I thought I’d finish tonight, but sleeping 4 hours last night really doesn’t help. I’m off to bed, and hopefully I’ll finish tomorrow… For once I’m gonna try to really polish this game. I think it might turn out good.

So I think the gameplay is done. The game is fully playable in versus mode (two players on one keyboard). I have texts and scripts ready for the tutorials (which will probably prove very necessary for a rhythm game), but I still need to plug them in. And I have the intention of thinking about making an AI. Or let’s modestly say a computer opponent, because I’m frankly doubting my abilities to make anything clever enough to make the game interesting against it.

I'm not sure about this title, by the way...

In a post-LD version (as if the deadline wasn’t two days ago already…), I’d like to think about networking. I know it’s not always easy to find someone to play around the same computer. On the other hand it’s a lot more fun…

Anyhoo. I really need to sleep.

So yay, I finally got the tutorials to work properly. As promised (and I don’t feel late at all…) the game is released!

No AI, so the solo mode is deactivated. The rest should be fine.

Get it on the submission page (Windows and GNU/Linux).

I hope the Windows version works. I crosscompiled from Linux, and although it ran in Wine, it was super slow.

I don’t have new screenshots, except tutorial text, so I’ll put back old ones. Because, heh, a “final” log entry should have screenies…

Here’s the readme:

Rise of the Taka-Pum

A Mini LD #16 entry by Noé Falzon (Tenoch)
<firstname.lastname@aliceadsl.fr>

Lead your army of Taka-Pum to victory using the Heavenly Drums of Awesome!

How to run

Windows: double-click Taka-Pum.bat
GNU/Linux: run Taka-Pum.sh (depending on your file manager, double clicking on it might be enough). You will need the following libraries: Lua 5.1, SDL, SDL_image, SDL_mixer, SDL_gfx, SDL_ttf.

Controls

1,2,3,4 = player 1’s drums
7,8,9,0 = player 2’s drums

Game includes tutorials.

Note: Solo mode doesn’t work yet. You’ll have to find friend.

License

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

GNU/Linux notes
The game comes with a precompiled binary (evolcore.so) created on a Ubuntu system. If it doesn’t work on your particular distribution, compile evolcore.c into a shared library evolcore.so, linked against the libraries mentioned earlier.

So I had this great MiniLD idea, but it turned out that HybridMind completely ripped it off, without even knowing it!
Also, since he did it a month before me, it’s not really a ripoff, just bad luck for me. Stupid MiniLD booking a year in advance…

So here’s what we’re gonna do: I’m going to tell you what I had in mind, and if enough/any people are interested (despite the close resemblance with the previous month’s Mini), we’ll go with it anyway.
If not, I’ll find a new idea shortly. Maybe you could even chose between the two themes.

So, here it goes:

Constraints

Dear, dearer and dearest LDers,

in anticipation of this coming event, and giving in to my never-ending love for the golden times when awesome games held into 1 MB cartridges, I prepared for you a tiny game engine, humorously named:

Retro (the Recursively and Erroneously Titled Retro Object)

It is a simple and very constrained game engine with a Lua and C API, offering the following characteristics:

– Low resolution (160×100) with 1-4 zoom, plus smooth scaling algorithms
– Palette based (8 colors including one optional transparent)
– Old console like input: arrows, A and B buttons, start button (mapped to keyboard, and partial gamepad support)
– Total source + assets shouldn’t weight more than 1 MB

It presents as binaries (for GNU/Linux and Windows, MacOS X if a good will makes the port) to which you feed a Lua source file in which you define callbacks such as update(), keypressed(), etc, and use an API that allows you to:

– Load images/palettes
– Blit images to screen
– Write pixels to screen
– Modify palette on the fly
– Load sound files
– Play sound files
– that kind of stuff

For those who do not desire to learn/use Lua, I intend to make a similar C API, so that it could be used from any C-friendly language (but then it requires you to compile the game yourself, thus limiting portability).

In fact, if you don’t like the engine at all, you can even make anything you want, provided that you stick to the constraints and use no library other than simple IO (basically SDL + standard C/Lua). The idea was just to give the same basecode to a bunch of wizard gamedevers and see what happens.

So there it was. Feel free to express yourself in the comments of this post so that we can decide together what is the better option. Also, the engine is almost entirely coded but it still needs a big evening to finish things up,so if no one is interested, I’ll probably play the lazy card, and just announce a one word theme.

Let me know, LDers!

Since several persons on the compo blog and the IRC channel seemed interested in my original idea, despite the closeness with the previous Mini, I am hereby releasing the aforementionned Retro engine!

Weee!

Source code, Linux binaries, Windows binaries

As you can see, it lacks terribly of Windows binaries. I’m terribly sorry, but couldn’t get my cross compilation thingy to work. It usually goes flowlessly, but here I’ve been battling for an hour, and I gave up.

EDIT: Thanks to Sos, we now have Windows binaries. Yepee! Thanks a lot to Sos. All hail Sos!

If someone with a good heart would like to, it can be built as follows: compile io.c retro_lua.c and lua_api.c into retro.exe. That’s all. But you’ll need dev libs for SDL, SDL_Image, SDL_Mixer and Lua 5.1

First one to publish a windows binary will win my eternal gratitude, and a cake*

Both source and Linux distribution contain full documentation (I hope), and an example game to help you get started.

And, as promised also, there is (a bit more) than a week before the actual Mini LD, which will therefore be held on the week end of the 20-21 of March 2010. No worries though, we’ll have the usual “take 48h when you want” policy, or even more if you like.

Okee. I hope I didn’t forget anything. Of course, don’t hesitate to ask questions on IRC and in the comments. Meanwhile, I’m gonna catch some z’s (I just love this expression, sorry).

Yours truly,

Tenoch

* The cake is a lie.

Since I finally managed to wake up, I guess it’s time to officially launch the compo.

Theme: Constraints (déjà vu?..)

To participate in the competition, you must use the provided “Retro” framework (links at the bottom of the post):

Retro (the Recursively and Erroneously Titled Retro Object)

It is a simple and very constrained game engine with a Lua API, offering the following characteristics:

– Low resolution (160×100) with 1-4 zoom, plus smooth scaling algorithms
– Palette based (8 colors including one optional transparent)
– Old console like input: arrows, A and B buttons, start button (mapped to keyboard, and partial gamepad support)
– Total source + assets shouldn’t weight more than 1 MB

If you don’t like Lua, there is a C API as well, but you’ll need to compile your game yourself, while the Lua based games should be (hopefuly) portable. If you like neither of them, you can also program your game in any language/platform, provided that you stick to the given constraints (and use no external library other than what is provided by standard Lua/C)

Note: the Retro thingy doesn’t actually check if your game weighs more than a MB or not. Furthermore, there seem to be problems with “light” music formats like XM, so if the size limit is exceeded because of music, it’s ok.

Note 2: remember to read the documentation! It containts important and valuable information. The packages also contain an example game.

Optional themes: Cute but Evil or Legendary Cosmic Monsters

If you have no inspiration whatsoever, you can use this secondary theme list to get you started.

Schedule

It’s a Mini, so don’t worry too much about time limits. Take 48 hours when you can/want or even a bit more if you feel like polishing your game.

Downloads

Thanks to the community, we have several Retro binaries to use. They should be compatible.

Source, GNU/Linux (32bits), Windows (MinGW),  Windows (MSVC + more options), Windows (LuaJIT version), Mac OS X

See previous post + comments for more details

Final words

Oh well, have fun

Good luck!

Hello everyone.

It’s now been a lot more than 48h, and I see on the compo blog that some of you have made pretty things. I guess we can call it a week-end, and gather all that’s been made.

Could an admin please set up the submission system?

EDIT: Submit Here | View All Entries

In any case, thanks a lot for your enthusiasm and participation, your help for porting the “engine”, and the hopefully wonderful games you made.

As usual, the submission system will be up for a while, so feel free to submit stuff even very late. This is a Mini LD after all. What matters is the result, not the time limit.

See you soon for more adventures (LD #17 coming up!)

Cheers,

Tenoch

The poster season has begun!

Tags: motivation

OK, ten hours have past already, but I just woke up. Breakfast at 13:00, no problem. Have kindof an idea for the islands, but not really sure yet where it’s going.

Also, it looks like I’m going down a very dangerous road, of trying 3D stuff. First time, yay. I’ve been playing a bit with my setup before, going through the Redbook, but never actually applied to a game. We’ll see…

Of course, since 3D is so hard to make look good (how the hell did they do Gears of Wars out of triangles, I’ll never understand), I’m going for a very minimalistic “retro” style, with flat shaded polys (no textures, except maybe for some UI elements)

Also I find the title “Islands of Misericord” to have quite a sound to it, although I’m not even sure it means what I want in English, and also I have absolutely no gameplay or background idea as of now.

Bah, all in good times.

Yay, greenish heightfield!

Also, for the curious, I’m using my own lib evöL, more or less a SDL wrapper, along with LuaGL, which despite being quite the suck on some points, is pretty cool.

Also, I’m planning on making the main input device a gamepad (with of course equivalents on the keyboard), because I have one, and it’s cool.

Tags: screenshot

For obvious reasons, it’s not a good idea to use immediate mode (gl.Begin() gl.End()) with an interpreted language (lots of slow function calls).

I therefore tried to use vertex arrays, since it’s apparently recommended by the Redbook of OpenGL. So be it. ‘Twas fine, until I realised that LuaGL would flatten arrays of vertices at every frame, which is slow as hell.

I therefore transfered that part of the code to pure C. Once I have my nice mesh in Lua, I flatten it once, copy everything in one C array, and then uses this one with glDrawArrays. It’s a looot better.

However, I wonder if my EeePC is really a 3D  beast, because the following scene:

200*200 heightfield, with 2 triangles per cell --> 80000 polys, rendered twice (filled, outlined)

runs at about 4 fps. Laaaame.

OK now I never did 3D before, so maybe I’m just not doing it rite (insert kitty picture).

• Vertex Arrays not supposed to be used like that? For now I have all the coordinates of all vertices of all polys one after the other into a 1D array of size (n tris * 3 vertices * 3 coordinates). So lots of vertices are repeated. Is that wrong? I see we can also use glDrawElements() to avoid repeating vertices, but that implies using an array of vertex indices. Would that be faster?
• Better technique than vertex arrays?
• Just plain too much polys, try to do level of detail, or manual clipping before drawing?
• Get rid of the nice outline (um, which gives as about 5 more fps…)?

For now I’ll just reduce the size, try to get some proper terrain generation, and gameplay into that. Cause yeah, it’s supposed to be  a game at some point…

Tags: screenshot

My terrain generation is really le big suck.

Tags: screenshot

Genesis 1:9. An Ceiling Cat gotted all teh waterz in ur base, An Ceiling Cat hadz dry placez cuz kittehs DO NOT WANT get wet. An Ceiling Cat called no waterz urth and waters oshun. Iz good.
(slight god complex here…)

Now with fully rotative camera, gamepad controlled

Still no precise gameplay in mind, but it will imply raising water level, probably something RTS-y.

Also, I added some Perlin noise to the heightmap. Now it’s almost always nice.

Tags: screenshot

Tags: motivation

Diamond dude has a view on the sea!

So mmm yeah, more distant guys are just square, closer ones are diamond shaped. Oh and I get about 10 fps. Myeah. I wonder if the final product will actually be playable.

The guys run away from the approching seashore. And if they’re stuck on an island, they DIE! Mwahaha. Ok so now, gameplay. Saving the lil’ dudes.

Tags: screenshot

Wooah, pink!

There is now a simili beginning of gameplay… The player places beacons all over the map, and the dudes within their areas of influence will be drawn to them.

Now we’re still far from actual game mechanics, or even winning condition.

Tags: screenshot

Oh yeah, ingame menu with 3D meshes!

Look at that, night has fallen on the little island world (yeah, there is a night/day cycle, just for fun).

I have a nice OBJ loader, so I can make 3d “icons” and other meshes in Wings3D. The selected icon in the menu rotates and it’s cool.

Also, the smallish thing in the center is a boat. It doesn’t work yet, but it’s going to!

Tags: screenshot

Aren't they cute?

Boats can now successfully (most of the time) load and unload passengers! Funny thing is that sometimes the dudes just run into the sea, to their tragic death.

Now more gameplay. A winning mechanism, perhaps?

Tags: screenshot

Oh really?

Yeah really!

You can make you own little network of them, if that makes you happy. ’cause you know, it’s just a sandbox for now…

Tags: screenshot

Completed shelter, on top of the mountain

It floats! Praise the lords!

Tadaa! Here is the ultimate way to save the dudes! Build them shelters, which will float once the tide rises.

Maybe the game will not be called Islands of Misericord, but Arks of Mercy. Or something mystical like that. Now I hope I can make it fun.

Tags: screenshot

Full menu: beacons, boats, teleport towers and shelters

Yay for digits made of OpenGL primitives!

Also, I needed a break from the coding frenzy, and wrote some music for the game. Since the game might very well never end up being a game, you can listen to the track here.

EDIT: perfectionism. Music is better like this.

Tags: music, screenshot

Done! My first 3D game ever. I’m tired but happy about it.

Entry is here, for GNU/Linux and Windows.

Arks of Mercy

Be the savior of an endangered nation, as the level of the waters rise ineluctably. Guide your people to the safest mountains, build boats, teleportation towers and mighty shelters before it is too late!

Be sure to read the readme. It might not be very complex, but there are no instructions ingame at all.

EDIT: the readme might not be totally clear, but you can change the whole keymapping (not only for the gamepad) in keymap.lua

Be sure to check the Gameplay video!

Also, no Windows binaries yet, sorry. Will work on it, but I don’t have a Windows computer right here.

EDIT: ported!

Since this is clearly going to be an all nighter, I might as well do the traditional postmortem right away.

What went wrong

• It’s not exactly “code” related, since the code is portable (both the C library, and the Lua “game”), but having issues with the Windows port is annoying. My library is probably very easy to compile on Windows, but crosscompiling is a nightmare. Will try to get access to a Windows machine soon. EDIT: done!
• Having — as usual — no idea whatsoever where to start, I built the game a bit randomly, throwing ideas and seeing what would happen. In the end, the code is so  messy that I couldn’t do what would have given the true meaning of the game: having a second player. Be it computer, or networked friend. The game is a kind of single-player training mode. The goal is to score a maximum of points. I’ve never been very fond of these “gradual” winning games. Being able to compete on the same terrain with someone else, and check who saved most, would have been great. Later work maybe?
• First time use of 3D. We’ve been warned, know the technology before using it in a limited time compo… Even if I had gone through the Redbook before, and had the library set-up done, a lot remained to learn or relearn. And a lot of time spend (not lost) on it.
• Stupidly spent a huge amount of time on the terrain generation. Tried and failed at midpoint displacement, fractal watchamacallit and other things. Tried three times to implement Perlin noise before succeeding. I guess being tired didn’t help. Or trying to tweak parameters that I knew would be irrelevant later anyway.
• Considering the game not being truly a “game”, I didn’t do any intro screen or background story, or levels, or campain. For a while I considered it a fancy toy.
• Spent far too much time playing the game. Hey no wait. That’s a good thing. It goes into:

What went (very) well

• Despite the few previous points, I actually enjoy playing the game. I spent a few times playing it through and saying to myself “oah that game is cool”. And that is pretty new. All my previous LD’s and mini LD’s left me with a certain feeling of frustration. And the impression of having made a non-fun game. This one keeps me glued to the screen, gamepad in hand, until the end. And this, for the following reasons:
• 3D coding turned out great. Sure there were a few facepalms, a few unfindable bugs, and a few mathematical challenges. But I am happily surprised to see how far a “first 3D game” can go. Plus, I was afraid of performance, since optimisation is excluded during 48h (octrees? meh… i just draw everything all the time!), and my EeePC is kinda slowish and doesn’t have a gamer’s graphic card. But with a bit of Level of Detail, and basic use of Display Lists, I end up having ~14 FPS, which makes it very playable. People with better machines will enjoy it even better.
• 3D looks turned out nice. With the obvious intent of having minimalistic models, no textures, flad shading, etc, it ends up being slightly retro. It’s been compared, obvious inspiration, to Darwinia (never played), which looks infinitely more fantastic. With the day/night cycle and the zoomable camera, there are some pretty nice landscapes ingame.
• Music. I needed a break from the code at some point and decided to make music, even for a non-game. I’m quite happy with the result, a dark atmospheric track that certainly sets the mood to this doomsday setting. Actually, it is probably for a big part in how compeling I find the game. It keeps you anxious and willing to save those little yellow guys, who keep dying. Oh nooo!
• My small brave library keeps working fine, and get additions every time. This compo was the inaguration of the new input system. It’s not perfect yet, but served its purpose well. I loved playing with the gamepad.

I realise I haven’t listed the tools I used, as it is tradition:

• EeePC 901, mouse, gamepad. A weebit smallish screen for some things (the art department), but otherwise quite ok for coding.
• Lua (mostly), C (a bit in the lib), in the geany text editor. F5 runs the game (or any command you need). Some autocompletion. Doesn’t get in my way. I am not as enthousiastic as usual about Lua, but it’s probably only because of the awful coding practices of the week end. Very ugly.
• LMMS (Linux Multimedia Studio) and the marvelous ZynAddSubFx, included in it. LMMS is not great, but good enough, and mostly makes a good front end to synths, samples players, trackers all in one. On the Eee, there’s not enough raw power to run jack and half a dozen sound apps at the same time
• Wings3D for the models. Curiously I knew very well how to use it, while I never really did that much 3D before. Very easy to use indeed.

Conclusion

I’m both very surprised and very glad of the final thing. Sure it could have been more (2 players vs/coop mode?), but I do enjoy playing it as it is, and that’s a very good sign.

Now I’d really like to hear what others think of it (agree, differ on the yes and noes). It’s one of the first games I’d actually consider finishing later. Cleaning code, adding modes, etc. Who knows.

Thank you reader if you managed so far,

and good voting!

Tags: final, postm, screenshot