Cavern, really?

Just woke up, at my friend’s place (I’m crashing there). Dunno if the social requirements of staying at someone’s place, as well as coming back from 3 months away from friends will allow me to compete.

Plus, caverns, seriously?

l’ll still try to make photos. Just to pollute the compo blog.

*Evil grin*

So I apparently started to code… But first, FOOD! To celebrate my return to Finland, Karjalan piirakat with eggbutter:

Mmm, yummy!

And the first screenie:

Rings any bell?

As you might guess, I’m remaking Boulder Dash. Because, well. No idea.

Tags: foodphoto, screenshot

I now have the complete gameplay, or so it seems. I’m adding bad guys and in order to make them move, I coded A*:

Not too fancy yet, and I’m not sure it’s fun. A lot of balancing shall be done, and I think I’ll have the time, for once.

Some graphics included.

The problem is that some sharp angles stay, and if I want to remove them, the number of combinations gets big. And i’m a bit lazy to draw + code them all. Next, FOOD.

Next next, sprites for the digger and the bad guys and the gems and the rocks. And stuff.

Oh hell, only 6 hours left

Tags: screenshot

Oooh, magic mushroomies!

Link to the entry (downloads for Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X)

Another LD. It was fun, but maybe less (for me) than the previous times. Indeed, the conditions were not really good. I just moved back to school, so I spent quite a lot of time with my friends during the week end (saturday evening, and sunday afternoon). Plus, I’m crashing at a friend place so it’s not like I can throw pizza boxes around the room from my bed. And I didn’t have all my stuff, including a mouse for the laptop.

Despite all this, I managed to make a complete game, and I’m kinda happy about it.

What when wrong

• Strictly no idea for the theme. Plus the fact that I knew I couldn’t give my full attention to the compo. So after a (short) while, I decided to remake Boulder Dash, which I actually didn’t know (I had in mind a clone I used to play on my old Mac). Originality zero.
• Loss of motivation halfway through it. I actually spent quite a few hours on late saturday night toying with LuaGL and doing the examples of the Red Book, to distract me a little.
• Erm, graphics. I suck at them, and I didn’t have a mouse. So I re-drew stuff from the web, which I’ve been told is valid. Note however that the title and win screen use images I didn’t create, and therefore shouldn’t be taken in account when voting. All the rest is “hand drawn with a model”.

What went well

• As the game itself was fairly simple, and since I didn’t need to think of new  ideas, the coding was fast and headache free. Gamplay was complete in maybe 6 hours.
• With all the time I had left, I could take special care about the sound. SFXR gave me all the in game sounds, but I took a while to select them carefully. And I managed to write a 1:19 min music with Milkytracker, which I think is not too bad (could have been a lot better, of course).
• For once, I have a game with an end, and the difficulty progression is quite OK. I managed to play to the last level, so the game should be hard but beatable.
• Once again I praise Lua and LÖVE. They rock. Plus the multi-platform awesomeness.

I don’t know how to compare this entry with my previous ones. On the one hand, it’s not original, super simple and doesn’t look too good, but on the other hand, it’s finished, a bit polished, and the gameplay is supposed to be good (I didn’t invent it. I just hope I didn’t screw it in the implementation).

Now I don’t except high positions in the results, but I don’t consider it a “real” LD for me either. Next time I’ll be more ready and available.

Good voting, and congrats to all entrants!

So, theme announced at 3am. I actually got an idea very soon, and decided to go with it because it is both simple and fun (more about it later).

However, I went to be at 6am, woke up at 2pm, and spent most of the day coding a curses-like library for SDL and my wrapper evöL. Of course, it’s always during the time limited compos that I finally motivate myself to do what I wanted to do for a while…

And now, after 13 hours of work, I have… the title screen, hurray!

My god, it's full of ASCII!

Fortunately I had coded a part of my html parsing right after theme was announced.

Now, gameplay!

Tags: screenshot

That’s definitely going to be a long night…

Weeeeee, rainbow!

Tags: screenshot

So, since you all obviously can’t wait anymore with my unbearable suspense, here’s my concept:

It’s actually a quite popular game, which consists in starting at a random page on Wikipedia, and trying to reach a certain goal page in the smallest number of internal links possible.

Now with shotguns.

The idea is to use each Wikipedia page as a level for an action platformer, where the links are the exits. With lots of baddies on the way. And of course, the goal is to find Duke Nukem Forever’s page.

Platforms and ladders... Random level generation ain't that easy...

As you can see I’m far from done.

Oh  and of course, Wikipedia -> text -> console based game. Now that I spent most of my time coding my curses libs, it’d be a shame not to use it…

If I still have time at the end, I’ll use GirlFlash’s wiki as a highscore/hall of fame thingy. But let’s face it, it’s unlikely that I’ll have time left…

Yes, ASCII art additive blending. Oh yeah. But it fails…

Edit: I just fixed it ^^

Six degrees of separation. With a shotgun.

I finally packaged stuff properly for Linux,  and made the Windows port. Grab them here.

Notes:

• It does crash at exit. Will fix later.
• You can get stuck at the top of the screen. I’m sorry but couldn’t find a way around.
• Sound can get irritating, be sure to lower your volume first.

Otherwise, I’m quite happy with it. Awesome theme idea, GirlFlash!

Here is the included readme:

Duke is dropped in a random Wikipedia page and has to get in as few links as possible to the article on Duke Nukem Forever. But the evil googlebots have invaded the pages, so it won’t be an easy journey…

Each level is made of platforms and ladders, and has one exit for each link found on the Wikipedia article. It also has the “Exit” exits, which brings you back to the previous level, if you need to backtrack.

Controls
——–

Left and right arrows: run
Up arrow: jump/go up a ladder
Control: fire
Shift: switch weapons (machine gun has a hight rate and range, but lower damage,
shotgun kills in two shots, but needs a second to reload and closer range)
Tab: bring up the history of visited levels
C: open the radar screen
Space: enter an exit

Escape: quit the game/close the radar screen

Radar
—–

To make this holy quest a bit easier, Duke has a radar. Hitting C opens a list of all exits of the level (links on the Wikipedia page). Use up and down arrow to highlight one, and space to select it, then escape to go back to the game.
In the lower right corner will be indicated the distance to the target.

Shift + up and down allows faster browsing of the links.

Notes
—–

– Entering a new level restores health entirely, and dead robots stay dead when you visit back a level.
– Requires a working Internet connection…

License
——-

The source code is under GNU GPL v3.
Sounds are cc-by-nc-sa.

Tags: foodphoto, motivation

Striking mess on the stage indeed...

A MiniLD #14 entry by Tût-tûûût  & Tenoch

(a.k.a. smots)

Get it here. (Available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows)

Sources are inside the .love file, which is a renamed zip. You can also find there the music/graphic files, if you want to listen/watch them out of the game.

Might follow a postmortem post, once we both get some sleep to compensate the week-end. And yay for including wednesdays in week-ends.

Here is a copy of the README file, which contains instructions for the game:

An divine love story

Hello, I’m Dionysos. I hope you’ll be able to help me.

You see, I think that two women are in love with me. This wouldn’t be a big problem if only these two women were not… goddesses. Yes: they are Thalia, the Muse of comedy, and Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy…

Out of jealousy, they try to destruct the art of each other: while a tragedy is being played somewhere on the world, Thalia messes up the mind of the actors and makes them play a comedy! So does Melpomene in comedies, of course.

I can’t make a choice between them: they are equally important for the human kind. And, as you will see, they are equally… cute.

I borrowed a few thunderbolts from Zeus and I strike the one that shouldn’t be on the stage. I hope this will calm down their anger…

The game

You’ll be randomly Thalia or Melpomene (you don’t need to know their names in fact). As a consequece, you’ll be either Comedy or Tragedy, represented respectively by pink and blue.

You must turn all the actors from your rival into actors of your Art. Easy game, isn’t it?

However, there are not only actors on stage: there is scenery, too! You’ll win when all the props on the stage are in your color. There is a bar on the left to let you know the repartition of the objects. You can’t interact with props. Only actors can. But you can inspire them…

Oh, and there is the other Muse on the stage, too. Otherwise it would be much more boring, you see. She can do the same things as you: turn your actors to her side.

Control

Move your Muse with the arrows of your keyboard.

“Switch” an actor with the spacebar.

Push escape to… escape.

Licensing

Source code is copyright Agnès Haasser & Noé Falzon, released under the
GNU GPL v3.

All music is copyright Noé Falzon, released under cc-by-nc-sa.

All graphical assets are copyright Agnès Haasser, released under
cc-by-nc-sa.

Tags: screenshot

Since the trend is to spam the compo blog, here’s my 5 cents.

I’ll probably be unable to enter (sadly) because of exam preparation. If I manage to work hard enough during the week I might do some LDing in the week end, but quite frankly, it’s highly unlikely…

I’m still gonna vote for themes, and hang out in IRC though.

G’luck everyone, and remember, laziness prevails!

So I’ll apparently be ripping off Patapon, a rythm game on PSP with cool vector-like graphics. Of course it’s gonna be nowhere near that fancy, and I actually never played Patapon. We’ll see.

I think I have enough graphics to start with, and I’ll try to get some coding done.

Rythm patterns recognition works! It was a lot easier than I had expected. See in screenshot:

• Patterns are described as string, for instance “1121”, where numbers from 1 to 4 mean drums 1 to 4 (and also keys 1 to 4)
• The actual rythm is given by a list of numbers, given in beats. {0,1,2,3} means that the four notes of this pattern are played on  each beat. {0, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3} is a tad more funky
• If no notes are played in the two beats following the last note, it times out and the pattern is reseted.
• After each new note, we check if the current sequence matches a pattern, and then we check that the recorded times are close enough to the wanted times. If yes, the action is launched.

Note that this implies that no pattern can be the prefix of another one, and that no note in a pattern can be equal or longer than two beats.

Pom pom pom TADA pom!

So now I have little guys. They execute the orders given with the different rythms. As of now, they can march forward, retreat, cover with shields, and attack. Arrows fly, spike guys charge. Of course there’s nothing to attack, but that is just detail.

Screenshots don’t really give a good idea, without the movement or the sound. But my video capture was awful, so no joy.

And sleep, for now.

So the lil guys now have opponents to fight. Note that arrows and spikes don’t do damage yet, but that will come…

I’m not dead! Just very late, but it’s a mini so I guess it’s not that bad.

EDIT: also, i’m very high on caffeine. oO’

I’m having a big gameplay direction crisis. I’m wondering if I’m not making the game too complex, and on the other hand I think making it simpler would make it a lot less interesting.

Plus the “musical ear” aspect. Should I expect players to be able to reproduce reasonably complex rythms, and how many different ones? This is hard

Plus I suck at art. Boo hoo.

Note the split screen...