http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2007/12/16/finally-finished/

Since I met Ludum Dare only at the last compo, I don’t really have a “favorite entry” yet, so I picked one that seemed nice, and changed the gameplay, added personal things, etc.

Here is the thing: revenge.zip

EDIT: see here about a Windows version

The goal is to blow the tiles marked by the pulsating squares. If there is only one, fine, but later there will be more, and the tiles marked have to be blown at the same time! To do this you take advantage of the chain reactions provoqued by the terrible Invisible Walker!

It just runs around the world, on the outside tiles, clockwise, and starts explosions as it goes.

To bring these explosions to the marked tiles, you can first move yourself, with arrow keys. You can also move some tiles: with X and V you rotate the 8 tiles around you. And with arrow keys while pressing C, you shift whole rows or columns. Beware: rows, columns and “ring around you” have to be full before they can be moved! No holes!

About holes…  Just don’t walk in them, or your life counter (right side of the screen) will decrease.

The similar counter on the left is the level counter. Of course, difficulty increases with levels…

Technical sadness:

The game is written in Lua and uses a personal lib that itself uses SDL and co. I included a compiled version of the library, made on Ubuntu. I have no idea if it’s going to work on another Linux machine, or even another Ubuntu, so be sure to read the README if you need to compile it yourself.

I unfortunately have no Windows machine available, nor Mac OS X, so no binaries for those. However, it is supposed to be portable, so if anyone manages to make it work, don’t hesitate to send me your binaries, so I can share them.

More details about the compo later.

It’s a cover of GBGames LD#11 entry, ‘minimalist’; turned evil. I like to think of it as a minimalist survival horror.

You can download maximalist and read more details here.

There is a gameplay video here … but it leaves off the surprise ending, so you still have to play the game .

The goal is to complete 25 levels an achieve the highest score possible.

Libraries used: Pygame, Rabbyt (including the pygame_font.py font rendering code), my (alpha) simplemenu library.

Tools used: The Gimp, Sfxr (DrPetter saves the day, yet again), Audacity, oggenc

I used a scanner to ‘photograph’ various objects around the house (including myself) to provide source images for further manipulation.

Assests: “Squealer” font by Ray Larabie, A scan of my face, A scan of a carved wooden ‘skull’ box on my desk, some hand drawn sprites (exit and glowstick), me screaming into the microphone.

Things I learned

Rendering fonts using the Rabbyt library is a little ugly unless you are using Pyglet for textures. I was using Pygame, so while I was able to use the pygame_font.py code which comes with Rabbyt to render fonts, it just felt wrong.

Source control (SVN) saved my butt this time. I was happily coding away, when I realized a few revisions ago the game performance had really dropped … constant slowdowns and jitters. I checked out copies of several revisions back and tested them to see at which revision things started to go all sluggish. Then, looking at the svn diffs (using Trac), I could see that it was my implementation of the score rendering code that was the likely culprit. Sure enough, making some sensible changes fixed the slowdowns … silky smooth gameplay again

I also learned that I perform better when I’m more relaxed … I deliberately choose a very simple game to ‘cover’ so I could focus more on graphics and polish, and I wasn’t even fully committed to completing the game this weekend. Taking a laid back approach really helped (at least it felt better).

I’ve been making a cover of Phil Hassey’s “Escape from Anathema Mines” today.

I’ve been wanting to try writing a roguelike for a while, and what better time than during LD? It is beginning to be playable so hopefully tomorrow I can get enough gameplay in it to call it complete.

Your job is to look through the LD archives at all previous entries to all previous LDs, and pick your favorite one that wasn’t made by you! Here is a handy link (warning, ten million screenshots, but much fun to look at!) to an archive of all that have been set up on the current LD site: Click me

Then do a cover of that game.

What is a cover? It’s not an exact remake. That would be pointless. You want to take that original concept and remake it in your own unique style, so that the end result is truly your own, just using the original game as inspiration (and cloning material). You can make the title be some minor variation of the original (“Commies+” or “PuffBomb Alpha”), a parody of it, or just a plain old sequel number.

Don’t forget all art, sound, and code must be your own creation this very weekend. Just because you’re stealing someone else’s idea doesn’t mean you can steal their content too.

So find your favorite, and get covering!

Entries must be in by 11PM GMT on Sunday, Nov 9th!