On 8/8/8 @ 8pm Ludum Dare 12 began, and the world would never be the same. The theme was ‘The Tower’, once again the theme ‘evolution’ was downed through natural selection. I didn’t find the theme very inspiring, but I was also brain drained from taking two finals earlier this day. I aced the classes though, so I was feeling good. One class was calculus, which probably influenced my choice of game.

I wasn’t having any particularly awesome ideas friday night, I wrote the basic “Hello, Tower” code. By the way here’s what I used:

Slow old laptop, which I’ve done all my coding on for about the past year. I like to write comfy code on the couch. Windows XP.

My IDE is Microsoft Visual C++ Express 2008, library is Allegro, graphics in Gimp.

Anyway I went to sleep without a decision at my usual 11pm, too tired to think. The possibilities I had come up with at this point:

1. Grow towering corn stalks by watering, but watering off center will cause corn to grow at an angle and eventually fall.
2. DeSprawler, pluck people from suburban houses and drop them in big city apartment towers.
3. A tetris game where you cleared equations instead of lines.

I woke up at my usual 8am, still not enthused about any idea. After lunch, about 1, I had decided on and started to code tetris. Now, I’m glad I finished it and I’m happy with it, but I could have come up with something more original, but so much time had already passed, I figured this would be simple to do in the time I had.

Also, funnily, I almost did a tetris clone for a previous LD. In LD6 (Light and Darkness) I started a game which involved working at a solar panel assembly plant. Solar panel parts would come on a conveyor belt, in tetris-like shapes (but I was going to have many more shapes) and you would pick them up with the mouse and drop them into a grid. The object was to fill as many grid cells as possible, but to make things trickier, the lights were slowly dimming, but completing a panel would raise the light level depending how much of the panel grid was filled. I didn’t finish that game in time, but now that I have a tetris engine, it would be pretty easy to finish it up to some extent. I put this into consideration when deciding on my LD12 game, which is actually not a good basis for the choice.

So, Saturday was making tetris for about 10 hours, rotation is the tricky part, I drew out all the pieces in all the positions on graph paper and typed in about 300 lines for this data. It’s all modularized so I could easily add more pieces and positions (I was thinking, tetris with 8 direction rotation, bricks on diagonal lines). I tested and got the numbers and symbols in the bricks and tried forming equations. They weren’t coming out too well, always the wrong symbols, I was thinking of giving up now because the game seemed overly frustrating. At this point there was not the tower of equations in the start. The game hardly had to do with the tower theme.

I played Notch’s entry: Breaking the Tower for at least an hour on Saturday night, too much fun, I had a few tabs of the game open and would leave them alone to just gather up resources while I coded. Note to self: there will be time to play other people’s games when they’re good and done after the compo ;] These web browser games are great, such easy distribution! This is exactly why I learned Java earlier this year, to distract people so I could win at LD ;]

Saturday night I went to sleep at about 1am, pretty much given up, woke up at 9am, lollygagged, at about 11am I decided I would go ahead and finish it. Sometime after this I came up with the tower idea, put that in, and now I was making equations! I got into it, making the equation checker, and I was doing pretty good on time. The game was a grid on a black screen with green text until about 4pm, 4 hours from the end, when I started making graphics. Making the background with help, code for level starting and sequencing, and tile graphics came pretty quick.

About an hour from the end, I remembered that in LD10.5, the game I submitted didn’t run for some people because I didn’t include any runtime libraries. So I researched that, found some libraries I hoped would work, but I didn’t actually get to test them on a virgin computer until after the end. This was because when I built the game in release mode, I got a screen full of tiles! One hour from finish and here’s the showstopper. Only happens in release, so I couldn’t debug easily, I was stumped. I narrowed it to some problem accessing the grid data, and switched _setstr to strcpy, and it was fixed! Whew, 15 minutes from the end and I almost didn’t have a game. Built my zip, wrote my post, uploaded and that’s a wrap. gg.

I’ve posted pictures of some of my meals, workspaces, kitties, and screenshots as the game was being made at a picasa album here: http://picasaweb.google.com/greencow/LudumDare12

qq l2+

Hola =]

Looks like I’ve finished with 10 minutes left..a new personal record! This is much nicer than finishing with 2 minutes left. Look at me writing this like I’ve got time ;]

I didn’t manage to have time for sound, which is probably good news, I was going to sing.

So Teenage Mathant Ninja Towers is a tetris clone, with numbers and addition, subtraction will be available in the retail version which hits shelves august 2012 for one million dollars MWAHAHAHA preorder now.

No, really, I could use the cash.

The file is here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?njp8o70rl5u

Let’s hope this one works! I included some redistributable files from MSVC2008 in the zip.

Good luck! Looking forward to playing some of your games!

Edit: Drat, well I found a bug, at level 3 there’s minus signs in the tower, however the code for computing minuses isn’t in, so some equations at level 3 and above will not clear. Here’s a link to a zip with no broken minuses, in case you’re really getting into the game and want to play it past level 3, but this version is not to be judged!

http://www.mediafire.com/?w9ptefdxbzc

Hiya =] well I took two finals today, completing my summer semester. If my calculations hold, I’ll have an A in environmental biology and calculus 1 woot. This is a nice place to relax after a busy summer =]

Hmm I haven’t written code in months, guess I’ll use allegro with ms visual c++ express as before.

Good luck everyone, may the force be with you!

Tower Power!

Well, I haven’t done anything except moo at #ludumdare, and come up with a few ideas:

verse versus verse - noah vs moses using some quotes from: http://www.cracked.com/article_15699_9-most-badass-bible-verses.html as attacks.

triangle man versus particle man - from the good ol ‘particle man’ by ‘they might be giants’. simple fighting game, particle man is indicated by a magnifying glass and just can’t win.

? vs ? - type names for each player and the first google image search result for each name is the sprite used for that player.

I’m imagining these as basic ’street fighter 2′ type fighting games, with juwhich is among my least favourite genres, so I haven’t been too motivated to code anything. Triangle man would be easy and a bit comical, mehbe.

Well I’m drinking coffee so that’s a start.

Update: oops, thought I posted this yesterday. well it’s sunday morning and no code, so I wouldn’t expect anything from me.

Hiya =] well I didn’t really post anything here for LD10.5 although I was working on something. The theme was kittensweird/unexpected/surprise, and for that I came up with a cat&mouse game where you would play as a kitty stalking mice using line of sight and keeping quiet. There would also be a movable cheese to bait the mouse. I set out to make the game in a side view with 3 axis of movement, which is far too many axii for a .5 compo =/ To save time I was drawing sprites by hand and taking photos of rooms to use as backgrounds, but putting 3 dimensional objects to do line of sight with was a daunting task, it would need a level editor and would be better presented in 3d at that point, too much for one weekend. Oh yeah, and I was fighting off the sickness. pwnd. Here’s as far as I got:

Also, I won’t be doing the LD11. I’m going to be racing my mountain bike on the cross country course at the sea otter classic in monterey, ca. My laptop bike mount is a little heavy for racing joo know?

So just to give a bit of background behind the chemistry of my game, here’s the page I used for research:

http://www.pslc.ws/mactest/radical.htm

Basically, the creation of the material we know as vinyl is done by a chain reaction of monomers into polymers (polymerization) initiated by a free radical initiator.

If you have shockwave then this short video (from the above page) will demonstrate the process effectively:

http://www.pslc.ws/mactest/movies/peprop.htm

aka FreeRad

Whew gotta get this in!

3 level rushed release =/ more levels later!

found some free file hosting in the last minute, here’s the file:
http://www.mediafire.com/?20tipylt149

(Thanks Jach for offering ftp space)

more to come later, probably my next free day: Wednesday.

Edit: If the game gives an error message like “This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.”, you may need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 redistributable package, which can be downloaded from:
here

Hmm the evening continues! Here’s the first screenshot from my LD10 entry:

hmm wonder what it is!

So far, Friday I worked until 5:30, there was a lame xmas picnic for lunch in which I ate mostly starch. Starch and cookie. My Maia picked me up and I had 1 hour to divert my eyes from 7 hours of videogame testing before 48 hours of videogame programming, the simple act of observing a lamp brings tears to my eyes.

I had a pre-dare snack involving a Tofurkey kielbasa, the best Saurkraut in the universe, and etc. As I delved into the reactorium on #ludumdare, mama maia was making me-a stuffed vegetables, mm mm. Proof!

Also my lack of desk brings this intangible workspace: