I’m not really super pleased with the result (in the end, I think the game still has too much “oooo… parallax” and not enough “wow, that was fun!”), but I also don’t have a clear direction that I’d want to push the idea in at this point, so I’m letting it stand as is for now. Maybe someday when / if I get a better sense of exactly what I want people to do in those caverns I’ll spin off a different game based on the entry.

Anyway, heres an updated screenshot (once LD was over, I immediately and shamelessly plugged in some graphics from LostGarden.com):

It’s playable online here: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/play-xue/

As Kobel suggested in the comments on the entry, I did use a color matrix to tweak the background layers (actually, the original entry did that too, but it only darkened them, so it wasn’t much of an interesting effect). There are a few different “atmospheres” that the game uses for the caves, each of which fiddle with the colors of the background layers in different ways.

Gameplay-wise, I added some fireball spewing monsters, along with items that restore fuel. I also fiddled with the controls for the player’s ship (and actually I’m still fiddling with them, even with the game already released online), and adjusted the way the crystals spawn.

The map is also completely enclosed now, so there shouldn’t be any more invisible walls, and there’s no longer a way to fly off into space off the top of the map. Technically the map generation got tweaked a bit too, but nothing terribly interesting (the maps start out at half size and get scaled up, which both speeds up the generation a bit and cuts down on some annoying small-scale features).

I’m always happy to get feedback (though on this one, like I said, I’m not sure if I’ll stick my fingers into it again for a while unless a really compelling new direction for it comes up).

I also realized when I was getting ready to write this post that I never posted the updated version of my LD14 entry — so I hope nobody will mind if I tack it on here!

That entry was Crushing Pressure, and it turned into this little Flash game:

You can give it a whirl here, if you like: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/play-crushing-pressure/

The original entry for LD14 had the same basic goal (rescue the little people while avoiding the walls), but it didn’t have any other obstacles to avoid (the updated version adds the DoomCubes and WhizBlades). The released version also added music, and little extras like an honest-to-goodness score counter and some quick transitions between levels. It’s still a pretty simple game, but there are a few minutes worth of gameplay hiding in there, I think.

Thanks for the feedback everyone left on both the original entries!

• fixed animation, to animate only when the char was in movement
• add some instrunctions of how to fire
• increase the distance of the border of the screen to avoid zombie-suprises
• changed the torch throw to allow multiple torches
• fixed level 3 and add a level 4
• criated a windows exe
• fixed some screen flickering
• reduce the maximum speed of the zombies
• generated some random textures for the ground

thanks all for the feedbacks !! this helped a lot to enhance the Java engine that Im building.

glaucon and the cave  v2

This has more content. I couldn’t really think of more stuff to add, but it should be more interesting for those who thought it needed a bit more variety.

If you play and start to wonder “where did that background go?” Not a bug. Took it out because it was UGLEH.

*1.2p = 1.2 post LD

It was a long and tiring journey, but I made a game, you can watch me do it if you want:

anyhoo, I need sleep now, hopefully tommorow I’ll have time to play a large chunck of the entries

ouch, that was close 30 minutes to the end and the jar file was giving me problems hehehehe, allways forgeting the deploy details !! but at the end everything is fine, and the final version is on the air.

thanks all !! that was a real fun !

Shelter From the Rain

And, of course, a gameplay screenshot:

Nuclear War. Truly, the end has come. Wait, is that a cereal box?

You dig a fallout shelter, then hoard supplies in it. The ultimate goal is to extend your shelter all the way to the cavern below, and re-unite with the rest of humanity. If you make it there you even get to submit your score (a composite of how much stuff you’ve gathered) to the leaderboards!

Download Shelter From the Rain for Windows, or get the Python+PyGame sources (for Linux).

About the game :

Well it’s the second ‘game’ i’ve made this year, it’s simple and has that one-more-go factor to it(at least in my opinion).

Things that went right :

Oh, So much went right and I was overjoyed when they did and it was finished and it actually ended up being pretty righteous. sound was nice and easy to do, graphics took the longest(the playersprite mostly – I was pretty lazy when it came to the floor tiles. Coding was fairly easy, the generation of the floor was a bit tricky but I got it in the end and was amazed when it all worked without a hitch! Scoring and highscores were easy to do, you get 1 point per step(~60pts/sec) and at 100,000pts(add : it’s actually about half an hour) something the world changes.

Things that went wrong :

Oh god the collision was a nightmare. The way i’d written it was everything except the score was moving at 2px a frame left, and Game Maker doesn’t like to do collision very well with moving objects because they are notorious for making the object stop without warning. This of course, led to problems with making gaps in the platforms. I think I completely squashed it though, but I think it might come back in a very very rare case.

ADD: People have commented about the logs that materialise out of nowhere, and they were a hacky bugfix that allowed me to get away with just randomising the floor/fire generation and letting it run wild(there’s a 25% chance of getting a fire tile) as anything more than a 2-tile jump is impossible(note : all two tile jumps are possible, anyone saying otherwise just got unlucky.).

Final Words :

I had a lot of fun coding this. Small games are easy to make, can sometimes be horribly addictive, and a big rush when people like them

My personal highscore is 20,171 – try to beat it!

I’ll definately be doing this again.

Cavernous Shooter! is a top-down shooter set in a cave environment. Try to fight your way through the entire cave system, using the links below:

Windows / OSX / Linux / Source

Java Webstart

Controls:
[WASD] or [Arrows] to move
[Left mouse] to shoot
[Right mouse] to fire shotgun (if you have ammo for it)
[R] to reload
[Q] to toggle particle quality settings

The linked zip file contains .bat and .exe files for Windows, or .sh for Linux and OSX. It also contains the game source code.

There is also a web (Java Webstart) link – just run the .jnlp through your java/bin/javaws.exe (most browsers will default to this behaviour).

“Done” as in, some stuff left to do, but I give up. The game is playable and submitted. People can play it. I will release a Windows version tomorrow-ish. (The XP laptop is asleep and I don’t want to wake it up and start downloading files)

So… I went to sleep on a friday after a long evening of Call of Cthulhu RPG playing with my wife and brother in law. Got to bed about 3am. Up again a few hours later and started to code on my entry around 7am, 2 hours after start. (local time, but you all knew that)

After some quick thinking with a tired brain, I decided my entry shold contain a monocle wearing gentleman on a penny-farthing. The penny-farthing should fly and the player should press and hold space to make it fly higher, and release the button to fly lower. Kind of like all those flash games nobody plays.

But when the first version of the map code was up and running I decided that he should ride the penny-farthing on the ground instead, so the game was transformed to some sort of top-down racing game. And the rest is pretty much history. I didn’t really have a big todo list from the start. I had a few ideas and everything else was thought up, and included, on the fly.

It was an interesting experience for me. I have never done a game in Ruby before. And I have never used Gosu, the game programming library that powers my entry. It turned out pretty well, I think. I really like Ruby because it makes most things pretty easy to do. Gosu was also very easy to use, and I will continue to use it in the future.

What Went Right:

The game runs smooth, even on this macbook with a intel graphics card. I knew before that Ruby isn’t the fastest language around, and I have heard bad stuff about its garbage collection, and how it can make games stutter and lag. I’m not sure I noticed it. At times things was behaving a bit bad, but I had a timelapse movie in the making at the same time and I believe it caused most of the poor performance. I also had a bucket full of apps open at the same time, so I’m not ready to blame Ruby and its GC just yet.

Not sure what else to write. It got done. That is something that went right.

What Went Wrong:

Well, where do I start? Entities and their controllers? I used a new approach for me when it comes to game programming. I followed a short tutorial on how to use Gosu and Ruby. And it used a Model View Controller layout for the game. “Fine”, I though. I already use that when I code in Ruby on Rails, so I’m not a stranger to that. But I made a poor implemention of it. An entity in my game has a model. The model describes what it is and what stats it has. (position on screen, image to show, velocity, etc). Every model needs a controller. The controller tells the model what to do. But I keep these in separate lists. Luckily, no bugs turned up making this fall appart. But instead of having two lists I should have only had one with models in it. And each model should be responsible to know where its controller is. Instead of updating the controllers I should update the models, which in turn updates their controllers. Or vice versa. Not both. That made a mess out of things.

I’m not happy with the map! For some strange reason I though it would be a good idea to store the map as a long list of strings. Each string could look something like this: “3;9;3″ which means, 3 solid tiles, 9 empty ones, then three solid again. This would save a lot of space and be a nice thing. Making a pillar in the moddle of the column would look like this: “3;4;1;4;3″ (3 solids, 4 empty, 1 solid, 4 empty, 3 solids)
But… WHY? What was I affraid of? Why do I need to save space? It only made things much more complex during rendering and collision detection. And when I realised that, half the compo was over! Too late to change now, just keep going! This of course makes things a bit more complex when it comes to detect what’s to the left and right of a tile. Notice in the game that the stalagmites, or whatever they are called, only shows below and above a column of tiles, and never on the sides? I didn’t even try to write code to allow me to check the sides, thinking it would slow down the game a lot. Next time, don’t diss the good old tilemaps!

Music! I’m not good at making it, and it turns out neither is the computer. The result you hear is at least a lot better than my first attempt! cfxr is a nice tool to make sound effects with (I love 8-bit sounds).  However, my attempts of making musical instruments in it failed in an epic way! So maybe it doesn’t sounds good, but be glad I rewrote it and switched to some samples I found online.

Difficulty; have you played the game yet? Enough said!

Collision detection — I’m doing it wrong! It got better during the second day of the compo. It was a rewrite I had to do! It’s far from perfect and I don’t like the code, but it works. Kind off. Please ignore that you sometimes goes through a piece of the wall before you die. Use it to your advantage instead. Sometimes your should be dead, but isn’t.

And finally, how things usually turns out in my code. I have heard that globals are Bad(tm). Avoid them like the plague, they say. And I do. Stuff is passed from and to the classes and stuff. But sometimes class A doesn’t know about B, and it would be silly if it did, but it must, otherwise I can’t do C. So I hack it in. Now A know B and C is done. But then C needs to know about A, so I have to make a short cut here. And then one there. And before I know it, it’s a mess! And today I found out that I had 3 methods that pretty much did the same thing. Did a quick code refactoring, but I felt silly. The rest of the code is ugly too. But it was written in under 48 hours so I shouldn’t complain.

Closing Words:

I had a lot of fun! I will do it again! I have done similar things in the past (game-in-a-day, and my own Im-bored-will-code-game-in-12-hours private compos), and really enjoys it. I hope you like my entry. Thank you for reading my rant.

Link to entry: here

Page is HERE for your enjoyment.

Have fun ^^

-Devlin

I need to learn how to draw one of these days.

Play Online: http://realnoyb.googlepages.com/cave.html

Finally done with my first Flash game (for certain definitions of done). I’m absolutely enamored of Flixel, especially coming from the oft-quirky Multimedia Fusion.

This game is a fairly straightforward sidescrolling shoot-em-up, with a greater focus on dodging than shooting. Collect gems. Ants fire blindly. Bats charge down the center if you wake them up by shooting. Shoot down stalactites to crush enemies beneath for bonus points. Falling stalactites shake the cavern when they land, and might cause unwanted collapses. The enemies get faster, stronger, and more numerous as the game progresses.

Controls: Arrow keys move. X shoots.

Tools: FlashDevelop, Flixel API, GraphicsGale, Modplug Tracker, sfxr, Audacity

Here is a recent screenshot of my little entry, Mr Monocle And His Marvelous Madcap Underground Race:

I got everything I planned implemented. Main menu, highscore, game over screen, items, enemies, a gentleman with a monocle on a penny-farthing, death, explosions, procedural generated music, sound effects.

What I need to do now is to playtest it a lot, fix all bugs I can find, finetune it, balance it, and, with some luck, at least try to redraw the sprites. I have had it on the TODO list since yesterday and I keep pushing it aside…

backflip alongside lava at really fast mph... how did I even come up with this?

playable after the link:

[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.sophiehoulden.com/randomstuff/ludum/LD15_web09.unity3d" width="560" height="420"/]

Next time, though…

I’ve had lots of fun! This was my first LD and I’m really satisfied. See you in the next one!

Title screen

The Evil Dark Cavern Which Leads Straight To Hell

• main menu = done
  
• level reading = done
• level changing = done
• collecting artifacts = done
• map scroll = done

• npcs generation = missing
• lifes = missing
• attack = missing

Fetch.

hopefully the game will be done soon and I can add more ticks and rejigger the player art.

playable after the link:

[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.sophiehoulden.com/randomstuff/ludum/LD15_web08.unity3d" width="560" height="420"/]

• Left/Right = steer
• Hold Space = Crouch (speeds up a little)
• Release Space = Jump (hold longer to jump higher)
• up/Down = Kickflip
• Tab = toggle cameras
• 1,2 & 3 = change board sound effect
• 4 = mute sound