I had just done a ton of art on mini-17, so I just kinda wanted to stay away from anything too art intensive. I had actually started to prepare a C++ engine using Gosu that I was planning to use for the competition. But then a new “real money” opportunity looked like it was going to prevent me from having the time to enter the contest at all. When that fell through at the last minute, with my c++ engine incomplete, and my lack of interest in doing anything with artwork this time around, I suddenly decided this would be the perfect opportunity to try to make my first interactive fiction game.

I was several hours late on Friday when I went online to see what the theme was. Clearly from the posts, most people seemed to hate the selected theme. That gave me the idea all at once of what my work should be about. I would make a game about a programmer trying to make a game about islands in this competition. I wanted to limit it to about one room to keep the game finishable, and so this idea seemed feasible.

I had no problem getting started. Inform 7 is a natural language. If you’ve never heard of a “natural language”, it is pretty amazing to say the least. You actually write the program in what is more or less normal sentences. For example, this is the description of a room:

‘The kitchen is a room. Southwest of the kitchen is the closet. The description of the kitchen is “This kitchen looks like it’s never been used.”. There is an oven in the kitchen. There is a turkey on the oven. The turkey is a portable thing. The description of the turkey is, “It looks frozen solid.”‘

Well, you get the idea, that is actually good code that will compile (maybe, not tested).

So doing all the descriptions and the text was easy, but going beyond that to do anything interesting took a ton of work. Every time I wanted to do something non trivial, I would have to search through all of the documentation and examples looking for a clue on how to do something. The language is incredibly powerful, but I was running into problems all the time where I would word something slightly different than the parser would allow and then the program wouldn’t work (funny, kind of just like the game itself). But I started to figure out the use of the language, using if and case statements (natural language versions) and how the language is actually pythonesque. I started to understand supporters and containers, how to create variables, the use of time, etc. For example, you might say something like this:

The turkey is a portable thing. The turkey is frozen, raw or cooked.

Instead of eating the turkey:
If the turkey is frozen:
say “You break a tooth off trying to dig into it.”;
Otherwise if the turkey is raw:
say “What are you, a werewolf?”;
Otherwise:
say “Yum, that turkey tasted just like chicken!”.

So after a while, and I had gotten more familiar with it, it became a lot easier, but I didn’t have time to go back and really fix some of the stuff I had done in the beginning that was essentially broken.

What I liked about making an interactive fiction game:

1. I got to tell a story, and actually I think it came together pretty well at the end. I think the storytelling aspect of games is perhaps what I enjoy the most about making them.

2. I never felt like I wasn’t going to be able to finish. There are contests where you try to make an interactive fiction game in 2 hours and the results are impressive. If I had known at all what I was doing, I could have probably done it easily in 8 hours or less. As it was, it took about 20 hours total with all the research I had to do. And also, I really could have cut it off and put in a forced ending if I didn’t have time to finish, so I was never really worried about not finishing the game for once.

3. No graphics and audio. Oh man, usually I spent so much time fiddling with art and stuff. I have probably spent 2/3 of the time of my last two projects on art. And I spent time trying to create musical scores and sound effects, though that was probably never more than a few hours for each game. It was really nice not to have to delve into that stuff and all the tools required to do something.

4. My entry was actually socially relevant. It touched on a hot topic regarding Apple’s decision to ban Middleware. It is kinda fun to think that the game is putting itself in the conversation of something important, even if it’s only satire.

Can’t wait till the next contest it was so fun!

My Entry
Islands Far Away

I wrote a little postmortem on my blog, with a link to the source code: http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/ld17-postmortem

Hello!

Since all the cool kids do liek this whole reply-to-comments thing, I thought I’d alienate myself further by pointing that out.
If you haven’t commented already, DO SO, NOW!!!1oenoenene
See, like I posted previously, I suck at posting-introductions. Well then, let’s reply to some comments, eh!

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a few people reported problems when running my game… and i have filtered it down to the compiler.

It compiled the game which was only compatible on 32bit systems.

I’ve now uploaded a 64bit compiled option.

I hope this resolves some of your problems.

shady1024 says …

Difficulty would have been nice, like easy would have given me a time limit of like 30 seconds or something. Cool idea though.

You’re rigth! I will put this option in the next version.

philomory says …

It felt like an interesting start, like the setup for a strategy game, but the 10-second timer was too hard to handle in the case of misclicks (at least on the setup I’m currently using to play it). Otherwise, could develop into something neat.

So, i did not thinked in this game like a setup for a bigger game, but who knonw?Maybe a naval war!! Or aerial war!!Where you need to build a island with all the resources that you will use to construct your fleet. Its sound nice! Thanks!

I must make an apology

I have, due to a pile of homework, been unable to rate many games at all.  will try to rate as many as i can, but I can’t promise that i will. If i didn’t rate yours, my sincere apologies. Good luck too all of you! ~ACWL

I’m still going to  be with the community, and will probably take part of LD#18, i will just be a little quiet.

I went and wrote up a postmortem for Nieuwe Aarde, my turn-based strategy game, over on my main development journal.

Hello people! =D

If there is someone out there who hasn’t played this game (or hasn’t finished it), this is your opportunity!

Walkthrough:

Tip: speak with everyone and try again to interact with some things each time you achieve something, dialogs change.

1- Three objects in BASURA: The rope is to the left of that guy in this island. It’s like a smudge with some black pixels. The fuel is in the PWC, and the propeller is in the wall of the hut (some mouse-aiming needed).

2-Speak with the joiner: The man in the orchad wants meat. You have to give him something to eat or he won’t let you see her.  He says he likes fish, but a chiken is fine too. In BASURA, a chicken has escaped form the pen.

3-Get to ROCA: There is a secret way to that island, by boat is imposible but… you have to have been in the currents and then you will be able to ask the joiner for the secret. She will tell you about a tunnel, you can reach it throug the  bush in the volcano.

4-Build the device: You can’t make it, but someone else can. Of course, the joiner is the right one. Talk to her. She doesn’t have all the materials. You need some copper. As you may have guessed all the materials are in BASURA. Ask the guy there for some copper and he will ask you for something in exchange.

5-Need some metal: As you took his chicken before, maybe you can give him some food? There is a fish caught in the net, in ROCA (to the left). You will have to use your inventory for the first time (the GUI is at the top of the screen, the icon is a suitcase). Use the fish with the guy and he will give you the copper.

6-Winning the game: Give the copper to the joiner and thats it! Now you have the device. You know what you have to do with it. That will trigger the crapy ending cutscene

7-Enjoy your succes… or maybe not?

It wasn’t that hard… but now you got no excuses for not playing it.

Hi dudes, i do know how answer the comments in my game Arquipelago, so i will write a post to do it, lets go:

jplur says …

I like how the villages grow into cities

I liked it too, in my idea there will be various types of cities, and the type will be influencied by the neighbors tiles.

fydo says …

Neat game, but I can’t find a link to your source.

Sorry dude, but i didnt found a way to make this before the game submission, another day i post it like a regular post.

crackerblocks says …

I see lots of potential with this concept.

Thanks for your comment, maybe it be a iPad game?

Hempuli says …

F-secure warns about this being a “suspicious program”. Yeah, it’s probably not true, but I’d like to hear something about this before allowing.

Well dude, i dont know what to say, but i will put the source code soon and this “suspicious” will desapear.

Endurion says …

Hmm, the time limit kills any strategy you might develop. Also, keeping the time limit running if you misclick is deadly.

Hmm, thanks for your commentary, i will think in a way to resolve this problem. But the time is a important point of tension in the game!

Thanks for all the people that tried my game,  is great to know that my unsleped hours was to a fun objective!

I’m wondering… is a link to the svn repository enough for the competition standards, or do I have to make a .rar file with all the source? It’s a public repository, anyone can use it / see it.

I can’t get embedded video to work, so click here for linky.

This is not a timelapse video (that one’s here)This is a video of the last and hardest part of the entire game, just to prove that it can be done (and to refute the naysayers who say it’s impossible). There are even a few flowers that I don’t collect in this run – they’re just there to make it a bit easier. Yes, you heard that right.

Well, it’s been a week.

This was my second ludum dare, and it was fun. I took a much more ambitious game design this time than I did for my first one, and it made things interesting in I think a good way. Although there are loads of ideas and features that I never got around to implementing, my game is playable and looks a lot better than I expected it to.

The good:

I made an RTS in 48 hours. Also, it’s kind of fun.

The random island generation looks cool and saved me the time to create a map editor and a bunch of interesting maps.

The AI is actually pretty cool. All of the “essential” features are in (fire, selection, training, movement, pathfinding, combat, fire).

The art actually looks pretty neat. I had images for all of the units, particle effects for the fire, circles for the ripple effect that doesn’t entirely make sense and a neat lots of trees effect to hide the fact that the map is tilebased.

The bad:

The fire is currently “if hp < maxhp then BIG FIRE ON UNIT end”.

I really wanted the size of the fire to depend on the size of the unit and how hurt the unit is, but I was just so rushed for time. I also wanted units to heal over time, but never got around to it, so if a unit is hurt even once it will remain on fire until it dies.

The AI is kind of random and doesn’t really protect it’s main base very well. It also never acts offensively; if it attacks you it’s because you’re too close to its merchants.

The map generator has a habit of creating inland cities. It also has a slight chance of spawning capitals directly adjacent to each other, and a hopefully slighter chance of locking up during the map generation process in which case the program would need to be restarted.

The game never says YOU WIN or YOU LOSE even if you destroy every enemy or an enemy destroys every one of you.

The selection mechanics were a bit clunky. If multiple units are in front of your mouse ,which one is selected is random. It is impossible to double click on a unit to select all of that type of unit, which is annoying because selecting all war ships without selecting any of your merchants is something you will want to do often.

Merchants will occasionally stop what they are doing and become idle. This happens often when the AI tries to order a merchant to trade with an inland colony.

Some undeveloped features are obvious, like the fact that you can “capture” colonies, yet their ownership is meaningless.

Due to the lack of variety in game elements, the strategy is somewhat flat.

There is a total lack of sound/music.

And there are a bunch of other minor bugs that managed to persist due to a lack of playtesting.

more thoughts:

I’m very pleased with the game that I managed to create, and have been enjoying the positive feedback.

It’s been a week, and I’ve mostly been busy, but I have started on a postcompo version.

So, as you can see in the cropped screenshot, there is some variation in the size of fires according to how hurt the unit is. You can also see  some aesthetic changes (like the shores), and an area of influence for buildings under a player’s control that provides healing to that player’s units. Also, there are no inland colonies.

[EDIT http://www.mediafire.com/file/ozfezytzyzv/TinyArmada1.1.zip]

Either Randall Munroe’s a fan of my game, or this is simply a matter of “childish minds think alike”. I’m rather entertained, either way.

Built with the idea that bombs would explode over the water, not in it…

Unfortunately that wasn’t the case,  still made for a good fort though.

Hi Everybody,

Since I had so much fun at this competition, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts in retrospect, 7 days after everything was done.

Basically, this will be a post-mortem of my game “Mauritius” along with random thoughts.

The Idea:

Upon finding out what the theme was, I started thinking quite a bit. I set myself a deadline of 6 hours into the competition to come up with an idea, and start working. To stimulate thinking, I opened up and read about Islands in Wikipedia, yielding all sorts of stupid ideas. I wasn’t sure if I was looking for a game in which islands are a game mechanic element, or merely a theme element. Needless to say, I went with the latter.

Reading about islands really stimulated me, and soon enough I had a bunch of random drawings on my desk, portraying various islands in all shapes and forms (including one on the back of a giant sea turtle, which was the runner up idea…). Finally, somehow I stumbled upon Mauritius and the story of the Dodo, and that was it.

Game Mechanics and Code:

Choosing a platformer/side-scroller was almost obvious for me, I have only recently went back to playing with game-programming, and anything more complex than that was out of the question.

I drew some sketches of what the game would look like, and didn’t really think of the details. I think this is the main flaw of my game, game mechanics are just too simple – I just didn’t have any good ideas regarding those, at least not ones I knew how to implement.

Code was written in C++ and ClanLib. I have been playing with both in the weeks before LD, just to make sure I remember how to wield this tool. I must say that 48h of coding really helps in MAKING THINGS WORK, without worrying about “But what if I want to add this feature?”. This really streamlined the whole experience, resulting in some ugly code, but at least a whole game. Definitely one of the best lessons leared – just code, damn it! don’t think about it.

Art:

The first thing I did is draw the Dodo sprites. I LOVE drawing sprites, and this one was especially fun. As a reference I searched for “Dodo” in google images, and just left the tab open while I draw the 32×32 pixels bird. Using GraphicGale’s onion skin really helped in making the animation better. The Portuguese hunter is a sprite I am particularly proud of – I drew using a random reference I found on google images (some 18th century etching), and for a 32×64 sprite I think it has nice details. I would have worked more on the animation though, but I didn’t have the time.

Tiles were drawn in a big frame in Paint.NET and later cut down to a tile set. I found this method good because it readily shows you how the tiles connect to each other. It’s the first time I made tiles for a side scroller of this kind, and it was FUN. Paint.NET, however, is really not an ideal tool for this – the grid is just not robust enough there, and handling 32×32 chunks is real cumbersome.

Music:

Music was whipped up very quickly – I used FruityLoops which I really like, and some samples I found on my hard-drive. I wanted something “Jungle” like, but not too happy, and I kinda like the result. Sounds effects were not really important, so I just went with “sfxr” and it did the job.

Random Thoughts:

Eli who introduced me to LD was very supportive, and having someone going through what you are, and sharing ideas, version, graphics and such was a great way to feel how you are coming along in the competition. I don’t think I would have finished anything there without him, so thanks dude!

In conclusion, I had an AWESOME time here at LD, and I am really looking forward for the next one. From what I’ve seen and rated so far, there are some REALLY good games here, so Kudos to all!

Thanks for reading,

Daniel

My previous host was having problems with downloads. Now I uploaded it to gamejolt and it should be working fine. If you couldn´t play it yet, do it and vote

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=1901

Also, thanks for all the comments. They have encouraged me to do a polished version of the game. I think that it is funny and addictive enough so I´m making a flash version. I think I will need help with the graphics though.

All the problems with the game are due to the lack of polishing. It is very hard for some and very easy for others

@ skintkingle: It was hard for me to figure why it was funny I´m not an English native speaker.

@ shockedfrog: Sorry about that. It is my first ludum dare so I wasn´t familiar with the rules. I made all the sound but I didn´t know about the music. It´s only fair to have a 1 in audio.

Well i’ve been stupidly busy at work at the moment so I haven’t really had any time to evaluate how it went properly, so here it is:

Things that went well:

• Graphics – I was overall rather happy with the art in the end, it’s really my first time doing my own art at all (short of modelling some stuff from TRON for fun) and I was surprised at how motivated I was to just continue doing it, i’m usually so terrible with drawing and so on that I tend to rely on others for this sort of thing but with super low-res pixel art it’s so confining it’s hard to get it wrong if you don’t mind stuff looking a bit silly.
• Controls – I don’t want to take credit for Unity’s physics or anything, but this was the first time i’ve done 2D platforming mechanics in Unity and was pretty happy with the result, jumping is a bit weird as I was trying to achieve jump height relative to the amount of time the button is pressed down but apart from that it came off well enough, if a bit heavy feeling.
• Getting it done – I was waylaid by a series of small jobs I had to do around the flat and helping people out with various computer problems, so most of all i’m just happy it was a somewhat complete product.

Things that went badly:

• Sound – Pretty obvious one given that there wasn’t any, I tried to record some basic stuff on my guitar but I couldn’t record it cleanly enough and trying to learn Musagi in the 3 hours I had to do sound proved way too much. I didn’t know about sfxr either so I gave up on sound effects altogether. Next time i’ll be much more ready for this sort of thing and if the theme fits i’ll probably be doing some form of rythm based game.
• Length – Again another pretty obvious problem with it, there’s literally 30 seconds of gameplay tops, primarily due to me building the level with about 5 minutes left and I wanted to make sure it looked right. I didn’t realise you could submit 15-20 minutes late otherwise I probably would’ve had 3-4 levels of significant but repetitive length.
• Dead bodies – Yeah those floating things are meant to be dead bodies, I have no idea how i’m meant to do those properly given the limited amount of pixels but they’re remarkably abstract.

I’m sure there’s other things that went wrong and right with it but those are the main things that come to mind.

Going forward i’m not sure if i’ll continue with it as a game, it’s a rather boring concept and i’m not a huge fan of the cliché’d super hard indie platformer genre, but if people actually want more levels i’m more than happy to implement some of the extra art I did and put together some interesting levels. The theme was fun but I couldn’t really think of anything that interesting to do other than the play on words in the title, but if anyone comes up with any interesting mechanics related to buoyancy and general island jumping I could easily get motivated again.

With regards to the whole debate about Unity/Game Maker/etc i’m a bit on the fence, I’ve done a lot of C++ with SDL/GL/D3D projects in the past and it’s such a laborious, un-fun experience I don’t really have a lot of inclination to take part in a strict competition like that. That said I think each game should be evaluated based on the amount of work gone into it, if you’re using a pre-made engine there should either be significantly more content, or some form of mechanic that would be too time consuming if you had to do the base engine for it too. Then again with that attitude you could end up with people forcing themselves to do contrived game concepts over simplistic but brilliant ideas just to keep up with the joneses. I guess the whole Tech category thing could work but then again that could result in LD being a glorified tech demo event, although it is balanced with the other categories (this was my first LD so i’m unsure as to why it was added then removed previously).

I’ll either be taking place in the Mini-LD this month or in the EGP for this month (High Velocity theme sounds pretty fun to play about with). It’s really fun taking part in these contests and getting feedback, it’s really nice to have people take the time to look at your stuff and give constructive feedback, I tend to be hyper-critical of myself so when people have fun with anything I make it’s a pleasant surprise. I’m working through the list myself and it’s pretty incredible to see how some people interpret the theme and how some people can achieve so much in so little time.

I’m open to collaboration on interesting game concepts (especially if they’re in Unity) so if anyone is serious about a particularly interesting concept or prototype and is capable of finishing products to completion with a high degree of polish i’m more than interested in helping (although with full time work I don’t have a huge amount of time). On another note my company (www.rubixstudios.co.uk) may be looking for a freelance chiptune composer for an upcoming iPhone project so if anyone wants to throw their hat into that ring, PM me here or email me at billy (at) rubixstudios.co.uk.

Lots of love,

Billy ‘brian’ Fletcher.

I want to give Perrin an award for his game, but I can’t because he doesn’t have any journal posts.

I want to give people awards for their games, but I can’t because they don’t have any journal posts.

floatation.webs.com

Go there to download the latest post-compo version. It’s currently only on Windows, but a friend is compiling it on Mac and Linux, too.

fydo says …

Very pretty! I liked the music too.

I must admit, it is difficult to tell how much of this is your hard work, and how much of it is just Unity. Especially since you’ve admitted to being lazy, in your timelapse post.

Not to worry, I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt.

(emphasis added by me)

It’s a very interesting question. And I’m not sure how to answer it.

I think the most honest answer would be that Unity 3D did all of it. Simply because if I had not used Unity I would very likely made a different game and this game wouldn’t exist at all therefore Unity is responsible for 100% of the game!

Click ‘read more’ if that answer doesn’t satisfy you.

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