Man, this was a while back. Magnificent Gunbright is a totally sweet faux-Japanese abstract minimalist shoot-em-up (complete with terrible Engrish) where your ammunition is also your armour. Your blobs swarm around you, you can fire them at your opponent, and you can also collect blobs that rain constantly from the sky.

At the time, I thought that having graphics consisting only of black and white circles was strong graphic design, but the game is completely unparseable from a screenshot and it’s not much better in motion. The sound effects are awesome, though, and no one can tell me different. Bloop-bloop-shinngg!

The game itself? It’s pretty okay. It’s mostly a matter of always moving, and getting lots of shots off at the computer when he’s fishing for ammo. I liked that if you got far enough in, eventually the computer would start with a huge swarm and you’d start with nothing — when you’re on defense, the game is pretty enjoyable. It’s just that when you’re on the offense, there’s no interesting strategy; you either hit your opponent or you don’t.

The best feedback I received was from my friend Patrick Alexander, who draws funny pictures for some gaming website or other, who summed it up thusly: “It’s like Ikaruga, only… only not as good. By quite a lot.” If Magnificent Gunbright had a box, this quote would be on it.

Before MG, I’d tried Ludum Dare once before — LD4, apparently, when the theme was Infection. My entry was to be a puzzle game called Hachoo!, where you were a bacterium who could only move by causing the host you were currently infecting to sneeze on another person. Unfortunately, I made one really stupid mistake which caused me to not finish — I used unfamiliar tools. I was a cocky C programmer at the time, and I worked mainly in embedded systems. When I played with writing games, I used SDL.  So of course the natural choice was C++ on Windows using Allegro. I chose Windows for obvious reasons, C++ because I thought the STL would save me time, and Allegro because I’d remembered being annoyed at the lack of batteries included with SDL in comparison when I was 16. Well, I had major issues with the MingW debugger, the STL doesn’t save you time when you’re unused to fighting with obtuse template-based compiler errors, and it turned out that what was simple and elegant when I was a dumbass teenager rubbed the more experienced me the wrong way. (Not to mention that I made a bunch of stupid rookie mistakes because I forgot key things about the API.)

So for Magnificent Gunbright, I decided to learn from my mistakes, stop worrying about stray pointers and just use Pygame. It worked great! I highly recommend it.  The only downside was that when there are a large number of blobs on the screen, there’s some significant flickery slowdown; I say it’s just an unintentional homage to the NES.

You can download Magnificent Gunbright from my website. It’s built for Windows, but it’ll run on Linux, assuming you have pygame, because all the source code is included.

Flowers n Bees was made for the 8th Ludum Dare 48 hour programming competition. This was my first attempt to create a game in 48h, so it was quite a challenge to come up with something playable at all. The goal of the game is to gather honey for the winter. However, you cannot collect honey on your own. Instead you have a swarm of bees at your command that can do the gathering for you. Flowers n Bees was programmed in Python using PyGame, PyOpenGL and PGU.

This was my second Ludum Dare entry, for LD#8. Theme was swarms. This time you’re playing the Master of Fireflies, out for revenge against some mushroom-dwelling things who didn’t invite you to some insignificant party last week. So you send your swarm of fireflies after them to torch their mushroom homes. That’ll teach ‘em! The mushroom-dwelling things doesn’t take kindly to this though, and starts spraying water around, which unfortunately kills your swarm and stops the mushroom fires. The battle is on!

This was the first time I made something with a swarm-like behaviour, which was nice. The game turned out ok, though not really finished — those mushroom-dwelling things only ever face right, for example, and the levels weren’t supposed to be that flat. There should have been platforms and stuff. Still, there’s a win condition and level progression and such, so that’s something at least. Anyway, it’s kinda fun-ish for a little while, torching mushrooms while those poor guys losing their homes at your hand try to kill off your swarm, but it gets boring and repetitive after a while.

Oh well, I had fun making it, and learned some new things in the process, so I choose to consider it a success regardless =)

Download: [ Source code ]

Ah, great compo this was. Tons of sweet games. Unfortunately that also meant fierce competition, and I only managed to snag a best position of 3rd in Fun (which is unusual for me, as I normally do better in the technical categories).

Base idea for the game was to have the level be “swarming”, for an unexpected approach. I figured there could be loose platforms drifting around in space and you’d try to jump around between them, doing… stuff. The gameplay part of it was sketchy at best.

I suppose the better part of the first day was spent getting the platform movement and interaction working, and then I think much of the second day I just sat and tweaked it, fixing bugs. The gameplay elements and final graphics/audio were added in the last two or three hours.

Windows download: 128 kB zip (exe, data, source)

Linux port: 16 kB tar/gz (needs above file for data)

Arcade build a’la Lerc.

I happen to be at the Zoo when I got emailed the compo theme (thanks Pov) so I snapped a bunch of pics hoping I could shoe-horn them into the game, which I did.

This is kind of a WarioWare like ’stroke’ based mini-game. You stroke your mouse (this is just sounding dirty) to knock flies off annoyed animals in a smooth motion - very, very quickly.

I played the guitar bits.

Download game and source

Ultra Fleet was my entry to the LD8 Swarms compo. For a bit of background information on it, please read about The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands.

Set in space, you controlled a fleet of virus ships that could convert enemy ships. Fleets of enemy ships kept on attacking, and you needed to keep your fleet alive so you could go on fighting, gaining points while doing so.

The game was, if anything, more pretty than fun, but it really was playable once you got into it. Although you probably got bored within an hour or so. Don’t know how it placed, but it received OK scoring, and also got praise such as ‘The game I’m supposed to be reviewing is more like a screensaver’, ‘I liked Hat Swarm better, though’, ‘Without a doubt, Hat Swarm is WAY better’, ‘I honestly would have given the hat swarm a higher score though.’ But seriously, some people (including me!) actually seemed to like it.

You can get the Ultra Fleet compo version. It requires OpenGL and is for Windows, but I’ve been able to compile it for Linux, although I have no idea where that port went, but it should be pretty easy if you want to try yourself.

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands is a game made within 14h for the LD8 Swarms compo. However, it was never really entered into the compo, because I felt it wasn’t quite enough, but also couldn’t figure out how to make something more of it. In the end, I abandoned it, and instead used it as a base for Ultra Fleet, which I did enter. This might not have been the best of decisions, but no matter.

You navigated your hat swarm around islands to destroy dancers that tried to defend the islands, while at the same time trying to avoid the deadly dances that was danced at you.

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands prime features was an intro, an island generator (that I later used as a base for rather prettier islands), the famous Hoids algorithm that simulates hats in groups flocking behaviour (later adopted for the fleets in Ultra Fleet), stick figures, and a lot of dancing. Strangely, it was also my very first LD game (together with Ultra Fleet) that didn’t use tiles.

There’s no dedicated distribution for The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands, but you can get it as the bonus in the Ultra Fleet compo version. It’s for Windows, but if you’re a bit clever, you can probably compile it for Linux. It requires OpenGL with 512×512 sized textures support.

I was quite pleased with how this one worked out, The game only has three levels and I was quite worried that the last level might be impossible. As time was running out on the clock I was trying to figure out if it could be done, I finally got a single ninja home and went “that’s it! ship it!”.

playing post compo I actually managed to figure out how to get all of the ninja home on that level by using a few tricks.

I also liked the look of Teeny Tiny Ninja. I got the stars idea from a previous Bluescrn entry. Adding a bunch of stars does indeed liven up the look of things. Also The ninja home came out surprisingly well for programmer art. I thought the sound worked well too, but the scores the game got suggested I was in the minority. when a ninja goes ‘Hut!’ every time he jumps it’s cool, but people found it less so when there were a couple of hundred Ninja doing it, serves themselves right for picking swarms as the theme I say.

The game used a homebrew physics engine made during the 48 hours. this worked quite nicely, Ninja were all implemented as tiny triangles

See. There was no Line to object collision detection so it was possible for Ninja to get stuck on corners by impailing themselves on a point and having their triangle points go either side. There were alsdo a few other little quirks that caused th ninja to get stuck. The solution worked brilliantly. I checked to see if a ninja hadn’t moved for a while and if so just added a huge random vector to its movement. A lot of people took this to be an intentional behaviour because it looked very ninja like. sometimes a ninja would jump to a wall or point and stick there for a bit then jump away again.

Once again the controls were a bit unintuitive. But I thought the use of a mousewheel worked well.

Download the game

Ludum Dare 8 was my second ’short term’ game programming contest, and my first solo. The theme was ’swarms.’ I was bound and determined to do an RTS game this time, since my partners in team compos always want to do something actiony. I think I actually wanted robots or magnets or something like that.

I thought it would be nifty if instead of directly building units, you had to attract units with various buildings. So you start with a base and 1 swarm. There are resource buildings (Apple, Flower, and Metal) that you can hover over that will give you various resources. You also have a base. You can build either Apple or Nectar huts in your base. These increase your attraction rates for food or nectar. (It was originally going to be food and sex, if you read the code. I guess bees have sex with flowers or something.) Once bugs are attracted to your base, you can add them to existing swarms, or break them off into new swarms. You can also build Radar to increase your attraction range, or buildings to increase the power or speed of your bugs.

Initially this was going to be swarm vs. swarm warfare, but I ran out of time pretty quickly. (I’ll go into my mistakes below.) So instead the computer just sent a specified number of waves with a specified strength at you at regular periods, and you needed to have swarms built up and ready to fight when they came.

Obviously one of my largest problems was art. As you can tell from my screenshot, It’s ugly. Really really ugly. All the art in the game was ‘placeholder’ art that I was going to go back and fix. That never happened. Secondly, I panicked at about 30 hours. I barely had an engine, and the deadline was closing in. I actually ‘gave up.’ I came back to it, and finished up later. Thirdly I didn’t have a good plan. I know I wanted an RTS, but I didn’t have a good execution plan. I also bit off WAY more then I could chew back then.

My tips for beginners are:

1. Make a plan - Seriously, take that first hour, and may out some code to get rid of the urge. THen take the next hour or two, and make a task list. What code does your idea need? Divide it up into tasks. As you go along, check things off that you’ve put in.
2. Take breaks - This is always a newbie mistake too, but, make sure you take regular breaks. 48 hours, even with a couple of sleep periods, is plenty of time to get something done.
3. Start Small - It’s much easier to add to a simple game then it is to try and cram in everything a more complex game needs.

Theme Swarm. I did a shoot em up, sidescrolling thing. Play the game online

Ingame screenshot

Swarm was my entry to LD8. The theme of was, well… “swarm”. I know, I know, I’m no good with coming up with names for my entries. Anyway, for this game, I coded an entire 3D engine (octree based) from scratch. So, I spent most of the 48 hours debugging octree code, and crammed in some gameplay towards the end. Since I never spend more time on gameplay - it still should be as fun to play as most of my games

This is an in-development screenshot, showing some octree debugging going on.

That’s how the game looks like. Shoot down all the pink, eyed balls to encounter the uber-cool-final-boss-with-superior-AI. (I got feedback suggesting that at least one person actually played long enough to encounter the boss - so I consider the gameplay aspect successful.)

Here’s a mirror of the original submission: Swarm

LD48 #8 theme was “Swarms”. It also occurred right around the initial release of the Nintendo Wii. Thus, you get Wee Ninja, a game where you are trying to beat an insanely large horde of other shoppers to the last remaining Wees in stock during the holiday season. It’s fun to play, simple, and includes achievements to unlock bonus abilities. One of the more complete entries I’ve ever done (possibly because the gameplay was so incredibly simple!).

Galcon cleaned up pretty well in the compo. Here are links to my post-mortem and history. Truth be told, I’ve been making versions of this game for about 15 years now. But this version almost didn’t happen - during the theme voting for this contest I was leading a large group of people to back a different theme from swarms - I had in mind to make an Adventure Game. But since swarms won, I figured I’d try re-making Galcon again for lack of a better thing to do.

On the tech side I realized I needed to up my production going beyond what can be done with pygame. I used pyplus and swig to build C extensions for my game so that I could do some cool graphic and swarming techniques not possible within python. However this caused some trouble, I was able to submit my linux source of the game for the deadline, but due to the craziness of python extensions for windows it took me another full day of work to get it ported to windows.

After the compo I made a shareware version of the game:

Check it out.