maximalist: a cover of GBGames LD#11 ‘minimalist’ minigame
Here’s my entry for mini-LD#5.
It’s a cover of GBGames LD#11 entry, ‘minimalist’; turned evil. I like to think of it as a minimalist survival horror.
You can download maximalist and read more details here.
There is a gameplay video here … but it leaves off the surprise ending, so you still have to play the game :).
The goal is to complete 25 levels an achieve the highest score possible.
Libraries used: Pygame, Rabbyt (including the pygame_font.py font rendering code), my (alpha) simplemenu library.
Tools used: The Gimp, Sfxr (DrPetter saves the day, yet again), Audacity, oggenc
I used a scanner to ‘photograph’ various objects around the house (including myself) to provide source images for further manipulation.
Assests: “Squealer” font by Ray Larabie, A scan of my face, A scan of a carved wooden ’skull’ box on my desk, some hand drawn sprites (exit and glowstick), me screaming into the microphone.
Things I learned
Rendering fonts using the Rabbyt library is a little ugly unless you are using Pyglet for textures. I was using Pygame, so while I was able to use the pygame_font.py code which comes with Rabbyt to render fonts, it just felt wrong.
Source control (SVN) saved my butt this time. I was happily coding away, when I realized a few revisions ago the game performance had really dropped … constant slowdowns and jitters. I checked out copies of several revisions back and tested them to see at which revision things started to go all sluggish. Then, looking at the svn diffs (using Trac), I could see that it was my implementation of the score rendering code that was the likely culprit. Sure enough, making some sensible changes fixed the slowdowns … silky smooth gameplay again 
I also learned that I perform better when I’m more relaxed … I deliberately choose a very simple game to ‘cover’ so I could focus more on graphics and polish, and I wasn’t even fully committed to completing the game this weekend. Taking a laid back approach really helped (at least it felt better).
November 9th, 2008 at 4:11 am
Superb ending!
November 9th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Nice… this seems to be the LD for disturbing games. You know you can cheat by just leaving the screen in windowed mode!
November 9th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
I probably deserved what I got in the end. I cheated the whole way through the game. In windowed mode you can teleport by simply moving off the window.
November 9th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Hah! I’m honored! And I love your cover! The graphics are pretty scary and trippy.
November 10th, 2008 at 1:00 am
Hmm … you know I wasn’t that sneaky in my testing and didn’t even notice that obvious teleport exploit (*blush*)
… it’s actually a nice test of simple lateral thinking (I failed). I guess I should make ‘electric’ edges or something ….
GBGames: Scary ! Mission accomplished ! I hope I was able to do the original justice
My best score, without ‘cheating’, is 130 (died on the second last level) … since the levels are random, I guess it’s only a matter of time before a perfect score is achievable.
In case anyone skipped the README … you get 10 points for exiting a level, you lose 5 points for using a glowstick, and your score is HALVED each time you die. Since there are 25 levels, the perfect score should be 250.