In making this game, I learned a bit about Lua, and a lot about cake.  Read on to find out what a sugary zombie invasion might look like…

Introduction

The competition was flagged up to me by someone at work, though I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it until the day before the start time (which was 4AM local time).  I didn’t even decide what development environment I was going to use until the Friday evening, when I spied a Lua book in the office library on the way home from work.  I’d seen LÖVE mentioned by a couple of folk here, so I decided I should give that a shot.

I should mention I’d never used Lua before, so when I started reading on Friday evening, I was literally starting at ‘HelloWorld’.  I went through a few examples, then started playing around in LÖVE, seeing what it was capable of.  Satisfied I could put together a simple sprite-based game, I went to sleep a few hours before the competition start.  I figured no point trying to stay up late just to find out the theme, only to ruin myself for the next day.

Trying to learn a new language, whilst against a deadline

Never having used Lua before, I had to learn how to solve a number of problems against the clock.  Things I take for granted in my day-to-day C#/.Net life.  Things like multi-file projects, debugging and error-handling, collections & queues, and so on.  At first it felt like I was reaching for a book five times for every line of code I wrote.  Not very productive!

I managed to pull together enough to make my game work, with minimal bugs.  However the code-quality is horrendous.  Inconsistent styles throughout, as I learned my way around the language.  Huge amounts of copy-paste, since I couldn’t get certain code-reuse aspects working properly.  Certainly not my prettiest work, from a development point of view.

Quick and easy love

The LÖVE engine made getting assets into the game very simple.  Images (static and animated) and audio were easy to bring in.  I would recommend it as a good choice, especially if I knew Lua better (or even at all!)

Cake!

The idea for the Wall Of Battenburg Doom came about as I was filling up on sugary snacks on the first day.  I went around the house, collecting anything that might work as ingame enemies, with the intention of taking photos of them to make sprites from.  (Art isn’t my strongest skill, so I figured that would save me time).  However I underestimated the amount of photoshop processing that would be required to turn the pics into something usable.

In the end, I only used two items: The battenburg cake, and some candy teeth.  I had an idea that I would create a parade of Marching Sugary Doom.  Doughnuts, fizzy drinks, lollipops, chocolate bars, and so on.  All of these would be following behind the main wall, covering the ground with sticky, sugary rubbish.  This obviously didn’t happen, which lessened the effectiveness of the other idea I had:  Creating a Left4Dead parody, specifically the survival-until-rescue part.

The food.  It’s… infected!

Imagine you’re the survivor of a zombie attack.  Only, instead of zombies, the virus/mutation/whatever is causing sugary snacks to rise up and eat people.  What’s more, their weapon of choice is CANDY TEETH!  So all the while, we’ve been told not to eat too much sugary stuff, as it will rot our teeth.  Now the roles have been twisted around.

Anyway, this side of the game never really worked out, simply due to time constraints.  I wanted to have multiple levels, with different types of wall behind the teeth, and various obstacles that the player would have to navigate around.  I also wanted to have different coloured pick-ups, with different effects.  But sadly time was against me.

Rescue

One of the great parts of L4D is waiting for rescue, against a seemingly never-ending hoard.  I blatantly ripped off the rescue-helicopter idea.  As the chopper got closer, he would radio in encouragement to hold out just a little longer.  If you managed to survive long enough, he would pick you up, and fly you to safety.  (Note how he flies you over the wall and beyond, where the legions of marching snacks would be, if I had time)

I wanted to have an actual radio, sat on a table next to the helipad, with the pilot’s speech bubbles coming from it.  But again, this didn’t make it in.

A familiar plateful of cake?

The final part of my L4D inspiration was the box art.  I’m talking about this

which I copied slightly to make this

Spot the similarity?  Apparently it was too subtle, since no-one mentioned it.  Oh well…

As I was thinking about how to schedule this into the next two weeks I thought up some rough stats based on how past compo playing/rating has gone:

• You should play and rate 8.6 games per day of the two weeks if you want to hit the deadline.
• If you assume an  average handling time per game of 3 minutes you are looking at 6 hours of just getting the games to the point where you are playing them.
• If you assume an average playing time per game of 2 minutes you are looking at 4 hours of total play time to get through all the entries.
• Given the average handling and playing times above you could earmark about 45 minutes of LD time per day for two weeks to finish on time.

Phew.. well, I better get cracking.  I must admit I haven’t had much of a chance to play more than a few so far.  The rating and feedback is so important though.  I know I really appreciate the time people put into playing and leaving thoughts on my game so I try and do the same.

Great compo everyone!  I can’t wait to see what everyone created…

While ‘playing’, press keys 1-3 to build stuff:

1. is a tree zapper, it gets you power for nearby trees. It costs 15 power.
2. is a mini tower of darkness, it creates darkness nearby. It costs 30 power.
3. is an attack tower, it shoots blobs of darkness at the poor butterflies. It costs 50 power.

To goal was supposed to be getting everything dark, sort of. There’s not actually any winning condition, but there’s not much other things either, so that’s all right then.

Don’t resize the window (don’t tell me I didn’t warn you).

Download Something of Doom Something Something (Windows binary, uses OpenGL, should work in wine).

You can see the “wall” collapsing in the back,. and the loosely defined pac-”worm”, that is the player, runs toward the screen in an attempt to escape it,. . Here the Advancing Wall is an Advancing Collapse of Doom.  This is going to be a bit rought, but something will be done.  I’m going to add some good/bad objects to play with on the wall, and then synth some sounds and music,. .  this all depends on how much time I get to work today,. . fingers crossed.

[ 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!

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!

And it’s doomed, you know. You are going to convert this cute little forest into a dark waste. At least, that’s the idea. We’ll see.

First, the mockup!

(Click image to view larger)

Anyway.. the simple concept is you are controlling a fleet of the last ships of your race.  You are fleeing your planet as an alien armada of doom approaches.  You will be able to move your fleet up/down/left/right and there will also be a key that lets you toggle the density/pattern of your fleet.  Think of it as able to expand or contract.

You will move through the armada avoiding colliding with capital ships and what will surely be horrendous energy weapons fire as they attempt to anihilate your race.

You must get a least ONE of your ships through the armada to win.  The more ships you get through the larger your bonus at the end for saving a larger gene pool of your race…

Simple idea, hopefully the scope will be one of which I can get a fun, playable game out of before the deadline is up…