Maybe I’m just being anal here, but the rules of the competition clearly state that

1. All content must be created during the compo
2. Source code must be provided

There are still occasional entries with images obviously taken directly from the web.

And in many entries, the source is forgotten (ignored?). Some even claim proudly that their game is closed soure…

I know it’s an honor system, and it is very unlikely that people will actually check your source for copy pasted code. But how long can it take to zip your project folder and upload it along? You can even just put it in a single archive with the compiled game if you can’t be arsed to make two different zips.

Now it’s too bad because the game are good. But how should these be judged? They should theoretically be disqualified. Should they receive N/A, or minimal grade on Overall?

I’m pretty sure most people didn’t pay attention to that aspect, but somehow it’s bugging me. Has an admin advice on the conduct to take?

Note the Windows 7 window decorations ^^

The game has been ported! Or more precisely the library behind it, since the game itself is purely in Lua.

Grab it from the entry page.

Remember to read the README, lots of nice info. Also remember that you can entirely change the key mapping if you don’t like the default one (see file keymap.lua)

Please consider rating the game if you already skipped it for non-Windowsness!

Have fun (hopefully)!

Done! My first 3D game ever. I’m tired but happy about it.

Entry is here, for GNU/Linux and Windows.

Arks of Mercy

Be the savior of an endangered nation, as the level of the waters rise ineluctably. Guide your people to the safest mountains, build boats, teleportation towers and mighty shelters before it is too late!

Be sure to read the readme. It might not be very complex, but there are no instructions ingame at all.

EDIT: the readme might not be totally clear, but you can change the whole keymapping (not only for the gamepad) in keymap.lua

Be sure to check the Gameplay video!

Also, no Windows binaries yet, sorry. Will work on it, but I don’t have a Windows computer right here.

EDIT: ported!

Since this is clearly going to be an all nighter, I might as well do the traditional postmortem right away.

(more…)

Full menu: beacons, boats, teleport towers and shelters

Yay for digits made of OpenGL primitives!

Also, I needed a break from the coding frenzy, and wrote some music for the game. Since the game might very well never end up being a game, you can listen to the track here.

EDIT: perfectionism. Music is better like this.

Completed shelter, on top of the mountain

It floats! Praise the lords!

Tadaa! Here is the ultimate way to save the dudes! Build them shelters, which will float once the tide rises.

Maybe the game will not be called Islands of Misericord, but Arks of Mercy. Or something mystical like that. Now I hope I can make it fun.

Oh really?

Yeah really!

You can make you own little network of them, if that makes you happy. ’cause you know, it’s just a sandbox for now…

Aren't they cute?

Boats can now successfully (most of the time) load and unload passengers! Funny thing is that sometimes the dudes just run into the sea, to their tragic death.

Now more gameplay. A winning mechanism, perhaps?

Oh yeah, ingame menu with 3D meshes!

Look at that, night has fallen on the little island world (yeah, there is a night/day cycle, just for fun).

I have a nice OBJ loader, so I can make 3d “icons” and other meshes in Wings3D. The selected icon in the menu rotates and it’s cool.

Also, the smallish thing in the center is a boat. It doesn’t work yet, but it’s going to!

Wooah, pink!

There is now a simili beginning of gameplay… The player places beacons all over the map, and the dudes within their areas of influence will be drawn to them.

Now we’re still far from actual game mechanics, or even winning condition.

Diamond dude has a view on the sea!

So mmm yeah, more distant guys are just square, closer ones are diamond shaped. Oh and I get about 10 fps. Myeah. I wonder if the final product will actually be playable.

The guys run away from the approching seashore. And if they’re stuck on an island, they DIE! Mwahaha. Ok so now, gameplay. Saving the lil’ dudes.

Genesis 1:9. An Ceiling Cat gotted all teh waterz in ur base, An Ceiling Cat hadz dry placez cuz kittehs DO NOT WANT get wet. An Ceiling Cat called no waterz urth and waters oshun. Iz good.
(slight god complex here…)

Now with fully rotative camera, gamepad controlled

Still no precise gameplay in mind, but it will imply raising water level, probably something RTS-y.

Also, I added some Perlin noise to the heightmap. Now it’s almost always nice.

My terrain generation is really le big suck.

For obvious reasons, it’s not a good idea to use immediate mode (gl.Begin() gl.End()) with an interpreted language (lots of slow function calls).

I therefore tried to use vertex arrays, since it’s apparently recommended by the Redbook of OpenGL. So be it. ‘Twas fine, until I realised that LuaGL would flatten arrays of vertices at every frame, which is slow as hell.

I therefore transfered that part of the code to pure C. Once I have my nice mesh in Lua, I flatten it once, copy everything in one C array, and then uses this one with glDrawArrays. It’s a looot better.

However, I wonder if my EeePC is really a 3D  beast, because the following scene:

200*200 heightfield, with 2 triangles per cell --> 80000 polys, rendered twice (filled, outlined)

runs at about 4 fps. Laaaame.

OK now I never did 3D before, so maybe I’m just not doing it rite (insert kitty picture).

• Vertex Arrays not supposed to be used like that? For now I have all the coordinates of all vertices of all polys one after the other into a 1D array of size (n tris * 3 vertices * 3 coordinates). So lots of vertices are repeated. Is that wrong? I see we can also use glDrawElements() to avoid repeating vertices, but that implies using an array of vertex indices. Would that be faster?
• Better technique than vertex arrays?
• Just plain too much polys, try to do level of detail, or manual clipping before drawing?
• Get rid of the nice outline (um, which gives as about 5 more fps…)?

For now I’ll just reduce the size, try to get some proper terrain generation, and gameplay into that. Cause yeah, it’s supposed to be  a game at some point…

OK, ten hours have past already, but I just woke up. Breakfast at 13:00, no problem. Have kindof an idea for the islands, but not really sure yet where it’s going.

Also, it looks like I’m going down a very dangerous road, of trying 3D stuff. First time, yay. I’ve been playing a bit with my setup before, going through the Redbook, but never actually applied to a game. We’ll see…

Of course, since 3D is so hard to make look good (how the hell did they do Gears of Wars out of triangles, I’ll never understand), I’m going for a very minimalistic “retro” style, with flat shaded polys (no textures, except maybe for some UI elements)

Also I find the title “Islands of Misericord” to have quite a sound to it, although I’m not even sure it means what I want in English, and also I have absolutely no gameplay or background idea as of now.

Bah, all in good times.

Yay, greenish heightfield!

Also, for the curious, I’m using my own lib evöL, more or less a SDL wrapper, along with LuaGL, which despite being quite the suck on some points, is pretty cool.

Also, I’m planning on making the main input device a gamepad (with of course equivalents on the keyboard), because I have one, and it’s cool.

The poster season has begun!

Hello everyone.

It’s now been a lot more than 48h, and I see on the compo blog that some of you have made pretty things. I guess we can call it a week-end, and gather all that’s been made.

Could an admin please set up the submission system?

EDIT: Submit Here | View All Entries

In any case, thanks a lot for your enthusiasm and participation, your help for porting the “engine”, and the hopefully wonderful games you made.

As usual, the submission system will be up for a while, so feel free to submit stuff even very late. This is a Mini LD after all. What matters is the result, not the time limit.

See you soon for more adventures (LD #17 coming up!)

Cheers,

Tenoch

Since I finally managed to wake up, I guess it’s time to officially launch the compo.

Theme: Constraints (déjà vu?..)

To participate in the competition, you must use the provided “Retro” framework (links at the bottom of the post):

Retro (the Recursively and Erroneously Titled Retro Object)

It is a simple and very constrained game engine with a Lua 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

If you don’t like Lua, there is a C API as well, but you’ll need to compile your game yourself, while the Lua based games should be (hopefuly) portable. If you like neither of them, you can also program your game in any language/platform, provided that you stick to the given constraints (and use no external library other than what is provided by standard Lua/C)

Note: the Retro thingy doesn’t actually check if your game weighs more than a MB or not. Furthermore, there seem to be problems with “light” music formats like XM, so if the size limit is exceeded because of music, it’s ok.

Note 2: remember to read the documentation! It containts important and valuable information. The packages also contain an example game.

Optional themes: Cute but Evil or Legendary Cosmic Monsters

If you have no inspiration whatsoever, you can use this secondary theme list to get you started.

Schedule

It’s a Mini, so don’t worry too much about time limits. Take 48 hours when you can/want or even a bit more if you feel like polishing your game.

Downloads

Thanks to the community, we have several Retro binaries to use. They should be compatible.

Source, GNU/Linux (32bits), Windows (MinGW),  Windows (MSVC + more options), Windows (LuaJIT version), Mac OS X

See previous post + comments for more details

Final words

Oh well, have fun

Good luck!

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!