So, I just woke up a couple of hours ago, and I’m pondering about what to do with the theme. I have a couple of ideas that I’m thinking about now. Here’s a concept image of one of them:

General laziness prevented me from making an actual game, but here are a couple of levels I made, inspired by some games I’ve been playing lately. See if you can guess which ones:

So, the compo has started. The sort of ideas I have:

• HUD editor/library. Basically, this would be a GUI editor/library with no support for direct interaction, mostly just pretty ways of displaying data.
• Start work on a multithreaded scriptable game engine. I kinda want to learn some multithreading and scriptability, so I’m thinking maybe I could start building an engine that does those.
• Library for making replays of a game. This requires close integration on the game’s part so I’m not sure if I could quite make this into a reusable library, but I think this would be an interesting feature to implement. The idea would be that this would be useful for both debuggin and as just a nifty feature on its own.

From reading the comments, I got this feeling that not everybody has understood how the grinds and walljumps work in Tiny Hawk. The way you do them is you have to be holding the button when you hit a rail or a wall. Most commonly, you’ll do a jump and you’ll keep holding the button until you hit the rail or wall. Also if you’re walljumping up a tall column, just keep on holding the button, you don’t need to let go for each jump. The walljump is actually kinda buggy, and won’t always work if you’re falling down. This is because the game thinks you’re landing on a tile instead of hitting it from the side. I’ll likely fix this at some point. Also if you hit a rail on the very edge, you might hit the rail but fall off instantly. I’m going to call that an unintentional feature, because it’s kind of a neat thing that you can “almost” hit a rail.

A lot of people have been asking for a button for changing directions, but I think that not being able to turn around and playing the game with just one button is a pretty big point. I’m probably not adding that in. The actual problem is of course level design. There should be more blocks around so that you can bounce off a wall if you want to turn, or climb up quicker if you fall down.

Anyways, people seem to be liking the game, so thanks for that. I hope this little explanation clears things out (if there was anything to be cleared).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6fX5zzRf9Q 

Here’s my timelapse video. The picture-in-picture part is not completely in sync with the big video, but it should be somewhat close. I cut out the parts where I was sleeping or otherwise away. Music is Scattered Progression by JDruid.

Tiny Hawk final release (194k)

Update: Tiny Hawk Windows executable (3.07M)

I think I’m done now. The game is six levels long, has sound effects and music, and is all sorts of awesome, naturally.

Have at it, but be gentle.

Here’s another screenshot of my game, which I’m still calling Tiny Skater I guess. This is the fifth level in the game. The other levels aren’t this big. This one’s a bit of a mess to tell you the truth. The minimal game mechanics kinda make it hard to have interesting level designs. I think I have an idea for one more.

This is what my dinner looked like today. Delicious sliced chicken fillet with colorful vegetables and long-grain rice. A glass of non-fat milk to wash it down and a red apple as a sweet finisher.

Youtube video of my game. Added some more colorful graphics since last screenshot. By the way, does wordpress allow embedded videos? I couldn’t seem to be able to do that.

Here’s another screenshot. As you can see, I’ve colored the skater sprite. I hope that doesn’t detract too much from the minimalism. I’m thinking of making the graphics more colorful in other ways too. I think the minimalism of the gameplay is quite enough for me, as the game still works with just one button, which you use to jump, grind and wall jump. You jump by pressing a button, grinding and wall jumping happens automatically when you’re holding a button when hitting a rail or a wall. I was going to make it timing based, but I didn’t want to make it very hard. So far the game doesn’t really have any goals other than collecting all the red gems. I’m thinking of having an exit you need to reach within a time limit, with the gems giving you more time. Like in N and N+.

My tiny skater now grind rails and collect red gems. It’s almost like a real game now! I’m also planning on having wall jumping, and possibly slopes. Also missing some core “game” stuff like counting points, and maybe a goal.

So this is what I have so far. A skating game / platformer with 2-bit graphics. Gameplay elements are rather minimal at this point. Oh, and those things floating in the air are rails to grind on, in case that’s not apparent.

My entry to the motivational poster party.

I just wanted to say hi, as a way of obligating myself to participation and not slacking off. I haven’t done LD before, although I have successfully participated in PyWeek a few times. I’ll probably use Python with Pyglet for my entry.

Also, what’s with all the people who hated on kittens on the first round of voting? That’s just mean.