Here comes a first screenshot:

The kittens are able to follow the mouse while maintaining to keep the swarm and stop at the screen border. Probably I’ll implement a test level with some deadly areas and a goal to reach.

O Ludum Dare, how dare you?

Initially I wanted to make some progress on my TIGSource compo game for December. But this warmup seems like a great idea as I have some swarm-algorithm code ready for some weeks now I wanted to put in a game. And guess what the generator for theme picked for me:

Kittens!

So I’ll try to make a game with a kitten swarm for warmup this weekend.

So for everyone who wants to rate some interesting games with not that much votes on the final day of voting, I would like to give you some recommendations:

Cosmic Heist – Kevin Wells

Surprisingly precise controls, fast gameplay and an interesting twist (no shooting). I had a lot of fun playing this. You should try it, too. (18 votes)

Escausage – jplur

Great physics game were you control both ends of one or more a sausages (this!). I really had to laugh out loud playing this. (26 votes)

Abandoodle – OddOneOut

Classic jump and run with smooth controls and a very authentic hand-drawn look. Feels like playing a lunch-break scribble. (14 votes)

Meta Abstract Room Escape – foobaz

This one has a great twist. If you are somewhat preserved against this click-around-to-escape-the-room games, like me, try this out. It breaks these kind of game down to basic flowcharts which is quite a funny approach spiced with humour. (22 votes)

Go try them out and give them a vote if you also feel that these games are about average quality and deserve many more votes.

After having improved the level generator a lot, I think it’s the right time to write a post mortem of my game.

What went right:

• Game idea: At first I was disappointed with the theme, because I had some nice ideas for self-replication and genetics. But with the morning shower there came several interesting ideas. First idea was some sort of swarm attracting rescue game (still self-replication minded), second was a rpg in which you try to escape your chosen role (e.g. only get xp for things you are bad at) and the third idea was the actual one. I chose the later because it was the easiest to implement.
• Tools: After warming up with python and pygame in the Mini-LD shortly before LD21 I felt very secure with the programming. Gimp, bfxr and Musagi also worked great.
• Time management: Almost all the time I felt just a little bit ahead of my schedule which really is a great feeling (should once happen in my everyday job)

What went wrong:

• Final improvements: I head some plans to further improve the game: better soundtrack, improved graphics, more player control over level generation. I even had the time, but as my wife and child came back home on Sunday my time for game development suddenly vanished (that’s not as bad as it sounds )
• Windows executable: Meh, stupid py2exe. Just didn’t want to automtically bind the sound libraries. Actually that’s just a small issue, cause it wasn’t necessary to have this executable at Sunday night, but I was so eager to release it in time.
• Randomized levels: I made a rather late decision to do randomized levels instead of pre-designed with raising difficulty. I am quite happy that I chose the randomized approach but my algorithm was to stupid to have real control over the difficulty (explanation here). I fixed it for now, which I want to illustrate with two screenshots.

Developer's "see all" mode: On the left the old generator on insane. Number of cages and cacti walls are quite random. On the right the improved version. Fixed number of cages and walls with random distribution.

Will there be a post-compo version? Definitely, there already is (not yet online) and I am planning to do further improvements based on the feedback so far. Ideas include:

• Different play modes (e.g. visible cages with other constraints than now)
• Kind of  dungeon crawler with inventory and classes
• Integrate the dungeon crawler to a bigger scale exploration game (to prevent stupid descend dungeon levels)

Final words: If you haven’t already:

Go Play

The ongoing discussion on irc/twitter/this blog about how the theme ‘escape’ enabled almost every game idea to fit somehow made me pondering, if there is some link to this big amount of new participants in LD21. So my theory goes like that:

• the theme was very open, so newcomers could submit almost every kind of game
• this encouraged a lot more people to try and made something very simple and stuck some sort of escape to it
• would the elected topic have been something like self-replication or recursion, the amount of submitted games would have been less

Especially the themes stated above probably would have needed a deeper insight to programming techniques and game design principles which could have put a lot of people off. Any opinion to this theory?

To fire the discussion, I can even give a counter-argument:

• There were so many new people attracted before the final voting ended (by notch, etc), that they had a significant influence on theme voting.

The compo is over, my game is finished and the rating starts. For anyone trying out my game (if you haven’t yet: HERE), I will explain some strategies to survive, just in case you have trouble with it. Additionally, as I tried to get some advice from my wife for setting up the level generator yesterday evening she wasn’t really enthusiastic, to say the least. So for anyone more interested in the tech behind I will explain, why the level generator currently doesn’t work that good for providing difficulty.

The game mechanic basically works with to values that decrease as long as you are digging tunnels (and even when passing existing ones). The first value is food/hunger. You can find three different kind of food which will give you 5 to 15 points back. Food, if there is any, is only revealed if you enter a cage. By that, it is often necessary to leave the direct path and search adjacent rooms if you are low on food. This strategy also has a second benefit related to the second value, hope.

Hope is generated by spotting new cages around you. So progressing the level is the key to prevent death by starvation.  The hope mechanics leads to another point. Often it is better to move to the center of the level because chances for revealing cages is better in free field than at the level borders. This seems contradictory to the aim of getting to the upmost row or the rightmost column which are the only places to escape the level later on. Remeber that you can see 2 spaces horizontally and vertically and one space diagonally (not if you are digging). So if you already are two rows below the top border and there is no cage above, you won’t find any if you dig that direction.

The cacti walls are revealed by digging, so sometimes a tunnel can give further information for planning your path. This only applies if you have enough food/hope left.

To summarize the strategies:

• try to reach upmost row or rightmost column of the cages but pass the center of the level
• don’t dig to places where there can be no cage (2 spaces between player and border)
• don’t hesitate to search rooms for food
• progress to keep your hope filled

Headed to the center and didn't took the direct path to replenish food and hope. Else I would have died short before exit (Difficulty: Hard).

With that you should be able to beat all difficulties after some tryouts. At this point the random generator sets in. The design I used is rather insecure in providing the difficulty level. Instead of spreading a fixed amount of cages for each difficulty, I implemented to check a percentage to set a cage for every field of the grid (e.g. 33:67 that there is a cage on a field in normal mode). Instead of filling one third of the level with cages, this leads to very unsteady number of cages. By that, an “insane” level could have more cages than an “easy” one. Same applies to walls. By that the difficulty selector is a rather vague adjuster. But nevertheless you will notice the difference if you give it some tries (one playthrough is quick; around 15 seconds). So go and play. Good luck.

TL;DR:

Just a game design related teaser for the post mortem coming soon.

Here comes a teaser for the background story of my game:

My wife and child came back today which cut off a lot of my programming time. Also it made me cook a very delicious dinner of which I made a picture.

sliced turkey with cream and chanterelles, green beans and potatoes - everything fresh from the marketplace

Now back to my LD game.

Almost won this level after quite a journey. I was running low on food and hope for some time and couldn’t find a way out. Finally I came to a cage which could lead me to my escape. Then I dug into cacti just before the exit right from the green arrow in the screenshot. With hope and food almost at zero there was no chance to get out via another path.

Already finetuning the game’s apearance. On my must-have tasklist are only screentexts, improved music and a death jingle left. If there is some time left in the end, I will try to include the possibility to choose dificulty by changing the level generation parameters.

Yeah! I am so happy. Just implemented the overall loop with reseting all instances to replay without quitting the game and it worked on first try without any bugs so far. This part had me quite daunted beforehand. Let’s check the current state of progress:

• Player can win
• Player can lose
• Player can quit anytime he likes
• Game has intro, win and death screen
• Game can be repeated

So theoretically I have a finished game. But nevertheless there are some important parts missing:

• Different levels (probably randomized)
• Sound effects
• Music
• Text for the static screens
• At least one additional feature to make it more interesting to play

Enough left for tomorrow but still quite far. I don’t have a bad conscience about getting to bed soon.

…for dinner.

Just a frozen food pizza with added mozzarella. ’twas okay.

This day is going great. I feel like I could finish a satisfying game even today. So far minimum requirement for my game will be setting up a starting screen to explain the story, making the kill-condition more than just a print ‘died!’ in console and making the game replayable without restart. Everything else is in. Better graphics, more features, sound and music is optional for tomorrow.

After adding more cages and enforcing hunger and desperation on the player it looks like that:

…in the cages. Softdrink, burger, pork what else could a escaping person need.

Here is the newest screen of my game. Game mechanic is working now it’s time to add more features. I am still indecisive if to make fixed levels or randomized. Also my neck starts hurting (7 hours of coding with some breaks) so I think I will have some relaxing time at the balcony.

The new GUI elements are displaying actual food/hunger and hope state.

Bread rolls with Jamon Serrano (Spanish ham). Delicious.

Just made a break from messing with the code and updated my graphics to look better and fit the story of my game.

Next milestone: Eat some Lunch!

Progress is satisfying at the moment. Player interaction and collision check for digging works. New rooms can be found! Next to implement are screen borders for digging and the exit.

Some preview on the story:

• You have been jailed in a deserted valley with many seperated cages standing around
• You are sitting in a cage of medium size
• you found a powered shovel (enables fast digging of tunnels) hidden in the ground
• the sun has blinded you somewhat, so you can only spot very near cages
• You running out of food and hope. Maybe there can be found some food in other cages.

I will reveal the reason why the player has been arrested in a later post. I think I came up with a great story idea for LD .

Rather unspectacular: Player, rooms, tunnels. Next to implement the mechanics.

First classes getting defined, first sprites are painted and the first big cup of coffee is inserted. So far I’m happy with my chosen idea. Let’s see if it stands the prototype test later this day.

Also, deskphoto: