Since several persons on the compo blog and the IRC channel seemed interested in my original idea, despite the closeness with the previous Mini, I am hereby releasing the aforementionned Retro engine!

Weee!

Source code, Linux binaries, Windows binaries

As you can see, it lacks terribly of Windows binaries. I’m terribly sorry, but couldn’t get my cross compilation thingy to work. It usually goes flowlessly, but here I’ve been battling for an hour, and I gave up.

EDIT: Thanks to Sos, we now have Windows binaries. Yepee! Thanks a lot to Sos. All hail Sos!

If someone with a good heart would like to, it can be built as follows: compile io.c retro_lua.c and lua_api.c into retro.exe. That’s all. But you’ll need dev libs for SDL, SDL_Image, SDL_Mixer and Lua 5.1

First one to publish a windows binary will win my eternal gratitude, and a cake*

Both source and Linux distribution contain full documentation (I hope), and an example game to help you get started.

And, as promised also, there is (a bit more) than a week before the actual Mini LD, which will therefore be held on the week end of the 20-21 of March 2010. No worries though, we’ll have the usual “take 48h when you want” policy, or even more if you like.

Okee. I hope I didn’t forget anything. Of course, don’t hesitate to ask questions on IRC and in the comments. Meanwhile, I’m gonna catch some z’s (I just love this expression, sorry).

Yours truly,

Tenoch

* The cake is a lie.

So I had this great MiniLD idea, but it turned out that HybridMind completely ripped it off, without even knowing it!
Also, since he did it a month before me, it’s not really a ripoff, just bad luck for me. Stupid MiniLD booking a year in advance…

So here’s what we’re gonna do: I’m going to tell you what I had in mind, and if enough/any people are interested (despite the close resemblance with the previous month’s Mini), we’ll go with it anyway.
If not, I’ll find a new idea shortly. Maybe you could even chose between the two themes.

So, here it goes:

Constraints

Dear, dearer and dearest LDers,

in anticipation of this coming event, and giving in to my never-ending love for the golden times when awesome games held into 1 MB cartridges, I prepared for you a tiny game engine, humorously named:

Retro (the Recursively and Erroneously Titled Retro Object)

It is a simple and very constrained game engine with a Lua and C API, offering the following characteristics:

- Low resolution (160×100) with 1-4 zoom, plus smooth scaling algorithms
- Palette based (8 colors including one optional transparent)
- Old console like input: arrows, A and B buttons, start button (mapped to keyboard, and partial gamepad support)
- Total source + assets shouldn’t weight more than 1 MB

It presents as binaries (for GNU/Linux and Windows, MacOS X if a good will makes the port) to which you feed a Lua source file in which you define callbacks such as update(), keypressed(), etc, and use an API that allows you to:

- Load images/palettes
- Blit images to screen
- Write pixels to screen
- Modify palette on the fly
- Load sound files
- Play sound files
- that kind of stuff

For those who do not desire to learn/use Lua, I intend to make a similar C API, so that it could be used from any C-friendly language (but then it requires you to compile the game yourself, thus limiting portability).

In fact, if you don’t like the engine at all, you can even make anything you want, provided that you stick to the constraints and use no library other than simple IO (basically SDL + standard C/Lua). The idea was just to give the same basecode to a bunch of wizard gamedevers and see what happens.

So there it was. Feel free to express yourself in the comments of this post so that we can decide together what is the better option. Also, the engine is almost entirely coded but it still needs a big evening to finish things up,so if no one is interested, I’ll probably play the lazy card, and just announce a one word theme.

Let me know, LDers!

So yay, I finally got the tutorials to work properly. As promised (and I don’t feel late at all…) the game is released!

No AI, so the solo mode is deactivated. The rest should be fine.

Get it on the submission page (Windows and GNU/Linux).

I hope the Windows version works. I crosscompiled from Linux, and although it ran in Wine, it was super slow.

I don’t have new screenshots, except tutorial text, so I’ll put back old ones. Because, heh, a “final” log entry should have screenies…

Here’s the readme:

(more…)

I thought I’d finish tonight, but sleeping 4 hours last night really doesn’t help. I’m off to bed, and hopefully I’ll finish tomorrow… For once I’m gonna try to really polish this game. I think it might turn out good.

So I think the gameplay is done. The game is fully playable in versus mode (two players on one keyboard). I have texts and scripts ready for the tutorials (which will probably prove very necessary for a rhythm game), but I still need to plug them in. And I have the intention of thinking about making an AI. Or let’s modestly say a computer opponent, because I’m frankly doubting my abilities to make anything clever enough to make the game interesting against it.

I'm not sure about this title, by the way...

In a post-LD version (as if the deadline wasn’t two days ago already…), I’d like to think about networking. I know it’s not always easy to find someone to play around the same computer. On the other hand it’s a lot more fun…

Anyhoo. I really need to sleep.

I’m having a big gameplay direction crisis. I’m wondering if I’m not making the game too complex, and on the other hand I think making it simpler would make it a lot less interesting.

Plus the “musical ear” aspect. Should I expect players to be able to reproduce reasonably complex rythms, and how many different ones? This is hard

Plus I suck at art. Boo hoo.

Note the split screen...

So the lil guys now have opponents to fight. Note that arrows and spikes don’t do damage yet, but that will come…

I’m not dead! Just very late, but it’s a mini so I guess it’s not that bad.

EDIT: also, i’m very high on caffeine. oO’

So now I have little guys. They execute the orders given with the different rythms. As of now, they can march forward, retreat, cover with shields, and attack. Arrows fly, spike guys charge. Of course there’s nothing to attack, but that is just detail.

Screenshots don’t really give a good idea, without the movement or the sound. But my video capture was awful, so no joy.

And sleep, for now.

Rythm patterns recognition works! It was a lot easier than I had expected. See in screenshot:

• Patterns are described as string, for instance “1121″, where numbers from 1 to 4 mean drums 1 to 4 (and also keys 1 to 4)
• The actual rythm is given by a list of numbers, given in beats. {0,1,2,3} means that the four notes of this pattern are played on  each beat. {0, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3} is a tad more funky
• If no notes are played in the two beats following the last note, it times out and the pattern is reseted.
• After each new note, we check if the current sequence matches a pattern, and then we check that the recorded times are close enough to the wanted times. If yes, the action is launched.

Note that this implies that no pattern can be the prefix of another one, and that no note in a pattern can be equal or longer than two beats.

Pom pom pom TADA pom!

So I’ll apparently be ripping off Patapon, a rythm game on PSP with cool vector-like graphics. Of course it’s gonna be nowhere near that fancy, and I actually never played Patapon. We’ll see.

I think I have enough graphics to start with, and I’ll try to get some coding done.

Since the trend is to spam the compo blog, here’s my 5 cents.

I’ll probably be unable to enter (sadly) because of exam preparation. If I manage to work hard enough during the week I might do some LDing in the week end, but quite frankly, it’s highly unlikely…

I’m still gonna vote for themes, and hang out in IRC though.

G’luck everyone, and remember, laziness prevails!

Striking mess on the stage indeed...

A MiniLD #14 entry by Tût-tûûût  & Tenoch

(a.k.a. smots)

Get it here. (Available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows)

Sources are inside the .love file, which is a renamed zip. You can also find there the music/graphic files, if you want to listen/watch them out of the game.

Might follow a postmortem post, once we both get some sleep to compensate the week-end. And yay for including wednesdays in week-ends.

Here is a copy of the README file, which contains instructions for the game:

(more…)

Six degrees of separation. With a shotgun.

I finally packaged stuff properly for Linux,  and made the Windows port. Grab them here.

Notes:

• It does crash at exit. Will fix later.
• You can get stuck at the top of the screen. I’m sorry but couldn’t find a way around.
• Sound can get irritating, be sure to lower your volume first.

Otherwise, I’m quite happy with it. Awesome theme idea, GirlFlash!

Here is the included readme:

(more…)

Yes, ASCII art additive blending. Oh yeah. But it fails…

Edit: I just fixed it ^^

So, since you all obviously can’t wait anymore with my unbearable suspense, here’s my concept:

It’s actually a quite popular game, which consists in starting at a random page on Wikipedia, and trying to reach a certain goal page in the smallest number of internal links possible.

Now with shotguns.

The idea is to use each Wikipedia page as a level for an action platformer, where the links are the exits. With lots of baddies on the way. And of course, the goal is to find Duke Nukem Forever’s page.

Platforms and ladders... Random level generation ain't that easy...

As you can see I’m far from done.

Oh  and of course, Wikipedia -> text -> console based game. Now that I spent most of my time coding my curses libs, it’d be a shame not to use it…

If I still have time at the end, I’ll use GirlFlash’s wiki as a highscore/hall of fame thingy. But let’s face it, it’s unlikely that I’ll have time left…

That’s definitely going to be a long night…

Weeeeee, rainbow!

So, theme announced at 3am. I actually got an idea very soon, and decided to go with it because it is both simple and fun (more about it later).

However, I went to be at 6am, woke up at 2pm, and spent most of the day coding a curses-like library for SDL and my wrapper evöL. Of course, it’s always during the time limited compos that I finally motivate myself to do what I wanted to do for a while…

And now, after 13 hours of work, I have… the title screen, hurray!

My god, it's full of ASCII!

Fortunately I had coded a part of my html parsing right after theme was announced.

Now, gameplay!

Oooh, magic mushroomies!

Link to the entry (downloads for Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X)

Another LD. It was fun, but maybe less (for me) than the previous times. Indeed, the conditions were not really good. I just moved back to school, so I spent quite a lot of time with my friends during the week end (saturday evening, and sunday afternoon). Plus, I’m crashing at a friend place so it’s not like I can throw pizza boxes around the room from my bed. And I didn’t have all my stuff, including a mouse for the laptop.

Despite all this, I managed to make a complete game, and I’m kinda happy about it.

What when wrong

• Strictly no idea for the theme. Plus the fact that I knew I couldn’t give my full attention to the compo. So after a (short) while, I decided to remake Boulder Dash, which I actually didn’t know (I had in mind a clone I used to play on my old Mac). Originality zero.
• Loss of motivation halfway through it. I actually spent quite a few hours on late saturday night toying with LuaGL and doing the examples of the Red Book, to distract me a little.
• Erm, graphics. I suck at them, and I didn’t have a mouse. So I re-drew stuff from the web, which I’ve been told is valid. Note however that the title and win screen use images I didn’t create, and therefore shouldn’t be taken in account when voting. All the rest is “hand drawn with a model”.

What went well

• As the game itself was fairly simple, and since I didn’t need to think of new  ideas, the coding was fast and headache free. Gamplay was complete in maybe 6 hours.
• With all the time I had left, I could take special care about the sound. SFXR gave me all the in game sounds, but I took a while to select them carefully. And I managed to write a 1:19 min music with Milkytracker, which I think is not too bad (could have been a lot better, of course).
• For once, I have a game with an end, and the difficulty progression is quite OK. I managed to play to the last level, so the game should be hard but beatable.
• Once again I praise Lua and LÖVE. They rock. Plus the multi-platform awesomeness.

I don’t know how to compare this entry with my previous ones. On the one hand, it’s not original, super simple and doesn’t look too good, but on the other hand, it’s finished, a bit polished, and the gameplay is supposed to be good (I didn’t invent it. I just hope I didn’t screw it in the implementation).

Now I don’t except high positions in the results, but I don’t consider it a “real” LD for me either. Next time I’ll be more ready and available.

Good voting, and congrats to all entrants!

Some graphics included.

The problem is that some sharp angles stay, and if I want to remove them, the number of combinations gets big. And i’m a bit lazy to draw + code them all. Next, FOOD.

Next next, sprites for the digger and the bad guys and the gems and the rocks. And stuff.

I now have the complete gameplay, or so it seems. I’m adding bad guys and in order to make them move, I coded A*:

Not too fancy yet, and I’m not sure it’s fun. A lot of balancing shall be done, and I think I’ll have the time, for once.

So I apparently started to code… But first, FOOD! To celebrate my return to Finland, Karjalan piirakat with eggbutter:

Mmm, yummy!

And the first screenie:

Rings any bell?

As you might guess, I’m remaking Boulder Dash. Because, well. No idea.

Cavern, really?

Just woke up, at my friend’s place (I’m crashing there). Dunno if the social requirements of staying at someone’s place, as well as coming back from 3 months away from friends will allow me to compete.

Plus, caverns, seriously?

l’ll still try to make photos. Just to pollute the compo blog.

*Evil grin*