Here is the final mini-ld #6 version of Monorail for windows.

STORY:

You are the Hero trying to reach the head of a runaway train to get to the locomotive.  You start at the caboose and work your way along fighting off the bad guys who have taken the train over. You have to be careful not to fall off the train cars or get swept off the left side of the screen with a disconnecting train car.  Also, don’t get shot!  You can get hit 3 times before you die.

CONTROLS:

Use left/right/up arrow keys to move and jump, spacebar to shoot

Use Gamepad stick and button 1 to jump, button 2 to shoot.

BUGS / FEEDBACK:

I’d love to hear any bug reports or feedback as I’ll be developing this game for a while longer still.  I listen to all suggestions and do work on these projects long after the compo deadline.  I will likely post an updated version before too long that is post-compo.

THOUGHTS:

This was my 3rd attempt at the 48hr competition format.  I think I am fairly pleased with the results.  I love how these competitions really let you bootstrap a concept in a really short amount of time.  I spent 35hrs of the past 48hrs working on this game!  While some people might not ever get why anyone would want to ‘work’ so hard on their weekend– it is SO worth it! 

Well.. my working title is evolving a little from “Monochrome Train”.   Anyway, here is the update:

I have been working like mad during this miniLD#6.  I worked 12 hours on Friday, 17 hours yesterday, and now I have a little over 5hours left to at least wrap up the gameplay.  At this point I’m going into triage mode again like many LD format competitions force us.  In a last minute rabid attempt to cram and adjust all the critical features that will turn a project from a demo into a  game.  This being my third LD type event I have yet to feel that I’ve suceeded within the timeframe.  Not sure this time will be any different yet but at least a big difference is that this time I have been able to play my game a LOT more during creation.  Probably to the detriment of the timeline a little.  I guess that is a good sign though.  Anyway, 8am EST is almost here and that is when my crunch time begins.  I have made a critical todo list to accomplish during this time and we’ll see how it goes!

CRUNCH LIST:

• score file handling to support matrins compo requirements
• detecting most primitive form of ‘you win’ condition when reaching locomotive at head of train
• enemies – spawning, moving, fighting, dieing, dodging (of some type)
• simple player / enemy animations for the logic I have coded so far (right now there is no animation)
• simple event sounds
• tiny train like soundtrack loop (update: DONE @ 9am)
• how to page?  I am confused on this because due to the matrin framework requirement– I was planning on using his idea of the 400×400 image in his framework to provide how tos… but I also want people to be able to know how to play if they just download this level from the blog without the loading framework.. so there is the connundrum of sorts.
• animations for train wheels and locomotive parts and steam cloud

Current screen shot above and current windows build here.  Use arrow keys (left/right/up) to move or gamepad stick with button 1 to jump.

Seeya all on the other side!

If you look closely.. you see the hero of the monochrome train!

I have now added three train car types of various heights.  You can now fall off or in between cars and die.  The train cars detach from the train when they hit the left side of the screen.  The velocity of the car is transfered to the hero so he drifts with them correctly.  He can now jump between all the cars with the jump from lowest car to highest being possible but tricky.  The game is over if you fall off and die or if you get swept off to the left of the screen.   You are supposed to advance to the head of the train but there are no enemies yet or win condition.  Only death…. and that is not handled gracefully.. if you ‘die’ the game ends abruptly.

For the brave, here is the current windows build exe.

Use arrow keys to move left, right, and jump! ESC to quit.

I just finished implementing parallax scrolling background objects for my game.  There is currently a nice cloud layer, a far plateau layer, and a near plateau layer all that move by in different speeds based on their distance.  I’m really quite happy with it so far.

I find I am not making much gameplay progress because it has been so relaxing for me to watch the train and dessert go by.  I have to start implementing some game play now!

Here is the latest test exe if any windows users wanna check it out! Left and Right arrow keys move viewport.  ESC to quit.

Well, things are getting off to a slow start this morning as I have been dealing / fighting with 20%+ packet loss on my cable modem…. *sigh*   Anyway– after a few hours it has cleared up for now.

On the monochrome train front, I have been sorta zoning out watching my current tech test demo.  There is no gameplay yet, but I like how it sets the stage for the coding yet to come.

I currently have a wide world of train landscape with cactuses, rocks and tracks.  Populated with a boxcar only ghost train right now.  The train chugs along to the right and will run for approximately 2-3 minutes (not locked down yet) before crashing.

The player (yet to be drawn / coded) has that amount of time to race from the caboose to the train engine to hit the brakes!  There will be obstacles of various types along the way (yet to be drawn / coded).

In this demo, you can press the left and right arrow keys to move the viewport back and forth.  When you stop, it keeps its slow advance.  My current idea is that the viewport moves just *slightly* faster than the train so that if you don’t creep along with it you will also get swept off the back of the screen and fail that way too.

Here is a win exe if anyone wants to see my monochrome train test.

I’ve been laying down the code since my last post and I already have a screenshot to post.  Basically the traincars currently come flying out of the left and head to the right past the various cactus, rocks and other western detritus that I will hopefully add for ambience.  I’m really liking the look of it so far.

Now, I have to code a player cam to track the train cars through the world coords.. fun fun!

First of all, thanks so much to everyone who left feedback to me in the ratings area.  I have taken a bunch of the suggestions that people made and have worked more on improving CoMuTor in the past 2 weeks.  Here is the latest work in progress of a post compo version of CoMuTor.  The readme file contains all the changes that I made so far based on my own and others feedback.  I welcome further feedback in the comments on this post for anyone that liked CoMuTor enough to try and play it again.  I’m just having fun working on aspects of polishing and modifying this silly little game.  I look forward to more Ludum Dares!!

CoMuTor v1.1 – Post Compo win32

Changes from compo version:

- added visual score feedback and level indicators
- added 3 minute time limit
- made it harder to eat people
- points scale with faster/smaller vehicles
- rebalanced point system
- rebalanced timing / car release system
- vehicles have different speeds now
- added people to vehicle sprites
- broke out car and suv sprite body for better coloring system
- crushing gas trucks no longer counts towards crush count
- vehicles running into you no longer spawn people
- adjusted menu instructions to reflect new changes

Mac version!

Windows version (FIXED—let me know if not)!

Linux: Well, both versions include the source code. Just ‘gem install gosu’ and run ‘ruby Main.rb’. You should know how to do these things

It’s all mouse-based because I tried to use controls simple enough to run on the iPhone (theoretically …). Hope it’s self explanatory, I moved the readme inside the game!

Known bugs:

• The pretty Unicode star (see screenshot) doesn’t work on Windows
• On WIndows, it opens a useless console window when you run the game
• (Gameplay usually suffers a bit because there is no incentive to actually use curved streets, like more points for driving on them :/ Still, I got >36k on my third game and it involved lots of curves at least in the first two thirds!)

Here is a link to the updated post compo version that will stay current. ** NEW **

Here is link to win32 binaries only final compo version

Here is link to Mac build of compo version (thanks to jlnr!) ** NEW **

Here is link to full source and media archive of compo version

Gameplay:

You are a monster who has decided you will take out your aggression on the morning commuters.  You can  crush cars and SUVs with abandon as long as you land squarely on them with your jump move.  You must be mindful of the dangerous GAS trucks!   Keep away from those at all costs and let them safely leave the screen.  Every car or SUV that escapes your wrath and flees the left of the screen costs you the same amount of negative points as if you had crushed them with a fatal jump move.  After each vehicle is destroyed it’s inhabitants flee in panic.  You can chase them down and eat them.  Don’t let vehicles run into you though as this will also cost you score as well.  The game speed will continue to increase with every 10 vehicles destroyed.  Since you are an invincible monster you are merely playing for a positive score until you retire from your activities.

Managed to cram some form of “game” into it but it definitely didn’t turn out how I meant it given all the triage and feature cuts I had to make both in programming and art.  I had an awesome time though just the same.  Can’t wait to play everyone’s entries!

 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.