This isn’t an official entry, since it’s way too late. You can see what I was trying to achieve and why I missed the deadline here and here. I thought I’d post what I’d made, just for fun. This is the product of about two laptop battery charges (~2.5 hours), and one hour to polish, fix the odd bug and package .. so in total it’s about a ~6 hour game made using Processing.org. The game takes 1 min to play, and I’d say most people will be able to beat it on their first or second try.

Chances are, everyone is far too busy judging the record number of on-time entries this year .. but if you are curious, you can see the details and play the game here.

If you know what Löve is, and have it installed already, just grab arcticum.love and run it.

If you don’t know what Löve is*, then take the all included ready to roll super dooper binaries for you favorite OS:

• Linux Ubuntu/Debian: arcticum-linux.tar.bz2
• Windows: arcticum-win.zip
• Mac OS X: arcticum-mac.zip

Each package contains instructions on how to run the game, and the following Readme. Enjoy!

EDIT:

• Known bug. When you win (ie get the fourth item), the game crashes (instead of going back to menu). But don’t worry. You still won! =)
• Game resolution is 1024×600. It might show up weirdly (strech for instance) on 4:3 screens. Press F on title screen to switch to window mode, much nicer.
• The sources of the game are in the .love file, which is really a renamed zip.

(more…)

Hello! For windows and linux, plus source of course. I scrapped my original game and made this instead.

Here we go!

Had to do a last minute downsample of the sound to make the zip small enough to upload =P

Posted to: http://www.originowl.com/Home/advancing-wall-of-math

Download: http://www.originowl.com/Home/advancing-wall-of-math/LD14-greencow-awom.zip

screenshot:

So I took a break from level design to sneak into my kitchen and see what I could find to eat. Turns out my flatmates beat me to it; I sat down and had dinner with the three of them. Costa Rican stew, rice, fresh carrot cake, and red wine. Yum. Thusly inspired, I completed Level 10:

And, of course, blurry iPhone pictures of dinner (remind me to dig out the real camera next time):

I promise it was better than it looks.

First night I had a chicken pot pie.

Second night I had a bunch of ham. (Not pictured.)

This morning (at noon) I refreshed myself with some ham&eggs!

Anyway, here’s a quick screenie of what’s done. (I’ve been kind of lazy this time around.) As you may guess it’s a standard flee-the-wall-of-lava-as-you-run-through-a-cave type thing. Still, even though it’s LD code, I think there’s some good code in here for me to use in the future. (And some very, very bad code.)

Okay, here it is:

The (Windows, binary) download link is here.

The source code is here.

Also, you can download the command line program I did to convert RGB jpegs to RGBA pngs here (includes source).

I’m afraid I’m too tired to do Linux and OSX versions, but I do intend to put them up eventually (probably next weekend, considering).

Also, I just realised I forgot to say at the start that I was using libogg and libvorbis for the audiofiles.  Hopefully that won’t be a problem?

I was going to post this maybe two hours ago, but some stuff turned up.

You can build stuff, and the stuff do things, but you can’t win, there’s no enemies that actually attack, it’s not balanced, there’s no levels, and it all feels sort of meh.

I could probably turn it into a pretty bad game with two hours of work (it’s pretty much all I’ve got left), but I’m not all that supportive of bad games. I’ll probably just post a non-entry.

02:44
Have a menu, and more importantly a working “game state” thingy to switch cleanly from menu to game and back, and possibly a help screen or prefs. Not always obvious since Löve don’t let you control the game loop (you overload functions like draw(), update(), mousepressed(), etc, and they are called by the engine). Also, it’s late and I should sleep a bit. Game mechanics are almost complete.

02:51
Yeah, going to bed. I’m affraid I’m now useless.

09:40
Allright, it’s a nice morning to make a winning entry. *Back to work, lazy ass!*

10:38
Now with a goal, a winning condition, and two game modes.

12:16
Added the critters. They just walk around and wait to be blasted away. Oh yeah

14:05
Face sorting is working. Took three different algorithms… And I’m pretty sure this one doesn’t cover every case either. But it seems to be quite OK anyway.

16:26
Just lost two hours researching and implementing an ear-clipping algorithm. Cause: opengl (and thus Löve) can’t draw non convex polygons. And I really need to draw one. I must admit I had fun coding that. But still, two hours…

I’ve added mini dark towers (is the prime thing used to spread darkness) and also finally decided on a dark vs. light (perhaps earlier mentioned as decay) thing.

Here’s a shot with lots of mini dark towers, so almost everything is dark, except where the butterflies fly. So in a normal game, you’d need to eliminate those.

Still need to add some sort of attacking unit to the light side, adding building interface, winning conditions, and a few levels. It might need a few others things too before it feels like an actualy game, but we’ll just have to wait and see. I probably won’t have time to make it a good game, honestly.

Battled with a stupid bug for maybe an hour. Turned out I had written an asymmetrical comparison operator which crashed sort. I’m not so great at debuggin D yet, at first I didn’t get the debug info, and when I finally did and found a debugger, it wasn’t so helpful. Funnily enough, I ended up solving it with traditional writefln debugging instead, which just took a couple of minutes. Hmm..

Anyway, what I had done before the bug was adding attack towers, which charge up blobs of darkness and fire them at the butterflies.

It mostly just looks like chaos, becuse I just randomly place everything.

They look better animated! Also, the tree zapper aren’t actually supposed to attack the butterflies.

Good morning. A little update. Yesterday I added The Dark Tower (player starting base) and tree zappers (drain trees for power and for simply draining trees).

After that, I wasted a lot of time on how the wall of decay etc should progress, only to ending up with something that wouldn’t work. So I’m still thinking about that. I could spend some time describing what didn’t work, but I’m not going to. Instead here’s a screenshot showing how the decay thing for the ground would look (the tree decay in this shot is just for testing purposes).

Now I have some thinking and showering to do. And breakfasting.

Advancing wall of gray goo…

You play on the side of the advancing wall of doom, which is trying to engulf all. The lousy civilization’s set up barriers, though, which the cloud can’t cross! Your job is to destroy these defences so that the cloud can continue its conquest.

Basic mechanics are working, the main things missing are enemies that fight back. Better graphics should be on the way, as well as some sound effects.

Blast them NMEs!

Yes, spaceships it is. ETA for “full” game (music won’t make the cut): 4 hours or so?

Wish I could get Ubuntu to take a screenshot when it’s in full-screen mode, but, alas.

Here’s my food collage:

And a bit of progress!  MAN that programmer art is looking nice…

Look out for the advancing wall of… doom?

16:50
Bullets! With gravity and terrifying blast damage!

17:51
Going to a dampling making/eating party at a friend. I guess I can use a break, my mind is starting to show me weird stuff.

(Too bad I didn’t take my camera, it would have made a nice food photo…)

22:00
Back to work.

23:34
I have boni/powerups on the game, and the effects of the boni are applied with timers that have callback functions. It may be the usual stuff for most people, but I had never used these before, and it feels really cool. “oah it works”

In my original plan, I was supposed to have finished coding game mechanics by day one, to have all the time in the world for graphics and sound. Technically, my day one ends 14 minutes ago… I’ll try to have at least 5 hours of sleep, though.

Still early days but it’s working with some performance issues, already!

I’m doing a strategy take on the theme. You use your resources to conquer the cities on the map. Any cities you control builds a wall between themselves, that the other army can’t cross.

I’m afraid I’ve bitten off more then I can chew. With wife, kids, and such, I don’t think I’ll have enough time to complete it. Originally the idea has a little turn based battle happening for control of any give city, but I definitely won’t have time to complete what will turn out to be two games. Of course, I’m only 4 programming hours in, so who knows what will happen.

A sidebar, A scroll window, some trees and a collection of houses.

Its progress, I suppose, but I’m a long way off the game I had in mind: a rolling-fortress-of-evil simulator,  where you must manage your staff, purchase rooms, etc in order to keep the “wall of doom” crushing everything in its path.

Hopefully I’ll get the actual fortress part in there soon…

Progress update: I’ve got a little bit of spaceship goodness, flying around and such. Lots of time to tweak things, still. Unfortunately there’s a math glitch somewhere; the camera is jumpy in an unpredictable way. Possibly just some numerical instability — debug it now, or keep making progress and wait until later? Decisions…

I spent the morning not doing anything, most of the afternoon playing UT2004 and Red Alert 3, but then maybe 2.5h ago I figured I should actually try doing anything. So I started out drawing some graphics (mostly vegetation sprites). Then I coded a little to get a random forest sort of thing.

And it’s doomed, you know. You are going to convert this cute little forest into a dark waste. At least, that’s the idea. We’ll see.

Well, its a start.

I’ve actually been drawing lots of graphics so far and am only just starting to write the code. My idea’s a bit ambitious and I needed a fair amount of graphics down before I could start to make them into something.