Mr Head and the Cow Drowning is now complete. Or as complete as it will get this weekend. I have many ideas on improvements, but they must, alas, wait. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As said earlier, the game is about drowning cows to prevent them from dying. Granted, they die anyway, but in a much more nice way, and outside the screen, mostly. Anyway, to drown cows, you must use key 1-5 to select which slot is currently bouncy, which will make any cows falling there to bounce out into the water. If you fail to catch a cow, you lose a life, but if you catch two in a row, you gain a life. You can have ten lives, and if they run out, the game is over.

During the game, Mr Head will observe and give you points and make announcements. He’s the mastermind behind everything, but exactly how is not certain. Do use his combo scheme to get many, many points. I’ve gotten 22 million as best so far. There’s no highscore in this version, but maybe I can add one later.

So, except for what has been told here, and what can be seen, there’s also a fancy intro, and mighty fine sound effects.

You probably want to download Mr Head and the Cow Drowning. Binary and source are included, the binary is for Windows, but with the right libraries and some changes to the makefile, you’ll be alright on other platforms too. Hopefully.

Also, make sure you don’t miss the Banana Ship text adventure non-entry, also made during this warmup.

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.

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.

Cuzco’s Goat Bloat Game was my first LD entry. I was pretty amazed that I was able to make a whole game in 48 hours. This game got me hooked on game compos for life My fiddling skills were pretty weak at the time, so I had to speed up the music in Audacity so it wouldn’t sound like a dirge. I had fun with the goat AI - it’s pretty realistic. (Goats don’t like water, they climb on rocks, and when you chase them they run everywhere!) Since it was my first compo entry, my “fun” rating was rather low - I didn’t take enough time to balance the levels. Also, the coloring of the goats makes them look like bees, oops!