I’ve released a post compo version of Cave Ninja. Nothing exciting, it just fixes two bugs:
1. Win check for last level corrected.
2. Divide by zero error fixed that occurred for certain OpenGL implementations.

To be honest, for most people there’s no reason to update. But for those that got the divide by zero (might also seem like it just shutdown at once), it might be worth it.

Windows binary (should run fine in Wine).

The Good

Fun tech. Not only does some tech idea stuff you want to try out make it fun to actually program the entry, it can also makes the entry interesting. Or so I hope it did. There was two things I tried out: Destructible landscape rendered with marching squares and some sort of fluid simulation.

I’ve wanted to try out destructible terrain with marching squares for some time. Mostly when thinking about doing Blastup 3, though I’m probably more for doing pixel perfect (with alpha) stuff. But still, wanted to try this approach out. It worked pretty OK, though it requires more work to be anyway close perfect. As a note, the collisions just uses bilinear filtering of the nearby grid points and checks it against the threshold, so the marching square output is just for rendering here (which really simplified things).

The fluid simulation pretty much just happened. I had a world which was a grid of values of 0 to 1. There’s a lot you can do with that. I’ve thought about similar things for earlier LDs, for the theme flood, but that theme never won. Basically, it’s like those old water simulations where each pixel is a water particle, and it can either go down or to the sides if there’s room. I just had float values instead, so the whole of it didn’t have to move. Then marching squares on top. Anyway, the lava seems to be what people liked the most, so I’m glad I did it.

The actual game idea. With the destructible terrain etc, I sort of wanted a game in between Worms/Liero and Lemmings. Which I think is what I got. It’s lacking things though (see below). Overall, I think it’s a good game idea.

Once again used the D programming language, which was good and makes most things easy (except in one place where a thing I did in a loop became very slow, which cost me some time). Also used OpenGL, GLFW and Fmod. Stuff that works pretty well and that I’m used to.

The Bad

Time, time. Lack of time. Or too ambitious project, perhaps. I spent 4 hours away from the compo helping some people to move, but I’m not sure those 4 hours would have made a lot of difference. The time issue had most impact on the level design, I feel.

The level design started out sort of OK. I wanted to introduce every new element by itself in a single level, then start combining them and creating puzzles.

Well, to start with, not all elements that I wanted to introduce got introduced. There was only one weapon, there was only one enemy type. I had planned for more there. And I had planned some cool movement tools, like a jetpack (and if I really had had some extra time, a ninja rope).

Anyway, as it were, I did get the elements that existed introduced in the way I wanted (though some levels was a bit too long, making them annoying). But then suddenly I didn’t have time to introduce more elements, yet I didn’t have enough materials or ideas to make good puzzles. So that first lead to a platform/jump level.

Then there was the last level. It got too hard. A little too busy. Even its name gives it away, it was named: A little bit of everything. Basically it had become apparent that it would be the last I had time to do, so wanted it real, if you know what I mean. Nothing tutorially. As a base there was a single good puzzle. But after making it, there was lots of room left, so got another semi-puzzle, some jumping, some digging, and some kill things. Too much. But maybe it suited as being the last level. I can tell you, even I have had trouble completing it sometimes.

That’s not the only bad thing with the last level though. The last level’s win condition check is bugged. So you only actually need to reach the star to win. I realized this bug existed after having gone to bed after just submitting my entry. So I got up, “fixed” it, and re-uploaded (it was within the deadline, don’t worry). Only the next day I realized the check was still bugged. I had added the correct check, but I had also left in a call to the base class update function, which just checked the star. So that was a waste of time.

Graphics. They turned out rather bland and boring. And dark. Noticed today that even just making the game 50% brighter helped a lot. But I’m not good at creating good textures or animate stuff, so perhaps it’s OK given the time available.

The Other

Sounds. It’s thanks to sfxr that I got any sounds at all. All in all, it might have taken 15 minutes to get all the sounds in. It was a great improvement over no sounds, but beyond that it was lacking. In addition, it seems that the sounds cut out for quite a few people — I have no idea why.

Heads up

I really recommend maximize the window to get a look at the whole level (if your screen is big enough). It’ll look bad that the level just cuts off if you have too large a screen, but even then it’s well worth it.

There’s a skip level cheat — it’s pressing F1 and F11 at the same time (as in most of me entries with levels).

I used a bit of base code and some utility code for rendering, fonts, and sound. Not really a library, just some random stuff (it’s what’s available in stdf in the source folder of the package). This is probably bending the rules a little, but I hope you guys are OK with it. Absolutely not game code.

Also, it’s not like I came up with marching squares during the compo. I’ve written a few application using it earlier, and actually adapted some old code. Writing it completely new might have cost me extra 15 minutes or so but it seemed pointless. The idea is really quite simple: For each square in the grid, start making a polygon. Check one corner, if it is within the threshold, make a point. Check this corner against the next corner — if one is out and one is in, find the point in between. Then do the same for the three other corners and edges. And that’s it.

Outro

There were probably some other things worth mentioning too, but none that I can remember now. Think I’ve responded to most stuff that I’ve got comments on as well. Overall, people seems to have liked the game, so I’m pretty happy. It’s been a good LD.

OK, so I’m not sure what kind of game I’ll make yet — I have several ideas, it’s just that I don’t know if they’d be fun. In the mean time, I’ve set up simple cave rendering:

It’s basically marching squares on top of a grid of 0-1 float values.

I spent a hunk of time today hacking myself up a proper library and deciding on what I’ll be using for LD #15, should I not wuss out at the last moment.

I am leaning towards things which I have used for the longest, this is to reduce the amount of figuring-out I have to do.

As tempting as it is to use python/pygame/macos, I have one half the experience with that, so it is best to stick to ancient and familiar technology, despite its limitations.

To implement:

• C/C++, sloppy and mixed. The way I like it!
• 2d vector graphics where possible, otherwise rotated/scaled sprites.
• Win32 (though, I would like to have it compile/run on MacOS as well. This shouldn’t be a huge problem.)

Libraries:

• SDL (sound, graphics, and input)
• OpenGL (strictly 2D and orthographic, unless I drink too many trappists and decide otherwise)
• mmgr.cpp/mmgr.h by Paul Nettle
• vector2d and related math templates by Bill Perone (I can’t seem to find a link right now!)
• MT19937 Mersenne Twister random number generator

To create:

• Photoshop for Graphics
• SFXR for Sound
• SciTE for Text
• Visual C++ 6.0 for Code
• SVN for revision control / backup

To eat:

• Water
• Trappist Beer
• Cola
• Food with nutritional content yet to be determined

Random thoughts:

I have a feeling I may regret my choice to use a gamepad/keyboard for input. But for now I will.

• Con: Mouse games have a lot of instant-appeal. Easier to get interaction “feeling right”
• Pro: Keyboard/gamepad is oldschool and works on consoles.
• Pro: Leaning back in a chair with a gamepad is more relaxing then hunching over a mouse.

I can do sound. SFXR is freaking cool. I spent a few minutes playing with it today and fell in love. This saves me from making corny sound effects into a microphone during the last minutes of the compo! Thank you DrPetter

All of the libraries, save for my starting template are freely available online. None of them resemble a game library / engine, so they are squeaky clean.

At some point I will post my starting source up for anyone interested. Hopefully there is something useful in there to be pilliaged by others during this compo, or future projects.

I’m curious to see what other people are using, or who else is using a similar (fairly heavyweight, rusty, and old) setup.

Right, so I decided to post this as a non-entry. Reasons include laziness and stuff. Here’s my last progress shot re-used as the ‘final’ shot.

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).

Here’s my entry. You control a spider that is in dire need of getting more legs. Sort of.

Download
Windows 32-bit binary with D source

Instructions
Collect all powerups to complete level. This will give you a time bonus.
If time runs out or if you fall outside the world, the level ends, but you are left with the score you got for any collected powerups.

Controls
Enter to start game.
Esc to quit (also at level over etc).
Left click/hold to set target. Speed based on distance.
Right click/hold to set target and jump.

Hints
You need to walk slowly to round edges.
You can only sort of jump away from the current surface you are on.

Source
Some source was previously written, but only sort of texture loading, font rendering and some init code.

Uses GLFW, FModEx, sfxr and some other stuff.

Also, note that the title bar is a total lier. The game did not take 32h to make, but 40h. That math is tricky stuff.

(For the framework stuff, the score is read from and written to ’score.txt’.)

Download here

Other screenies, time log and the above download here

It’s a board game for 1-3 human players, with AIs taking over the other 1-2 cars depending on how many humans there are. Cars can’t jump over each other, so if there’s no free lanes, you can block the traffic. Different routes are longer than others, and it’s possible to run out of gas.

Everyone plays with the same cards, only shuffled differently. Have fun!

I’m thinking about entering LD13 depending on what the theme turns out to be.  I haven’t done a full LD yet, just 2 mini-LD’s.  I wanted to use my standard C library functions for OpenGL, Portaudio, Ogg/Vorbis/Vorbisfile, and my GUI.  There isn’t any game logic routines or structures as per the rules.  It’s a collection of sound, text file, opengl drawing, and string tools for C.

I wasn’t sure what I have to do or if there is some type of time limit, but anyway here is a link to the library code.  It’s mostly a conversion of some old SDL stuff I liked to use.  I moved away from SDL lately though and have been using GLFW.

Phew, got it finished

PyGL2D is a simple 2D library for PyGame and PyOpenGL. It’s licensed under the GNU LGPL. See http://pygame.org/project/972/

You can download it here.

I’ve named my “tool” ChipmunkLand!

It can’t load files yet, but it does say “Usage: … filename” if you don’t give it a command line argument. I’m sticking to command line arguments because I’ve never made a usable GUI before. I’m using OpenGL and Glut so I can just use the drawing code from the Chipmunk Demos.

Ok. So I’m done! Thanks to timezone, I’m early too.

This has been my first competition, and it’s been a lot of fun.

Download it: http://www.ingeniumdigital.com/ldimg/TowerOfDoom.zip

Readme it: http://www.ingeniumdigital.com/ldimg/readme.txt

With all hope (due to its lack of being tested) it’ll actually work. It’s written in C++ with SFML. I’ve licensed the source under the MIT license. If this is a problem, yell.

Stay tuned for a postmortem and perhaps a less broken build after I sleep.

It would seem that I will be another heretic not using Python. I’m not a fan of scripting languages, so I’ll be using good old C++ with OpenGL I will be trying to do something in 3d and I’ve prepared myself a small framework using SDL (loading models, loading images, window initialization etc.) Apart from that I will be using only free ( as in freedom ) tools, so no Visual Studio or Photoshop for me. But that’s ok, I always prefered KDevelop and GIMP.

It’s still a couple of hours till the compo. I just can’t wait. It’ll be my first LD actually. I tried to participate in LD10 but due to some circumstances I wasn’t near my computer through the weekend.

I hope I won’t be the only one developing on a Linux powered machine Good Luck!

I finally settled on a name. Since this game is based on one of my past projects, a roguelike called “The Hunter”, I kept thinking of corny names like “Hunter 2D” for its contiguous 2d coordinate system, and “Hunter 360″ for 360 degrees of freedom. Yuck. Finally I came up with “Omnihunter” for an omni-directional version of The Hunter.

As for the polish I added since my last post, it was mostly a hour worth of minor bug fixes, and I replaced the alligator graphic with a rat because it matches the monsters’ movement pattern better. Here’s what it looks like:

It’s very… minimal. There’s a lot more I could have done with this game, like adding more types of monsters, give the player a choice of weaponry, make the monsters spawn out of things that the player can destroy, add walls and turn the environment into a labyrinth, add animations… even make the rats spontaneously combust. Overall, though, I’m pleased with how it turned out. It’s nice to see my entire development cycle outlined in my posts, and for my idea to have become a reality in about a day. Plus, I have fun playing my game, and I think other people will too.

According to my posts, it looks like I have spent around 9-10 hours of work on this project over the course of 26 hours. Somehow I think it should have taken me less time than that, seeing as it’s a very simple game, but I finished a project for once, and I have plenty of time to spare. Better that than not finishing in time.

Download the game here: http://www.mediafire.com/?xcmndkznj4n

EDIT: On second thought, there were still a few changes I wanted to make. I’m really cutting it close with only 17 minutes left. Download the updated version here: http://www.mediafire.com/?jdmmi1k5e7y

Dependencies:

• Python
• Pygame
• PyOpenGL
  • EDIT: PyOpenGL also requires you to run this file: http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py

Tools used:

• Ubuntu
• gedit
• terminal + command line python interpreter
• GIMP
• Audacity Sound Editor

Bit of a late entry for me, but oh well, here it is anyway:

Download: cubetendo.zip (Updated with trivial fix for ATI cards)

Windows exe and source code included (compiles in Linux). Requires OpenGL 2.0. If it crashes, try running it from a console (updated the zip with a bat file that does this).

Howdy!

Here is my entry. It’s basically a cross between robotfindskitten and a generic platformer.

DOWNLOAD: http://kittay.ca/kittay-fydo-LD105.zip (1.0 mb)

Written in C, uses OpenGL. Didn’t have time to make a linux binary, sorry team.

I’m planning on doing a post-compo version, with bugfixes and better level graphics. Also, I’ll incorporate the other 3 mini-songs that I recorded, too.

Enjoy!

EDIT: Note that I’ve created a launchpad project for kittay. So you can file bugs there! Yay!

Hey, so here it is. I managed to learn the basics of OpenGL and integrated with tinypy for a basic gamelett. I totally cheated by recycling one of my old games for the logic in this one. Which, I guess is cool, because I was able to get all that code working with tinypy. It uncovered a couple bugs which I fixed. Anyway, on with the game:

Download the goods – click on “main.exe” to run.
linux folks check out svn://www.imitationpickles.org/ld105/trunk ; python build.py

Mr Head and the Cow Drowning is now complete. Or as complete as it will get this weekend. I have many ideas on improvements, but they must, alas, wait. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As said earlier, the game is about drowning cows to prevent them from dying. Granted, they die anyway, but in a much more nice way, and outside the screen, mostly. Anyway, to drown cows, you must use key 1-5 to select which slot is currently bouncy, which will make any cows falling there to bounce out into the water. If you fail to catch a cow, you lose a life, but if you catch two in a row, you gain a life. You can have ten lives, and if they run out, the game is over.

During the game, Mr Head will observe and give you points and make announcements. He’s the mastermind behind everything, but exactly how is not certain. Do use his combo scheme to get many, many points. I’ve gotten 22 million as best so far. There’s no highscore in this version, but maybe I can add one later.

So, except for what has been told here, and what can be seen, there’s also a fancy intro, and mighty fine sound effects.

You probably want to download Mr Head and the Cow Drowning. Binary and source are included, the binary is for Windows, but with the right libraries and some changes to the makefile, you’ll be alright on other platforms too. Hopefully.

Also, make sure you don’t miss the Banana Ship text adventure non-entry, also made during this warmup.

Yah, so I might not have a game, but diving into the wild world of OpenGL all the same!! Look at my peachy fire effect:

Finally I’ve ported it away from XNA to OpenGL, still got the (almost) same lousy controls, for your pleasure. Still needs .Net 2.0 to be installed though, but should be compatible with Mono, and thus playable on Linux. If someone like to try to compile it on Linux, contact me. Some things have been tweaked and added. But the game play is the same. Added ugly clouds for better sense of height movement. Updated the physics lib to the newest version.

Arrows: (over) steer

Z: Claw claw claw!

X: TURRRRRRBO

Space: Reset heli position

R: Reset level

N: Next level

Download now! 441KB Now with dependencies included!

Only 4 people rated my game. Thats unacceptable, I need get rid of XNA. So I’ve thrown all XNA stuff out of it. I needed to poke a bit in the source of the physics lib as well to cleanse out the filth, thankfully that was easy. Now I need to tame the horrible controls (That was my fault, cannot blame XNA for everything), and then pretty it up and I’ll make a release. I plan to port it to linux too, with Mono.

I’m only using Glfw, OpenGL and .Net 2.0 as we speak. For sound it will be OpenAL.

Well, I ran out of time. =) This is not even the gameplay that I intended and it is not playable (unless you like to lose). I spent too much bloody time on collisions and missile trajectories, etc.. The “daleks” that you see in the screenshot were going to be gun turrets which you use to shoot down incoming missiles. If enough missiles hit the ground, the ground is destroyed and your tower plummets. I had other buildings and a point to the whole thing, but those were plans that had to be thrown out. I think with another hour to two hours, this could actually be playable, though not polished. My greatest regret is that I did not get a chance to rotate the missiles so that they point in their direction of travel.

Here is the zip. Download and run at your own boredom.

python source (64K) Needs pygame and pyopengl.

Edit: Uploaded new version with a .bat file that uses CRLF terminators.

Edit 2: Uploaded a non-zero length archive (for ‘archival’ purposes now that judging and whatnot is over). Not really sure how that happened in the first place.

Right. Didn’t get any game done this time, but I give you a fabulous non-entry called Evening Journey.

Download Evening Journey. It’s for Windows and comes with source.

How to ‘play’
Get ship (red beacon) to the jump gate (strip of green/yellow dots). You can add a thrust with right mouse button. There’s a time line at the bottom where you can select what state to do an action in (only action is the thrust). There’s infinite random levels.

What would have existed
A challenge.
Pickups.
More kinds of actions.
Actions limited by pickups.
Increasing difficulty on levels.
Levels connected so you can go back to previous level and get different pickups.

Stay tuned for post mortem tomorrow.

Ok, here is my first screenshot. I have been wrestling a lot with the underlying code, so things have been a bit slow. Plus I have to re-familiarize myself with a number of graphics tools.

The premise of this game is that you have a flying island high above a windswept planet. On your island you must gather the precious gas resource and defeat your rivals for control over it all. You have the choice of whether to build gas gathering buildings, defensive turrets (pictured), offensive missiles, or stability buildings.

The chain reaction is that when your island is hit with missiles neighboring areas begin to weaken. If there is too much weight on a weakened area from your buildings, whole parts of your island may crumble.

Ok, time for some shuteye and then the final push!

CEngine is a Python library I started writing mid-2007 for doing a remake of Chaos: Battle of Wizards by Julian Gollop. The library uses PyGame and OpenGL and is still far from complete – I haven’t even started on the remake yet, but there is some functionality in the library that may be useful for this competition.

Feature list and download.