I really like this theme so I’m throwing something together here between family duties… not sure if I’ll make the official deadline or not.

Here is my screenshot, you can sort of see what I’m going for here… it’s a word association game made from wikipedia data that is loading in the background as you play.

In the pic, underlined words are “correct”, but that is temporary… going to show hits/misses on the left side of the screen later.

Unless I limit to certain categories or something, it’s going to be .. weird… I sort of like the complete insanity of it so I might leave it “very” random.

So.. pretty simple concept, but would like to bring it up to a level of polish where it really “works”.

I’m using my iPhone framework, but targeting windows for now.

http://pekuja.com/news/106/wikipedia-galaxy-forever/

Now with a playable demo!

As the title would suggest, I threw away a good portion of the day on my romantic, emotional choice to redo everything in Ruby.

I… had a wakeup call. Using Ruby/SDL was my reality check.

In short, the thing threw tantrums at random, denied having methods that the manual listed, and generally misbehaved.

I’m not going to sit here and rant. I’ve got things to do. I just want to take back what I said in my last post.

I’m sorry for all this emotion, but I get alot more wishy-washy when I don’t feel as much pressure. (IE: When the game doesn’t count for a score, and I plan on working on it past the compo anyway)

I’ma shut my trap and get back to work now.

Peace.

—Mr. Dude

Making a quiz type thing (using php and, uh, lua). No interactivity yet (other than reload), but it can load random pages from Wikipedia, parse descriptions, select one as an answer, and show options! Yay!

http://pekuja.com/ludumdare/100/intergalactic-planetary/

So yeah, I guess I’m still posting in my own blog. Sorry about that.

Alright! This is a totally kick-ass theme (thanks, GirlFlash) and I’m glad to see lots of people running with it. Too bad I’m not one of them, though — this is just about the most straightforward Wikipedia-reliant game you can imagine. There are two players, a runner and a chaser, each of which starts out on a random page. It’s basically a game of tag with the chaser chasing the runner through article after article. The chaser moves faster, but the runner has complete freedom to duck into “Lists of Phoenician Rhetoricians” and hide all night, if they like.

It really just looks like a two-player browser, doesn't it?

While technically two-player, you can only (at the moment) play as the chaser against a simple AI runner — I’m currently trying to figure out how to adapt an existing bit of code that calculates the distance between two phrases (actually, my PhD project truth-be-told) into this without making you download ~80gigs of word-vectors.

So, since you all obviously can’t wait anymore with my unbearable suspense, here’s my concept:

It’s actually a quite popular game, which consists in starting at a random page on Wikipedia, and trying to reach a certain goal page in the smallest number of internal links possible.

Now with shotguns.

The idea is to use each Wikipedia page as a level for an action platformer, where the links are the exits. With lots of baddies on the way. And of course, the goal is to find Duke Nukem Forever’s page.

Platforms and ladders... Random level generation ain't that easy...

As you can see I’m far from done.

Oh  and of course, Wikipedia -> text -> console based game. Now that I spent most of my time coding my curses libs, it’d be a shame not to use it…

If I still have time at the end, I’ll use GirlFlash’s wiki as a highscore/hall of fame thingy. But let’s face it, it’s unlikely that I’ll have time left…

http://pekuja.com/ludumdare/97/wiki-space/

Still posting in my own blog. I think I’ll post here directly in the future though, unless I can get the syndication hooked up.

I’m currently working in Python, but I’m finding more and more that I kinda… Dislike it.

I’m going to start remaking my game in Ruby. I don’t have a whole lot of code right now as it is, and I’d be much happier working in Ruby.

That said, there’s a pretty good chance that I won’t finish in time. I’m going to try to have something by the deadline, though.

Edit: Using Ruby/SDL instead of Gosu. Prefer raster to sprites-on-polygons… :-/

I’ll be using Ruby/SDL for my graphics, sound, etc. SDL is one of my favorite libraries, and has yet to let me down. I’m not sure how it is with rubyscript2exe, but it should be fine.

Read on for more explanation, if you’d like.

(more…)

That’s definitely going to be a long night…

Weeeeee, rainbow!

I’m in the process of adding in codes you can use in area pages.

First, there’s [[GET:Foo]], which will let the player pick-up an item called ‘Foo’ from that area. The item will only appear there if they do not already own it.

Then there’s [[IFHAVE:Foo|Bar]]. This checks if the player has ‘Foo’ in their inventory. If they do, ‘Bar’ is displayed. Bar can contain formatting, but I think it won’t work if you put anything with ]] inside it. I’ll have a go at changing that.

I’m keeping an up-to-date list of codes and formatting that work here, if anybody wants to start messing around with them!

I think I’ll go to bed soon, so that’s probably it for today. It’s been really fun so far, especially considering how clueless I was to begin with.

So, theme announced at 3am. I actually got an idea very soon, and decided to go with it because it is both simple and fun (more about it later).

However, I went to be at 6am, woke up at 2pm, and spent most of the day coding a curses-like library for SDL and my wrapper evöL. Of course, it’s always during the time limited compos that I finally motivate myself to do what I wanted to do for a while…

And now, after 13 hours of work, I have… the title screen, hurray!

My god, it's full of ASCII!

Fortunately I had coded a part of my html parsing right after theme was announced.

Now, gameplay!

I’ve posted about my progress on my blog. Until I get PoV to hook me up with some syndication, here’s a link:

http://pekuja.com/ludumdare/92/wikipedia-mapping/

OK, so I have a working prototype!

Kind-of pointless screenshot.

Not very exciting, but it works. Create and edit pages here (starting with ‘Adventure/’, link them up, and it’ll let you navigate between them. To make it easier, pages that don’t exist will give you a link so you can write them. To jump to a page, simply add ‘p=PAGENAME’ (without the ‘Adventure/’ bit) to the URL. It’s case-sensitive.

Um, not really sure where to go from here. Making ”’ become <b> and ” become <i> would be good. Then maybe some kind of inventory…? I really have no idea.

EDIT: The best bit about this is that other people are already writing the actual game pages for me!

I really, really, really shouldn’t be participating this weekend, as it’s my son’s first birthday and there are relatives from all over filling my househole.

But the theme!  It’s too good!  And worse, games with this theme will probably be LESS good if you just decide to release them later on, because they will require way too much explanation.

I don’t have a lot to show yet, just a title screen really.  I’m reading data from the wiki (specifically, from http://www.minild12.sophiehoulden.com/index.php?title=Special:Random ), but that’s not evident here.  Game will be a frantic shooter, I guess.  Probably smash TV style.  Also I looked on the rules wiki for “profanity” and I didn’t see anything preventing it!  So!

oh f stop sharing information title

I wasn’t planning on entering miniLD 12. But the theme was just so interesting that my mind won’t let me not enter it, so here I go.

My original plan was C++, SDL and cURL. However, cURL refuses to work at all, so I’m stuck with PHP, the only other language I know reasonably well. This limits my choices significantly, but since I didn’t have any to start with, this isn’t really a problem.

So, my current plan is a choose-your-own adventure made of wiki pages. First name I could think of is ‘Wikiventure’, which is awful, sounds like a Wiki-based investment company, and is probably going to stay as the name because I can’t think of any others.

It’s located here, and currently just outputs the wiki page, not that exciting.

I’m still having trouble deciding on my idea. >_<;

The RCR clone may not really be what I want to do.

I’ll post again when I have something to show for my efforts. Until then, I’m going to refrain. I just thought I’d get this out so I don’t feel so obligated.

—Mr. Dude

Because I lack the coding chops to access data from a website in my game, I’m going a different route.

I was in IRC lamenting my lack of ability with regards to the theme, when GirlFlash suggested that I simply pick a topic in Wikipedia and run with it.

With that, I’ve chosen m’topic.

Yes, River City Ransom. A clone of it!

I’m going to make it as true to the original as possible without it actually being the original!

(EDIT: I’m actually leaning more towards Python/Geany/Pygame right now, so I really don’t know ’till I write some actual code )

And I’m doing it in C++! In Code::Blocks! Using SDL!

Here’s hoping…

—Mr. Dude

And the theme is…

WIKIPEDIA / MEDIAWIKI

ok, so before I dropped the hint that you should be ready with some way of getting at web data, well heres what that is all about:

I want you to make a game that pulls stuff from wikipedia (or a mediawiki I set up especially) and uses that in your game. it could be something as simple as loading images on a page and making them enemies to kill, or perhaps you want to generate levels from the text, and links on the page are doors to other levels? or perhaps (if you really want to push yourself) you can get your game to add pages and content to the wiki and have a full on changing MUD going on.

reading information from mediawiki really isnt that daunting, and I’ve put up some examples on the mediawiki I set up to get you started.

if you cant (or dont want to) access the web with your game, saving a local copy of a page and/or images is fine. as is picking any page on wikipedia you want and using that as a theme instead if you want a more traditional LD experiance.

big important thing to know:
miniLDs now also have the new submission page for your finished games (if you only make a blog post about it I might miss it!) so when your game is done, post it here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-12/

and finally the optional bonus theme that gets you pretend points:
“Duke Nukem Forever”
…have fun with that one folks

finish time is 0000 UTC on monday, you have 48 hours, get cracking!

I’ve made my decision.

Unless the theme is something really, really interesting, I’m just going to ignore it and do something else instead.

Why not? After all, Mini-LD is just for fun!

That said, I’m more than likely going to ignore the theme.

Instead, I want to make a 2-day roguelike in under 100kB.

I will be using C, NCurses, Vim, and GCC.

I’m very excited about this.

—Mr. Dude