For those who might not be familiar with GT, here’s the spiel from the front page:

Glorious Trainwrecks is about bringing back the spirit of postcardware, circa 1993. It’s about throwing a bunch of random crap into your game and keeping whatever sticks. About bringing back a time when you didn’t care so much about “production values”, as much as ripping sound samples from your favourite television shows to use in your game, or animating pictures of yourself making goofy faces on your webcam. Where every ridiculous idea you had, you would just sit down and code. When you would make up a “company name” to legitimize dorking around on the computer with your friends.

It is not about unfinished, unplayable games. If any part of a glorious trainwreck is terrible, it is terrible in a way that is AWESOME.

Klik of the Month (FAQ) happens on the third Saturday of every month, and it’s about coming up with whatever you can come up with in two hours. Usually using Klik & Play (a horrible Win3.1-era game authoring tool), and usually by gleefully abusing stock sounds and graphics. Personally I find it a fantastic challenge to turn out something interesting (although that’s certainly not mandatory) in such a short space of time with such a limited, primitive tool. Hope to see some more LD people there next time it rolls around.

This time around for KotMK#27 I wanted to try doing some pretty bullet patterns in KnP, so I made a horizontal SHMUP. I wasn’t sure if it would work, seeing as how KnP suffers once you hit the limit of 255 sprites, but it came out pretty decent. Check out KILL GOD.

Fellow Ludumer Hempuli missed out on KotMK#27 due to timezones so we decided to have an encore mini-klikkening. I was pretty tired and just wanted to see how far I could get with adding features to a little Dwarf Fortress fangame inside two hours (again, the object limit of 255 being a huge problem). Yesterday I added a bunch more features. It’s hard to stop adding shit, in fact. I can sort of see how someone could do it full-time  with the kind of love Toady does. Check out Lonely Hermit Dorf.

In general I’ve been on a bit of a KnP bent lately. If this stuff interests you, I also recently released two KnP RPGs:  MOTORCYCLE COCK and Mathora VI.

What went well

• The basic game, taking pages from the wiki and letting you travel between them, was very quick and easy to set-up. Then it was just a case of feature-creep for the rest of the weekend, which was perfect for me!
• People took an interest and wrote some content for me!

What went badly

• Spent rather a long time at the start battling with C++ libraries before moving to PHP. Though that did help me come-up with an idea.
• Also spent rather a long time at the end trying to fix an infinite loop, but managed to do so before the deadline, so no real bad points.

What I would do differently

• Plan-out code structure before writing it. I spent quite a while on the Sunday rewriting all the tag-parsers to remove a lot of repeated code. There’s still a lot now.
• Put time into writing content! I only actually created two areas, as a test right at the start before I’d added any tags, and then I kind-of expected people to write my content for me. Which some people did, but it was horribly lazy of me.

Things I’d like to add

• Cookies or some other way of keeping things persistent between sessions. Could tie it to user-accounts on my site.
• Combat system, mentioned already.
• More levels of persistence than ‘IFVISITED’ and ‘IFNVISITED’, so that the player wouldn’t necessarily have to follow the same set of actions multiple times.
• Any other stuff I happen to think-up.
• Content!1!1!!1!!!

So yeah, it went pretty well. I’ll keep working on it and maybe it’ll become something really interesting.

Shelter From the Rain

Looking back at my past LD and MiniLD entries, I really feel like I’m improving. My games for LD15 and MiniLD12 just feel more polished, somehow — a feel which makes me inordinately happy. I did something a little different with Shelter From the Rain; I knew I didn’t have a very strong gameplay idea, and that my mechanic (running around picking things up) had more holes in it than a ten-gallon coffee strainer. So I got the basic game together, then spent most of my time working on little polish-type features. Things like my (relatively) slick menus, configurable options, and online high scores — not to mention some, for me, pretty good atmospheric audio. In my previous entries I’ve always tried to focus on improving my skills in a particular area; this compo was no different.

If I were to go back and re-do Shelter From the Rain, I’d break it up into a series of ‘quests’ — tasking the player with going out and collecting, say, 10 cans of beans. I’d also add more hazards to both the above- and below-ground: fallout, soldiers, survivalists. In short, I wish I’d made the basic game more complex. I also feel like the visual style was crazy-disjoint, something I’d love to improve. “What are these black geary things?!” you cried. What, indeed.

Wikirunner

Oh man. I’m so pleased with this one. If I’d realized it would receive any publicity at all (ohmygod, indiegames.com. I feel legit) I’d have spent way more time working on it this weekend — as it is, the game is basically the product of some hasty Saturday morning programming, and a little polishing on Sunday night. It’s rough, and ugly — but, I like to think, actually Fun.

This is promising. I’m working on a post-compo now, to fix some of the glaring usability bugs people have been reporting and clean up the AI a little. Breath, held.

Oh, and I changed the name to “The Hardest Text Game In The World”.  If you’ve played it, you know why.

Can you score 100 points?

Grab it here (for Win).  I did a sort of post-mortem here.

Now with 70% less disorientation!

http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/ld/sfxrhx/

There are several ways to use it:
- you can start with making a sound in sfxr and save it as a .sfs file and use the load() function
- generate random sounds in your program and simply save the random seeds of the ones you like, use create(), randomize() and mutate()
- if you need to fine-tune a sound, you can also edit the individual parameters in your program
- use generate() to create the wave file in memory
- finally, use play() at any time to play it

Six degrees of separation. With a shotgun.

I finally packaged stuff properly for Linux,  and made the Windows port. Grab them here.

Notes:

• It does crash at exit. Will fix later.
• You can get stuck at the top of the screen. I’m sorry but couldn’t find a way around.
• Sound can get irritating, be sure to lower your volume first.

Otherwise, I’m quite happy with it. Awesome theme idea, GirlFlash!

Here is the included readme:

Duke is dropped in a random Wikipedia page and has to get in as few links as possible to the article on Duke Nukem Forever. But the evil googlebots have invaded the pages, so it won’t be an easy journey…

Each level is made of platforms and ladders, and has one exit for each link found on the Wikipedia article. It also has the “Exit” exits, which brings you back to the previous level, if you need to backtrack.

Controls
——–

Left and right arrows: run
Up arrow: jump/go up a ladder
Control: fire
Shift: switch weapons (machine gun has a hight rate and range, but lower damage,
shotgun kills in two shots, but needs a second to reload and closer range)
Tab: bring up the history of visited levels
C: open the radar screen
Space: enter an exit

Escape: quit the game/close the radar screen

Radar
—–

To make this holy quest a bit easier, Duke has a radar. Hitting C opens a list of all exits of the level (links on the Wikipedia page). Use up and down arrow to highlight one, and space to select it, then escape to go back to the game.
In the lower right corner will be indicated the distance to the target.

Shift + up and down allows faster browsing of the links.

Notes
—–

- Entering a new level restores health entirely, and dead robots stay dead when you visit back a level.
- Requires a working Internet connection…

License
——-

The source code is under GNU GPL v3.
Sounds are cc-by-nc-sa.

Wiki Warrior is a generic top-down shooter with elements pulled from random Featured Articles on Wikipedia. The enemies in-game are generated from the article’s links, and the background is pulled from the article, too; in the case where an image couldn’t be found associated with the article, a random image in the Cityscapes category at the WikiMedia Commons is used instead (I happen to think that, for the most part, random city panoramas make for okay background images in this context).

I used python and pygame to create this, with sounds made with DrPetter’s sfxr, along with python-wikitools to handle all of the MediaWiki API stuff. Of course, I didn’t discover it until after I had already learned most of the details of the API, but it was still nice to not have to implement all of it myself.

This was my first LD, mini or otherwise, and I have to say, it was quite enjoyable. This project ended up being my first real pygame project, and  all in all, I’m pretty satisfied with the results. The code is very unorganized and kind of thrown together haphazardly, but the fact that it works and is still manageable enough that I can still extend it further is enough to make me happy. Dead simple gameplay, to the point of being almost too shallow is probably the biggest problem I have with it at this point, with the relative lack of polish coming in a close second.

Two things I learned this weekend:

• 48 hours is actually a really long amount of time.
• Despite that, it’s never as long as you think it is.

I’d like to polish the game up, implement a few more complex features, etc., but we’ll see how well that idea holds up after future consideration.

Any thoughts, comments, or questions regarding the game? Problems running the Windows executable? I tested the py2exe build process as best as I could, but I figure there’s always an outside chance of failure.

Thanks for reading and/or playing, and my apologies for rambling.

Remix: http://v.youku.com/… – NEW

Latest upload of Blow Up Wikipedia is here.

PLAY ONLINE

This is a post-compo version where the game is more like what I actually meant to make.  The original and post-compo versions are marked as such on the game’s page.

It’s like some weird mashup of a broken typing tutor and Space Phallus (NSFW!  Play it at home!).  Only mine has no genitalia.  Well, depending on which Wikipedia articles it uses.

to submit your game go to:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-12/

and to view all entries check:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-12/?action=preview

you guys clearly took the theme and ran with it, very far indeed it seems! I have to say you guys once again impressed me. I cant wait to check out what everyone has done

if you havent finished yet dont sweat it, its only a miniLD after all and I’m not going to hurt you if you want to take an extra hour or so to clear out any bugs and the like

also, voting for August’s LD ends in 3 hours so if you have time to spare you dont have long left to vote.

entry page

Every screenshot I post looks the same...

Wikirunner is a game played on Wikipedia articles. There are two players: a runner and a chaser. Both start on a random article; the chaser’s goal is to end up on the same page (at the same time!) as the runner. The runner is simply trying to evade the chaser for as long as possible. You can play it single player, as either player, or hotseat with a friend. Woo! It’s based on Jeremy Bushnell’s Wikipedian Tag rules — be sure to check him out as well.

I spent the last two hours or so giving myself a crash course on python threads, and re-writing all my internet code to be asynchronous. I’m certain this was a good use of my time, too — the little throbber that flashes up while it’s downloading from Wikipedia is so very worth it. Plus I have (tentative, indirect) permission from the author of the ruleset I’m using (‘Wikipedian Tag’) to re-use it here — something I need to actually obtain, as it’s licensed CC-BY-ND, and this is pretty clearly D.

Anyway, it’s been an awesome Mini-LD. MUST… FIX… INFINITE… LOOP…

EDIT: FIXED! YAYAYAYAY!!!

Turns out, it’s because I’d got the position in a string, modified the string, then still used that position. Silly me. All works now! Time to update the documentation, submit, and go to bed, and only 25 minutes to spare.

I’ll make my final submission soon. Not much time left, and at least I’ve got a goal in the game now.

Edit: I just fixed it ^^

The problem is that I screwed up my time management; I didn’t get started until today, and the deadline is actually much closer than I realized (who uses UTC?!? @_@).  But anyway, I worked up something which is not a game but is still kind of neat.

FaerieNet – Create a Faerie

I probably won’t be able to work on this any more before the official midnight UTC deadline.  So, this is it for me for this MiniLD.  However, I might just continue working on this project in the days ahead…

I should ask.

Anyway, soldiering on in the face of an almost certain copyright violation:

Progress! Even though things look the same.

I’ve got both AI players working — they’re not the smartest in the world, but they’ll do. And the Chaser will give you a run for your money if he picks up the trail. Pretty pleased about that. Still have a few bugs relating to turn length and whatnot floating around, but I welcome criticism! And suggestions!

You can download a windows build here, if you want to give it a spin. Or click mindlessly for half an hour in something other than Firefox. Same thing, really.

After re-discovering HybridMind’s friend’s ruleset, I realized I’m doing a pretty mediocre job of enforcing those rules. I may go back and make this an explicit version of Wikipedian Tag, just to go with the tried-and-playtested rules they’ve hammered out. Not without getting very definite permission, though — that would feel overwhelmingly like theft, even moreso than now.

I had alot of fun, once again, but this time I just lost too much time dicking around with things that didn’t work out. :-/

Oh well. I’ll be posting a link to my game tomorrow, once I have an actual game.

I got alot done, all things considered. I got a 3D collision engine, mapped 2D images to 3D collision boxes, and got a little dude running around, punching and kicking.

Tomorrow, I’ll add enemies and a camera. Then, a scoring system, and so on.

Today, though, I’m just too tired. I need to rest. I’m not happy about it, but it’s just gotten to be a real struggle for me.

It’s been very fun. I’ll still be around on IRC, and will probably post updates on OpenRansom as I add to it. Less frequently than I did over the course of today. ^_^;

Well, it was fun. Time for me to call it a day.

—Mr. Dude

[[IFHAVE:Foo| [[GET:Fish]] [[GET:Chips]] ]]

The Get tags are at the same level here, and so will display oddly. Though I think they might still work.

If anybody has any ideas of other things they’d like in, please comment below! And feel free to use tags in pages: They make it a game rather than a wiki browser.