Windows – OSX

Zoomed out! Click for more detail

Can now actually win and lose levels!  Added a cheap-ass main menu with level select.

I’ll have a few hours tomorrow morning to somehow magically tweak gameplay to be more fun, do music, add more baddies.  (Design calls for three, only  have one, and I’m just using a tinted hero sprite at that!)

Want went right today:

• Whipped out really cool random level generation algo, it guarantees that each part of the building is accessible.  Really, I guess I made sort of a side-view maze generator.
• Added zoom settings per level – The screenshot above is zoomed way out.. I might leave a level like that just for fun, even though it’s hard to play that way.  An unexpected consequence of zooming out is it sort of minimizes the bad artwork.
• Main menu works, took a detour to make it all keyboard controllable so you don’t have to keep switching back to the mouse.  It’s the little things. Plus, this is going to be a Proton SDK sample eventually so I want its code to be usefully copyable

What went wrong:

• Bad art is bad
• Original design wasn’t much fun, dumped half of it.. better, but it still not there
• Behind schedule..  feeling bad that I skipped weekend ultimate frisbee with Cosmo (my kid) for like the first time in a year.. you’re a cruel master, LD.
• Still have no real cosmetic theme or name to tie everything together.  it’s just so generic and I HATE generic.  Dream self, please figure this out during tonight’s repose
• Connection to the “Discovery” theme feels weak

Well, I’ve got elevators up the yang.  I did some character “art” for walking and climbing ladders.  Yeah, that’s a walk frame above, what the heck ??

Maybe I can somehow explain the weird visuals by adding a story element about the main character having to deal with a deformity and back problems.  See, that’s how real gamedev works, kids.

The apartment building is randomly generated and I’m looking forward to trying some big ones with dead ends, enemies, and treasures.

Still have too much to do at this point to feel anything but iffy, but after adding some sfx it at least “feels” pretty good to run around the level.  When the character walks there is this donkey-kong like sound effect.

Thanks, sfxr!

Quitting for the night, will be back in irc bright and early to try to turn this into something.  (I’m SethR in #ludumdare)

Well, I sort of have this elevator action type spy game where you need to unlock doors and find the “data”.  But after doing this uninspired artwork and I’m just totally unmotivated.   Will try to keep going though…

I decided to upgrade the Irrlicht component at the last minute and it’s half broken.. oops, one hour to fix! Not sure if I want to use it though…

2d or 3d?  Optimize for touch so I can release for mobiles too or not?  QUESTIONS!!!?!?!  Nice to have choices I guess.

Tools:  MSVC++, sfxr, mic (or is still broken?), midi keyboard

Oh, and I changed the name to “The Hardest Text Game In The World”.  If you’ve played it, you know why.

Can you score 100 points?

Grab it here (for Win).  I did a sort of post-mortem here.

I really like this theme so I’m throwing something together here between family duties… not sure if I’ll make the official deadline or not.

Here is my screenshot, you can sort of see what I’m going for here… it’s a word association game made from wikipedia data that is loading in the background as you play.

In the pic, underlined words are “correct”, but that is temporary… going to show hits/misses on the left side of the screen later.

Unless I limit to certain categories or something, it’s going to be .. weird… I sort of like the complete insanity of it so I might leave it “very” random.

So.. pretty simple concept, but would like to bring it up to a level of polish where it really “works”.

I’m using my iPhone framework, but targeting windows for now.

** HINTS **

No matter how impossible a level looks, I guarantee you there is ALWAYS a solution.

You can use Alt-Enter to toggle windowed/fullscreen mode.

Edit the command_line.txt file to change the screen resolution if you want.  (1920 by 1200 is niiice)

Check the readme.txt for more info, and the /source dir for sources.

For music I used Sonar with the “Dimension” soft synth, using an Evolution MK-461C for control.

For sfx, I used sfxr, of course.

Downloads:

Update April 20th: If you are not an LD judge, you should download these slightly improved versions instead

Update June 27th: Get Mind Wall for iPhone!

Original Compo versions:

Windows

OS X (universal binaries)

NOTE:  Meh, there is a minor cosmetic bug that makes the “congrats, you won” text hard to read… there is a work around though, after you’ve unlocked the last level, quit and restart, your progress will be saved and when (or should I say, IF?!!)  you win the text will look right.    (Thanks to 5arrowhawk)

95% done, so I’m just going to sleep and hope I wake up in time to polish and submit like usual.

Lot of behind the scenes mathy stuff was taken care of, including the wall/level generator but still oh so much to do if I want this to look anything like the thing I’m seeing in my head…

A delicious (?!) meal of pig entrails and seaweed.  This was NOT part of my gameplan but I guess the wife has her own plan to sabatage me with inedible food… !!

Download here for Windows

The only ugliness is it requires a onload=”load()” onunload=”GUnload()” in the <body> tag, and I don’t see any (easy) way for the plugin to do that for just the pages that use the “SimpleMap” shortcode in their text. Setting up a filter to replace that part in the header seems really ugly, don’t want to do that…

So that means it requires a wordpress template which is bleh.

It has a wordpress control panel thingie where you enter your google map API key and can clear its database. No way for logged-on users to enter their own geocode yet.

I have real work to do now but hope to finish it up and move it to the real LD site at some point before the next compo!