Since LD16 I have done some additional work on my entry, “Ruins”. (And thanks to everyone who’s commented on the entry!) A lot of what I’ve done has been technical and a bit behind-the-scenes, but I wanted to share a very short (3 room) demo I’ve put together of both a new mechanic for the player and several smaller features of the engine.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can find it here:

http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/ruins-demo-1220/

(This is more of a tech demo than a “game” — you can “win” by completing all three rooms, but there aren’t any gems to collect or any leaderboards to deal with.)

And here’s a couple of quick screenshots:

From a gameplay point of view, the interesting change in this demo is the addition of a brief (about 6 seconds) period of time after dying during which you can exist as a spirit. During this spirit existence you can still interact with objects like levers and switches, but you are immune to damage and cannot attack. If you’ve created a “Patch of Life” before dying, and you reach it as a spirit before your 6 second time limit expires, you will be restored to life.

Smaller updates include moving to flixel 1.47, adding levers, moving gates and bridges, pressure plates, pushable blocks, and bats (well, a rough of draft of bat AI anyway — they’re still just brown blocks that flap around the room). I also took advantage of the post processing support in flixel to add some very basic lighting effects and some blurring and color effects during “spirit mode”.

I’m experimenting with the tilesets as well: this demo includes tiles either taken directly from, or based on, art assets released by Daniel Cook (http://lostgarden.com) and they’re certainly nicer than what I was able to whip up at the tail end of 48 hours, but for the next Ruins demo I’m planning on trying to put together a couple of more abstract (and simpler) tilesets just to see how that might change the feel of the game. (I’d like that next demo to include a rough cut of the introductory scene for the game, that way it might give you a bit of flavor for the story rather than just a bunch of technical doodads to poke at, but I’m not sure when I’ll have that ready.)

As always, feedback on any part of the demo is more than welcome.

And finally, just for fun, here’s a screenshot of the first draft of the second cave in the demo as it appears in the editor:

So far the player can wander around, jump over things, and shake mangoes out of trees; and since it’s 4 AM for me now, I’m somewhat reluctantly calling that “good progress” for the first night ;p

I’m not really super pleased with the result (in the end, I think the game still has too much “oooo… parallax” and not enough “wow, that was fun!”), but I also don’t have a clear direction that I’d want to push the idea in at this point, so I’m letting it stand as is for now. Maybe someday when / if I get a better sense of exactly what I want people to do in those caverns I’ll spin off a different game based on the entry.

Anyway, heres an updated screenshot (once LD was over, I immediately and shamelessly plugged in some graphics from LostGarden.com):

It’s playable online here: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/play-xue/

As Kobel suggested in the comments on the entry, I did use a color matrix to tweak the background layers (actually, the original entry did that too, but it only darkened them, so it wasn’t much of an interesting effect). There are a few different “atmospheres” that the game uses for the caves, each of which fiddle with the colors of the background layers in different ways.

Gameplay-wise, I added some fireball spewing monsters, along with items that restore fuel. I also fiddled with the controls for the player’s ship (and actually I’m still fiddling with them, even with the game already released online), and adjusted the way the crystals spawn.

The map is also completely enclosed now, so there shouldn’t be any more invisible walls, and there’s no longer a way to fly off into space off the top of the map. Technically the map generation got tweaked a bit too, but nothing terribly interesting (the maps start out at half size and get scaled up, which both speeds up the generation a bit and cuts down on some annoying small-scale features).

I’m always happy to get feedback (though on this one, like I said, I’m not sure if I’ll stick my fingers into it again for a while unless a really compelling new direction for it comes up).

I also realized when I was getting ready to write this post that I never posted the updated version of my LD14 entry — so I hope nobody will mind if I tack it on here!

That entry was Crushing Pressure, and it turned into this little Flash game:

You can give it a whirl here, if you like: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/play-crushing-pressure/

The original entry for LD14 had the same basic goal (rescue the little people while avoiding the walls), but it didn’t have any other obstacles to avoid (the updated version adds the DoomCubes and WhizBlades). The released version also added music, and little extras like an honest-to-goodness score counter and some quick transitions between levels. It’s still a pretty simple game, but there are a few minutes worth of gameplay hiding in there, I think.

Thanks for the feedback everyone left on both the original entries!

If you like, you can play around with it here: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/ld15-xue/

I think I’ll be calling it “Xue”, but I’m not entirely settled on that yet.

Oh, and here’s what was today’s breakfast — it was responsible mostly for fueling the bump-into-walls part, I think…

For starters, here’s a grainy, badly lit picture of my desk!

(I also fail at taking pictures of my tasty food stuffs, but I knew that ahead of time.)

I decided at way too close to the last minute to whip up something for this LD. (my first — which is probably why it’s been such a clumsy affair!)

In any case, it’s a little Flash game I put together with FlashDevelop (and SFXR for the few sounds it has) called Crushing Pressure (the screen shot doesn’t really do it justice, even though there isn’t that much justice to do).

It’s online and playable here:

http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash/ld14/index.html

And the source, if you like:

http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash/ld14/AngryWaffle_Crushing Pressure_LD14.zip