Ludum Dare » mondrian

Ondrian Fordrian Final

hamburger — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:05:42 +0000

Here it is!

It’s lovely!

This game is sort of like Frogger, except you can’t move backwards. Enjoy!

I had a lot of fun with this. I wanted to do a couple more sets of levels with other Kandinsky paintings, but I didn’t have time.

Coded in ActionScript 3 + TweenLite, with art stolen from Wassily Kandinsky, and animations created in the Flash CS3 API.

Only Forwards + Mondrian = Ondrian Fordrian

Ondrian Fordrian?

hamburger — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 06:52:11 +0000

Well, after a couple of hours playing old LD games (which tend to be amazingly good, btw), here’s my screwball idea.

Only Forwards + Mondrian = Ondrian Fordrian

In this mashup, I intend to mash extra hard, almost beyond recognition. In other words, I will be interpreting my inspirations loosely.

In Only Forwards, the avatar is always moving forward and the player’s inputs cause the avatar to turn left and right. In Ondrian Fordrian, the avatar is either moving forward or not moving at all; input consists of exactly one key, the MOVE FORWARD key. The player’s goal is to move forward as much as possible.

In Mondrian, the visuals are inspired by the De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian. In Ondrian Fordrian, the visuals are inspired by the Bauhaus artist Wassily Kandinsky. Or who knows, once I actually have a game maybe I’ll go with someone else, someone whose work is more gamey, like Mondrian’s friend Theo van Doesburg, founder of the De Stijl art movement. I totally just looked all that stuff up on Wikipedia.

In Ondrian Fordrian, the avatar is a Kandinsky doodad attempting to traverse the frightening, bewildering Kandinsky miasma. His goal is to move forward along his curvy, Kandinskic path. Everything moves. Some of it pushes him backward, some of it can hurt him.

Never Look Back. This is the second (way more boring) title for this game. Never look back, Kandinsky doodad. The past is past, and the only way is forward.

I will be working in Flash with AS3. I intend to finish the game this weekend, but it’s going to be meager, for a couple of reasons. Chiefly, I have a lot of other stuff on my mind, plus the weather’s so damn nice.

Mondrian : an update

pansapiens — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:30:15 +0000

Firstly, I’d like to thank everyone who voted for providing kind and constructive comments in the voting area. They’ve really encouraged me to continue developing this game. Keep in mind when reading my comments that I too am trying to be constructive, and I’m not trying to come across as a complete butthead. In my mind anyone who even got half a final entry completed has done an amazing thing in such a short time. Secondly, let me apologize for including a few levels that were far too hard …. actually I’m almost certain now that they were impossible.

So, I’ve prepared an updated version of Mondrian for those who’d like to play it. I thought I’d leave this release until after voting, to ensure that nobody could accidentally judge based on the non-48 hour version. You can get the latest version a my OMGWTF Games !!1! page. This new updated version includes:

20 tested and achievable levels, loosely ordered in increasing difficulty.
Snappier graphical effects (subtle fades)
Full screen mode (-f, or ‘f’ key in the game on Linux)
Level restart with right click, spacebar or ‘r’.
A saner level editor. Edit any level with -e command line flag.

The README in the zip gives more details.

I’ll probably continue developing this over the next few months / years. My target is to make 100 decent levels, a title screen with menus to match the command line flag functionality, a level selector, better synth sounds, and some alternative “not-so Piet-Mondrian” colour schemes (maybe a “psychedelic” visual mode ?). There are also a few different game ‘rules’ that I’d like to play with, like making the colours “swap” when unmatched colours collide, rather than grey dead squares. This would totally change the game, but make for some nice tricky logic puzzles.

As always, feedback (and custom levels !) are apprieciated, and I hope those who like puzzlers will enjoy this more polished (but still not complete) game.