Also, here is what I ate last night. Om nom! 😀

Tags: foodphoto

A pleasant surprise … I had this made for me.

What is it about me doing LD that makes my girlfriend want to cook so much !

Tags: foodphoto

(cross-posting from my blog until I can figure out how to get syndication working.)

Okay, I’m registered. Now to start with some inspiration. Way back when Resident Evil 2 came out for the PS1, my friends and I loved it, and played it to death. There were two things that we were particularly fond of. First off, the voice “acting” was excellent. And by “excellent”, I mean perfect for the B-movie motif of a modern zombie movie (er… videogame with extensive cut scenes). The awkward pauses in dialog were further exacerbated by the long loading time for the PS1 to read the sound files off the disk. This, combined with the awkward hand-gesture animations made for some moments that would have made Ed Wood proud. For example the classic, “Stop!… don’t open… that door!” from from the first Resident Evil game. Or one of the initial exposition dialogs from the sequel:

Marvin:
About two months ago…there was this incident… involving zombies…
in a mansion… located in the outskirts of this city.
Chris… and the other STARS members discovered that…
…
…
(sinister voice) Umbrella…
was behind everything.
…
They risked their lives to reveal the truth.
But, no one… believed them.
Not long after that… (with emphasis) all this… started to happen.

But I digress… Our second favorite thing about the game was its constant confirmationitis.
“There is a key here, would you like to take it? (yes/no)”
“There is a lever here, would you like to use it? (yes/no)”
“There is a switch here, would you like to switch it? (yes/no)”

Based on this, we devised the obvious logical extension of the series. At the time, we called it “Resident Evil 3”, but actually “Resident Evil 0” might have been more appropriate. Considering both those title have since been taken, and reconsidering our design of the game, I think this is probably the most apt title:

That screenshot is pretty much the entire extent of the game. Choosing “No” would send you to a Game Over screen. Choosing “Yes” would send you to an identical Game Over screen, which we called “the good ending”. Depending on how long you took to answer “Yes”, and how many times you had to switch the cursor between the two choices, the game awarded you a rank, from D to A. If you chose “Yes” really quickly… I’m talking within a matter of minutes, you’d attain the coveted ‘S’ rank. Achieving the S rank unlocked a bonus part of the game, which played exactly the same as the original, but the menu was blue instead of green. If you beat the “blue version” with an S rank, you unlock the “red version”, and so on…

Tags: inspiration, journal

Oh yeah, that’s raspberry cream cheese. Mmmm.

Tags: foodphoto

I have gameplay now:

Er, you can’t tell from the screenshot, but the small square is your mouse cursor. The large square that is the same color is the goal. There are as many obstacles as the level number, so level #5 will have five obstacles.

The rectangles are obstacles you need to avoid to get to the goal. If you touch an obstacle, you go back to the beginning. They vary in size, so sometimes a single pixel can trip you up. Be careful!

Tags: screenshot

OK. I’ve written a columns-like game. Columns to begin with is very minimal. I had this idea of a little improvement (or weirdification) that one could rotate it around. Which I tested.

See? It’s not so useful though. Thinking maybe it’s better to just reduce it to actual columns, then at least innovation is minimal! But would feel a bit cheaty.

Got to fix score viewer and game over thingy, so I’ll have some time to ponder it.

Tags: colors, columns, journal, screenshot

Here’s another screenshot of my game, which I’m still calling Tiny Skater I guess. This is the fifth level in the game. The other levels aren’t this big. This one’s a bit of a mess to tell you the truth. The minimal game mechanics kinda make it hard to have interesting level designs. I think I have an idea for one more.

Tags: bad pun, levels, screenshot, tiny skater

Woke up today, ate some food:

Got some cola here too, but unfortunately the floor decided to take a sizeable portion of it.

Anyway, I finally got the engine done now! No new screenshot since it looks the same as before, but now I can easily add screens simply by making a new png for the graphics and a lua script to link it to stuff. Time for content creation..

Also, maybe some sound. I’ve got some samples that would be perfect for ambience, but I probably can’t use those since they weren’t created during the compo (or by me, even). Guess I’ll have to try to make something.

Tags: foodphoto

10:51
Woke up to find out my comp had bluescreened, how annoying. And no, I didn’t leave my game running for the night!

13:00
Defined base of enemy script and enemy movement systems and made some first proof-of-concept protos of them.

15:29
Tweaked way too long trying some different material choices for bullets and still settling for a really simple one. Firing, bullet movement and collision detection with enemies is now done. Now it’s time for a small break to eat something, and then I’ll work on constructing enemy script from level data.

16:52
Actually I once more had to enhance the route system to ease the content creation a bit. Let’s see if I can now add more enemies. Screenshot from level editing.

I have a main menu:

And gameplay:

I need sound effects, but I have made a game for Ludum Dare!

Tags: screenshot

Game is progressing, but very slowly.. Spending too much time fiddling with details.

I ate some stuff again in the hope that some energy will be beneficial:

Also ate a banana earlier. It’s important that you know these things.

Tags: foodphoto

I’d decided before the competition got under way that I wasn’t going to be have time to actually compete, and that I was going to use the weekend as an opportunity to get back up to speed with C++ after a break of around 10 years, but with the theme being “minimalism” it was just too tempting to give it a go.

I certainly wasn’t going to have enough time to put together a decent original game in the 8 hours or so I could reasonably expect to have, and if I was going to do minimalism properly, the .EXE should be as small as possible and require no external libraries, and ideally no external resources either.

I came up with two ideas which I thought would fit the bill:

• A version of the Atari 2600 classic “Yar’s Revenge”.
• A version of the VIC20/C64 Jeff Minter classic “Gridrunner”.

I opted for the second idea as it was a game I played to death back in the day, and promptly spent 5 hours last night (going to bed at 4.30am) arsing around sketching on graph paper and putting together simple animations using OpenGL primitives. Still, I now have all the graphics I’m going to need generated in code, plus a basic framework handling game state and properly timed animation. All that’s left is writing the actual game, but I’m hoping that I’ll get 5 or 6 hours tonight which should be enough for something this simple.

After feeding it through UPX my current .EXE comes in at 13k (down from around 27k uncompressed) which I’m quite happy with, as it’s just game logic which needs to be added. Fingers crossed I’ll be able to submit something which is playable and finished at a basic level in under 15k.

I’m only just back in now after being out since first thing this morning and have a pile of urgent things to do before I’ll have chance to do any more coding, but will try and get a screenshot or two posted up before I head back out.

Minimalist game. Few pixels. Few words.

Download.

Windows, run executable. Ignore errors. They claim fatality. They lie.

Others, need python, pygame. Run python main.py

Tags: final

Here’s my final submission of Mondrian.

The game is heavily inspired by the visual art of Piet Mondrian, and while he wasn’t strictly a Minimalist (apparently he was a Neo-Plasticist), his works look pretty minimal to me. It also has a minimal ambient soundtrack.

You can download it here [Mondrian_by_pansapiens_LD11.zip] (runs on Windows and Linux).

Read the README in the zip. Esstentially, you just click the mouse and press ‘r’ to restart a level.

Here’s the screenshot:

Don’t let it fool you … it looks (and sounds) much prettier when in motion.

There are ten levels. I think it can be completed, but the last few levels are hard (or impossible :P). It could do with some better levels … there is an in built level editor (using the commandline switch -e). Send me some better levels !

Tools used:

Python (2.5), Pygame (1.8), Rabbyt (0.8.1) (and it’s dependency, PyOpenGL)

Played with Pyglet but hacked that code out and didn’t use it in the end.

Gvim and Eric as IDEs, SVN and Trac for source control.

The GIMP for image editing, LMMS (using the BitInvader softsynth) for sound. Sounds trimmed using Rezound, encoded with oggenc. My Ensoniq Mirage was used as a controller keyboard (should have just sampled it).

All put together on Ubuntu Linux, Hardy Heron Beta with a flaky Pulseaudio server that wasted my time (should have never upgraded before the official release date :/ ). Windows version compiled with PyMike’s PySetup.py, on Windows XP running in a VirtualBox VM. Briefly tested on Vista.

Big thanks to my girlfriend for cooking all weekend.

Now it’s sleepytime.

Tags: final

17:28
Yay, first enemies spawning from the level data. Now it’s about
time to make even some simple movement logic for them!

Okay, this time I really think I’m done. I added an intro and an outro, fixed some bugs, and changed the way scoring works, and tweaked gameplay a little bit. I also added a windows executable. Cheers! 😀

Source: Download (55 KB)
Windows: Download (3 MB)

Tags: final, pixelman, pygame, python

Well, I’m back up and starting to wake up.. (mmm coffee)  I was too tired last night to tag the evening with a journal update as to progress of MinMo so I think I’ll do that now as I recollect my thoughts and tasks for the day.

I managed to get about 3-4 hrs of code in last night during which I got the block classes correctly picking new heights, updating to the new heights etc.  It looks really neat in motion and there is something about it’s minimalism that I do like.

I got the player char position to be updated as the blocks rise and fall and started working on more advanced collision detection.  I need the char to correctly get stuck in the block valleys and be able to move left and right only when their block is above neighboring blocks.  Sounds simple enough right?  😉

I managed to piece something together that was crudely working after fighting through some annoying bugs but basically hit a wall of tiredness where I was causing more harm than good.    So, I went to bed hoping to refactor a bit better / clearer algorithm in the morning and then hopefully add a few more elements to make this thing a ‘game’ and maybe even slightly ‘fun’.  I still have hope even though there is less than 10 hrs left in the compo.

Tags: gosu, journal, minmo, ruby

Yep, that’s a shot of gameplay! Hey, it’s supposed to be minimalist.

you may download the intense thrills of Still Pond: stillpond.zip (2MB)

It is for windows and includes source code.  Developed using PTK, and I think I did things in the semi-proper way, shouldn’t be too tough to recompile for Mac.  There are two exes, a windowed and a fullscreen, but on my computer the fullscreen one constantly minimizes itself, which is beyond annoying. I consider the windowed version official, but if the fullscreen one works for you, it is better for the gameplay.

Tags: final, leaf, minimalist, pond, still

Well, I think I’m done… it’s rather a lot more minimal than I’d hoped, not been feeling too well this weekend, so decided to stop early. I’d hoped to make better use of Chipmunk and put in ropes/chains and other fun stuff, and some hazards – but kept getting too distracted playing it / building levels (it’s got a built-in level editor, if you press E in-game, but it’s a bit arkward to use, and I didn’t get round to writing any instructions…)

Final(ish) version is here…

http://www.bluescrn.net/LD48/LD48-11-bluescrn.zip

Tags: bluescrn, chipmunk, final

Yes. See how far I’ve come. You all don’t stand a chance. Maybe, before time is up, I’ll even manage to make my sprites flip without glitching out in oldfashioned tilemapped glory… but who really wants that anyway? Tilemapped glitches are the best.

Tags: bug, glitch, sprites