What worked well:

• Building a good infrastructure: Clean object system & usable level editor = worth a lot. I only really started building levels around the 40 hour mark, and that worked like a charm.
• Cutting stuff in the end: Music wouldn’t have helped me a lot. Not having an ending was smart too: Everyone who noticed that must have liked the game anyway
• Ruby, together with an ad-hoc autoloading mechanism, made for one of the smoothest coding experiences ever.
• TIME MACHINE! I knew I’d need a backup system sooner or later (turned out to be true), but I really didn’t feel like bothering with Subversion because I always forget to add files etc. and it wastes time, so I just watched Time Machine do its background work every hour. Boy was that a relief.
• Periscope: While my timelapse wasn’t highly interesting, it only took two clicks to create, so no time wasted here for a low score

What didn’t really work:

• People had various problems with the gameplay (controls, motion sickness, …), and even if I knew that earlier, I probably could not have done much about it except getting into a panic.
• Needed to do more optimizing than I usually do, and some levels are still slow. Will revisit this and try to improve on this from the Gosu library’s side.
• I had a cold that made thinking pretty hard. Anything that involved maths was buggy, which caused a minor panic just before the deadline. It also made IRC very hard to follow

Next time’s plan: Keep the solid workflow, hope that the game concept works out better with regards to the Fun, and consequently Overall category, try to be more experimental technically. Can’t wait

Also, did anyone play the game with a gamepad? Would be cool to know for the next time, because it was hard to decide between a small ending screen and gamepad support in the last few minutes Thanks!

Introducing ‘Of Robots & Groglots’, which is a cross between an old favorite of mine, Star Fox 64, and the minimal and popular Helicoper Flash game (see link if you want to be prepared for minimalist controls):

The whole game is controlled using only two buttons, of which one is usually permanently down; the microplanets add another touch of minimalism. Downloads:

• Windows version
• Mac version
• Source only version (for Linux)

These links have been updated to point to a version that includes 1) a two-line fix for two levels that were unplayably slow on some systems, and 2) a one-line fix for a bug that could stop your show, depending on your style of playing. Other minor bugs and balancing haven’t been touched. If you want to see the original version, replace ‘opt’ by ‘final’ in the links. Thanks!

Be prepared for:

• No music — no need to stop Winamp
• Gamepad support!
• Needing a minute until you can maneuver as smooth as you want.
• Two interwoven storylines (sort of) and very different levels. If you get stuck, see the Readme file for a cheat so you can inspect them.

Last foodphoto:

The timelapse is available on YouTube. I caught a cold and look pretty exhausted =) - and it’s probably only interesting if you know the game.

MinMo is my entry into the LD11 - Minimalist Theme compo:

Update:

Two win32 versions are now available, a fullscreen and a windowed.  No other changes were made to gameplay or bugs.  The resolution is 1024×768.  I recommend the fullscreen version for a more immersive experience. 

Fullscreen win32 available here (2.3MB)

Windowed 1024×768 win32 available here (2.3MB) 

full zip with win32 exe and source here (3.5MB)

I’m hoping to post a linux version / instructions soon too. 

The goal is to get from the left of the screen to the right of the screen. Each time you do the world will advance one level. Each level brings more flowers and enemies to overcome.

You play as a character with two forms. “Min” - who is thin, vulnerable and snakelike. “Mo” - who is an invulnerable and immovable gelatinous mass.

You can only move around when you are Min but if you are falling off of a block you can transform into Mo to crush enemies below you. If you happen to be cornered by an ememy as Min, you can transform into Mo to let them pass by safely. You can only get hit by the enemies once or the game ends. You can continue though so never fear!

The game world consists of rising and falling blocks that also play the music of the game in time to their movements. There are little flowers that grow from time to time that you can collect for points.

This was created with ruby and the incredible gosu game library.

I used the awesome sfxr for all game sounds too!

Bitmaps created in Tile Studio after some initial concept art inspiration in Corel Draw.

I finished this with 3 minutes left in the deadline. That means that I didn’t have a chance to play it that much to tune for fun. It is functional and seems stable. The player crushing enemies collision detection could be a little better for sure and the levels could advance in a more interesting way. All in all I am very happy with having completed this project in such a short time. I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it under the deadline the past 4 hours or so leading up to the end so I am glad that I actually managed to pull something off. I’ll post a post mortem later perhaps. I can’t wait to check out all the other entries! Good luck and congrats to everyone who participated!

So, after some sleep last night I have finally finished a good working pass on all the character vs moving blocks collision tests.  Had a few bugs / kinks to work out that I introduced due to tiredness last night.  Now everything seems stable and falling seems to work good enough for now.  Plus, the characters position correctly updates as the blocks move up and down and the character can now fall down and meet a moving block without problems.  Plus, thanks to the new algorithms I should be able to implement similar ones for any other objects / obstacles / enemies I manage to implement in next 8 hrs or so! 

win32 available here for anyone curious as to its workings / progress.

Well, I’m back up and starting to wake up.. (mmm coffee)  I was too tired last night to tag the evening with a journal update as to progress of MinMo so I think I’ll do that now as I recollect my thoughts and tasks for the day.

I managed to get about 3-4 hrs of code in last night during which I got the block classes correctly picking new heights, updating to the new heights etc.  It looks really neat in motion and there is something about it’s minimalism that I do like.

I got the player char position to be updated as the blocks rise and fall and started working on more advanced collision detection.  I need the char to correctly get stuck in the block valleys and be able to move left and right only when their block is above neighboring blocks.  Sounds simple enough right? 

I managed to piece something together that was crudely working after fighting through some annoying bugs but basically hit a wall of tiredness where I was causing more harm than good.  :)  So, I went to bed hoping to refactor a bit better / clearer algorithm in the morning and then hopefully add a few more elements to make this thing a ‘game’ and maybe even slightly ‘fun’.  I still have hope even though there is less than 10 hrs left in the compo.

Hmhmhm, I’ve been annoyingly lazy and slow today, and I know it will come back at me tomorrow — but at least I managed to have the first playable level

This game is also inspired by the popular one-button helicopter game, but transferred into polar coordinates, with an overworld, enemies and kind-of quests. So it’s my minimalist version of Starfox on microplanets, or something
In other news, I found some leftover veggie BBQ stuff to photograph… and eat! Nom.

Here is another screenshot of MinMo. I have got a basic ‘block’ class defined and working for the land now. Basically, keeping to the concepts of the theme with min and max (or mo?) the blocks will be moving up and down possibly signaling their moves with color changes ahead of time. Another minimalist thing I’m trying to incorporate is that your little MinMo player guy can’t jump. You will have to use the moving of the ground blocks to get around the world. You WILL be able to fall though and I’m still thinking up what kinda of implications this may have. I am still brainstorming other aspects of the game (enemies, goodies etc) but nothing too concrete yet.

So, now I’m off to a birthday party I’m throwing for my girlfriend so I won’t be back for about 6 hours or so. Then it is a late night sprint on the game, some minimal sleep and the final crunch on Sunday to pull this thing off. Good luck all!

Finally got a screen shot here along with a link if anyone on win32 wants to try my character test and let me know if my exe doesn’t work. Basically got my character tiles from last night all coded in and initially timed between states.

The current player character MinMo has two states. A ‘Min’ state where he is a little thin snake and a gelatinous block ‘Mo’ state where he can’t move but will probably be invincible. You are frozen as ‘Mo’ currently until the time is up where you then transform back to ‘Min’.

You use arrows to move left and right, space to transform, and ESC quits. Now for more game elements!

win32 exe available here

With all the C/Python/SDL-based libraries mentioned here, I’d like to advertise my/our gamedev library, Gosu. It has originally been my private library, spread only via ICQ/IRC to interested people, until I made it public to use it for my LD3. That is a while ago, and in the meantime, it has been used for some LD entries by me and other people, also for more serious projects, and is actually documented.

Long story short, Gosu is a 2D game development library for Ruby and C++. I guess the C++ version is a bit too heavy to learn until Friday *and* actually use, though. The Ruby version gets you up and running quickly.

Pro (compared to your generic SDL wrapper): *Very* fast graphics with rotations and all that, because the library was designed to use OpenGL; an API which tries not to get in your creativity’s way; examples on how to integrate it with ImageMagick and the Chipmunk physics library; serious OS X support.
Contra: Linux port misses gamepad support; can’t handle too complex text input well.

If you would like to give it a try, the library can be found at http://code.google.com/p/gosu.