I decided to have a little fun today.

 I took the game engine I created for Simple Dungeon and created a new adventure out of it. This one is based on the TV series LOST. I don’t know if any of you are fans of the show, but I’m a big fan. 

 Anyway, the adventure is set on Lost island. You are Locke and the objective is to kill Ben. You’ll run into many of your favorite Losties here. Maybe even the smoke monster. You’ll finally get to see how that Locke vs. Jack battle turns out.

 Code is 99.7% the same. Mostly what I changed were the two data files. Fixed a couple bugs though while I was at it. It took a couple hours to design the new world and objects and monsters.

Have fun and let me know if you enjoy your adventures on Lost island.

 Game is here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/109829863/KillBen.rar.html

 –Note, updated rar. Forgot one of the files needed to run the game.

The compo has been over for days, but I just drank the last cup from my 2.5 gallon jug I bought for LD. This is called ‘Closure’, ladies and gentlemen.

Well I have had 5 comments now that said that they either don’t have a Facebook account, or that they don’t want to install extra apps. This is a bit of a bummer (and I knew beforhand that I was taking a risk by choosing this path), but if I could plead with you, it is easy (and free) to create a Facebook account to play the game — Heck, you don’t even ever have to use anymore after that. You can also remove the app after adding it and playing it.

I go through the trouble of dual booting back into Windows and installing various versions of different libraries to try other people’s apps, could you please at least exert just a little effort to try my app? Thanks.

So I’ve got around to compiling my 2GB of screenshots into a timelapse. You can see a long period at the start when visitors came round and I got absolutely no work done, but things get more and more frantic as the deadline approaches.

It looks like I never slept – but this is because there’s no screenshots from when the computer was off.

http://www.surrealix.com/ludumdare/timelapse.html

If you are getting a blank white screen when you start my game (even if you used your intellect to then click on it and play the game anyway), your video card may be displeased with my non-power-of-two textures. No, I wasn’t just being SUPER minimalist! The version I have up at my site (sorry, it’s in an installer) fixes that, so it may work if you had visual problems before.

Get it here: stillpond_install.exe (1.9mb)

However, that’s also my post-compo edition. It has two new bonus game modes (they are hidden, search the title screen! Think of Strongbad!), but aside from those modes (and fixing the texture sizes) it is totally unchanged. So I think it’s fair for you to judge it for the contest, provided you ignore (or don’t find) the bonus modes.

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.

I figured I’d post some more after thoughts. The contest went really well for me despite not having the whole weekend available to me. I had to go home to visit my father who was recently in a skiing accident. So, I’m happy with how things went.

Unfortunately, I posted my final entry early, and then I found a bug that evening when playing my game before going to bed after the contest ended. It was a minor thing, but apparently I would play my game exactly the same way each time, and thus why I didn’t find it until later.

Then after sleeping, I realized that while my directions on my menu state one thing, I had eased up on one game play element, making the game some what trivial. So, when I woke up Monday morning, I set out and fixed it. Looking at the comments so far, it’s too bad I didn’t think of fixing it sooner.

All in all, I think I spent about 12 hours or so on the project. I used Python + PyGame for the coding, the whole thing is under 400 lines of code. I used SFXR and Musagi for the sound effects and music. And I used my good old pals MsPaint and Photoshop for the graphics. I’m always amazed when I find myself going back to MsPaint for the really simple stuff I can’t do in Photoshop easily. I also used Audacity to convert my wav samples to off format for file size. And I used py2exe with the pygame2exe script to create the windows executable.

I wish I was able to comment to the feedback from voting.  If your confused about losing, you have to make all of the “invisible” frames (outlined in black on easy mode) appear first before clearing the screen of frames.  It was kind of a hard thing to explain.  That’s why I added the outlines on easy mode from feedback I got back from my girlfriend.  Of course, after you’ve played a couple of times, it makes more sense.  As for after figuring that out, there’s a strategy that guarantees victory, which I realized and fixed shortly after the competition.

So, I think that’s everything. For those looking for more of a challenge and how the game should have played, feel free to check out Framed! v1.2 (win).

EDIT:  Seems like I forgot to put the Readme in the win32 version zip. Whoops. Quick reupload.

Ok, the .exe file included in my upload didn’t work it seems, I’m not on a Windows desktop while developing, so I didn’t have time to try the compiled version during the compo. But I’m pretty darn sure I have a working version now. I updated the Final-post with a download link but here it is again

download(win32)

The fonts gets a bit messed up in the win version for some reason but It’ll have to do. Changing things more than getting it to compile after the compo would be cheating, right?

Until Phil gets around to fixing the link, give this a try.

/ludum/category/ld11/?tag=final+final&mythumb_nav=1

This should display the final entries grid, excluding the food pictures. Not sure why its final+final, but it works.

Alert!

I’ve added Mac and Linux builds of my game Strong AI so all the world can enjoy the fun of indiscriminately killing!

Well, it’s here!

A Windows port of ‘The Butler Did It‘ is now available for download. It’s unchanged from the linux version (except the bits coded so badly the compiler wouldn’t let me get away with).

Download, run, and keep trying until it manages to start without crashing.

Windows Binary (zip, 2.5 mb)

Unfortunately, I couldn’t finish in time… in fact, it’s still not finished, but I’m aiming to have it finished by Friday ( and certainly by 2nd May as I’m using it for AI coursework now, and that’s when it’s due. )

So, what went wrong?

Point One : My engine was a bit less useful than I had hoped.
It required ( and still does ) extensive amounts of work on to get something done, which scares me as I’ve been working on the engine for most of the year as my Honours Project, and there’s a hell of a lot of code in there, but to get it to do much game logic, it required a lot of work to the Entity classes and managers.

Point Two : The idea was a bit too ambitious.
The idea was that you’d “influence” the development of a community of shapes – the circles or squares. You couldn’t directly control them, but could assign them tasks from their basic pleb-like status to Attacker, Defender or Healer.
Plebs came in Male and Female forms, and hunted out the opposite gender to mate, increasing the population.
Attackers would actively seek out enemy units to attack.
Defenders would actively block enemy units that came near.
And finally, Healers would sacrifice their energy to top up every other unit’s energy.
Once given a task, they could not be influenced again.
Of course, this meant writing AI for each of these tasks as well as a CPU AI for the other player…

Point Three : Hardware Being Stupid
My laptop was being interesting and in the final two hours, it hard locked.
I would have been able to submit a basic version of it – with the Pleb AI running around and doing it’s thing – if my laptop hadn’t decided to bail on me in such a way that it wasn’t until half an hour AFTER the competition finished that I finally got the thing up and running again… by which point I was rather miffed at the thing and decided just to go to bed.

But what went right?
Point One : GL Renderer implemented!
I met my goal for implementing the GL renderer to the engine. Course there’s not much configuration from script side as I was trying to get it done quick to use for LD11, but it’s there

Point Two : The Scripting actually WORKED!
This one is a biggie as it’s the whole point of the engine.. there was actually enough exposed to Lua to get the Pleb AI doing it’s thing. There was a downfall I noticed here in that the Lua->C Stack was getting severely hammered which caused devastating performance hits, but that’s somewhat straight forward to fix by getting Lua to handle more data by itself rather than asking the engine to do everything, and requesting co-ordinate data for every entity, every frame, multiple times.

Although I didn’t get anything finished, I still managed to get a lot done in the time.. and I will be finishing the game off
At the moment, it’s interesting just to watch the Plebs run around and do their own thing.. Lua does sometimes freak out with the amount of data it’s having to shift, making some of them “explode” and move towards the camera, rather than hunt out another mate. And due to the rather standard C pseudo-random number generator, the majority of the Plebs congregate in the centre of the level somewhat, like a mass of worms.

Well done to everyone that did get something finished in time!
It was amazing sitting in IRC and watching the blog as progress was made on everyone’s projects, and there looks to be a number of really interesting games coming from this.. unfortunately, mine wasn’t one of them, but I’ll be posting binaries and all source by the end of the week when it’s finally finished – just for anyone interested in what I got up to

Temporary download site:

http://users.evtek.fi/~jarikom/ld11_most_entries.zip

About 160 megs or so. Notes:

• Only entries with trivial download links included (rapidshare and links to home pages not followed)
• Doubtlessly missing some stuff
• Did not uncompress stuff this time, so have fun figuring out how to decompress all the various formats =)

As always, this is just a kick-start package and you should read everyone’s blog for updates, missing files, as well as food photos and timelapses. Have fun, kids!

EDIT: Great minds think alike – mrfun was working on a kick-start package as well. Here’s his link:

http://www.codedojo.com/temp/LD11_for_windows.zip

Tailored for windows, entries unpacked in their own directories, etc.

EDIT2: Keeyai set up a torrent of mrfun’s package!

I posted a postmortem of my experience on my blog here.  Check it out

Here is my time lapse vid. I put the webcam time lapse inside the screen one and synced them up as best as I could, so it looks best in fullscreen mode. You can get the high res version here (~6.5MB)

I did not write much in my last post about what my game is all about, so here goes:

In the game you defend the whitish circles, aka planets, from asteroids. You use the mouse and WASD buttons to play, mouse controls the white square and the keyboard controls the grey shield on every planet. There are currently 5 levels.

I have come to realize that my game has several flaws:

• Bad English: This is the result of stress combined with English not being my mother language.
• The levels are not particularly well balanced: I did not really have time to look into that.
• The whole God-theme seams a little misplaced: Well, I had a great idea that would explain everything, which I of course did not have time to realize.

Looking back,  I realize I might have had my priorities wrong, but It feels like I’m getting better and better every time I do something like this, so maybe next time I’ll avoid the stupid mistakes.

Tools I used:

• Gedit
• Python interpreter
• The Gimp
• Rosegarden
• Audacity
• Probably something more that I have forgotten

Here’s a timelapse for my game. Watch me repeatedly fail to draw stuff, write big chunks of code that was later thrown out, and also try to make music that I decided to not put into the game! (The music just didn’t fit at all. I extended it a bit and used it in this video in stead)

Contains spoilers obviously, so play the game before watching =)

Oh, and I noticed the counter shows -1:39:49 at the end of the video. I did go a few minutes overtime (mostly upload issues though, also I started way late so please go easy on that =]), but only by a minute or two. There was a bug in the counter that caused it to count wrong when it went past the deadline. (Also, the time skips when the sleep window pops up as my PC was off then.)

Hello again! The linux binaries (and source) are up! These are post-deadline versions where nothing except the necessary has been changed. In order to get the game working on linux I’ve changed the following things:

• Reference parameters in the Vector2 class has been set to const

• One _itoa_s() call has been changed to a sprintf() call

• The time function has been changed from clock() to (clock() * 1000 / CLOCKS_PER_SEC)

Nothing else has been changed (in order to not cheat!), so there’s still a couple of bugs in there which can be used to get higher scores etc. I’m not going to tell you where though

Linux binaries and source:

http://gustav128.googlepages.com/sailor_linux.tar.gz

I should probably mention that you can move your boat using the arrow keys and repaint it while sailing! (people often ignore the readme for some reason )

I was surprised I was able to finish this game. The level is actually pretty darn big with 10+ rooms to explore and an entire forest as well.  In terms of size, the dungeon is nearly a 100 screens large. There are about 8 or so different monsters. Each one you encounter is a little more difficult than the last.

You have two kinds of points. Offensive points and defensive points. Every time you hit a monster you lose some offensive points. Battles can take a long time if you don’t maximize your offensive points because your hit damange is a percentage of your total offensive points. So heal before battles (every step will heal one point) and search around for special items that may increase your offense points. This is the key to quick effective battles.

 Every time a monster hits you, you lose the corresponding  amount of defensive points. If your defensive points drops to 0 then you die. You heal one point for each move. Potions will heal your defensive points and look for other ways to heal your points as well. Always go into battle well rested with lots of points.

 The game also is completely data driven and you could build your own dungeon with your own set of monsters simply by editing the two files, objects.xml and map.txt. Have fun with it and let me know if you come up with a great dungeon of your own.

 Have fun! If you make it to the princess I will be really impressed!

Timelapse!

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=2WrnjfxFQ64

Strangely enough, very little of the final levels I shipped with are in there. I stopped recording when I rebooted about half and hour before the deadline, so you can’t see me fooling around with sfxr either =(. You can, however, see all the time I wasted on that math problem on Saturday >:).