Hey ho. I’m on a very limited (and flakey) dial-up connection this time around, so I will be working on stuff that compresses well.

I had a hard time getting away from the obvious chain reaction ideas.. and ended up settling on one of them. Explosions. Whatever this game is going to be, I know that the chain reactions have to be big, chaotic, pretty, long-winded affairs for them to be satisfying. From this premise, I arrived at the concept of a fireworks factory.

For once, I could start off by drawing a run cycle. Just like the good ol’ days.

The story: There is this abandonded fireworks factory, see. It’s full of fireworks in storage, and noone knows how to dispose of them safely. It’s time to call in Mr. Splode.

Mr. Splode has a special fire-proof cloak that he can hide under. Most of the game consists of throwing matches into large stacks of boxes full of fireworks, and taking cover.

Actually, just a mock-up. I want the main character to be quite small so that he can duck and dive around projectiles while he’s being chased by waves of exploding fireworks boxes For this purpose, he should probably have double jump, and a bit of jump-time thrust. Why not. Will probably ditch the idea of having a separate button to go into defensive mode – better just to design the levels with little holes to hide in.

A real in-game screenshot this time. The game should rate highly on the crate index. Each colour tag indicates a different type of fireworks.

Yikes.. 5 hours left. To do: fireworks, collisions, level design, audio. For sound, I’m going to jump on the sfxr bandwagon with everyone else. That program is so kick-ass.. I’ve been considering adding lasers just so I can make sounds for them.

ok, so coding fireworks is a lot of fun and I spent way too much time on it. Now I just have an hour to finish designing the map, and come up with some sound and a title screen. Fek, there’s no way.

But wait! What’s this.. the comp finishes at 4pm NZT, not 3pm. SWEET, SUCCULENT TIMEZONE CONFUSION.

Hmnn.. my ftp server is down ): Anyone keep to upload it somewhere for me? jwwhite at gmail dot com.

Mr. Splode and the Fireworks Factory:

download with dlls

Tags: final

ok, so maybe I’m a bit late to the party, but here’s a quick post mortem for my ld10 entry. I had limited internet access for this one, and missed being able to hang out on IRC and see what everyone was up to as things progressed, but it’s been great reading the blog posts retrospectively.

:: Design

The compo started at 4pm Saturday for me (New Zealand). I got home around 6pm, completely not intending to enter, but when I saw the theme was chain reactions I caved. I spent most of Saturday evening thinking about game ideas. The main contenders were:

• a 2 player board game with tiles which keep changing colour until the board reaches a stable state.

• a dominos bowling game with many many pins standing all over the place.

• a platform game with lots of crates full of fireworks.

The last one was by far the easiest to visualise, and to know that somehow it would turn out to be fun without oo much messing around. And when I saw that Dr. Petter didn’t have platformers covered for once, it was a no-brainer. :p
:: Tools

This is my 4th entry, and I’ve used the same tools each time:
sdl, sdl-mixer, bcc55, mspaint, gimp. Also this time, sfxr.

:: Implementation

The first step is always to get a black screen which responds to keypresses. I hate that part. I cheated a little this time, by copying snippets of code out of a past entry (sprout) to get the sdl initialisation and keypress code working. Knowing I did this is a tiny lead weight which my soul will carry forever.

Next up was running around a test map. I love this part. It doesn’t take much to get a guy running around 2d blocky landscape, but it’s instantly satisfying to start leaping around and exploring the limits of the world. I spent a lot of time tweaking the physics until it had a good feel to it.

The whole time I was doing this, I was imagining how the fireworks might work. I knew how the sparklers and rockets would be, and they took very little time to draw and code. The roman candles I wasn’t so sure about, and I ended up spending 5x as much time on them. Writing code and drawing gfx doesn’t seem to be the bottleneck — it’s just deciding exactly how things should look and behave.

I had just moved back from overseas when I did this compo, and in the midst of daylight savings confusion and lack of internet connectivity, thought I was finishing at 3pm instead of 4. I realised my mistake quite close to finishing, and was very happy to have the extra hour. I didn’t leave enough time for the vital task of designing maps, but was still able to try out what I imagined to be the defining moment of the game – being chased down a corridor of exploding crates.

I did the sound in about 5 minutes with sfxr. I would formally like to donate my audio points to Dr. Petter for that one. I just grabbed the first 5 randomised explosion sounds that came out.

:: What Went Right

• Not using placeholder graphics. They have a weird way of finding their way into the finished game.

• Being familiar with the tools. I could concentrate on designing stuff rather than fighting with technical issues.

• Making sure of the design before getting deep into implementation. I didn’t end up spending much time reworking code or graphics.

:: What Went Wrong

• Bad time distribution. Even 30 more minutes working on level design would have improved the game a lot.

• Not budgeting time for details. Little things like a nice txt file to go with the game, windowed mode support, hardly take any time but would have been worthwhile.

:: The Fucha
The problem with making 48h games is that I alway want to spend more time brushing up my entry and re-releasing it. Splode is no exception — I’m thinking to make a nicer 10-level arcadey version with online scores and recording at some stage. I’ll post here when it happens.

No entry from me this time around ): but I couldn’t resist at least designing a game for this theme. You can play it in the comment section! (well, not really). This one is a game about minimalism, rather than being minimalist.

• The game is played in rounds between, say, 32 players.
• At the start of the round, each player is given a list of objects to draw in an in-built pixel pusher. house, pineapple, kite etc..
• For each object, the player must use the lowest number of pixels they think are necessary to communicate what the object is (see scoring).
• Once everyone has submitted their drawings, they are randomly redistributed to other players who have not been asked to draw the same object.
• Each player is then asked to guess what each picture is.

You get 2 points for drawing a correctly guessed image with the smallest number of pixels (each object is drawn by more than one player), and 1 point for guessing someone else’s.

Examples:

Here’s my first screenshot – a quick mock-up of stackable cats. Notice that if you put two next to each other, you can also stick another cat on top in the middle upside down. This is important!

I’m doing this entry with haxe and physhaxe. It’s my first time using either (or, any flash development for that matter), and I’ve been pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get up and running with these tools. This program will be about 99% physhaxe and 1% game.

It started off as ‘The Amazing Human Tower’ — a bunch of acrobats joining hands and feet together to make a big wobbling structure. I suspected this was going to be too complicated though, so went with rigid cats instead. I’ll throw a few other things in too if I have time.

Tags: cats

For anyone using flash.. let me direct your attention to a mod player which has been released recently:

http://gimme.badsectoracula.com/flashmodplayer/modplayer.html
http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?p=168442

Tags: mod, music

End of day 1 for me.. after a lot of messing around with physics and n00b flash stuff, I have something playable to work with.  The cats appear from the top and are controlled tetris-style.  The aim is just to stack them as high as possible.

I spent most of today fighting with flash and tweaking the shapes and material properties of the cats for maximum stackability. It turns out dense, high friction cats are the most fun. Slippery cats suck, but you already knew that.

(‘scuse the weird dithering)

Tags: cats, haXe, physhaXe, physics

..and coffee.

Tags: foodphoto

I’ve implemented a simple online high-score system for Cat Stacker. Well, actually the game will link to the comments section of this post, in case anyone wants to get competative. See what happened there? It was the act of telling you about something I made which allowed me to make the thing I’m telling you about.

Inconceivable!

Tags: scores

Play it online here (requires Flash9)

Download with haXe source here

Ran out of time to do music ): I’m moving house later today, and need to start packing @_@.

Good luck with the rest of the compo — I’ll see you on the flipside.

Tags: cats, final, haXe, physaxe

Argh, the wysiwyg tables keep eating my text. Wysiwie tables more like.

So.. I didn’t have enough time this weekend to produce an entry but I made a mock-up and design sketch to ease the pain.

:: Desert Road Painter

This is a single button game. Press button down, paint starts spraying.. release button.. paint stops.

Your task is to repaint a set of fading road markings as accurately as possible. Each segment is rated and scored according to degree of accuracy. After 10 bad errors the game is over.

The game is pretty boring to start off with. It’s mostly just about getting a steady rhythm going and not becoming so hypnotised by the process that you screw up.

As time goes on, the desert starts to get to you. The long straight road feels static — as if only the rocks and dust to each side are actually moving. The sound of the paint hitting hot asphalt seems close and intimate. Memories start drifting through your consciousness, at first with clarity, but soon become confused and tangled with your senses.

It turns out the last guy who painted this stretch of road had the same problem. The strange creatures he saw hovering in front of him starting beating rhythms on his brain. The regular stream of painted segments became a rich sequence of syncopated markers; a secret language communicating ultimate truths about the world as it is.

Tags: design, LD13 - Roads, mockup

My LD12 entry, Cat Stacker, has grown up and now features assorted fruit. Also, instead of the original tetrisy controls, you can click and drag the current piece around with no time pressure (press A and D to rotate). There are 20 levels and it get’s pretty tough. Good luck! (^ _ ^)/

Cat Cat Watermelon

Tags: haXe, physaxe, stacker, update

ok, I’m a whole compo behind, but here’s an update for my LD15 entry (Caverns). For that compo I hacked the game out in two 4h sessions, so it was missing a couple of vital elements: sound, and the ability to shoot physhaxey bullets at the attacking circles. There’s also a little bonus tune when you finish the game (thanks to Flash Module Player). Hope you enjoy it!

Also, I should have posted this earlier but the organizers of Sense of Wonder Night (TGS) have uploaded the presentations on youtube. You can see my one on Swarm Racer (LD08) here

I plugged LD in the Q&A section, but they cut that part ):

Hey all

Lexaloffle HQ will be open 2pm -> 4am on both Ludum Dare weekend days if anyone in Tokyo would like to join us.

For more details: http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=1292

Click to bigify:

See you on the flipside

This was my first time doing a jam game with other people, and it was a lot of fun getting incoming graphics to work with. I was kind of busy that weekend and couldn’t finish a complete version, so I came back to it last night and added sound, music and some gameplay improvements. Click for the flash version: