I wasn’t planning on entering miniLD 12. But the theme was just so interesting that my mind won’t let me not enter it, so here I go.

My original plan was C++, SDL and cURL. However, cURL refuses to work at all, so I’m stuck with PHP, the only other language I know reasonably well. This limits my choices significantly, but since I didn’t have any to start with, this isn’t really a problem.

So, my current plan is a choose-your-own adventure made of wiki pages. First name I could think of is ‘Wikiventure’, which is awful, sounds like a Wiki-based investment company, and is probably going to stay as the name because I can’t think of any others. 😛

It’s located here, and currently just outputs the wiki page, not that exciting.

Tags: php

I really, really, really shouldn’t be participating this weekend, as it’s my son’s first birthday and there are relatives from all over filling my househole.

But the theme!  It’s too good!  And worse, games with this theme will probably be LESS good if you just decide to release them later on, because they will require way too much explanation.

I don’t have a lot to show yet, just a title screen really.  I’m reading data from the wiki (specifically, from http://www.minild12.sophiehoulden.com/index.php?title=Special:Random ), but that’s not evident here.  Game will be a frantic shooter, I guess.  Probably smash TV style.  Also I looked on the rules wiki for “profanity” and I didn’t see anything preventing it!  So!

oh f stop sharing information title

OK, so I have a working prototype!

Kind-of pointless screenshot.

Not very exciting, but it works. Create and edit pages here (starting with ‘Adventure/’, link them up, and it’ll let you navigate between them. To make it easier, pages that don’t exist will give you a link so you can write them. To jump to a page, simply add ‘p=PAGENAME’ (without the ‘Adventure/’ bit) to the URL. It’s case-sensitive.

Um, not really sure where to go from here. Making ”’ become <b> and ” become <i> would be good. Then maybe some kind of inventory…? I really have no idea. 😛

EDIT: The best bit about this is that other people are already writing the actual game pages for me! 😛

Tags: php, screenshot

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

I’m in the process of adding in codes you can use in area pages.

First, there’s [[GET:Foo]], which will let the player pick-up an item called ‘Foo’ from that area. The item will only appear there if they do not already own it.

Then there’s [[IFHAVE:Foo|Bar]]. This checks if the player has ‘Foo’ in their inventory. If they do, ‘Bar’ is displayed. Bar can contain formatting, but I think it won’t work if you put anything with ]] inside it. I’ll have a go at changing that.

I’m keeping an up-to-date list of codes and formatting that work here, if anybody wants to start messing around with them! 😀

I think I’ll go to bed soon, so that’s probably it for today. It’s been really fun so far, especially considering how clueless I was to begin with.

Tags: php

That’s definitely going to be a long night…

Weeeeee, rainbow!

Tags: screenshot

http://pekuja.com/ludumdare/100/intergalactic-planetary/

So yeah, I guess I’m still posting in my own blog. Sorry about that.

I’m currently working in Python, but I’m finding more and more that I kinda… Dislike it.

I’m going to start remaking my game in Ruby. I don’t have a whole lot of code right now as it is, and I’d be much happier working in Ruby.

That said, there’s a pretty good chance that I won’t finish in time. I’m going to try to have something by the deadline, though.

Edit: Using Ruby/SDL instead of Gosu. Prefer raster to sprites-on-polygons… :-/

I’ll be using Ruby/SDL for my graphics, sound, etc. SDL is one of my favorite libraries, and has yet to let me down. I’m not sure how it is with rubyscript2exe, but it should be fine.

Read on for more explanation, if you’d like.

I have found myself more and more draw to Ruby as of late. It’s strange.

I’m not sure why. It’s… Beautiful.

Maybe I’m getting too emotional about this. I feel very strongly about this, though.

I’m going to be coding more in Ruby in the coming weeks. I want to see if this is really for me.

In other news, I’ve decided to remake Byte Vs. GNOME in Ruby, as well.

The code is just too hairy to do much of anything with.

Work on Byte Vs. GNOME will continue alongside OpenRansom after Mini-LD is over.

I’m not going to make huge plans at the moment. I’m just going to start working, and try not to look too far ahead or too far back.

Here’s hoping.

—Mr. Dude

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…

I really like this theme so I’m throwing something together here between family duties… not sure if I’ll make the official deadline or not.

Here is my screenshot, you can sort of see what I’m going for here… it’s a word association game made from wikipedia data that is loading in the background as you play.

In the pic, underlined words are “correct”, but that is temporary… going to show hits/misses on the left side of the screen later.

Unless I limit to certain categories or something, it’s going to be .. weird… I sort of like the complete insanity of it so I might leave it “very” random.

So.. pretty simple concept, but would like to bring it up to a level of polish where it really “works”.

I’m using my iPhone framework, but targeting windows for now.

Alright! This is a totally kick-ass theme (thanks, GirlFlash) and I’m glad to see lots of people running with it. Too bad I’m not one of them, though — this is just about the most straightforward Wikipedia-reliant game you can imagine. There are two players, a runner and a chaser, each of which starts out on a random page. It’s basically a game of tag with the chaser chasing the runner through article after article. The chaser moves faster, but the runner has complete freedom to duck into “Lists of Phoenician Rhetoricians” and hide all night, if they like.

It really just looks like a two-player browser, doesn't it?

While technically two-player, you can only (at the moment) play as the chaser against a simple AI runner — I’m currently trying to figure out how to adapt an existing bit of code that calculates the distance between two phrases (actually, my PhD project truth-be-told) into this without making you download ~80gigs of word-vectors.

Tags: wikipedia

As the title would suggest, I threw away a good portion of the day on my romantic, emotional choice to redo everything in Ruby.

I… had a wakeup call. Using Ruby/SDL was my reality check.

In short, the thing threw tantrums at random, denied having methods that the manual listed, and generally misbehaved.

I’m not going to sit here and rant. I’ve got things to do. I just want to take back what I said in my last post.

I’m sorry for all this emotion, but I get alot more wishy-washy when I don’t feel as much pressure. (IE: When the game doesn’t count for a score, and I plan on working on it past the compo anyway)

I’ma shut my trap and get back to work now.

Peace.

—Mr. Dude

http://pekuja.com/news/106/wikipedia-galaxy-forever/

Now with a playable demo!

Well, it’s done, I guess.  Not a lot of improvements since last time really, but it’s got interactivity now at least. Oh, and score. Also made it request about 4 pages from wikipedia per question overall, in stead of infinite.

entry page

thats 48 hours folks!

to submit your game go to:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-12/

and to view all entries check:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-12/?action=preview

you guys clearly took the theme and ran with it, very far indeed it seems! I have to say you guys once again impressed me. I cant wait to check out what everyone has done

if you havent finished yet dont sweat it, its only a miniLD after all and I’m not going to hurt you if you want to take an extra hour or so to clear out any bugs and the like

also, voting for August’s LD ends in 3 hours so if you have time to spare you dont have long left to vote.

Items can now be gained and lost, there are IFHAVE and IFNHAVE to conditionally output text, and you can click on items in your inventory to use them: if that area has a [[USE:Foo|Bar]] tag, then it will display Bar if you use Foo. Tags can contain other tags, but not perfectly if there are multiple tags at the same level. eg:

[[IFHAVE:Foo| [[GET:Fish]] [[GET:Chips]] ]]

The Get tags are at the same level here, and so will display oddly. Though I think they might still work.

If anybody has any ideas of other things they’d like in, please comment below! And feel free to use tags in pages: They make it a game rather than a wiki browser.

Tags: php

I’m forfeiting from Mini-LD. It was fun, but I’m tired, and likely won’t get a game together.

I had alot of fun, once again, but this time I just lost too much time dicking around with things that didn’t work out. :-/

Oh well. I’ll be posting a link to my game tomorrow, once I have an actual game.

I got alot done, all things considered. I got a 3D collision engine, mapped 2D images to 3D collision boxes, and got a little dude running around, punching and kicking.

Tomorrow, I’ll add enemies and a camera. Then, a scoring system, and so on.

Today, though, I’m just too tired. I need to rest. I’m not happy about it, but it’s just gotten to be a real struggle for me.

It’s been very fun. I’ll still be around on IRC, and will probably post updates on OpenRansom as I add to it. Less frequently than I did over the course of today. ^_^;

Well, it was fun. Time for me to call it a day.

—Mr. Dude

I knew I’d seen a game like this somewhere; HybridMind surreptitiously reminded me that it belongs to Jeremy Bushnell, whom I dearly hope doesn’t mind my stealing it shamelessly. Perhaps I should ask.

I should ask.

Anyway, soldiering on in the face of an almost certain copyright violation:

Progress! Even though things look the same.

I’ve got both AI players working — they’re not the smartest in the world, but they’ll do. And the Chaser will give you a run for your money if he picks up the trail. Pretty pleased about that. Still have a few bugs relating to turn length and whatnot floating around, but I welcome criticism! And suggestions!

You can download a windows build here, if you want to give it a spin. Or click mindlessly for half an hour in something other than Firefox. Same thing, really.

After re-discovering HybridMind’s friend’s ruleset, I realized I’m doing a pretty mediocre job of enforcing those rules. I may go back and make this an explicit version of Wikipedian Tag, just to go with the tried-and-playtested rules they’ve hammered out. Not without getting very definite permission, though — that would feel overwhelmingly like theft, even moreso than now.

Tags: intellectual property, wikipedia

So I had this cool idea about faeries living in the net, and you could browse webpages and recruit them, help them fight off boss critters, etc..

The problem is that I screwed up my time management; I didn’t get started until today, and the deadline is actually much closer than I realized (who uses UTC?!? @_@).  But anyway, I worked up something which is not a game but is still kind of neat.

FaerieNet – Create a Faerie

I probably won’t be able to work on this any more before the official midnight UTC deadline.  So, this is it for me for this MiniLD.  However, I might just continue working on this project in the days ahead…

Tags: php, procedural generation, web-based, wiki, wikipedia

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

Edit: I just fixed it ^^