Hey folks! Pyoing is live on the app store. I didn’t do much to it past the compo version, but my friend / co-worker Yann at Lucky Frame made the sounds for it. He also spent all day yesterday throwing together this amazing promo video and website.

I guess I can do a bit of a post mortem? Eh?

So about 12 noon, uk time I decided to throw my hat into the ring on this LDmini. I was otherwise just watching tv that weekend, and wanted to muck about with my game engine a bit more. I spent about two hours working towards getting something like Rampart in place, where you could place bases, and then you would be able to chuck cannonballs from your base. That seemed to fulfill the war theme, and was something I had been interested in making since the last LD.

At around 4, I went out to have a BBQ and did that until around 5:30pm. It was nice to get away from the compo for a bit and kick a ball around, and eat a ton, etc, etc. While I was there I talked to Yann (the man in the gif above) about the game, and he suggested a few things. First that I should just make crossfire, forget all of the ramparts stuff. Second he asked if I was using box2d, and I said “no, I think I can figure out the physics just fine thanks”. When I got home I spent about 5 minutes banging my head against the idea of doing the physics myself, and then about 20 minutes setting up box2d. I think I went to sleep that night with all of the basics in, except for the win / lose states. You could chuck around the balls, etc.

The next day, I got started on it and first put in the win / lose states. Then I did the full game loop with the beginning and ending screens. It was nice to have a tweener library around to get cool animations for everything without much work at all. I play tested it a bunch with my partner, and decided to add the limited shots mechanic. That made the game a whole bunch more even, and about strategy. After that, I still had some time, so I did the retina display version of the game. I had the graphics pretty well integrated with the box2d stuff, so I had to retune everything for the larger masses that were flying around. This resulted in the retina and non retina versions of the game playing slightly different. Hopefully this is not a huge problem. The last thing I did was integrate the audio engine, and throw in a few sfx. They were not super great, but good enough. I think I finished everything up by around 11pm. I want to say that the whole process took about 11 hours of computer time to get finished.

The next morning, Yann did all the sfx over again, and it made everything better, and we submitted to the app store. Done

The final thing was all the promo video, which is basically a scene for scene rip of the crossfire video. That took about a day to do, and we had to learn apple motion. Our greenscreen was a pink blanket purchased from a charity shop around the corner:

Anywho, thats about it! Here are a few promo codes, if you could please post the one you use in the comments, that would be great! If you don’t get one, let me know and I can post some more:

A4PE3LMF7AL6
EYJJWAFXKRNL
NFMN6LNJKKMY

I am pleased to present the final version of AVOIDAL. It has gone through heavy changes since my last post-compo post.

I’ve been working very hard on it since Ludum Dare concluded and have put about 30 more hours of work into it (or about 50 or so total on this game so far.) I wanted to be able to get this finished in time to submit to August’s Experimental Gameplay Project since I was aware of their theme of “Zero Buttons” while I worked on this and I was able to do it!

Big thanks to Sparky who has given me a TON of invaluable feedback and ideas while tweaking this final version.

The menu should read v1.0.7 or greater in the top-left or your cache is old.

RECENT VERSION HISTORY

v1.0.7 – Posted 8/30/2010

• Made HUD a little less cluttered

v1.0.6 – Posted 8/30/2010

• Combo introduced and capped to x5 multiplier
• Mines now can start moving around at higher levels
• New “Mine Streak” bonus awards at 10,25,50,75,100,150,200
• New menu layout
• Tracks local highscore, highest streak and difficulty for local replayabilty and challenge
• More sounds added for new notices and awards

v1.0.5 – Posted 8/30/10

• New visual effect and sound effect for when a spike hits a mine (to differentiate and add variety from when a seeker hits a mine)
• Smoother angled robot effect when mouse moves left and right
• Smoke toned down to be less distracting
• Mine lifespan increased at beginning to 6 seconds instead of 4
• Added a 10 frame damage image to the robot torso to also help show player health
• Adjusted game to run at 60FPS instead of 30FPS
• Smoke now appears behind player sprite
• Fixed score bug

v1.0.4 – Updated 8/29/10

• More changes to difficulty curve based on feedback
• Added Animation on How To Play screen to easily explain game mechanics instead of having as much text to read

AVOIDAL – Post Compo Version!

I’ve made a bunch of improvements to AVOIDAL since the compo and I’d love your feedback!

Play the post compo version of AVOIDAL here

The LD48 official compo version for judging is here now

Changes to the new version:

• Added 1 second of invulnerability if you take damage (this helps a ton!)
• Rebalanced the difficulty curve to make it progress a tad slower
• Mines spawn a tad further in from the edges to help player not get stuck on walls as much
• Reworked How To Play screen to be simpler and clearer
• Changed ‘Energy’ to ‘Health’ in UI
• Fixed some sound volume and playing issues
• Added a nice visual effect of little random twinkling stars in the background

I’m gonna keep listening for feedback and working on this game but I think it is pretty close to me calling it done at this point. Thanks for the great feedback I’ve gotten already to everyone who left me comments on my rating page.

For part one, head on over here This post will continue on the 4th comment. I’m going to respond to every one!

(more…)

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

If you’ve already experienced Towlr, you don’t need this.  But if you plan to sacrifice any friends to Towlr, I’ve made some useful fixes and changes.

http://junk.mikekasprzak.com/Research/Towlr/Towlr2.zip

First off, I’ve removed the ESC and F10 keys, since they’ll just make the player sad (or relieved).  Next, I changed the background color to gradually become more red over time, to add to the “driving you crazy” factor.  Finally, I named the executable correctly, so in the future people can stop asking me if it’s towel-r or t-owl-r.

Enjoy.

EDIT: Linux Version (Experimental)
EDIT: MacOS X Version (Intel) (Experimental)