Save The Hut was my very first entry into the world of ‘make a game in a low amount of hours’ compos. It was all about The Hut, and how to Save it from the hut-hungry alien invaders. The player had to make sure The Hut survived for a certain amount of time. To achieve this, stuff could be built, but there was a limit set by the amount of credits available. It played as a mix of RTS and puzzle.

Featuring 10 levels, 8 bit palette graphics awesomeness, developed for DOS using Allegro and DJGPP, it placed about 14th. Its shortcomings seemed to be that people had trouble figuring it out, had real trouble passing level 3 (The Holy Cactuses, which was pretty hard), had trouble running DOS games, and also found ‘hold out for X seconds’ extremely annoying (because it sucks to fail at ‘2 seconds left’ and have to replay the level).

You can download a newer, slightly improved version (for Windows) of Save The Hut as a .zip archive, or as an installer. Or, you could get the old compo version (for DOS).

Tags: 2D, aliens, allegro, building, C++, cottage, DOS, final, firs, guardian, huts, invasion, protection, puzzle, RTS, save, tiles, Windows

Save The Hut was my very first entry into the world of ‘make a game in a low amount of hours’ compos. It was all about The Hut, and how to Save it from the hut-hungry alien invaders. The player had to make sure The Hut survived for a certain amount of time. To achieve this, stuff could be built, but there was a limit set by the amount of credits available. It played as a mix of RTS and puzzle.

Featuring 10 levels, 8 bit palette graphics awesomeness, developed for DOS using Allegro and DJGPP, it placed about 14th. Its shortcomings seemed to be that people had trouble figuring it out, had real trouble passing level 3 (The Holy Cactuses, which was pretty hard), had trouble running DOS games, and also found ‘hold out for X seconds’ extremely annoying (because it sucks to fail at ‘2 seconds left’ and have to replay the level).

You can download a newer, slightly improved version (for Windows) of Save The Hut as a .zip archive, or as an installer. Or, you could get the old compo version (for DOS).

Tags: 2D, aliens, allegro, building, C++, cottage, DOS, final, firs, guardian, huts, invasion, protection, puzzle, RTS, save, tiles, Windows

Having learnt some great lessons from my previous LD48 entry, Save The Hut, I decided to not include as much boringness, confusion and frustration in my next game. Together with the theme Construction/Destruction, and a cosmetic theme of Sheep, it all became so obvious: I was to make a game where you construct traps to destruct sheep. And lo and behold! there was The Destruction of the Sheep.

I decided to use pretty much the same tech as for Save The Hut, but used it better to get some fancier stuff, like sub tile precision movements, rotated sprites, pseudo 3D particle gibs, and paintable background.

The game was supposed to be a puzzle game, but in the end only a few levels were puzzly, the rest was just mindless, but entertaining, sheep destruction with lots of gore. All in all, it worked out very well, making me a winner in ‘fun’ and ‘complete’ categories, and third in ‘gameplay (innovation?)’ and ‘overall’.

There’s an improved version available, adding some fixes, and a 2x time speed-up button (but there remains at least two bugs and a lot of spelling errors). You can get this version of The Destruction of the Sheep as a .zip archive or as an installer. They’re for Windows.

The original compo version is also available, both for DOS and for Windows (the Windows .exe was kindly provided by Hamumu during the compo). There’s also the source.

Tags: 2D, allegro, building, C++, complete, construction, destruction, DOS, explosions, farm, final, fluffy, fun, gore, puzzle, sheep, tiles, traps, Windows, winner

The Destruction of the Viruses was a fairly ambitious (but not very innovative) game written for the Infection theme. The player had to clean out the insides of a computer by killing all the viruses that resided there. The viruses could clone themselves, so it wasn’t always that easy.

It played like a top-down shooter, with FPS controls, and used OpenGL to draw a level that could be rotated around the player.

There were many good intentions, and much love for the number 5 (there being 5 levels, 5 enemy types, and 5 weapon types), yet the game failed badly. The biggest mistake was a bug which made some parts of the game framerate dependent, leaving it extremely hard if you had a low framerate (it played as intended at about 180 FPS). It’s hard to say how it would have fared without the bug, but as it were, it placed about 23th.

You can get the compo version, or its source, if you want to, but I really must urge you not to! Better to get the ‘made working dist’ released a few days after the deadline. Both of them are for Windows and OpenGL.

I have an even better version around somewhere, that I haven’t packaged and released yet. I’ll do that soon, and then I’ll include it here.

Tags: 2D, allegro, C++, destruction, explosions, final, infection, opengl, railgun, rocket launcher, shooter, tiles, viruses, Windows

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.

Tags: 2D, allegro, Best In Show, C++, dungeons, exploration, final, firs, opengl, random, RPG, shopping, The One Ring, tiles, Windows, winner

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.

Tags: 3D, Best In Show, C++, darkness, explosions, final, GLFW, innovative, light, linux, opengl, puzzle, shadows, tiles, Trendy Cellars, Windows, winner

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.

Tags: 2D, building, C++, final, fun, GLFW, growth, huts, linux, opengl, people, puzzle, simulation, tiles, Windows, winner

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.

Tags: 2D, arcade, boids, C++, dancing, GLFW, hats, humor, intro, islands, non-entry, opengl, random, silly, stick figures, swarms, Windows

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.

Tags: 2D, arcade, boids, C++, final, fleets, GLFW, opengl, pretty, ships, shooter, space, swarms, trails, Windows

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.

Tags: 2D, anti-text, D, final, GLFW, moon, opengl, pong, Windows

After having relaxing sleep and relaxing breakfast and all that, I’ve investigated current situation. The theme that’s won is Chain Reaction, and it’s won by quite a lot. It’s not the theme I most wanted, but then, whenever do you get what you most want?

So, I really don’t have very much time today to work on things, just a few hours, but with some luck I have the whole of tomorrow available.

I’ve so far made two conclusions about the theme: It’s extremely easy to come up with a non-innovative game for it. Could be a tetris/columns/pool/TIM (the list goes ever on) game. So it can be easy. But how fun would that be? But if I can’t come up with anything else decent …

I do have two ideas so far though, that’s half-way innovative. Almost. Not quite though. A bit innovative to be sure. Not a blatant rip off of existing games. Much.

So first idea I had was an explosion chain reaction game. You had different kinds of explosives and maybe something else. The explosives had different explosion radius and critical explosion radius. If another explosive is within the explosion radius (but not within critical radius) it goes off too. Then you can get a chain reaction. Goal would be to blow something up, I suppose. Thing is I’m not sure it would be such a fun game really, and I’m not sure I could keep the goal tasteful. It would be too easy to make it all goreish. Not sure I want that, even though it probably would be popular among some.

And second idea I had was you have your space ship stranded in space, without any fuel, and you need to reach your home bay. Problem is, the home bay is several jump gates (or whatever they’re called, think like in Eve) away. So in each star system, you need to get to the gate that takes you to another star system, and so on until you eventually reach your home bay. Each system is a level, but ultimately, they’re connected. In fact I could allow revisiting of star systems, and multiple paths if I were to allow multiple gates per system. Anyway, in each system, you would need to get your ship to the gate. To achieve this you can make use of your initial momentum (not much), gravitational forces from planets and the sun, and hi-tech gravity modules and explosive weaponry you can launch from the ship. Or maybe just place. Dunno for sure yet. Then the idea is to plan a level, then let it go, get to the next level, and so on. In the end you’d have the full path through all the games automatically traverseable. I’m not sure if this is enough chain reaction… and interesting enough.

Well, that’s my thoughts so far.

Tags: log

Saturday 21:19
Back from lots of cake etc etc. Was a bit distracting, even though a lot of fun.

Been thinking about my idea. I think it could be a fun game, but I’m not sure it’s actually chain reactiony enough. Need to come up with something for it. I’ll just get on coding and see what happens, I guess.

Saturday 23:19
Been coding. Have the basic structure. And gravitational forces. Most advanced so far is the ship circling the sun. I also have state cloning and so, so can probably do the path thingy without much of a problem. Is pretty tired, so will go and sleep now. Not really sure I’ll have time to make a game of this tomorrow, but we’ll see.

Tags: log

Sunday 12:20
Done sleeping. Tried to think last night on how to make this gamey and chain reactiony enough, but didn’t come up with something. So I need to decide if I should scrap it and do something else, try for it and see, or just give up. Giving up is the far easiest choice, but not very fun.

Been looking a bit at the progress of other games, level of completeness varies quite a lot it seems. Though most are further ahead than me, obviously.

Sunday 12:55
Worked a little, added some planets and the appearance of a jump gate. So took a screenshot showing this minimal thing.

The red thing is the ship beacon, the blue things are planets, the big yellow thing a sun, and the strip of greenish lights are the gate.

Tags: log, screenshot

Sunday 18:47
Just writing to give you another screenshot really. You can now ‘win’ a level (you can get the ‘next level’ button, only it doesn’t do anything yet), and you can run the simulation if you want to. Yeah, and the buttons are all new. Next thing would be to actually have real actions you can do to achieve the goal.

Tags: log, screenshot

Sunday 19:07
I don’t think I got around to writing it down but I earlier considered the case with static vs. non-static planets and sun. Thing is that sun and planets wouldn’t really move if I used a realistic time scale, but on the other hand, it could be much more interesting that way. At the time, I decided to stay with static, but I’m think I will experiment with non-static (as that would push more important but more bothersome into the future).

Sunday 20:04
Has eaten supper. Can also report that non-static planets are tricky, because of how easy it is to not get stable orbits. However, with some math and physics, I got stable paths. Or path. With just one planet it worked anyway. With many they interfere with each other. I could make sure they’re longer from each other I guess. Oh, and there’s the ship too.

Sunday 21:21
Been a bit social.

Sunday 22:31
Been battling with multi-planet system stability and haven’t really reached a good solution, but I’ve reached ‘stable enough’ for up to three planets. It’s kind of big distance between them then, and the third planets aren’t even on screen most of the time. So, that’s a lot of wasted time. Yay etc. I don’t think this will work out, because I can’t really work that much during the night. I’m pondering whether I should just turn it in as it is as a non-entry, or just add something gameplayish, but if gameplay is just a boring hack then what’s the point of the gameplay?

Sunday 23:54
Been away a little while. It’s really like 4 hours until deadline but I’m going to try shut down now. There won’t be an entry. There will be a non-entry that you can play around with for a few minutes if you want to. I’ll just get the final stuffs together for it.

Tags: log

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.

Tags: 2D, GLFW, gravity, non-entry, opengl, screenshot, time, Windows

While trying to think of a decent game to make for the Weird/Unexpected/Surprise theme (a theme I had voted for, but never expected to win, so I never thought about any real game ideas before start), I sat down at wrote Banana Ship.

It’s not meant to be a real entry, but yet follows the theme quite well. If anything, it lacks in that it’s not much of a game, you just have to figure out what to do, and it’s not much of that either. It’s more like a short story, really, but you might enjoy it for a minute or so before it ends.

You materialize out of nowhere, and have no idea who you 
are, or what you are expected to do.    

You are wearing a pink sheet cut into a really ugly robe.  

All around you are filled with nothingness, except for a 
small, yellow banana, floating in the air right in front 
of you.  

>

Tags: adventure, D, humor, non-entry, silly, surprising, text, text adventure, unexpected, weird

I finally have an idea of a game. And not only that, I have an intro for the game ready. So now I just need to make the game!

The idea is that you should drown cows. They come flying in from one side of the screen, and you must catch them, and make them bounce into the other side where there’s water. Otherwise the cows will die as they hit the ground, and we don’t want that, now do we?

The intro is a bit weird as to fit the game and the theme well. You can try it, but maybe it’d be better to wait for the rest of the game, too, so you can enjoy it all together. Here’s an image of it to inspect while you wait:

Tags: idea, intro, log, Mr Head, screenshot

Oh yes, I’ve finally reached the spot where screenshots make any sense. Huzzah! To celebrate, here’s a screenshot:

As you might see, the goal of the game is to catch the dropping cows, and bounce them out towards the water. You press the 1 to 5 keys to select which slot is bouncy. Next up is probably to implement some fancy scoring system with combos and whatnot, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, because it’s sleeping time.

Tags: bouncy, cows, log, screenshot

I now have a scoring system, combos, and lifes, so you can get game over. And announcements. Here’s a screenshot:

What’s missing yet is some effect for non-bounced cows, lip sync for Mr Head up in the corner when announcements are made, and some balancing.

Things that would be nice, but aren’t top priority yet, is a highscore table (for scores, most drowned, highest combo etc), a nifty pause feature, a skip intro thingy, and possibly web scores, only that probably won’t happend during this weekend anyway.

Tags: combos, log, Mr Head, screenshot