The 2nd Global Game Jam happens at the end of January, one week after the upcoming MiniLD. I’m curious as to how many LDers will be participating, and where — I’ll be at the Scottish Game Jam in Glasgow. Anybody else feeling up for some slightly more social game dev?

Seeing as I expect to be somewhere over the Atlantic in about six hours I’m going to have to call this short and submit what I’ve got. Fortunately, what I’ve got is a reasonably complete (if somewhat slim) roguelike: …Deeper. Download it from the submission page and give it a go.

Hex Roguelike! Huzzah!

The game is a teensy bit lackluster, lacking several significant roguelike features. I’m pretty excited about the tech though — my goal for the weekend was to come up with a solid hex-based map and associated utilities that I can use in another project, and I think I’ve succeeded at that.

Ok, guys — thanks to the awesome doohan (tester extraordinaire) I now have, in my possession, a fully working build for both Windows and Linux. I’d really love some testers, since my score submission system could use a shakedown (who am I kidding? The whole thing needs a shakedown…) — so I’m proposing the following bargain:

You give my game a quick playthrough, submit a score, then leave some kind of feedback in the comments here. Leave me a link to your builds and I’ll download, play, test, and generally try to break ‘em, generating needlessly detailed bug reports in the process. Sound fair? Together we can improve the overall bug-free-ness of LD16 — download the Windows or Linux build of …Deeper and leave me some thoughts.

A beautiful, animated, working title screen.

...and a gameplay screenshot. Did I warn you it was a roguelike?

In the meantime I’m going to go off and try to hack together an OS X port — and, oh yeah, pack for the plane I’ve got to catch in seven hours. I love LD.

So I’m just about seven hours into this thing, and it’s going reasonably well. Lighting works, which is cool — when you walk around the map things are revealed as you approach, then fade back into darkness as you move elsewhere. I’m probably going to duck out of here a little earlier than normal (got to catch a plane Monday at 4am, and I still haven’t packed!), so I don’t expect to get too much else into the game beyond some simple dungeon crawling mechanic.

Lighting!

Brie, cranberry, and chicken ciabatta. Mmm.

I remembered, just before I took the first bite, that my phone is more than just a device for playing Galcon. Lunch was a pair of brie, cranberry, and chicken ciabatta sandwiches — and I moved a Hobgoblin into the fridge, so I get to follow up this foodie binge with a bit of excellent beer. Celebratory, you ask?

No, just tasty.

Progress proceeds apace: no new screenshots, because nothing new is going on in the visual department. Lots of map-related mechanics in place, though — and I’m about twelve minutes away from having walking entities in the world. All right!

Things are looking increasingly roguelike on this end, which is nice in the sense that I finally have a direction. But a bit problematic in the ever-going-to-finish department, I’m afraid…

I have a procedurally generated hex map. I’m not entirely sure where to go from here, though I’d like (for starters) a less organic-looking map. The plan is to drop the player into this world (cavern? déjà vu…), fill it with fog, and let them loose with limited vision range and line-of-sight. I’ve never done either of these things before, so I’m looking forward to figuring them out. Vision is easy, I think — cover the map with an additive-blended mask — but I’ve no idea how to go about implementing line-of-sight. Wish me luck

See? Hex map.

This is all in python, by the way. In case you were interested. Same basecode as before, caveat bugfixes, etc — I’m not entirely displeased with this progress, because I’ve only been awake for a few hours. Damn you, 2am compo time. Damn you.

Also, my camera is on loan for the weekend so I’m afraid I can’t participate in the great parallel foodie blog. Tragedy.

Oh, man. Has anybody else noticed that we’ve had a truly excellent run of MiniLD themes lately? I’m in, and on time too — I started thinking seriously about things this morning, but didn’t make a post until now. I’ve got something on the order of seven million ideas for this one, ranging from the totally reasonable to the downright Vista-esque, but instead of actually fitting the theme properly I’m going to engage in a little quick-and-sly reinterpretation. It may not be educational, but it will be for education! I present a ludicrously rough version of PopCat!, a collaborative offline-multiplayer wordgame:

A bit of backstory (warning — academic-speak to follow): I’m working on my PhD in cognitive science, and my research revolves around something called categorization — the process by which people recognize objects and group them into logical categories. I’m trying to build a computational model of this using only words, but there just isn’t any data to be found. So far I’ve been getting folks on Mechanical Turk to fill in dumb little surveys, but maybe, just maybe, I can make the task fun enough (and competitive!) that people will produce my data for free. Maybe.

/end academic speak

Anyway, the game is something like Scattergories played in reverse; you’re given a bunch of words and have to come up with a category for each one. There’s a timer, so you have to think fast, and you get points for each category proportional to how many other people came up with the same category. The idea is to make it something of a mind game — do more people thing “tomato” is a fruit or a vegetable? Which is worth more?

The game is in Flash and Flixel (well, B-Flixel specifically), while the data server is in PHP. Joy.

It’s been a few weeks (!), but I feel like I’ve been sitting on this retrospective for so long I may as well post the thing. LD #15 had a fantastic theme, Caverns, and I got a kick out of participating. As usual.

Shelter From the Rain

Looking back at my past LD and MiniLD entries, I really feel like I’m improving. My games for LD15 and MiniLD12 just feel more polished, somehow — a feel which makes me inordinately happy. I did something a little different with Shelter From the Rain; I knew I didn’t have a very strong gameplay idea, and that my mechanic (running around picking things up) had more holes in it than a ten-gallon coffee strainer. So I got the basic game together, then spent most of my time working on little polish-type features. Things like my (relatively) slick menus, configurable options, and online high scores — not to mention some, for me, pretty good atmospheric audio. In my previous entries I’ve always tried to focus on improving my skills in a particular area; this compo was no different.

If I were to go back and re-do Shelter From the Rain, I’d break it up into a series of ‘quests’ — tasking the player with going out and collecting, say, 10 cans of beans. I’d also add more hazards to both the above- and below-ground: fallout, soldiers, survivalists. In short, I wish I’d made the basic game more complex. I also feel like the visual style was crazy-disjoint, something I’d love to improve. “What are these black geary things?!” you cried. What, indeed.

Wikirunner

Oh man. I’m so pleased with this one. If I’d realized it would receive any publicity at all (ohmygod, indiegames.com. I feel legit) I’d have spent way more time working on it this weekend — as it is, the game is basically the product of some hasty Saturday morning programming, and a little polishing on Sunday night. It’s rough, and ugly — but, I like to think, actually Fun.

This is promising. I’m working on a post-compo now, to fix some of the glaring usability bugs people have been reporting and clean up the AI a little. Breath, held.

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.

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.

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.

Put together a timelapse for this weekend; the picture-in-picture is me, waving my arms in time to the beat of stupendous bugs.

Finally, a submission-worthy version, complete with menus, music, and online high scores:

Shelter From the Rain

And, of course, a gameplay screenshot:

Nuclear War. Truly, the end has come. Wait, is that a cereal box?

You dig a fallout shelter, then hoard supplies in it. The ultimate goal is to extend your shelter all the way to the cavern below, and re-unite with the rest of humanity. If you make it there you even get to submit your score (a composite of how much stuff you’ve gathered) to the leaderboards!

Download Shelter From the Rain for Windows, or get the Python+PyGame sources (for Linux).

Is this screenshot busy enough? I'm not sure yet.

Well, stuff is happening. I’m pleased with my first day’s progress — I’ve hit most of the points I designed, and in that regard this has been a smashing success. Trouble is, the game as-is is neither as polished nor as fun (even to me) as what I like to turn in as a final compo entry. Good thing we’ve got another day, I suppose. I’m out, folks — going to hit the bed and work on some music until I pass out. If you’re feeling bored and/or charitable, check out my first day’s (TEMPORARY, SLIGHTLY BUGGY, UNREFINED, etc.) playable: Fallout Cavern.

’tis appreciated!

Lasagna and chocolate. What more could you want?

I had dinner plans. It was covered — I’d gone to the store yesterday and bought way more food than I could possibly eat in a weekend, all of it quick to prepare and full of game-inducing nutriment. And then my flatmates go and make lasagna. I mean, seriously? I have sandwiches to eat, folks. You’d think they’d keep that in mind.

Ahem.

Anyway, all is good — dinner was fantastic, and I solved a niggly little Python bug I was having. Word of caution: when switching back and forth between Ruby and Python, try to keep your head on straight as to which one you’re using. And what constitutes an error in which. My problem came down to my calling a method (in Python) that didn’t exist; in Ruby this is throws an error, but in Python it’s hunky-dory. Apparently. Gargh. I mean, I like the ‘not-an-error’ approach, but it really bit me this time.

So. About that update:

+17 hours.

You (the dude with the shovel) can dig out a fallout shelter, then dash above ground and bring back food and supplies to tide you over through nuclear winter. Graphics are terrible, which is really embarassing — but I don’t really know what I can do about that. Next up, audio, scoring, and some better pacing — the intensity doesn’t ramp up at all right now. Sadness.

Bacon & Brie Ciabatta, plus a handful of pecans, carrot cake, and apple juice.

Oh man, I love food. It’s a good thing I actually have this thing in front of me, because the sight of it makes me hungry. So, progress on the life front — but what about the game? I present a screenshot:

+7 hours.

You can move, dig, and scroll around. But it’s a start, anyway. Nothing technically challenging or interesting going on here, folks — I’m afraid I’m just not that kind of LDer. Sad day.

It's not much, but it's something.

It’s not much — not hardly a dock-quality screenshot — but it’s a start. If nothing else I’m super-pleased with my framework — managed to get the code (for generating the sky, which fades to grey over time, and the bumpy ground) running in about half an hour. Plus some photoshop time, of course, to mock it all up. Good times.

Wee — LD15. Color me excited, or deep turquoise.

In the name of honesty, and because there’s been a flurry of this sort of activity of late, I thought I’d post a link to my framework code that (pending theme selection and noggin-bursting spasms of creativity) I’ll be using this weekend. I call it Bebop, partly because it’s proved relatively useful for improvisation, but mainly because I’m madly in love with clever acronyms. A (slightly) more exhaustive description posted over in blogland, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

Ok. Let’s get cracking, folks.

Or, to put it more succintly, port. For the questionable joy of those of you wishing to combine your passion for dropshadows, love of BSD, and desire to vote on LD entries: you need wait no longer! I have assembled an OS X port of Put the Ball in the Bucket. Proof:

A confession: I don’t really use the ‘unlikely purple nebulae’ background; I just turned it on for Zomg Running On A Mac appeal. This is exactly identical to the contest windows version, so feel free to use it for judging.

Of course, if you prefer your operating system to hail from Washington State or Finland, rather than California, you can still get the Windows or Linux (i.e. python+pygame sources) versions.

I want to tell you a story, a story about something I hate.

“But why,” you ask, “would we want to hear your story?”

I’ll tell you why: do you know what I hate? I hate free hosting services. And so, instead of my daily dose of self-flagellation I decided to download all of the windows-playable LD 14 games, many of which were hosted on places like 2share, rapidshare, getdropbox, etc. This was painful.

But, like any other zealot who has recently undergone such a rugged purificaiton, I have Good News! Instead of jumping through these hoops yourself, you can instead download this:

Torrent of Windows Binaries!

There. Now I’ve taken away your excuse; you have to vote! And, once you’ve voted, please (please!) take the time to seed this for a week or so. I’m only one man, and, more importantly, I’m only one man with a single DSL connection.

*note: Where possible I’ve included whatever each participant marked as “download for windows” or similar. If a downloadable Java or Flash version was provided, I included that instead of the online version. Where no windows binary was available, I included the source code if it was in a language that (might) run on Windows (i.e. python+pygame, Löve, etc.).

**note: Missing from this torrent are: secret_knitter (broken download link), winferno (broken download link), increpare (OS X only), GBGames (Linux only), and eugman (*nix only). Please remember to look these games up and find a way to play them!

***note: URLs for Flash games hosted online but not linked for download are listed in the file “Links to Online Games.html”.

Ok, guys. It’s that time of the weekend. Download Put the Ball in the Basket and give it a try. Windows executable only for the moment; linux and possibly OS X builds later this week.