This is my entry into the Ludum Dare competition for December 16th 2007. It comes with a Windows binary and the source code. It’s not quite a game. It’s more of a game engine or toy. The commands are the cursor keys to move your selector around, and ‘u’ for up, ‘d’ for down, ‘r’ for right, and ‘l’ for left.

The game is a setup as a grid. Each cell can have animals: elephants,dogs, cats, and mice. The idea was to set of chain reactions by placing certain animals or changing which direction an animal was facing. Currently you can only change the direction animals are facing. But the animals do have behaviors that you can exercise. Dogs will chase cats; cats will run if they can. Cats will chase mice. Elephants will stampede if they see a mouse, and charge in any given direction for a short burst. Another idea to add to the game would be to have items perhaps, e.g. peanuts, bones, catnip, and cheese to persuade the creatures to move into some alignment that is favorable.

Graphically, I was trying to go for a hand drawn animation look, with the flicker that inevitably results from little mistakes on the tracing. I think if I had put a kind of sketch-pad/notebook background behind it, and finessed it a little it might have made up for my crude artistic skills. I created each of the prototypical animals using the draw-vector program I made (included with the zip file).

I only managed to get out one level, and there’s no goal. So it’s still at toy status. My excuse was I was fighting with my environment for almost all of Friday just trying to get Windows binaries from CLISP. Once I had my environment working, doing remote development with SLIME had a bad behavior which nearly forced me to go to some other development kit mid Saturday. However, once I fixed my SLIME problem, it was actually pretty fun to write it in Lisp. Oh well, maybe next time I’ll have my environment ready before hand.

Anyway, it was great to try out the competition. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot.

-Shane Celis

Toolset

• CLISP (Windows)
• lispbuilder-sdl
• Emacs + Slime (Mac OS X)

Tags: final

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 9:12 pm and is filed under LD #10 - Chain Reaction - 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.