Well, it’s done, I guess.  Not a lot of improvements since last time really, but it’s got interactivity now at least. Oh, and score. Also made it request about 4 pages from wikipedia per question overall, in stead of infinite.

entry page

Wikirunner (aka Wikipedian Tag) is a go:

Every screenshot I post looks the same...

Wikirunner is a game played on Wikipedia articles. There are two players: a runner and a chaser. Both start on a random article; the chaser’s goal is to end up on the same page (at the same time!) as the runner. The runner is simply trying to evade the chaser for as long as possible. You can play it single player, as either player, or hotseat with a friend. Woo! It’s based on Jeremy Bushnell’s Wikipedian Tag rules — be sure to check him out as well.

I spent the last two hours or so giving myself a crash course on python threads, and re-writing all my internet code to be asynchronous. I’m certain this was a good use of my time, too — the little throbber that flashes up while it’s downloading from Wikipedia is so very worth it. Plus I have (tentative, indirect) permission from the author of the ruleset I’m using (‘Wikipedian Tag’) to re-use it here — something I need to actually obtain, as it’s licensed CC-BY-ND, and this is pretty clearly D.

Less than an hour until the deadline. It’s gone midnight. I am rather tired. The most complicated tags so far have just gone in, (SPEECH and TALK, for enabling conversation trees. And probably anything that needs a choice actually. Whee!) and I have an infinite loop somewhere. Oh goody.

Anyway, it’s been an awesome Mini-LD. MUST… FIX… INFINITE… LOOP…

EDIT: FIXED! YAYAYAYAY!!!

Turns out, it’s because I’d got the position in a string, modified the string, then still used that position. Silly me. All works now! Time to update the documentation, submit, and go to bed, and only 25 minutes to spare.

http://pekuja.com/ludumdare/119/globetrotter/

I’ll make my final submission soon. Not much time left, and at least I’ve got a goal in the game now.

Yes, ASCII art additive blending. Oh yeah. But it fails…

Edit: I just fixed it ^^

So I had this cool idea about faeries living in the net, and you could browse webpages and recruit them, help them fight off boss critters, etc..

The problem is that I screwed up my time management; I didn’t get started until today, and the deadline is actually much closer than I realized (who uses UTC?!? @_@).  But anyway, I worked up something which is not a game but is still kind of neat.

FaerieNet – Create a Faerie

I probably won’t be able to work on this any more before the official midnight UTC deadline.  So, this is it for me for this MiniLD.  However, I might just continue working on this project in the days ahead…

I knew I’d seen a game like this somewhere; HybridMind surreptitiously reminded me that it belongs to Jeremy Bushnell, whom I dearly hope doesn’t mind my stealing it shamelessly. Perhaps I should ask.

I should ask.

Anyway, soldiering on in the face of an almost certain copyright violation:

Progress! Even though things look the same.

I’ve got both AI players working — they’re not the smartest in the world, but they’ll do. And the Chaser will give you a run for your money if he picks up the trail. Pretty pleased about that. Still have a few bugs relating to turn length and whatnot floating around, but I welcome criticism! And suggestions!

You can download a windows build here, if you want to give it a spin. Or click mindlessly for half an hour in something other than Firefox. Same thing, really.

After re-discovering HybridMind’s friend’s ruleset, I realized I’m doing a pretty mediocre job of enforcing those rules. I may go back and make this an explicit version of Wikipedian Tag, just to go with the tried-and-playtested rules they’ve hammered out. Not without getting very definite permission, though — that would feel overwhelmingly like theft, even moreso than now.

I’m forfeiting from Mini-LD. It was fun, but I’m tired, and likely won’t get a game together.

I had alot of fun, once again, but this time I just lost too much time dicking around with things that didn’t work out. :-/

Oh well. I’ll be posting a link to my game tomorrow, once I have an actual game.

I got alot done, all things considered. I got a 3D collision engine, mapped 2D images to 3D collision boxes, and got a little dude running around, punching and kicking.

Tomorrow, I’ll add enemies and a camera. Then, a scoring system, and so on.

Today, though, I’m just too tired. I need to rest. I’m not happy about it, but it’s just gotten to be a real struggle for me.

It’s been very fun. I’ll still be around on IRC, and will probably post updates on OpenRansom as I add to it. Less frequently than I did over the course of today. ^_^;

Well, it was fun. Time for me to call it a day.

—Mr. Dude

Items can now be gained and lost, there are IFHAVE and IFNHAVE to conditionally output text, and you can click on items in your inventory to use them: if that area has a [[USE:Foo|Bar]] tag, then it will display Bar if you use Foo. Tags can contain other tags, but not perfectly if there are multiple tags at the same level. eg:

[[IFHAVE:Foo| [[GET:Fish]] [[GET:Chips]] ]]

The Get tags are at the same level here, and so will display oddly. Though I think they might still work.

If anybody has any ideas of other things they’d like in, please comment below! And feel free to use tags in pages: They make it a game rather than a wiki browser.

I really like this theme so I’m throwing something together here between family duties… not sure if I’ll make the official deadline or not.

Here is my screenshot, you can sort of see what I’m going for here… it’s a word association game made from wikipedia data that is loading in the background as you play.

In the pic, underlined words are “correct”, but that is temporary… going to show hits/misses on the left side of the screen later.

Unless I limit to certain categories or something, it’s going to be .. weird… I sort of like the complete insanity of it so I might leave it “very” random.

So.. pretty simple concept, but would like to bring it up to a level of polish where it really “works”.

I’m using my iPhone framework, but targeting windows for now.

http://pekuja.com/news/106/wikipedia-galaxy-forever/

Now with a playable demo!

As the title would suggest, I threw away a good portion of the day on my romantic, emotional choice to redo everything in Ruby.

I… had a wakeup call. Using Ruby/SDL was my reality check.

In short, the thing threw tantrums at random, denied having methods that the manual listed, and generally misbehaved.

I’m not going to sit here and rant. I’ve got things to do. I just want to take back what I said in my last post.

I’m sorry for all this emotion, but I get alot more wishy-washy when I don’t feel as much pressure. (IE: When the game doesn’t count for a score, and I plan on working on it past the compo anyway)

I’ma shut my trap and get back to work now.

Peace.

—Mr. Dude

Making a quiz type thing (using php and, uh, lua). No interactivity yet (other than reload), but it can load random pages from Wikipedia, parse descriptions, select one as an answer, and show options! Yay!

http://pekuja.com/ludumdare/100/intergalactic-planetary/

So yeah, I guess I’m still posting in my own blog. Sorry about that.

Alright! This is a totally kick-ass theme (thanks, GirlFlash) and I’m glad to see lots of people running with it. Too bad I’m not one of them, though — this is just about the most straightforward Wikipedia-reliant game you can imagine. There are two players, a runner and a chaser, each of which starts out on a random page. It’s basically a game of tag with the chaser chasing the runner through article after article. The chaser moves faster, but the runner has complete freedom to duck into “Lists of Phoenician Rhetoricians” and hide all night, if they like.

It really just looks like a two-player browser, doesn't it?

While technically two-player, you can only (at the moment) play as the chaser against a simple AI runner — I’m currently trying to figure out how to adapt an existing bit of code that calculates the distance between two phrases (actually, my PhD project truth-be-told) into this without making you download ~80gigs of word-vectors.

So, since you all obviously can’t wait anymore with my unbearable suspense, here’s my concept:

It’s actually a quite popular game, which consists in starting at a random page on Wikipedia, and trying to reach a certain goal page in the smallest number of internal links possible.

Now with shotguns.

The idea is to use each Wikipedia page as a level for an action platformer, where the links are the exits. With lots of baddies on the way. And of course, the goal is to find Duke Nukem Forever’s page.

Platforms and ladders... Random level generation ain't that easy...

As you can see I’m far from done.

Oh  and of course, Wikipedia -> text -> console based game. Now that I spent most of my time coding my curses libs, it’d be a shame not to use it…

If I still have time at the end, I’ll use GirlFlash’s wiki as a highscore/hall of fame thingy. But let’s face it, it’s unlikely that I’ll have time left…

http://pekuja.com/ludumdare/97/wiki-space/

Still posting in my own blog. I think I’ll post here directly in the future though, unless I can get the syndication hooked up.

I’m currently working in Python, but I’m finding more and more that I kinda… Dislike it.

I’m going to start remaking my game in Ruby. I don’t have a whole lot of code right now as it is, and I’d be much happier working in Ruby.

That said, there’s a pretty good chance that I won’t finish in time. I’m going to try to have something by the deadline, though.

Edit: Using Ruby/SDL instead of Gosu. Prefer raster to sprites-on-polygons… :-/

I’ll be using Ruby/SDL for my graphics, sound, etc. SDL is one of my favorite libraries, and has yet to let me down. I’m not sure how it is with rubyscript2exe, but it should be fine.

Read on for more explanation, if you’d like.

(more…)

That’s definitely going to be a long night…

Weeeeee, rainbow!

I’m in the process of adding in codes you can use in area pages.

First, there’s [[GET:Foo]], which will let the player pick-up an item called ‘Foo’ from that area. The item will only appear there if they do not already own it.

Then there’s [[IFHAVE:Foo|Bar]]. This checks if the player has ‘Foo’ in their inventory. If they do, ‘Bar’ is displayed. Bar can contain formatting, but I think it won’t work if you put anything with ]] inside it. I’ll have a go at changing that.

I’m keeping an up-to-date list of codes and formatting that work here, if anybody wants to start messing around with them!

I think I’ll go to bed soon, so that’s probably it for today. It’s been really fun so far, especially considering how clueless I was to begin with.