I uploaded the game to a friend’s host. I apologize for making you wait this long.

I couldn’t figure it out why it doesn’t work on vista.
I’m using directx 9.0c but i didn’t test it on vista.

I could probably because of the vertex codes without using shaders or because of fullscreen, i don’t know…

I’ll be glad if you send any error messages you’ve got to me  .

Thanks.

I was waiting for a Windows port before doing a postmortem, but I wanted to add a walkthrough for people who don’t want to solve the whole thing.

General hints: There’s three parts: an “orientation” section, followed by a puzzle with three switches (orange pink white), followed by a puzzle with four switches (blue green red yellow). Each of these three parts is separated by a long tunnel, and you never need to backtrack to a previous part. If you think you’re going the wrong way, press Down to turn around. Also, hold Up or Space while walking to speed things up. Because all the steps are reversible, it shouldn’t be possible to get stuck. You might wind up worse off than you started, though.

In the walkthrough below, each line is one room. “Blue 1st right” means turn to face the blue switch, hit it, and then take the first door to the right of the switch. If the line doesn’t have a color, such as “2nd left”, do not turn to face the switch, even if there’s one in the room. Just take the second door to the left of the direction you were facing when you entered. (This is counting closed doors, so if the first door on the left is closed, “2nd left” is the first open door on the left.) Okay?

Part 1:

1st left
Cyan 1st left
Purple 1st left

Part 2:

Orange 1st left
Pink 1st right
White 1st left
Orange 2nd left
White 2nd left
Pink 1st right
White 1st right

Part 3:

1st right
Green 1st right
Red 1st left
Yellow 1st left
Blue 1st right
Yellow 1st right
Green 1st left
Yellow 1st left
Blue 1st right
Yellow 2nd left
1st right

Thanks for playing!

First I’d like to say that I appreciate all the good constructive feedback on Shafted!.  To all those who have commented – thanks!  I have a new version of the game which addresses some of the feedback:

• I’ve now mapped all controls to the keypad which works much better.
• No more mouse required. To start the game, simply press <enter>.
• Press ‘h’ to toggle display of the help text  explaining all the controls.
• I’ve moved the camera a bit to make more of where you’re jumping visible
• Pressing space on sign more than once no longer throws up more text
• The player now turns red when he reaches fatal fall velocity.

Note: This new version is setup to run in windowed mode by default. To run in fullscreen, find ‘command_line.txt’ and remove the ‘-window’ argument.

Download Windows

Download Mac [Coming soon]

I’ve made a couple of post-compo modifications to my entry.

The main one you might be interested to hear about is that solo play is now possible. You can load and save by double-clicking the relevant buttons at the bottom of the editor. I just whipped up nine demo maps, included.

Note that you can’t overwrite a map, so don’t worry about that. Every time you hit save the map gets a unique filename which you can mess with later.

Besides the time considerations I originally didn’t want to include saving at all, because I thought that feature might deemphasise the interaction between players. But since I haven’t gotten much feedback from people who actually have another person to play with I thought I’d open it up a bit.

Another LD ended (my third one) and this time I’m proud of this game. A mix of puzzle and quick-action I hope that it will deliver some good moments to the player.

From the beginning I started with a cumulative design in mind, that is, I started with “the player runs in a grid” and started coding that. Then the next idea was making the player explore a maze, so the maze concept was implemented, but then enemies were needed to give more pace to the game. The maze and enemies combined  well into this puzzle-like + memory + timing mechanics. So all maps were created to take advantage of this moto: “the real challenge of the game is to understand the level and then go to the next” (note that replayability was never a goal of the game). The last design element was growing difficulty, I wanted a serve-all solution so the multiple exits were implemented (an exit that it’s easy to reach means that the next room is easy (when compared to the other choice)).

But this way of designing the game brings its share of problems. First, there’s no defined “finished” game, so you can always add or at least think of other features you can add. Second, and building in the first problem, you may lose some notion of how much time left there is for polishing the game (the menu teaching on how to play the game was only made two hours before the deadline and so the code for that is one BIG hack).

The big thumbs-up for this method is flexibility, if an idea doesn’t work you can throw it way without worries. In contrast, when you design everything and only after you start coding, if some feature doesn’t work as expected you must certainly will have to change (or, in the worst case, also throw way) some features that depended (or interacted) with the lost one.
Another positive point is that you never over-design a game that needs completion in 48h, although you need to reserve a greater chunk of time to polish the game than you would need with the design-everything-first method to avoid the problems mentioned above.

Technologically, everything went smooth for the most part of the game code. SFML is a really good media library that gives you everything you need but doesn’t get in the way you want to design your code. Many people use SDL when using C/C++ but I really recommend using SFML. I picked it up one day before LD15 and still could make a game without almost no worries (great tutorials for each feature and great organization of the library also makes the API reference easy to read).

The problem arose when porting to Windows. SFML uses OpenGL but support for it (in Windows 7) is still in the early stages , so testing the game when its rendering performance dropped considerably was a pain. I just hope that other Windows users don’t have those problems and can experience the game in its fully performance.

About the graphics, although I’m no artist, I always try to make something good looking. But this time I focused much more on game design, making the maps balanced and polished. So the 30 minute art that I did in the first day stucked until the end, but still I think it isn’t that bad though I could have made simple animations if I just had put another hour to it.

In the retrospective, I think that, of the 3 LDs I’ve taken part, this is my best entry so far. The biggest problem was really porting to Windows, so lesson learned, next time code in Windows and Linux comes as a bonus port

Play here

I’ve tinkered around with my Ludum Dare entry a bit more, and am ready to make another release (there may be one or two more after this, but nothing major.) For a while now I’ve been wanting to play with these mechanics, and Ludum Dare was a great opportunity.

New this version:

• sound (or something vaguely resembling it)
• vacuum affects enemy projectiles
• vacuum can be used to destroy enemies with their own projectiles
• 8 levels

There are other things I’m interested in trying, but I will probably not experiment with them in this prototype. These include:

• an alternate weapon mode that adds to walls instead of destroying them
• incorporating indestructible surfaces
• a charge shot with variable blast radius
• ammunition containers that double as shootable explosives
• better ways to handle lava
• stones (Dig Dug!) which are embedded in walls and can be freed to crush enemies, saving ammunition
• ways to limit recoil jumping, so it can be used to hover, but not reach unlimited heights

Timelapse video of “nice cave”

The dual monitor setup made this timelapse a pain in the ass to put together! I hope some of you enjoy it though.

How do I embed youtube into the LD blog?

This is a short behind-the-scenes explanation of why my game, Let’s go cave-burrowing is missing some gameplay

In the beginning I envisioned a game where you threw “grenades” to change the environment, sort of a casual-like game. I didn’t want to have any game-over screens or the like, as this would detract from the core gameplay. One solution to make it more interesting was to add diamonds that threw out more puke-like balls that exploded, though I didn’t had the time to implement it.

All the easy game-play I could add to make it more challenging would remove the fun. For example I thought to add a timer so that you had to complete the level within a certain time, but then the player would not be able to “explore” the level at his/her own pace.

It was only now this morning that I realized that the perfect solution would be to rate the player based on some score of fast-completion and huge explosions, since then it would add a challenge for those who wanted it, but it wouldn’t punish those who didn’t. I guess you can’t win every time

Click to watch a gameplay video.

Beacon is currently at Version 1.10 now, with the following changes:

• Added ambient background track courtesy of Ronan McGrath.

• Spikes no longer kill you when hit from the side.

• Fixed tiling issue with certain tiles next to spikes.

• Many difficulty tweaks made to the later, harder rooms.

You can download the latest from here:

ZIP (3.36 MB)

RAR (3.12 MB)

It was also features on this week’s ByteJacker episode. The LD compo was linked to as well.

http://www.bytejacker.com/episodes/052

I probably should have written this closer to the end of the contest, but I wanted to finish a small puzzle game (The Knight’s Tour) I had started the week before for release. As a result, my recolection of some of this may be a little hazy.

I’ve added a zip containing my project directory to my game’s page… it’s complete except that I had embedded the font ‘Arial’, and you’ll have to add your own copy of arial.ttf to the font’s directory in order to get it to build.
(more…)

I apologize to everyone that wanted to try my game but weren’t able to do it because it was Linux only.

Now I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 (thanks to university for early access to it and quickly ported the game to Windows. But some problems arose while porting, one being the performance of the game, but that may only be because I have an old laptop and the drivers for Win7 are not good enough (I’ll dive into more detail in the post-mortem that I’ll write after this post).

So if you have issues with performance and have the possibility to test the game in Linux, please try in both.

Again, sorry for the inconvinience, good luck to all other entrants.

link: http://psa-sandbox.googlecode.com/files/Cavern%20Escape.zip

I’ve listened to the comments that the controls in Cavern Copter are not as good as they should be and as a result I’ve uploaded a new version with an alternative control scheme.

• Cavern Copter (new controls) – Windows
• Cavern Copter (new controls) – Mac (Intel)
• Cavern Copter (new controls) – Mac (PPC)

Think of it as Asteroids and you’ll be fine (I hope).

For what it’s worth, the new controls work better for me. I can now rescue all 8 scientists in 112 seconds.

— Rod

Lots of people have been saying my entries not working, so if you tried it and it crashed, go to the page, and replace your exe with the one in the debug .zip, and then post the number in debug.txt, so i can try to track down the cause

Timelapse

Compilation of gameplay videos made during the development.

My timelapse: (not sure how to embed it!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPk11bHJQG0

I finally finished up porting my entry for LD 15 to Mac OS X. It took a surprisingly long time (about 8 hours of work!) but amounted to virtually no change in the codebase. The code is available so hopefully someone else can save some time and avoid this nonsense.

• DevIL was removed and replaced with SDL_image.
• Sound and texture loading code was modified to work with OS X bundle path names.
• A 1 character bug causing poop to sometimes be emitted from the bats face instead of rear was fixed  (for real!)

I’ve updated the babe smashing hit game A CAVE FOR MY BIKINI BABES, making it now on v1.1.

PLAY IT HERE AND EARN HIGH SCORES!

Changelog:

• Added Mochi leaderboards!
• Slightly altered economy and item use counts!
• Fixed a bug that was preventing combo scores from counting (with the version I included in my LD submission, spikes were hands down the most efficient trap)!
• Capped the inventory for each trap at 20!
• Added a prep time of 15 seconds to the beginning of each level!
• Fixed a bug where you could get the player off the map!
• Altered enemy spawning and time limits slightly!
• Cop and babe walk speeds are now switched, to account for economy rebalancing!

So after a bit of a problem with Youtube and 700MB of wasted uploads, I finally got a working timelapse that can actually be seen from the Intertubes, wooh! Music added for dramatic and emotional effect.

Timelapse for \”The Narwhal Bacons At Midnight\”

If you haven’t played the game, you can do so here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=rate&uid=1097

Edit: How can I embed a Youtube video in WordPress?

I noticed a number of people were a little confused with how to play my entry Brinie, so I thought I would offer a quick guide to the game. It’s funny, I just assumed everyone would pick it up through playing it a little bit.

Ok, when the game starts, you should see Brinie, a net, and a bunch of things that look like fleas. These are the Grags. They live to eat, pretty much anything and everything. As Brinie is the only thing out there, you will see them start to chase her around. When they touch her, they begin feeding off of her. When they eat all they can, they will go off and cruise, but not before having a baby.  In this way, very quickly 10 Grags can become 100 Grags and 100 Grags can become 1000 Grags. If enough Grags get to Brinie, they will very quickly kill her off.

You have three options to try to save Brinie.

1) Drop a Gauloop somewhere on the playfield – it is a hive of small noisy creatures. These are like bait. They have a strong smell and may attract Grags away from Brinie. In the same way, Brinie doesn’t like the smell of the Gauloop so it may repel her a bit. You can use these to try to get her to go where you want, or if not that, at least keep her away from certain places. The problem with Gauloops is that Grags feed off them and will quickly devour them and cause the ranks of Grags to grow greatly.

2) Drop a Pauper somewhere on the playfield. A pauper is like a Gauloop, and it has a much stronger smell, but it doesn’t feed them nearly as well. What it does do is after a few seconds, it explodes, killing all Grags in the area. If positioned properly, this can be used to wipe out a huge population of Grags. The drawback is that Grags love to eat dead Grags, and a few living Grags will find the carnage a great feasting area and may quickly multiple their ranks back up.

3) Use your Net to capture Brinie. When Brinie is completely on the net, simply press the capture button and you win the game. The net also has the effect of killing any Grags on it at the time it is pressed. This fact can be used in combination with 1) and 2) to really wipe out the Grags. It is a great and difficult (and not necessary) accomplishment to completely wipe out the Grags, but it is possible and quite a fun challenge.

Now you are limited to 9 Gauloops, 6 Paupers and three Net captures, so use them wisely. Also, you can only have up to 3 gauloops and 1 pauper on the playfield at one time, so that is a consideration as well.

That’s about it. Hope that helps clarify some things. Here’s the game online in case you are interested in giving it a try now:

http://www.brinie.org