade from light to dark - plus, there's already support for more than one light source, and when the two intersect nothing wonky happens. (And if you dislike the way the picture above looks, please let me know with a suggestion about what would make it better.)

So not a whole lot, I know, but I'm rather satisfied with how the morning's gone and I'm ready for lunch. I'm excited to hear about what you guys have gotten done once you're ready - happy coding!

Authorized Personnel Only will be a 2D, top-down game with elements of stealth that features light as a key gameplay element (not dissimilar to Shadow's Veil, from the third competition). Trespassing into an underground facility that, as the title indicates, is off-limits to anyone unauthorized, the protagonist must evade security and traps set up around the darkened facility while attempting to reach the very heart of the labyrinth for a mysterious goal (which means that I haven't figured that out yet). The current idea is that you'll explore the facility by figuring out what is in each room, using as little light as possible so as to not alert whatever is inside it that you're there, before disabling the traps set up or sneaking through to progress. I'm not entirely certain what the overall game will look like (whether it will be one large pre-made map to get through, or numerous independent rooms and set-ups for a procedurally generated map each time you play) or how exactly all the gameplay elements will be balanced, but that's a rough idea of what I have in mind. This is all not only subject to change, but likely to change, haha!

Achievements:

Thinking Ahead: Spend time before the start of the competition planning your game.
Seeing the Matrix: Share your source code with the people in the competition via GitHub, BitBucket, or a simple download.
Happy Accident: You accidentally create a bug that leads to humorous results.
The Tinker: Fiddle with a complicated piece of code and get it to work only after a lot of failed tweaks. (Yup, this happened a lot when programming basic lighting, especially when fine-tuning it to look nicer.)
Leveled Up: You learned something that you didn't know that you can reuse in other games or other programs. (When rewriting the calculations for the flashlight beam, I had to be able to find the closest point of intersection between a line and a point, which proved difficult, but hey, I did learn something from it.)
Vincent van Gogh: You create your own artwork for your project. (Sort of - I'm not making the 3D models myself, but I am animating, rendering, and assembling them into texture atlases.)
10 Hours: You spend at least 10 hours programming your game during the month.

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Source Code

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