FLEEDOM FLIES - by HybridMind - April 17th-19th, 2009
Created from scratch for Ludum Dare 14’s 48hr game competition

Story:

An unstoppable armada of alien warships is approaching your doomed homeworld. Your only hope is to see how many of your race’s precious colony ships you can save! Flee through the armada for freedom, your fleet flies for it’s lives!

Controls:

• Use the arrow keys to move
• Use Z/A/Y to contract your fleet’s ship spacing
• Use X/S to expand your fleet’s ship spacing

How to Play:

The more expanded your fleet the larger your score multiplier!  Watch out though as this will make you more vulnerable sometimes.  To score high you will need to balance when you contract and expand with how you move through the alien armada.

• Also features Online Leaderboards for some friendly competition!

Tools used:

• Coded in ActionScript 3.0 using the Flash CS4 IDE and using Dr. Petter’s sfxr for sound effects.
• MochiAds Leadboard v3.0 API used
• Greensock TweenEngine Lib used

Got Feedback?

Leave a comment below or in the voting feedback area, or email me at dave [at] hybridmind.com

I’ll be working on this game some more so any thoughts or suggestions will be taken into consideration for the post-compo version!  Thanks for playing and I hope you have a good time with it!

Files:

PLAY THE FINAL VERSION HERE IN YOUR BROWSER!

NOTE: If it seems slow or laggy, Flash can sometimes have issues when you view it with your browser.  I recommend downloading one of the links below to play on your desktop for maximum performance!

WINDOWS EXE HERE

SWF FILE HERE (Right-Click Save-As)

SOURCE AND ASSETS HERE

Click to enlarge.

The wall’s coming, honestly..

I’m at the stage now where I’m just mapping out the gameworld and populating it with words and people. It’s looking like I’ll finish in time, which I’m pleased about

Click to enlarge.

Hey all.. I realized I had forgotten to post a lib I wanted to ask about using that is related to online high score ability in a flash game.  Would just want to know peoples thoughts about using it for this compo.. or other compos if deemed too late.

Link to mochi leaderboards api docs

Link to mochi api v3.0 (as2/as3)

Basically it’s just a 2 line call someone can drop into their flash project that enables online leaderboards via mochi.  You don’t have to use their ad network or anything but it would easily support the ability for people to see others scores in my game.

Anyway.. thoughts?  Too late for this time perhaps..? but what about future compos?  It isn’t really game code per se.. but it does give a game an advantage in that online leaderboards often lead to more competition with the score motivated players.

[ PLAY CURRENT BUILD IN BROWSER HERE ]

Well.. grabbed some sleep last night.  Just played my game this morning to see how I felt about it’s progress and direction.  Time to make the short list of goals that is so important in these compos to trying and pull off a playable and hopefully fun game in time.

I find a good trick to use is decide what makes the compo version versus what I’ll save for a post-compo version.  I’ve been pretty good about actually doing a post compo version lately that I’m not too worried that I’m using it as a fake crutch.  You can learn so much from a rapid prototype like this that it is still worth it to finish a reduced yet playable game for many reasons.

Anyway, knowing that some of my favorite features will likely still see the light of day makes me more willing to cut them for the compo version.

It is with that in mind that I am thinking about the following design decisions:

Compo Version Features:

1) One formation only of your fleet ships… the long and lean horizontal one.  This is because I am not sure if I’ll have time to code enough of what I want to justify the other formations right now.  I may have to focus on just making this a fun space avoider with the twist of having multiple lives / health built into the number of your fleet ships remaining as you fly along.  As long as 1 ship makes it you have been considered to win in that you’ve saved some of your race’s people.  The more ships you save the larger the score multiplier probably.

2) Probably not going to implement player ships fighting the enemy armada of doom.  I’m really trying to focus on not making this a shmup but rather sticking to the fact that these are light and nimble colony transport ships that are trying to get the hell away from their doomed planet / advancing wall of the enemy armada.

3) I think that since I have a simple but functional way to hand code in all the enemy ship placements and movement speeds I have the ability to build an exciting armada progression that will have some fun surprises and such along the way for the player to fly through.

4) I am worried that since these compos don’t afford much optimization time I may end up making a version that in order to look as cool as I want will likely suffer performance wise on slower computers.  I may have to go the route of a simple button to: “play high quality” and “play low quality” to turn down all the beam / particle effects I want to use.  I think that is a fine compo compromise.

Of the 16 hours remaining I fear I may have some domestic duties to attend to as well unfortunately… laundry and the ilk.

Oh well.. it’s crunch time here at LD so good luck everyone!

I had a few hours of sleep and got back to work. I’ve now implemented player movement, gravity, collisions, etc., and just finished my class to handle animations.

Collisions caused me quite a bit of bother as I made a load of stupid mistakes (as usual), but they seem to be well and truly out of the way now.

I still need to pull the sprites I made over from my other computer so I won’t bother with a screenshot this time.

Implemented tiles. Okay, it’s still at the stage where everything is boring. I think after this one, I won’t post until I have something a little more visually stimulating.

Play in yo browser here…

Yeah– I’m excited.. so far… OK.. the two largest ships fire these purple beam weapons.  The largest ship with the chance of firing 2 of them.. the second largest ship firing one.

I also have doubled the level length but that will change as well eventually.. I just wanted a larger amount of ships to fly through.

Also.. I made it so if your fleet touches any of the screen boundaries.. they asplode.  Ideally… this wouldn’t be the case.. but after fighting collision detection logic (it is complicated due to fleet coords/ tweening patterns etc..) there were so many ways to rig the system to get your ships to hide.. that I just made them asplode…

Anyway— Beam weapons give you a tiny bit of warning via visual clue.. think any robotech episode when they are firing the reflex weapon.. there is always that .35 of a second where you can get out of the colorful path before you are so many cinders.

So.. recap: running into screen boundaries.. capital ships.. or giant purple lasers will kill your little ships..

Let me know if the effects are killing anyones computers yet.. i’ve done 0 optimizations.. (hey.. its LD)

Started coding a little while ago and just finished a pixel font class.

I’m working with the Flex SDK in FlashDevelop.

So, I have another playable build of my work in progress available.

Play it here in your favorite browser

It now has an enemy ship wave manager so I can build out the Wall of Doom(tm) that you must escape through to rescue the last of your race.

I also took a suggestion to map the fleet pattern echeleons to the Z/X/C/V keys.. four patterns in all.

Give it a whirl if you’d like as I’d love to hear any feedback.  I’m trying to get absolutely as much of the gameplay done before screwing around with any graphics this time.  I think it is actually progressing really well for once!

The game just ends right now when all the enemy ships go by.  Also.. if you lose all your ships you have to refresh your browser to continue!

Current build playable here in your browser

Working title is Fleedom. Wanted to handle what I felt would be one of the most challenging parts of my game design which was making a fleet of small ships that you could toggle through various flight patterns while moving.

Got a decent enough working version now.  Z/X toggles next/previous fleet pattern.  Arrow keys move.

Here is the background on my current game’s design

Hello all,

I just found this open sources lib (http://www.web-adventure-kit.com/) and i want to know if the rules let me use it for this compo.

What you experienced devs say?

ps: It is a framework to make point & click adventures in AS3.

Thanks,

Lucas

I am pretty sure I’m going to make a go of LD14 this weekend.  I will be voting in the theme rounds all week long and take a look Friday to see the theme that is picked.  I will make up my mind then for sure.  Why the hesitation?  Well, I have a lot of things I’m already working on game wise so I have to make sure working on ANOTHER game is the best use of my energy… ;)  I do love the LD compos though.. it’s what got me back into game programming again so it will always have a lot of pull on my heart.  It is just so much fun as many of you know to participate in this event.

As far as programming tech and libraries go I will be making a change for the first time in all my LD experience!  Previously I was rocking the Ruby language and using the excellent Gosu game dev library (which I still highly recommend!)

This time I’ll be using Flash / ActionScript 3.0.  I have spent the past couple months learning ActionScript (first used AS2 for one game) and then another game I did in AS3 to work on my knowledge in that.  Plus I’ve cranked through a couple really great books I picked up that I also highly recommend to anyone looking to make the leap.  Essential ActionScript 3.0 (O’Reilly), ActionScript 3.0 Animation (Keith Peters), and Flash CS4 Professional  (Katherine Ulrich). The Kongregate Shootorials were also a great place to start for AS2 and they have an AS3 version of the finished tutorial to learn from the code (it is well commented.)  I learn good from books so I had to grab a few to help out.  Anyway, I’ve been having a blast with Flash / ActionScript!

I’ve been very impressed by how quickly you can rough out a game prototype using the Flash authoring tool and some simple ActionScript classes.  I used to think that I’d be hard pressed to find as rapid a dev environment than what I was already using with Ruby / Gosu but all I can say is DAMN.. flash is fast. 

Plus, the added benefit of having both rapid playable cross platform versions for compo feedback as well as not worrying about the various builds after the compo and I think it builds a strong case as rapid prototyping tool geared for quick compos like this one.

Tool Set I want to use:

Flash / ActionScript 3.0

Libraries I want to use (if this seems ok par the rules?):

GreenSock’s tweening engine TweenMax / TweenLite

Looking forward to a great theme and a great compo everyone, take care!

Here it is!

It’s lovely!

Play it here.

This game is sort of like Frogger, except you can’t move backwards. Enjoy!

I had a lot of fun with this. I wanted to do a couple more sets of levels with other Kandinsky paintings, but I didn’t have time.

Coded in ActionScript 3 + TweenLite, with art stolen from Wassily Kandinsky, and animations created in the Flash CS3 API.

Only Forwards + Mondrian = Ondrian Fordrian

Well, after a couple of hours playing old LD games (which tend to be amazingly good, btw), here’s my screwball idea.

Only Forwards + Mondrian = Ondrian Fordrian

In this mashup, I intend to mash extra hard, almost beyond recognition. In other words, I will be interpreting my inspirations loosely.

In Only Forwards, the avatar is always moving forward and the player’s inputs cause the avatar to turn left and right. In Ondrian Fordrian, the avatar is either moving forward or not moving at all; input consists of exactly one key, the MOVE FORWARD key. The player’s goal is to move forward as much as possible.

In Mondrian, the visuals are inspired by the De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian. In Ondrian Fordrian, the visuals are inspired by the Bauhaus artist Wassily Kandinsky. Or who knows, once I actually have a game maybe I’ll go with someone else, someone whose work is more gamey, like Mondrian’s friend Theo van Doesburg, founder of the De Stijl art movement. I totally just looked all that stuff up on Wikipedia.

In Ondrian Fordrian, the avatar is a Kandinsky doodad attempting to traverse the frightening, bewildering Kandinsky miasma. His goal is to move forward along his curvy, Kandinskic path. Everything moves. Some of it pushes him backward, some of it can hurt him.

Never Look Back. This is the second (way more boring) title for this game.  Never look back, Kandinsky doodad. The past is past, and the only way is forward.

I will be working in Flash with AS3. I intend to finish the game this weekend, but it’s going to be meager, for a couple of reasons. Chiefly, I have a lot of other stuff on my mind, plus the weather’s so damn nice.

This could only bring madness… or terror… or both!

Short Fuse + The Hairy Chestival.

I’m going for it!  This is rough mockup to get the idea down but basically instead of the old miner carrying the leaky powderkeg.. we have our miner taking up a different profession.  That’s right, he’s using the lawnmower (or is that chestmower?) from The Hairy Chestival.. only problem is that the lawnmower is leaking fuel like there’s no peak oil!  You have to mow down the dry grass (or is that… hair?) before the spark ignites your fuel mixture.  Oh yeah, for some reason the field is littered with explosive barrels that you can’t run into but that you have to destroy.  There will also be a fuel meter on the lawnmower that will run out I think as well (like the button to discard the powderkeg in Short Fuse.  I still have to work out exactly what the rewards are (do you really need one in a game so ludicrous?  ;)  ) and what the dangers are.  But, I have high hopes for this.. hehe.  I’ll be using Flash.  Either AS2 or AS3.. jury is still out for this mini-LD.

I love the theme of the mash up and am scouring the archive grid looking at old thumbnails.  I’m trying to find a concept that won’t be too ambitious at all.  The reason?  Because this weekend I will make some progress towards learning AS3 I hope.  I have my Essential ActionScript 3.0 book handy.  I have my Flash CS4 Professional book handy.  I have healthy snacks…  I have angry chihuahuas.. (well not really, but my wife and I are picking up a new puppy tomorrow!  Shiba Inu mix, not chihuahua I’m afraid.) 

I have already made 1 Flash AS2 game so far but know nothing about actually using the Flash tool for making animations and such things.  I also “know” AS2 in that sense that I’ve been programming in other languages a long time and can now brute force any kind of ugly code into working but I’m far from the land of knowing best practices so far!  I really want to push on past AS2 though.

I think it would be fun to find a mash-up game that will ideally not be too large in scope that will allow me to get to know the Flash authoring tool and AS3.  It does mean I have to make some more progress in the AS book.

Only time will tell what will happen.  Epic Fail?  We shall see! 

Protect and grow your cell core to reach 1000 points or die!
Click-fest guarenteed!

• Online version (score not capped)
• Zip including win exe, source code, game art.  (2 MB)

Post your scores in the comments section! My best is 400 something.

Ok here is my final entry. It is far from being polished but I am up for 17 hours 12 of which were programming… My brains are messy now

So no sounds, no bunch of planed effects and sleek interface… And output codes may not be forum friendly… Not time to test and debug but mostly game works.

Also sorry for English don’t have willpower to go and check if I did some mistakes and ofcourse there are bugs and glitches

But at least I did everything I wanted from mechanics point of view. Enjoy this game and share bugs and replays here plz.

Image

Links:

EXE file

Browser version

Source FLA and AS files

Well source codes. Half of the time I was waging war with interface which resulted in really messy structure and some bad dependencies. Also I go tired of commenting so I am not shore if it will be of any use to anyone

Used Box2DFlashAS3_2.0.1 and some my utilities of my own