I would call my game Incoming Fodder both a minor success and a minor failure.

My goal for this competition was to create sound and music in the game, and of course it must be playable. So I made a lot of sound effect, some good some bad, mostly bad when things get crowded there are so many sfx playing it’s annoying. The music, or what you might call it (You can kill the music) was a complete failure. There was a MOD player lib for flash that I though would be awesome to use, took about an hour to get it to work.

Then I needed to create music. I suck at composing, I know it, doesn’t matter what tools I use, it’s just awful. I might have a tune in my head, trying to get the music to sound like that never ever happens. So I scribble down something trying to make it sound like music, copy paste. Crap, I better sing the tune next time.

I chose flash 9 as platform, that was good. Learned a few valuable things, like it’s not easy to pause things running with event listeners without preparing for that before you build your system. I had to skip pause, lost some time there.

Game play wasn’t as developed as I wanted. I really don’t know why I didn’t have time to improve here, I picked the idea of the game so I could spend more time on polish, but I guess I wasn’t interested enough in the idea to really devote to it. I need to be quicker in this area. I need to focus on that in the next LD.

Coding OOP is lovely, I had one moment of awesomeness this time. I’ve built a tower that can shoot arrows, then I built a castle to protect, after a while I realized that the castle also should shoot arrows, so I made castle inherit tower and voilà it shoots arrows! I did have to make it own 3 more towers to make it have 4 arrow shooters.

Graphics was the least of my priorities and it turned out ok, the defeat screen it the best of the whole game.

Defend the castle!
Click with the mouse to build a tower. Ctrl-Click to build a casino.

Download CrossPlatform 2.6Mb

Need Flash 9 installed

The monsters don’t stand a chance with the LD formation, hehe.

A* finally working somewhat, I got 2 diffrent monsters now, Really Stupid and Stupid (A*).

Next I think I’ll get it somewhat balanced for gameplay. Oh and polish the A* a little.

I felt like I picked up some speed, here is something remotely playable: http://enedahl.com/ld12/incomingfodder01.html

Going to bed now. Oh, the music is just a placeholder, a demo .mod file.

And buying towers works, they can cost gold and wood and should be taking time to build. My goal is to get it playable and have sound and music. Something I’ve neglected in my prior entries.

Im going for a Tower Defence with resource and upgrade trees.

Title screen working, and filling the screen with towers works also.

From wiki:

I’ve participated in a few ludumdare contests over the years, one with a friend. This friend gave me a call about me helping out with some flash stuff for JunglePeak. I meet up with them and pushed that I’m very interested in making games. I also took a lower price for game development. I did a few things, mainly flash website stuff, for them and it worked great, well, except for me working more than I want, I wanna work with games and have the time off with my family. So I introduced my current day job with this entertainment company hoping I could consult, that resulted in nothing.

A few weeks later Ludumdare 11 took place, one of the highlights of the year, I made Exxon - The oil contaminator a game based upon an idea I’ve pitched for this company. So the Monday after LD11 I sent the game to the entertainment company and a few days later the CEO called me up. He wants me to lead the development for their MMO flash game. Three weeks later the contract is signed and after the summer I’ll start making games for a living, partly thanks to Ludumdare.

I’ve found out that level mode is troublesome on Vista system. Running my game in a browser solved that problem. However, performance goes down a lot in the browser. To get decent framerate shrink the browser window until it feels good. Here is the game

http://enedahl.com/ld11/final/exxon.swf
Same as the exe but online.

You are on a mission, decontaminate that oil! Instructions are in game. The name Exxon comes from a oils spill disaster in the USA.

Download in following flavours:

Flash 0.2MB - Requires Flash 9 installed
Windows Executable 1.5MB
Macintosh Executable 3.9MB

Running the game in a browser is possible, but cripples the framerate. I recommend running the executables or running the swf in flash player 9 not in a browser.

Edit:

There are two modes: Level mode and Free mode. Click: “Click to play” for level mode. And 600,1200 or 2400 for Free mode, where the numbers are how many oil spills there are. Note, if you by any chance run the game in the browser, the Level mode might not work and falls back to Free mode 600. If you see a lot of (N)’s around, you are in free mode. Go back (Esc) and click “Click to play” again for Level mode. (Xml loading issue)

Edit2: Those on Vista could not run the game in level mode. It turns out that running it in a browser worked. http://enedahl.com/ld11/final/exxon.swf
Same as the exe but online, will hurt perfomance though… keep the window small for better fps.

Ahhh that coffee was great!

Islands are temporary up, No collision responses yet and uglyishly(I made up that word just now), randomly placed. I made all islands fit a circle, to simplify the collisions a lot, fits the theme as well. I’m gonna put the islands in a separate sector manager. Next is collisions and neatly placed islands.

Closing the gap!

Ta da! The oil is gone! It’s magic!

Want to test download the exe (windows) or run the swf, although the swf is slower. Arrow keys to drive, space to deploy buoys.

That’s all for day one. I’m going to bed. (00:13)

Crazy buoys flying all over the place. I got them under control now though. Next step is to close the buoy divider and get points for decontaminated oil spills.

Hotdogs! Yeah, I forgot to buy the bread. Toast it is. Works.

Great, I had a tough bug haunting me for some time. When it finally was fixed I got the game up to speed. I can have 2000 oil spills at good framerate in flash on my laptop 2ghz centrino. Thanks to some dynamic sectoring.

Next up is to wrap the oil spills by dividers that will be dragged by the boat. And then some islands.

Mmm chocolate eggs.

On the screen you can see 200 oil spills (circles) pushing each other away to a distance, thats about the maximum amount possible ATM. I’m investigating dynamic sectors to solve the performance issue. The oil is moving slow so they don’t need to update their sector every frame. perhaps once every two seconds.

In my garden. It’s really not much bigger that what you can see here.

Mmm Sweat and sour chicken.

Thinking about my game, the boat is steering now. Could use a little tweaking, but I’ll move on anyways, not to get cought up in tiny issues. Not putting up a screen now, think title screen with only blue and boat and you got it.

Ahhh the coffe is ready… back to coding.

A sketch of the title screen.

This will be a 2d topdown boat game in flash. Isolate oil spills with dividers. All graphics and sound are kept minimalistic and simple. If stuff goes quick and I have a playable semicomplete game today I will try make it multiplayer.

The name Exxon comes from a oils spill disaster in the USA.

Me and my two chidren, eating at my workplace.

Coffe and sandwich

Some energizing topping..

And the idéa for minimalist?  Perhaps a boatgame I had in mind before the compo. Yes, I’ll elaborate on that idéa. The minimalist part will be the visualisation of the game, both graphics and sound. Clean, simple.

I’m sitting in the kitchen this time. With my laptop. The stationary PC’s monitor is blurry and I cannot look at it more than half an hour or so. Whats up with the toys? Well… I got kids. Oh you mean the Nintendo DS? Thats mine ;P

Want a closer look at the screen? I’ve begun brainstorming on the themes with most votes, those on the left are less likely to win, and those with bold type got more than 10+ votes.

Finally I’ve ported it away from XNA to OpenGL, still got the (almost) same lousy controls, for your pleasure. Still needs .Net 2.0 to be installed though, but should be compatible with Mono, and thus playable on Linux. If someone like to try to compile it on Linux, contact me. Some things have been tweaked and added. But the game play is the same. Added ugly clouds for better sense of height movement. Updated the physics lib to the newest version.

Arrows: (over) steer

Z: Claw claw claw!

X: TURRRRRRBO

Space: Reset heli position

R: Reset level

N: Next level

Download now! 441KB Now with dependencies included!

Only 4 people rated my game. Thats unacceptable, I need get rid of XNA. So I’ve thrown all XNA stuff out of it. I needed to poke a bit in the source of the physics lib as well to cleanse out the filth, thankfully that was easy. Now I need to tame the horrible controls (That was my fault, cannot blame XNA for everything), and then pretty it up and I’ll make a release. I plan to port it to linux too, with Mono.

I’m only using Glfw, OpenGL and .Net 2.0 as we speak. For sound it will be OpenAL.

What went wrong

1. Choice of development platform, XNA studio 2.0 Beta. People were having trouble running the game. I knew this before I started but things like Intellisence, love for C# and curiosity of XNA took the upper hand. This was my first XNA game, and my first use of an physics engine. I used Farseer 2d physics lib. Having no previous experience in both fields was challenging.
2. The controls are like standing 100m away from a real helicopter with a remote control keyboard that has a delay of 2 sec. It made the game totally unplayable for most of the people who actually got the game running.
3. Too advanced idea for the time frame.
4. No guidance when flying out of scene.

A lot of these stuff are related to the physics engine and my lack of experience with them.

What went right

1. The editor was whipped up in director’s authoring app very quick. Place and size different rects and run generate() to make the xml level file. Yeah, loading levels were easy too. with xml serialization.
2. Sound effects came out great thanks to DrPetter’s sfxr program. The xna audio framework was a bit confusing at first, but it did the trick. Adjusting the helicopter engine sound along with the thrust was effective for game play.
3. Game play is really fun once you get the hang of the controls. I found myself several times playing around when there was stuff to code.
4. Code. The code is clean and got unusually many comments for a LD contribution.

Porting

So I decided to try to port the game away from xna, to OpenGL, so that more people can play it. The rendering part went fine. But then the physics lib stabbed me in the back again. It uses the xna lib. So I dug out a version that did not. But I failed again. It turns out that that lib also is xna dependent. So I tried to get the source code and remove all dependencies. But failed to grab the source. Not much energy left to de-xna it.

A helicopter physics game, made with XNA 2.0 beta.

You will need a pile of shit to get this to work, here it is:

1. .Net 2.0 SP1 (we are currently uncertain if it ships with Vista)
   • Note you can also use the original .Net 2.0 but you will also have to install the C++2005 SP1 Redist (G4WL will also install this, so this is only needed if you are not also installing that redist)
2. DirectX9.0c
3. XNA runtime 2.0

I’ve had ppl not being able to run the game anyways, Im looking into the problem. Pls tell me if it works for you.

Anyways I hurried with the levels, Yay it was fun to make them I hope to release a map pack soon. Unfortunaly the editor is built within director, so I will have to work on it a bit to enable the community to build their own maps, unless you got director. All sound was made with DrPetters godlike sound effect app, sfxr. Kudos to him!

Game goals: make the red box be within the red rectangle for 3 seconds to go to next level.

Controls: (Xbox360 controller should work, not tested, buttons? test them!)
Arrows <- -> Steer

ArrowUp/Down throttle

Z - Open/Close the CLAW!

X- Turbo (For making panic manouvres)

R - Reset level (Yeah this key you will know by heart)

N - n00b?

Here is bin 440KB

And here is source + editor + bin + other useless stuff 3MB

Yay! I have a working editor! Im using director and layout out sprites and rect at positions and various sizes.

And here is an ingame view of the map, after a little playing

I had some framerate issues, was only stuff intersecting at load (Phew)

Thank to DrPetter’s sfxr app I managed to get a decent heli sound. After wrestling the XNA sound app, I got it to pitch with the heli’s thrust value. I got rid of the polygon objects and focus now on rectangles. perhaps I need some springs… hmm. Oh and I got to get some gameplay, important that one. Anyways I gotta catch a train, there is a x-mas “smorgasbord” waiting for me 110km south… ta ta!