Wikirunner (aka Wikipedian Tag) is a go:

Every screenshot I post looks the same...

Wikirunner is a game played on Wikipedia articles. There are two players: a runner and a chaser. Both start on a random article; the chaser’s goal is to end up on the same page (at the same time!) as the runner. The runner is simply trying to evade the chaser for as long as possible. You can play it single player, as either player, or hotseat with a friend. Woo! It’s based on Jeremy Bushnell’s Wikipedian Tag rules — be sure to check him out as well.

I spent the last two hours or so giving myself a crash course on python threads, and re-writing all my internet code to be asynchronous. I’m certain this was a good use of my time, too — the little throbber that flashes up while it’s downloading from Wikipedia is so very worth it. Plus I have (tentative, indirect) permission from the author of the ruleset I’m using (‘Wikipedian Tag’) to re-use it here — something I need to actually obtain, as it’s licensed CC-BY-ND, and this is pretty clearly D.

It’s been a few weeks (!), but I feel like I’ve been sitting on this retrospective for so long I may as well post the thing. LD #15 had a fantastic theme, Caverns, and I got a kick out of participating. As usual.

Shelter From the Rain

Looking back at my past LD and MiniLD entries, I really feel like I’m improving. My games for LD15 and MiniLD12 just feel more polished, somehow — a feel which makes me inordinately happy. I did something a little different with Shelter From the Rain; I knew I didn’t have a very strong gameplay idea, and that my mechanic (running around picking things up) had more holes in it than a ten-gallon coffee strainer. So I got the basic game together, then spent most of my time working on little polish-type features. Things like my (relatively) slick menus, configurable options, and online high scores — not to mention some, for me, pretty good atmospheric audio. In my previous entries I’ve always tried to focus on improving my skills in a particular area; this compo was no different.

If I were to go back and re-do Shelter From the Rain, I’d break it up into a series of ‘quests’ — tasking the player with going out and collecting, say, 10 cans of beans. I’d also add more hazards to both the above- and below-ground: fallout, soldiers, survivalists. In short, I wish I’d made the basic game more complex. I also feel like the visual style was crazy-disjoint, something I’d love to improve. “What are these black geary things?!” you cried. What, indeed.

Wikirunner

Oh man. I’m so pleased with this one. If I’d realized it would receive any publicity at all (ohmygod, indiegames.com. I feel legit) I’d have spent way more time working on it this weekend — as it is, the game is basically the product of some hasty Saturday morning programming, and a little polishing on Sunday night. It’s rough, and ugly — but, I like to think, actually Fun.

This is promising. I’m working on a post-compo now, to fix some of the glaring usability bugs people have been reporting and clean up the AI a little. Breath, held.

Oh, man. Has anybody else noticed that we’ve had a truly excellent run of MiniLD themes lately? I’m in, and on time too — I started thinking seriously about things this morning, but didn’t make a post until now. I’ve got something on the order of seven million ideas for this one, ranging from the totally reasonable to the downright Vista-esque, but instead of actually fitting the theme properly I’m going to engage in a little quick-and-sly reinterpretation. It may not be educational, but it will be for education! I present a ludicrously rough version of PopCat!, a collaborative offline-multiplayer wordgame:

A bit of backstory (warning — academic-speak to follow): I’m working on my PhD in cognitive science, and my research revolves around something called categorization — the process by which people recognize objects and group them into logical categories. I’m trying to build a computational model of this using only words, but there just isn’t any data to be found. So far I’ve been getting folks on Mechanical Turk to fill in dumb little surveys, but maybe, just maybe, I can make the task fun enough (and competitive!) that people will produce my data for free. Maybe.

/end academic speak

Anyway, the game is something like Scattergories played in reverse; you’re given a bunch of words and have to come up with a category for each one. There’s a timer, so you have to think fast, and you get points for each category proportional to how many other people came up with the same category. The idea is to make it something of a mind game — do more people thing “tomato” is a fruit or a vegetable? Which is worth more?

The game is in Flash and Flixel (well, B-Flixel specifically), while the data server is in PHP. Joy.

I mean, I kind of like it, but...

Tags: motivation

I have a procedurally generated hex map. I’m not entirely sure where to go from here, though I’d like (for starters) a less organic-looking map. The plan is to drop the player into this world (cavern? déjà vu…), fill it with fog, and let them loose with limited vision range and line-of-sight. I’ve never done either of these things before, so I’m looking forward to figuring them out. Vision is easy, I think — cover the map with an additive-blended mask — but I’ve no idea how to go about implementing line-of-sight. Wish me luck

See? Hex map.

This is all in python, by the way. In case you were interested. Same basecode as before, caveat bugfixes, etc — I’m not entirely displeased with this progress, because I’ve only been awake for a few hours. Damn you, 2am compo time. Damn you.

Also, my camera is on loan for the weekend so I’m afraid I can’t participate in the great parallel foodie blog. Tragedy.

Brie, cranberry, and chicken ciabatta. Mmm.

I remembered, just before I took the first bite, that my phone is more than just a device for playing Galcon. Lunch was a pair of brie, cranberry, and chicken ciabatta sandwiches — and I moved a Hobgoblin into the fridge, so I get to follow up this foodie binge with a bit of excellent beer. Celebratory, you ask?

No, just tasty.

Progress proceeds apace: no new screenshots, because nothing new is going on in the visual department. Lots of map-related mechanics in place, though — and I’m about twelve minutes away from having walking entities in the world. All right!

Things are looking increasingly roguelike on this end, which is nice in the sense that I finally have a direction. But a bit problematic in the ever-going-to-finish department, I’m afraid…

Tags: foodphoto

So I’m just about seven hours into this thing, and it’s going reasonably well. Lighting works, which is cool — when you walk around the map things are revealed as you approach, then fade back into darkness as you move elsewhere. I’m probably going to duck out of here a little earlier than normal (got to catch a plane Monday at 4am, and I still haven’t packed!), so I don’t expect to get too much else into the game beyond some simple dungeon crawling mechanic.

Lighting!

Tags: screenshot

Ok, guys — thanks to the awesome doohan (tester extraordinaire) I now have, in my possession, a fully working build for both Windows and Linux. I’d really love some testers, since my score submission system could use a shakedown (who am I kidding? The whole thing needs a shakedown…) — so I’m proposing the following bargain:

You give my game a quick playthrough, submit a score, then leave some kind of feedback in the comments here. Leave me a link to your builds and I’ll download, play, test, and generally try to break ’em, generating needlessly detailed bug reports in the process. Sound fair? Together we can improve the overall bug-free-ness of LD16 — download the Windows or Linux build of …Deeper and leave me some thoughts.

A beautiful, animated, working title screen.

...and a gameplay screenshot. Did I warn you it was a roguelike?

In the meantime I’m going to go off and try to hack together an OS X port — and, oh yeah, pack for the plane I’ve got to catch in seven hours. I love LD.

Tags: screenshot

Seeing as I expect to be somewhere over the Atlantic in about six hours I’m going to have to call this short and submit what I’ve got. Fortunately, what I’ve got is a reasonably complete (if somewhat slim) roguelike: …Deeper. Download it from the submission page and give it a go.

Hex Roguelike! Huzzah!

The game is a teensy bit lackluster, lacking several significant roguelike features. I’m pretty excited about the tech though — my goal for the weekend was to come up with a solid hex-based map and associated utilities that I can use in another project, and I think I’ve succeeded at that.

Tags: final, pygame, python, screenshot

The 2nd Global Game Jam happens at the end of January, one week after the upcoming MiniLD. I’m curious as to how many LDers will be participating, and where — I’ll be at the Scottish Game Jam in Glasgow. Anybody else feeling up for some slightly more social game dev?

Tags: ggj

I’m just not feeling this for some reason. The theme rocks, especially the limited palette and fixed window size — but I’ve completely lost interest in the thing I’m building.

The title reflects my soul-crushing lack of creativity this weekend...

The game is in as3, and is, if you like, quite playable.

Tags: screenshot

I guess this makes us Earl.

Tags: motivation

Huh. I've been at this for longer than I realized...

Note to self: enter more compos.

Tags: montage

“Enemies as Weapons”, eh? Fell asleep last night with that idea ringing in my head; woke up excited with an idea that I’ve been hacking on ever since. The trouble is that I don’t really like to do ‘enemies’ in my games, much less ‘weapons’ — I’m sort of a nonviolent guy. But I’ve got something anyway, even if it is a bit of a stretch.

Anyway, the real reason for this post: breakfast. It has been consumed.

Note: this does not double as a desk photo. That's my craft/writing desk, not my code desk.

Tags: foodphoto

I spent the first few hours of the compo grinding out mediocre rendered sprites. It was pretty mindless, which is good as it gave me time to think about my mechanic. “Do I like this idea?” I thought to myself as I adjusted the specular highlight on my wooden cue ball for the umpteenth time. “Does it please me?”

Turns out the answer was yes; the idea I’m working towards seems decent, if underwhelming. The graphics I churned out on the way, though? Useless. Utterly, uglily useless. So I set out to prototype the thing, which went pretty well (hurrah! Prototypes in LD = meta-prototypes). Now to have a bit of a nap and dream about visual styles and blending modes.

It's pool. And also putt-putt. In, err, vector graphics.

The (only) cool bit of all of this is that the course layout (bumpers, starting positions, hole, etc.) is entirely data driven. I’ll need an editor to layout courses; that’ll be part of the game. Obviously. And, really, if I’ve already got an editor how much harder will it be to let players share courses & scores? And how cool would that be?

Tags: physics, pygame, screenshot

To my mixed pleasure, some friends called me around seven and invited me over for dinner. It was good dinner, don’t get me wrong — but throughout the evening my thoughts were dominated by three distinctly anti-social questions:

• What is the next milestone I need to hit for my Ludum Dare entry?
• When is the earliest socially acceptable time for me to bow out and get to work on said entry?
• Dammit, I’m eating during a Compo and I don’t have a camera.

Not all was lost: I worked out the details of my course editor over a glass or three of wine. And behold! An hour or so after my return, here it is:

If you're reading this, Celia, I'm only kidding. It was an /awesome/ dinner.

I’ve also settled on a visual style that doesn’t make me retch. It’s amazing what you can do with a bit of Photoshop glow and additive blending. Mmm, blending.

Oh, and the food I failed to photograph? Homemade (vegan) pizza. Mmm, despite the distinct lack of, well, anything I’d ordinarily put on a pizza. Since I don’t have a picture, can you just envision it? Maybe?

Ah, there you go. No, wait — you forgot the sweetcorn.

Mmm.

Tags: pygame, python, screenshot

I very nearly just gave myself a heart attack. I’ve been trying to hack in some simple particle effects (whee! collision-splash!) for what feels like ever, and glanced at the clock as I finished it up. “10:30!” I exclaimed. “But it’s still light out!”

Oh. That’s 10:30 AM. Very, very cool — I’ve got all afternoon and evening to either design a bunch more courses OR polish up the map & score server. Since the course editor is part of the game (hey, I needed the tool, and it was the easiest way to implement it…) all I need to do is provide some mechanism for players to share their courses. Also, some incentive. Fun fun.

Blending is such a cheap/glorious effects tool, no?

Now, onward to an options screen, followed by some LAMP hackery!

Tags: pygame, screenshot

It’s true, I do. I mean, I don’t hate it per se — It’s just that I’m really bad at it, and I hate doing things for which I know I have no skill. I like my games nice and easy, perhaps too easy, and my level design tends to reflect that preference rather strongly.

Ahem.

And so I present: Double Bounce, a content-driven puzzle-type game where each level (‘course’) generally takes no more than a handful of seconds to puzzle out.

Wait — but I wanted to avoid level design, right? Well, sure — but Double Bounce includes a reasonably easy-to-use editor, and makes it super easy to share your own creations. Editing a course? Click that ‘Upload’ button! Want to play something you didn’t make, but that’s harder than the usual fare I create? Download more courses.

It’s a button. Click it.

Oh yeah.

The world is full of crap. That's why we have n/5 stars reviews, right?

But the thing is, it’s so easy to publish courses that even I’m generating crap very nearly by accident. Crap I don’t want to play. “Boy, it sure would be helpful if someone would sort through these levels and tell me which ones are worth playing,” I thought to myself. “I guess I could do it.”

But we already established that I’m really bad at assessing levels! And so: after you complete a course in Double Bounce you can rate it /5 stars (you know the drill) and that rating will get averaged and aggregated on the download server. Pretty slick, though I’m clearly not going to have the time to iron out the kinks and weird bugs in my network code. Grr.

Tags: progress, screenshot

Yep, I’m finished. True to form, I spent half of Saturday writing a toy, then a day and a half buffing it to a needless shine and building up unnecessary cruft around it. Double Bounce is a simple physics puzzle, a sort of mash-up between air hockey, pool, and putt-putt golf. Give it a play and you’ll know what I mean.

Anyway, it’s got rad particle and blending effects, plus easy-to-use tools to let players create, share, and rate levels.

Whee! It's not a bacterium, I swear.

Now, off for some (much-needed) sleep.

Give Double Bounce a play!

Tags: final, screenshot

Ok, I give up. I tried (again) to do a double timelapse, merging screenshots and webcam pictures into a single, hey-this-is-what-I’m-doing-and-what-I-look-like-while-I-do-it kind of video. But I can’t for the life of me get the timestamps to line up. If it helps, think of this as two timelapses of my writing this game which may or may not have been made at the same time. Anyway, my timelapse for Double Bounce:

I can't figure out how to embed YouTube videos on WordPress, so...

I spent several hours this afternoon trying to put together a trailer, but I can’t seem to get anything out of CamStudio that is A) not terribly encoded and B) readable by iMovie. Any tips?

Tags: timelapse