I’ve made a few improvements to Col-4, so that now at least I think it’s fun.

Relevant changes are:
- Smaller playing area, but higher.. kind of
- Different speed scale
- Special block
- Now middle area swappable instead of the upper one
- Preview of next block

Download source and Windows binary. Extra clarification note and reminder: this is post-48h, and shouldn’t be used for the voting.

I decided to have a little fun today.

 I took the game engine I created for Simple Dungeon and created a new adventure out of it. This one is based on the TV series LOST. I don’t know if any of you are fans of the show, but I’m a big fan. 

 Anyway, the adventure is set on Lost island. You are Locke and the objective is to kill Ben. You’ll run into many of your favorite Losties here. Maybe even the smoke monster. You’ll finally get to see how that Locke vs. Jack battle turns out.

 Code is 99.7% the same. Mostly what I changed were the two data files. Fixed a couple bugs though while I was at it. It took a couple hours to design the new world and objects and monsters.

Have fun and let me know if you enjoy your adventures on Lost island.

 Game is here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/109829863/KillBen.rar.html

 –Note, updated rar. Forgot one of the files needed to run the game.

Windows exe + source (compo version; if it crashes, get the post- compo zip below)

Windows exe + source (trivial post-compo fix edition, see below)

Timelapse video

Updated with a fix version above. The game would crash if run at a bit depth lower than 24bpp, use the fix version if it does! The fix also removes a comma from brygge-s.lua to fix a copy/paste bug that prevented turning around/right when looking away from the wharf, this isn’t required to beat the game or even much noticeable though.

Tools used: kate (text), gimp (graphics), sfxr (sound)

Libraries used: SDL, SDL_image (png), SDL_mixer (ogg vorbis), Lua

Hello! I’m finally finished with my game, “Sailor”.

The game let’s you build a boat and sail the sea. Try to stay afloat

as long as possible, it’s not as easy as it sounds though.

I’m way too tired to write a more lengthy post, please download the game and give it a try

Windows binary and source:

http://gustav128.googlepages.com/sailor_win.zip

*UPDATE: The readme links to the wrong Visual C++ redistributable, here is the correct one:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=200B2FD9-AE1A-4A14-984D-389C36F85647&displaylang=en

(Only download this if you experience problems when trying to run the game, most of you already have this installed)

A few days ago my laptop got violently attacked by all sorts of bloatware. I’m guessing it was due to some IE hole or something, oh well. Anyway, it inspired this game. You get to destroy bloatware - yay!

Download for windows or get the source svn://www.imitationpickles.org/ld11/trunk/

Oh, and you can get all kinds of crazy combos if you don’t miss any boxes and are really fast.  So get playing!  Made with python / pygame as per usual.

Here’s my 10 hours entry: Col-4. It’s based on Columns, with the biggest difference being that you can swap the upper part of the playing field. This isn’t really so useful, but it can serves as a few extra lives, or half-lives, rather.

I didn’t much like the theme in the end, and that was why I didn’t start on an entry until today (well, partly — I couldn’t come up with a fun idea). And even then, I did a minimal effort. For matching the theme, there’s lots of minimalism. Columns to begin with is a very minimal game. Then I added minimal innovation that had minimal usefulness. Improvement in fun over the original is extremely minimal (probably negative). Readme is pretty minimal too. Features in game are minimal. Graphics are minimal.

Line up three or more blocks in same color to get points and remove blocks. Left/Right/Down keys to move moving block. Space to drop it. Up to rotate colors. A/D to swap upper part. Esc to quit.

Windows binary and source. Compiling for GNU/Linux shouldn’t require more than a small effort, but I’m not sure it would be worth even that.

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).

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.

After a long struggle to get it working, I finally have py2exe version of my game. This release also includes a bugfix to my library, which lets the game run on ATI hardware (the texture loader wasn’t enforcing power of two texture sizes).

Sorry it took so long, but I didn’t have much time to devote to LudumDare in the 2 days after the deadline and I had a really hard time getting PyOpenGL to work with py2exe (for details on how to make it work see my journal).

Here are links to the new release files:

GlobCombat 0.1.1 for Windows (6MB)

GlobCombat 0.1.1 for Linux (1.5MB)

Here is an exe and some dlls for my game if you use windows. You still need the data (graphics and levels) from the other archive though. Just put the contents of the two zip-files into the same directory.

Here’s the zip:

http://d.skalle.googlepages.com/ld10_final_exe.zip

If nobody gets any problems with this zip then I will probably make a new zip with the EXE, the datafiles and the source code together.

Shrapnel!

Downloads (both have windows exe + source code and Linux makefile):

• Compo version
• Post-compo: Smaller zip, sound latency fix (no code or data changes) (new)

Uses SDL, SDL_mixer and SDL_image. I used kate for code/text, gimp for graphics, sfxr for sound effects (thanks DrPetter!), and pxtone to make music.

If the Linux version crashes when you run it on 32-bit x86, use this SDL library (contains a fix for a bug in SDL_SoftStretch)

Edit: Figured out the Windows sound latency issue! Seems the SDL.dll I used was buggy. Replacing it with one from libsdl.org fixes things.

Hero School is an arcade game that forces you to nimbly avoid, disarm or block bombs while navigating terrain to rescue alarmingly ugly girls who tend to say snide things to you.

It’s sort of Bomberman with new play mechanics, you don’t throw bombs, you avoid/disarm them.

Each level has different rules or items in place.

Heroes can’t cross water but fire sure does.

What a good looking hero!

Download game with source for Windows
(will think about doing a linux/OSX build too.. hrm)

Postmortem comments:

This was a really difficult competition for me because my brand new computer arrived RIGHT BEFORE it started and I had to constantly fight the urge to go set it up! Yeah, that’s dedication.

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.

The theme for LD 9 was “Build the level you play”. The premise is that you’re some god or something whose sole purpose in life is to control the path of some space fish, guiding them through gates that changes their colour, and get at least some set number of fish to go through the spectrum in each level. You control their path by creating planets, of course. Planets attract fish using the laws of gravity.

This is actually the first game where I’ve used OpenGL, apart from some small fiddling. (This also made it easy to make the game window freely resizable with hardware scaling, and I made sure the window always keeps the correct aspect ratio by inserting black borders where appropriate. Incorrect aspect ratios are always annoying.)

That aside, this one didn’t go very well. I spent a lot of time just fiddling around with insignificant things and not getting any parts of the game done, and about midway through I changed the aesthetics from creepy-ish paper-cut-outs floating around — something which at least looked somewhat interesting — to badly drawn space fish, and also inverted the planets, for reasons which completely escapes me. I had also coded up an in-game level editor that I used to create the included levels, but this was disabled for the compo release. For a compo where the theme was “build the level you play”. WTF?! Why did I do this? I have no idea.

The gameplay itself also had its issues. I think I made the gravity a bit too “realistic”, since inserting a planet subtly effects everything — so it doesn’t really matter if you’ve fine-tuned your existing planets to perfection if you have to insert a new planet or even move an existing one, the new gravity will upset the fish and you’ll have to fine-tune again. So, while the gameplay can be fun-ish for a little while, the constant required adjustments can quickly get annoying.

After the compo I played around with visualization of gravity by using a GLSL shader, which made the game somewhat more interesting (not to mention extremely colourful). Another thing I tried, both during the compo and after, was making the planets be effected by gravity, so they’d float around too (until they collided and launched themselves at light speed off the screen), and also make the fish generate gravity, attracting other fish and planets. Somewhat fun to watch and play with, specially with gravity visualization enabled, but the game was pretty much impossible then, heh =)

Download [ Windows/source code ]

My entry for Ludum Dare 8.5. LD 8.5 wasn’t a 48 hour compo, we only got 24 hours to make the game in, but the start time was flexible so you could choose the 24 hours of the weekend the compo was held that was best for you. I managed to use exactly 24 hours on my entry =)

Themes were Moon (actually “But even if you doubt their overwhelming findings, the Moon will never be the same to you again. Never will you raise your eyes to look at her without wondering: IS IT OR ISN’T IT AN ALIEN SPACESHIP WORLD?”, but everyone interpreted it as just “Moon”) and Anti-Textmode, no text at all in the game.

The story, which you have to guess at since there’s no text (and the readme is rather sparse), goes: You’re a rabbit, minding your own business on the moon, when one day a butterfly comes flying from somewhere. It flies straight into a crater, which happens to lead to a huge system of caves beneath the surface. Curious rabbit as you are, you follow it, and so the game begins.

When I started making this I actually intended to make one of those bullet hell shooter games, but for some reason the game evolved into this cave-flying exploration game in stead. Or, well, calling it an exploration game might be a bit of a stretch since there’s only 5 rooms in the game, not counting the exit room (which is a very quick drawing of what’s supposed to be me in my bed, getting a good night’s sleep after 24 hours straight spent coding and drawing), but it would have been if I had spent less time fooling around with the code. For such an art-heavy game you’d think most of the time was spent drawing things (all the rooms are just bitmaps, there’s no tiles), but I actually spent most of the time on code. So, the art didn’t take much time, which kinda surprised me, though of course everything being lores greyscale had something to do with that, and I did rush it a bit too. Anyway, doing the art was a lot of fun.

So anyway, you fly around in this cave system, collecting flashing ring things to open gates while avoiding monsters and projectiles and such. It’s a shame the game is so extremely short, because I really like it and think it could be a good game with some more work. Maybe I’ll get back to it sometime =)

Download: [ Windows | Linux/source code ]

This was my second Ludum Dare entry, for LD#8. Theme was swarms. This time you’re playing the Master of Fireflies, out for revenge against some mushroom-dwelling things who didn’t invite you to some insignificant party last week. So you send your swarm of fireflies after them to torch their mushroom homes. That’ll teach ‘em! The mushroom-dwelling things doesn’t take kindly to this though, and starts spraying water around, which unfortunately kills your swarm and stops the mushroom fires. The battle is on!

This was the first time I made something with a swarm-like behaviour, which was nice. The game turned out ok, though not really finished — those mushroom-dwelling things only ever face right, for example, and the levels weren’t supposed to be that flat. There should have been platforms and stuff. Still, there’s a win condition and level progression and such, so that’s something at least. Anyway, it’s kinda fun-ish for a little while, torching mushrooms while those poor guys losing their homes at your hand try to kill off your swarm, but it gets boring and repetitive after a while.

Oh well, I had fun making it, and learned some new things in the process, so I choose to consider it a success regardless =)

Download: [ Source code ]

Moon terraform pong was a rather half-hearted entry for the LD 8.5 warm-up compo, with the themes Moon and Anti-text. It was an experimental entry, as it was my first using the D programming language. I don’t think I spent much more than an afternoon on it.

In the game you terraform the moon by playing pong using it. Get past the opponent paddle and you gain a bit of terraforming, if it gets past your paddle it loses a bit of terraforming. Also, when blocking successfully, speed is increased and size reduced, increasing the difficulty. Granted, it starts so terribly easy it’s only be the end of the game it plays at a decent difficulty, but hey, the moon really is rather big.

The game doesn’t feature any text, but an image at the ‘title’ screen really explains it well enough. Click to start, move mouse to move paddle. Easy.

You can download Moon terraform pong. It’s for Windows and requires OpenGL.

This was my entry for the LD #6 contest, “Light and Darkness”. In this small platform game, your goal is to avoid the rain drops and light up all the candles in each level.

Unfortunately, I didn’t finish the game in time, so you can’t actually complete a level (I spent too much time drawing the graphics).

The game was programmed in Delphi (using the DelphiX library) and I used Tile Studio for the graphics. You can find more screen shots and download the game (and source code) here.

Ultra Fleet was my entry to the LD8 Swarms compo. For a bit of background information on it, please read about The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands.

Set in space, you controlled a fleet of virus ships that could convert enemy ships. Fleets of enemy ships kept on attacking, and you needed to keep your fleet alive so you could go on fighting, gaining points while doing so.

The game was, if anything, more pretty than fun, but it really was playable once you got into it. Although you probably got bored within an hour or so. Don’t know how it placed, but it received OK scoring, and also got praise such as ‘The game I’m supposed to be reviewing is more like a screensaver’, ‘I liked Hat Swarm better, though’, ‘Without a doubt, Hat Swarm is WAY better’, ‘I honestly would have given the hat swarm a higher score though.’ But seriously, some people (including me!) actually seemed to like it.

You can get the Ultra Fleet compo version. It requires OpenGL and is for Windows, but I’ve been able to compile it for Linux, although I have no idea where that port went, but it should be pretty easy if you want to try yourself.

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands is a game made within 14h for the LD8 Swarms compo. However, it was never really entered into the compo, because I felt it wasn’t quite enough, but also couldn’t figure out how to make something more of it. In the end, I abandoned it, and instead used it as a base for Ultra Fleet, which I did enter. This might not have been the best of decisions, but no matter.

You navigated your hat swarm around islands to destroy dancers that tried to defend the islands, while at the same time trying to avoid the deadly dances that was danced at you.

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands prime features was an intro, an island generator (that I later used as a base for rather prettier islands), the famous Hoids algorithm that simulates hats in groups flocking behaviour (later adopted for the fleets in Ultra Fleet), stick figures, and a lot of dancing. Strangely, it was also my very first LD game (together with Ultra Fleet) that didn’t use tiles.

There’s no dedicated distribution for The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands, but you can get it as the bonus in the Ultra Fleet compo version. It’s for Windows, but if you’re a bit clever, you can probably compile it for Linux. It requires OpenGL with 512×512 sized textures support.

The People was written for the Growth theme, and in many ways it resembles my first two LD games—there’s the tiled world, and you can build things on it. Only in this case it looks more fancy due to some clever tile rendering. Like my two first LD games, it’s a puzzle game.

There’s seven levels of varying difficulty, with goals such as ‘reach a population of X’ or ‘get Y huts’, a sandbox mode, and a tutorial mode. While you build stuff, a simulation is going on where new people appear and so on. A good description of what you actually do is, as someone put it, playing a planetary engineer.

My ‘post mortem’ for the game was pretty much the following:

So how did the game turn out? Good, and bad. My first idea was a kind of God game where you created land and such and people appeared. And there was supposed to be a kind of currency, that I called belief. So I coded the tile system and the simulation first, then I started to try to get it into a game. Well, it didn’t work, or at least it didn’t work without very much job, so I dropped it (the game idea, not the simulation and that). So I figured out another game: You have a limited supply of different kinds of land, and you have objectives to complete. Then there’s supposed to be interesting levels that are fun and challenging. I fixed up a tutorial mode, and a sandbox mode. These are pretty cool. Then there was the levels. I managed to come up with a few OK ones, but then it went downhill. So I ended with 7 levels, of which some are OK. Most are pretty easy, you just have to wait a while. I’m not very happy about them. But on the whole, the game’s pretty OK.

If you’re to believe the unofficial results from my own vote counter, The People did indeed turn out OK, and placed first in ‘fun’ and second in ‘innovation’ and ‘production’.

You can get the Windows compo version, or the Linux port version. They require OpenGL with multitexture support.

Uplighter was my entry for the Light & Darkness theme. It was a puzzle game centered on lighting up levels to certain percent by, among other things, placing lights, breaking down walls, and removing light sinks.

It’s was my first entry to feature 3D, although all gameplay and lighting is really in 2D, and it was also my first entry to not use Allegro. Instead it used GLFW, which is more lightweight, and I really didn’t need all the extra stuff from Allegro.

Uplighter is probably my best and most innovative LD entry so far—it placed first in ‘innovation’, second in ‘fun’, and also won the ‘Best In Show’ award.

You can get the compo version of Uplighter. It’s for Windows, but there’s a shell script (kindly provided by alar_k after the compo) that will fix stuff so it will compile for linux. You’ll need GLFW, GLFT, FMod and FreeType2.

Small notice: After the compo, it was reported to run very slowly on 3.0+ GHz machines. I’m still not sure what that was all about, but it has been reported that this can be fixed by compiling it in VS. If this is still much of a problem, I might get around to fix it myself.

This was my entry for Ludum Dare #7, which was the first LD I entered. The theme (growth) eventually gave me the idea of growing a maze.

So, you create the maze as you walk around inside it. When the game begins, the maze is just a set of disconnected squares. Each of these squares can be linked with a set number of its neighbours (how many depends on the square, from none to four), and you create new links by walking from one square to another where there’s no previous link. Once a link is created it can be walked on as much as you want, but a link can’t be removed once created, so you have to be careful when creating your maze so you don’t get stuck.

Once I had that working the deadline was looming close, so I threw in some keys and locks and made the objective to clear all locks of each level, to make the thing resemble an actual game. In the end there was four levels, a random level generator, and also a level editor.

I wrote in the original README that I’d continue to work on the game, something I haven’t done. I still like the general idea behind the game, but it has this tendency to degenerate into just staring at numbers, which isn’t very fun at all, and on top of that it’s easy to get stuck, having to restart the level if you don’t pay attention. Perhaps some of the extra elements I didn’t have time to put in the game for the compo — more tile types, powerups, bombs, enemies — would have made it better (more varied if nothing else), but I think the interface is the main problem. It should be more obvious what tiles can connect, how many exits are left, etc, so there’s less guesswork, no number tracing, just puzzle solving. Since the levels are so “dynamic” getting that to work would be tricky, though.

Download: [ Windows | Linux (x86) + source code ]

Random Dungeon Exploration is the result of trying to push the Random theme as far as possible. It got random levels, random enemies, random quests (well, a little bit random!), random items, random player names, and random events. I guess it could have been even more random, but time was a limiting factor.

As for the actual gameplay, it’s fairly simple step based dungeon crawling. And a ‘town’ screen where you can shop and select dungeons. It felt pretty solid, but there were a lot of balancing issues that you’d notice once you reached some higher levels.

The game was well received, placing second in the ‘Fun’ and ‘Production’ categories, and also getting the ‘Best In Show’ UBER prize.

You can get the slightly improved post compo version, or the compo version. Both are for Windows and OpenGL.