I tried writing a post up in this thing but It kept on trying to eat it so I put my post-mortem here

Wayhaaaay a final submission.

It’s flash so just go play it now at

http://screamingduck.com/Cruft/BoomShakalaka.html

source is here

Yay done!

The plot thickens

Some of you may already be able to guess how to play this game.

Here we go.   I’ve started.

This is my room. I took this before another LD48, but it hsn’t changed much, Just more mess now.

Proof I have real trouble coming up with good game names.

This game was a quick one. A week before a LD we had a warmup, put in 12 hours during the weekend. The theme was vectors and a subtheme of chains.

I was quite pleased with how this worked out in a lot of ways. The rendering was with a little 2d OpenGL style setup where I implemented pushmatrix, popmatrix, scale,rotate,multmatrix,LoadIdentiy, setcolor and line. All of the glowy effects were done by a two layer drawing system, A blur buffer of high saturation drawing and a overlay of bright low saturation. The persistance came from averaging neighbouring pixels in the blur buffer and subtracting a bit. I did that part with a wee MMX routine.

Most of all, the thing that pleased me about this game is how fun it is. It’s a bit hard but I think there’s potential for a great full game in this idea. I build a linux version and had it running on my arcade cabinet for ages, that was great fun.

I guess the only sad part about this on is that if I had have done this for a genuine LD48 I would have used the extra time to make something even better.

The final game isn’t entirely my own work though. I slapped a mod file onto the game for music. Livens it up quite a bit.

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I was quite pleased with how this one worked out, The game only has three levels and I was quite worried that the last level might be impossible. As time was running out on the clock I was trying to figure out if it could be done, I finally got a single ninja home and went “that’s it! ship it!”.

playing post compo I actually managed to figure out how to get all of the ninja home on that level by using a few tricks.

I also liked the look of Teeny Tiny Ninja. I got the stars idea from a previous Bluescrn entry. Adding a bunch of stars does indeed liven up the look of things. Also The ninja home came out surprisingly well for programmer art. I thought the sound worked well too, but the scores the game got suggested I was in the minority. when a ninja goes ‘Hut!’ every time he jumps it’s cool, but people found it less so when there were a couple of hundred Ninja doing it, serves themselves right for picking swarms as the theme I say.

The game used a homebrew physics engine made during the 48 hours. this worked quite nicely, Ninja were all implemented as tiny triangles

See. There was no Line to object collision detection so it was possible for Ninja to get stuck on corners by impailing themselves on a point and having their triangle points go either side. There were alsdo a few other little quirks that caused th ninja to get stuck. The solution worked brilliantly. I checked to see if a ninja hadn’t moved for a while and if so just added a huge random vector to its movement. A lot of people took this to be an intentional behaviour because it looked very ninja like. sometimes a ninja would jump to a wall or point and stick there for a bit then jump away again.

Once again the controls were a bit unintuitive. But I thought the use of a mousewheel worked well.

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I tried thinking out of the box and failed miserably.

The theme was growth, I thought of the idea of crystal growth and pretty much made an incomprehensible game with crystals in it. Hardly anyone figured out how to play the sodding thing. The final insult was that I ran out of time so you could build yourself an army but had no-one to fight.

The bright side was I was quite pleased with the overall look and User interface. It’s a basic RTS engine with minimap and group selection, resource collection etc.

Some of the development was stalled due to me not knowing how to debug. I wrote the game In Blitz max, having downloaded the demo version on the thursday before the compo. I didn’t figure out how the debugger worked (or even that it had one) until sunday.

I was faily stumped for ideas in this one, ‘Build the level you play’ . The only ideas that I could come up with were Tower Defense style or maybe a netstorm clone. Several people encouraged me to do the netstorm thing, so I had a go. I used BlitzMax for it, This enabled me to make a nice ‘just the exe’ version that just works.

All up, I think I did quite well. I didn’t have time for a proper enemy, so I just added a tower defense style neverending wave of aliens. Instead of the Netstorm style resource collection, I made the ground itself produce energy. This made quite a nice playable element where you made pipes to make the energy flow to the right places. Unfortunately people had absoluetly no idea how to play the game. Unless you’ve played netstorm a bit, it seems there aren’t enough clues as to what the hell you should be doing.

After the Compo, I put together this shot to give people a clue as to what they should be doing

I didn’t make much in the way of post-compo changes to this game. I played with the engergy flow a bit just for fun, I think that’s about all.

Post-compo version is available here

This was my first attempt at a Ludum Dare, and in some ways my best entry. I still think I aimed too low for the game, I think this may be why I havn’t done so well in others, I’ve aimed too high overcompensating for this one.

The competition version of the game required two players on the one keyboard to play, limiting the number of people who could use it. It turned out that, after the compo, it only took an hour or two to make a workable AI player. I should have pushed for it in the 48 hours. Instead I had a go at network play, I did get a sort of game running networked but it ran like crap. I played a game against a friend in australia during the compo 48 hours but I was still on dial-up so it was never going to be a good look. I ended up stripping it all out again.

The game itself was quite simple. There is a dark player in a light universe and a light player in a dark universe. You can shoot at the walls of your univers to make it larger (while reducing the enemy universe). The object of the game is to get your ‘gribblies’ home. The gribblies have an incredibly basic movement behaviour that everone complimented as being far more clever than they actually were. You help the gribblies home by cutting paths for them to travel.

A post compo version of the game with AI and a few more features is available here

All up this game was qute fun to play, I still play it from time to time. My daughter, fiance, and nephew all like it so I’m happy.