YOU CAN’T FRIGTH BACK AGAINST BABBY OF TOWLR!!!

I did a cover of PoV’s Towlr from LD12. Good luck figuring out how to defeat it.
Download it (Windows only, 670kb)

It’s done! It took longer than the alloted time by quite a bit, not to mention I massively cheated (about half the final code is from existing work, not new). But it’s fun, in a weird and weird, weird way. It’s a goofy game. But it’s got skills and leveling up, so that makes it good. it’s also very hard with most of the maps I found, but they all seem winnable if you got ninja skillz.

Enjoy Ninja Kitty’s neverending battle against the horrid Nukebots.

Download: Windows EXE (660kb)

Here’s a screen! You can’t actually get hurt yet, but I can tell it’s nearly impossible so far. Kitty is a ninja in the shinobi style - that means he can teleport dash through the air freely. And he clings to walls and ceilings and throws stars. The only controls are left mouse to dash to cursor, and right mouse to throw stars.

Nukebots, of course, contain nuclear explosives inside. So killing one will cause an explosion that will hopefully help you, but might kill you too. And all those yellow blips are the absurd amount of firepower the robots currently have. They also have way too much life, or you do way too little damage. The color of the Nukebot tells you its abilities. The less green it has, the faster it moves, the less red, the more life, the less blue, the faster it shoots (I know less is weird, but there’s logic to it, I think).

This design supports absolutely any colors you want, not just the official ones! Of course, black=walls, white=space, and FF00FF=player start. But other than that, it’s all robots. And those big colorful blocks make for an awful lot of robots.

I’ve got two ideas for this weekend.  I’m pretty sure I’ll do #2, but it sounds hard, with lots of math.  I don’t like math.

#1 - Pixel Editor

This is a unique idea.  It’s a paint program, with features intended for pixel art, lots of zooming and whatnot.  So what’s special?  Well, it can ‘render’ in various ways.  Think of the Puppygames type of look - big pixelated things, but they’re done up all nice in photoshop with glowing outlines or whatever.  You can take your pixel creation (zoomed in to at least 2x) and render it with several different effects, saving your work in a 32bit png:

- An outer glow around it in whatever color you like

- ‘Tetris blocks’ (each pixel is a shiny block rather than a single color)

- An overall highlight, treating the whole shape as one huge tetris block - if a pixel has no left neighbor, shade its left edge, if it has no right neighbor, brighten its right edge, etc

- ‘Piping’, highlighted stripes on the internal edges of the shape

- Other!?

I think that would be a really cool tool for making that nice modern-retro art.  Almost a SFXr for graphics, in a way.

#2 - Hitsuji Editor

I saw people talking about doing this in the chat too.  They called it a manikin editor.  I just want to take the concept of the editor I made for my long-ago LD entry Hitsuji and make it nice and more powerful, so you can do freeform creations instead of sheep holding swords.  The concept is to make models by stringing bitmaps together with pivot points, then you can rotate and translate them all (scaling would be nice too).  Then you make animations for them, and it stores it all much like a 3D model, only it’s 2D.  Then obviously you can put that in a game and animate it all nicely and smoothly.  I love how it’s trivial for such a model to transition from one animation to another.  I could see a lot of potential for games made with these types of characters.

#1 sounds a lot easier than #2, and it’s more original.  But it’s definitely not as useful…

Rise Of The Owls

It’s a TD game that takes place inside a tower. You will enjoy it if you learn the hero abilities! It’s fairly easy to win (though sometimes it seems insane) once you know how, but to get a high score requires great skill and daring.

win32 version: Click On Me (1.12mb)

If it doesn’t work for you, you can try the command line argument “opengl” to run it in openGL instead of DirectX. Probably won’t help, but hopefully it works anyway!

Let’s get eclectic!  For lunch, it’s pizza, egg rolls, and corn on the cob.  I’m not a giant pig - this is food for two.  Iced tea for the lady, pineapple juice for me.  Speaking of giant pigs…

My cat is so fat, he needs two chairs.

Can’t show a screenie since I am currently working on the offline computer, the only one with decent art programs on it (stupid Vista won’t run PSP9 or Max5).  Thusly, what I am doing now is art!  I’ve got lots in so far, though endless hours spent doing it.  Six in fact.  Still need some stuff for the buttons you click on and the title screen, and the treasure the owls are stealing, then I guess art is pretty much done.  Then I’ll need to get some challenge/point/structure to the gameplay, and some sounds.  That should pretty much do it.  I’ll need more heroes than I have to reach that point, but I’ll just reuse my existing art for those, because man, I’ve made a lot of little heroes.  I think about 8 unique characters.

I wanted the game to include a skill tree for boosting all your heroes, but I think that’s something for later.  You’ll have to be content with the strategy/luck involved in which heroes you get.  Not much luck needed at this point, since the pool of heroes currently is the same as the number of rooms at the inn, and you’re allowed to have multiples of the same.  I want to change that, but can’t until there are a whole lot more heroes.  Which probably won’t happen by the deadline.

So I’m off to do that.  I’d also like to have more than one kind of monster, but that too will have to go by the wayside.  Hordes of ordinary owls is interesting enough for now!

In classic autumn colors, it’s a delicious crunchy, nutty, raisiny cereal, with a side of the world’s finest juice (right, PoV?).  My wife was really upset to find I had put the juice in that cup.  She really hates when the food is the same color as the vessel.  But it’s all so lovely and autumnal!

Lunch: LD baked potatoes with sauteed veggies on top.  Hard to tell that it says LD, but I swear it does.

Dinner: grilled cheese with tomato soup and horchata.  We tried burning LD into the bread by putting butter in the shape of the letters, but it cooked evenly anyway.

Progress on all fronts simultaneously (except art and sound).  This shot depicts the Inn Menu open.  As you can see, many of the bunks are occupied with clones of Archie the Archer, since he’s the only hero in the game.  The cursor you can’t see is on one of them, eliciting that handy tooltip that describes him.  At the top of the tower is a vast collection of invaluable treasure.  Hidden behind the row of bunks, you can just barely see that the owls now have life meters for your convenience.  Every few seconds new heroes come to the inn, and ones leave, giving you an endless array of heroic selections.  Of course, they’re all Archie right now.

I guess the next step is to let the owls steal the treasure.  They drop it when they die right now, but I don’t actually know that, since they can’t pick it up in the first place yet.

Well, by “game” I don’t mean something you can play.  But it is something you can watch as all the (temp art, in case there was any doubt…) elements function as intended: the owls ascend the stairs and even descend again if they reach the top.  The archer as you can see fires arrows at them.  He can even kill the first one before they get past him!  The excitement is palpitatious!!  Things are going well, I think, though I am dreading the actual real implementation.

My game is this: tower defense, inside the tower itself.  Eventually, there will be a pile of gold that the owls are stealing at the top.  You of course strew archers, chefs, and yetis about the tower to stop them.  The twist is that instead of buying generic units, you buy specific heroes as they show up visiting your inn (so a random element to that).  So you might dump Archie the archer after a while for Blog the barbarian.  The end goal is something with 100+ different guys (some not too different, like an archer who does more damage or fires faster than another), and a lot of wacky variety.  Don’t think there will be 100 of them by tomorrow, though.

A hearty breakfast to get towers going: LD’ed toast, scrambled owl eggs with fakon and cheese, and a sunrise smoothie with raspberry garnish.

Here’s my setup for this weekend.  Laptop in the living room.  There’s a shiatsu machine strapped to my chair, though!  I will probably also venture into the actual office, because none of my good art or sound programs run on this computer (Yay, Vista!).

Gotta get fueled up with a healthy dinner before you compete!  Here’s to hoping the theme is “heartburn.”

Theme Owl Series, #2.

Well, I gave up on the actual contest. But lately I’ve really been having fun making generators (you know, web ‘games’ that randomly spit out some name like “Fluffyborg The Transient”), so I made another that sort of fits the theme! It’s not based on any particular movie, but it’s not hard to see elements of every Summer blockbuster in it. Here’s a ’screenshot’:

In a world…

Where ice cream is optional…

ONE woman…

And a boy…

Must face the worst disaster the world has ever known.

A Spike Lee Joint.

Coming Summer 2038 to a holotheater near you.

The ‘download link’ is http://hamumu.com/random.php so go generate some previews of your own!  I’m marking this as my final entry, but I do hope to add more possibilities to it right up until the deadline.  Luckily, the link won’t be changing!  Ah, the magic of the web.

(Yes, I included both turnips and unicorns)

This might be my record for least finished LD entry (of ones where I actually bothered to submit anything), but here it is! There’s no game here, you can just hop around on 3 ships a little bit and then exit. PRESS Q TO QUIT! Z is jump, and arrows move.

You can download the awesome windows EXE here: Miyamoto Download (712kb)

Enjoy your hopping!

And there’s a good reason!  I spent at least 8 hours of yesterday stuck at one spot in the game - dealing with the + and - signs of camera position versus ship position (the ships are like individual tile maps, but those tile maps are placed in the world… kind of inspired by DrPetter’s Swarming Of The Machines!) versus player position versus waterline.  It is a trivial problem, solved in the end by swapping some signs around and actually watching which way things move (or, more quickly, by drawing a simple diagram, which I never did).  The reason I spent all day on it was that I was watching TV and not even trying to think about it.  Just haphazardly flicking values every so often.  I don’t think I’m very dedicated to this project.  But I’m gonna try some more today!

Once I finally stopped TV for a second though, I nailed that and now I have Miyamoto running and jumping along a set of 3 boats, quite successfully.  He has no animation, but whatever.  I think I will add enemies and things you can stomp to sink the boats today.  I’m not feeling very pressured.  The unofficialness is getting to me!

Okay, there’s now a ship editor that loads and saves!  You can’t actually choose which tile to use (of course, there is only one tile… but you can’t erase it!), but you can load, save, and exit.  And it shows you the waterline.

Pretty classy ship, huh?

Super Miyamoto!  I don’t have the foggiest clue how to actually animate him,  but I’ll worry about that tomorrow.  I really need to start on some code, I think…

Well, I spent all last night thinking up VS ideas, then watching TV and thinking of more, then when TV was over I said, “that’s it.  I’m going with Schrodinger Vs. Pavlov”.  I thought it’d be cool, an army of dogs that you can steer around with a bell cursor, vs. a guy who can place boxes that contain pop-up cats that may be alive or dead.  Then I was thinking it would be like a board game, where the Pavlov guy has cards with various dogs and bells and things, and the Schrodinger guy has dice with 3 alive-cat faces and 3 dead-cat faces.  The closest I got to an actual idea was that Schrodinger could commit his dice to various battles, and hope they were enough when actually rolled.  It didn’t actually make a game, though.

So this morning I woke up still with no ideas that worked, and finally decided it had to be the very first idea that struck me as solid.  I didn’t want to do a platformer, but here I go anyway: Miyamoto Vs. Yamamoto.  You’ll hop from ship to ship, bouncing on their various parts to sink them, then hop off before you sink with them.  It won’t be Mario, because you’ll be dodging fire directly aimed at you by the cannons and other oddities, and the ‘defeat each ship’ motif is a little different.  Got some ideas, anyway!  Time to build a ship editor!

Hey, visit the rules wiki to see what I’ve put down for Mini LD. I’ve got a set of rules (well, a list of ways it’s different from normal rules), and a host sign up page, which I conveniently nabbed the first slot on. Feel free to edit and improve the whole thing. This isn’t my deal, it’s the community’s.

Things still quite unknown include: how judging works, or not if we don’t do that, and what category/tags/whatever the entries and journals need to go into. Will each one have its own category? Maybe a general Mini-LD category? If so, how do we separate the entries for different months? These things need work.

There are 10 months of the year that lack an LD contest.  This simply cannot stand.  It is a blight on the game development community.  I feel that by filling those months, we will attract more regulars and more interest, and LD will be more popular.  But on the flipside, LD is a special event, twice a year, a big deal.  If it happened every month, you’d only have a small percentage of the contestants in any given event (and very little overlap, so you’d never get to know anybody).  And so the proposal:

 The LD48 Mini-Contest.  All that I am about to say is just the proposal and up for discussion as to what is right or whether it’s just stupid in general.  This is just my original basic idea for it.  It runs once a month, on the first weekend.  It does not occur in April and whatever other month Real-LD happens in (shouldn’t there be an official month for that too?).

There is no theme voting - the host simply dictates the theme.  Themes for this are encouraged to be different from the type that LD48 uses, though the host does whatever they want.  Basically, I’m picturing setting up a specific challenge for people, rather than a general theme.  Like we might finally see the “no graphics” theme in the form of “Make a game that communicates with the user only through sound.  The player can communicate back by any method you want.”  Something like that, but also something that can be shorthanded to one or two words if needed (”Audio only”), so people don’t have to explain the theme every time they talk about their game to other people.  Other challenges might be things like “Here’s a set of tiles, make a game with them”, “A maze game featuring zombies that is 64k or less zipped” (blah, I wouldn’t enter that one), or “You just got the Fight Club license.  Deadline is in 48 hours.  Go!” (I could see that one with a lot of movies… Office Space!)  If people don’t like your challenge, who cares?  There’s a new one next month.
Host also dictates the start time, so that he gets to announce the theme at a time convenient for him rather than at 4am.  Contestants have 48 hours from that start time to finish their project, just like in LD.

Rules are relaxed - you can use anything you want to make your game, start with any code.  If you just want to mod your existing game, go for it.  It’s almost the opposite idea as LD is - instead of seeing what you can build from scratch, we want to see what you are capable of with unlimited resources (and very limited time).  Content is just as unrestricted, just keep it legal.

The source code rule is equally relaxed (and rightly so, since you can use code that you’re not allowed to share anyway!).  We’d really like you to post your source, but it’s optional.

People sign up on a list to host this, first-come, first-serve.  You can sign up again only once your last hosting is off the list.  This means Fydo gets to run a Kitties contest.  Hosting is entirely simple: just come up with a theme and announce it when the time comes.  Phil’s amazing wordpress code does the rest, letting people upload their entries (well, links and such) and shutting it all off when the time comes.  All mini-LDs would go in one wordpress category, maybe, so we didn’t keep adding categories all the time.  Don’t have that bit worked out at the moment.

Hosts can participate in the contest too, even though they know the theme in advance.  We’ll trust their integrity.  Probably hosting would have some simple restriction on it, like you must have been in 3 real LDs previously (or you must spend at least 70% of your life lurking in #ludumdare), so we don’t get a flood of people signing up and disappearing.

After the 48 hours, the entries are up for voting, and you don’t have to have entered to vote.  You just need to be signed up on this site, to encourage people to check out the entries and see what they think.  The voting (which Phil of course implements for us!) is simpler than the full-on LD, maybe just 1 category: Awesomeness (maybe Gnarliness, or Radicality, or maybe it shows it with a random name each time, or does the host get to choose the category too!?).  You rate it 1-100, so it’s kind of like grading a paper.  Voting can simply remain open until the next Mini-LD (or actual LD) starts.

Of course, each of these mini-LDs will get a much smaller number of competitors, and nobody would do them all (well, somebody would, I bet you, but not many), but they are a nice option for the bleak wasteland of empty existence between LD48s.  I don’t think they’d detract from the bigness and participation of the real LDs, given their smallness and unofficiality.  My hope is that they’d pull more people in for those.  And we always have people in #ld saying “boy, I need a new LD!”, and with this, there’d always be one of sorts around the corner.

And yeah, it’s more work for Phil to get it up and working, but that’s what he’s here for, right?  What else is he good for?

Discuss.