well, i shoulda wrote this the day after, but whatever.

 this was my first actual entry in a competition on the interwebs, ever. HAVE MERCY ON ME! actually i couldn’t really come up with anything decent that didn’t require a physics engine. i didn’t have one ready so i had to make do with what i had. which was nothing. not even kidding. i had jack squat.

actually one of the ideas that came to mind involved a spin on games like bust-a-move and snood and all those. it was a spaceship game where you had to get to the core of a circular space station by knocking off the hull. the hull would be made of different colored hexes or circles and you would shoot colored shots that would connect to it if it was the wrong color, or pop them all and possibly break off sections. i actually wanted to have an asteroid field of random collections of these blocks that you could tractorbeam and catapult at the station. you’d have a weapon you’d have to charge and blast the core with once you had an opening. hmm. that’s still a good idea. i didn’t need a physics engine for that. why didn’t i do that one?

anyways, i pretty much kicked back and took it easy for the entire one. had alot of family trouble keeping me from the project, too. wasn’t a pretty scene there.

 so yeah. i’m sure i could have put more effort into the game, but it was a pretty crappy idea and i knew there wasn’t any substance to it. i saw it as one of the Dud entries, just there to fill out the ranks and to get my name out there. also, it was a chance to get some funnies in. i think i aughta score ok for that. got some giggles out of the gf, it did.

wrapping up, i’d say there’s no way i’m gonna beat out some of the other entries. they were looking super good and i knew i didn’t have a chance in hell. i had a blast though! good luck everyone!

Tags: game idea, LD #10 - Chain Reaction - 2007, postmortem

If anyone like the music in my game (though I’m probably the only one who does) listen to this special edition. Infact, you should listen to it either way.

Space Pling

Yes, that is me playing the tuba  😀

Tags: music

The infection risk of the Crabs was depending on the CPU, now it’s constant for every CPU. The Game should now be much easier.

Furthermore the speed of the crabs is no more increased from level to level, because fast crabs are really hard to kill and move. The first level starts with a number of 50, the second with 100 and so on.

I updated the mouse controls and hope it is better now, soon I will include some Options, where the mouse sensitivity can be adjusted.

Please try it again, thanks for reporting the bugs.

Download TheCrawlyCrab_a.zip

Tags: update

Tags: 30min

My birthday is today, this image represents the fun of losing time you had..

Tech notes: This was an image to the 30 min graphics compo. No rules so I used an image I had the rights to. I also had to do R&D to the tool I used (GIMP). Didn’t have the time to buy Photoshop. I think they should award talent with free copies though..

Tags: 30min

Tags: 30min

Theme: “Running out of time!”

Tags: 30min

Tags: 30min

After a long struggle to get it working, I finally have py2exe version of my game. This release also includes a bugfix to my library, which lets the game run on ATI hardware (the texture loader wasn’t enforcing power of two texture sizes).

Sorry it took so long, but I didn’t have much time to devote to LudumDare in the 2 days after the deadline and I had a really hard time getting PyOpenGL to work with py2exe (for details on how to make it work see my journal).

Here are links to the new release files:

GlobCombat 0.1.1 for Windows (6MB)

GlobCombat 0.1.1 for Linux (1.5MB)

Tags: final, incomplete, Windows

If you were having trouble running my final entry please download it again. I accidentally linked to a debug dll in the release version of my game. I have since fixed the problem and it should run on most peoples machines. I have also tested it under parallels with dx support and it runs fine. Finally I have not received any reports of it working under wine. If you manage to get it running under wine please let me know.

People reported being unable to download the file. I don’t know a good host, but I tried hosting it again somewhere else. If anyone would like to post this on a good host, I’d be grateful. This is the Windows version of the game (the source code is fairly small and the other link should work, but it requires Python and Pygame).

http://www.mediafire.com/?c9ma0gsxju4

Hope it works this time.

Another two problems are the lack of README.txt on the Windows version and the fact it’s written in a rush. I’m sorry about that; I was trying to get the game playable as soon as possible and ended up rushing everything. The above link has an improved README.txt and more in this post there is a copy of the “how to play” section of it for those who were already able to download it or are downloading the source.

I apologize for all the trouble.

How to play:

This is a turn-based two-player strategy game. One is the red player and the other is the blue player, identifiable by the color of their units. The objective of the game is to eliminate all the other player’s units.

Each unit has a different attack pattern. Everyone on their attack zones take damage when they attack, and the idea of the game is that an attack on an unit triggers it to attack, possibly creating a chain reaction of attacks (as in the theme).

The game is divided into turns, until all units of one side are destroyed. Each turn is divided into three phases.

At the beginning of the game, there is a special phase called the Setup phase. This is where you’ll put three initial units on the grid. [Each is meant to be able to put their units only in their “zones” (the bottom half and the upper half), but I had to implement playability first and I didn’t have time to make that.] The red does this once, then the blue does this once.

On other turns, this is called the Draw Phase. [Imagine an imaginary deck. ;)] It’s basically the same as the Setup Phase except you draw one random unit from a predetermined deck instead of three preset units.

The second phase is the Move Phase. You are able to move at most three of your units. To move them, just click on them and choose a blue square to go to. Press ‘e’ [or the imaginary “Done” button] to end the phase if you don’t want to use all three moves. Also, moving your mouse above a unit shows you their attack zone, which are the tiles on the grid on which units standing on them are damaged when it attacks. In this phase, you can also change an unit’s facing with no cost. The only thing an unit’s facing affects is the unit’s attack pattern (for example, a spearman can attack 2 squares north, 2 squares east, 2 squares west, 2 squares south depending on its facing). Each player does this once.

The third phase is the Attack Phase. In this phase, each player chooses one unit to attack, and they’ll attack. Their attacks may trigger other attacks, and so on.

[I know the attacks go too fast – sorry about that. And the attack graphics are placeholder graphics, except for the spearman.]

This doesn’t really have anything to do with the competition, but I thought I’d let you guys know. Thanks to Hamumu’s suggestions I made a quick update to my entry M3 – Molesting the Match-3 Market.

The most drastic change is in the way the checking for matches works in the game. Now the game lets everything fall down first and then checks for matches (as suggested by Hamumu). I also changed the colors of the blocks so that the contrasts between them is higher now.

You can download the new version from here: M3_release2.zip (2.3 Mb) (Release 2).

Tags: update

I’ve changed the font-rendering in my game as to avoid GLUT and letting me build a working package you guys can run.

Nothing even remotely related to gameplay has been changed, only font rendering is different.

Here it is: PewPew Laz0r

And here’s an uptaded source version

Tags: final, update

Still a bug in the controls, I will try to fix it, update soon.

It’s still early, but it’s usable. Get ready for sfxrVst.

Windows (32bit): sfxrVst – pre release 0.2

Any feedback, confirmations that it works with your host would be appreciated.

Notes:

• The interface is not yet ported, but most VST hosts support interfaceless VST’s. All parameters should be tweakable just like in the sfxr interface. Magic instruments and Load/Save buttons coming.
• Start Frequency (Freq) parameter disabled (midi pitch takes it’s place).
• Volume parameter isn’t functional.
• Using a small decay sometimes creates a hum sound where the note should have ended. That’s a bug.

History:

Windows (All notes same Freq): sfxrVst – pre release 0.1

Tags: tools

Well, not much to say about this entry … I used pygame which was a good choice as usual.  I broke my level into MVC components, which really didn’t matter much, but it was interesting to do.  (I’ve usually done my games as just a single blob.)  It didn’t take any more or less time to do, so I guess I might as well do it, since it makes enhancing a game that much easier.  (Galcon is just one big blob and it’s somewhat painful to work with sometimes.)

The gameplay was the first okay idea I had.  I think half the fun is not playing the game, but messing around with making a million fuses go.  Originally I had it so you could set up your fuses and then light them yourself, but the gameplay seemed pretty slow.  I made the fuse auto-light to give it a more arcade feel, which I think worked.  However, the gameplay isn’t really “great” but I think it’s passable.

I had most of my fun drawing the backgrounds for the game.  I figured since the gameplay wasn’t the strong point I’d go for broke on art.  However, I’ve been in a bad mood about python+C integration the last few weeks so I didn’t feel like writing a particle engine in C, so my explosions ended up being really sorry.  I wish I understood blender so I could render stuff with that, but I don’t use it often enough to retain memory of how to use such a crazy interface.

My sound is usually a pretty strong point.  This time it was a bit weak, I just cranked out a chord progression.  I had some intentions of adding in a viola track over that, but didn’t feel like it.  The sfx were made with SFXr of course.  Really cool tool!  It saved me the bother of recording my handmade effects, which since I was feeling lazy was good.  I prefer to make my own, but it was nice not to have to this time.

Anyway, that’s about it.  Hope you had fun with the game.

Tags: post-mortem

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.

Controls should be fixed.

I have added some options:

-choose between window and full screen mode

-choose mouse sensitivity

-choose crab speed

Download: TheCrawlyCrab_b.zip

What Went Right

1. Not giving up
Above all else, the most important thing that went right was the fact that I didn’t give up. After reading the theme I thought about it for a few hours before starting to work, and figured it would end up being a puzzle game (not much unlike a bunch of entries ended up).

However, puzzle games require lots of well-designed levels to be fun, and I was pretty sure that I couldn’t manage that in the time frame. There were several moments during the contest where I was asking myself why am I doing this, this is not going to be fun, but pressed onwards anyway, and the end result (after changing from pure puzzle game to something between a puzzle and a shmup) is pretty neat.

This is also the first time I’ve felt like continuing development on an LD entry right after the contest =).

2. Pseudo-random level generation
At first I had totally random levels, but they were, quite frankly, boring. I ended up writing a bunch of different level-generation algorithms (looped square, circles, grid, spiral), which then were fed some pseudorandom values with increasing number of partycles as the levels progressed. I think the first 25 levels or so are surprisingly good with this design.. after that we’re well into the bullet hell territory, and levels were turning pretty similar.

One thing that happened almost by accident is the fact that different levels require different kinds of gameplay – some are “almost” pure puzzles, some are “almost” pure shootemups, and of course the frantic bullet hell levels later on.

3. Time management
I managed to go to dog school, take the dogs out six times, take a shower, do some christmas shopping, sleep well over 8 hours in the middle, watch a movie, etc. and still submitted the final entry 9 hours before the contest end time.

4. Sfx(r)
One thing I’ve really improved upon in LD entries is the sound effects. Sure, I used the (amazing!) sfxr tool as basis this time, but also recorded (with a crappy webcam mic) and mixed some sounds. I used fractal music generator for the music again, which, while not good, is better than nothing.

5. Graphics
I think the graphics turned out pretty good this time, the little there is.

What Went Wrong

1. Bugs
A few bugs which I could have found (and possibly fixed) during the last 9 hours of the compo were left in. Widescreen monitor support, which I actually spent some time on, is broken. Midi music volume works differently than I expected, ending up changing the system midi volume(!), and third, some PCs, more-or-less-happily including my wife’s, are slow. As in 2fps slow.

I’ve solved the first and have been trying to figure the last for the past week or so. It appears that the rendering drops into software on my wife’s PC for some reason that I haven’t been able to figure out yet.

2. Tons of other stuff to do
Having this kind of contest in the middle of the holiday panic isn’t the best possible time =)

3. Tuning
Another thing where I could have used more time on; more level generation algorithms and/or hand-designed levels, slowing down the “normal” bullets from partycles, different kind of partycles that would lead to different kinds of puzzles.. etc. We’ll see if the game is popular, I might spend some time developing it further.

4. Code re-use, or lack thereof
I realized, while doing this contest entry, that I’ve probably written a bazillion font printers. Thus, I started working on a basecode set which includes most of the stuff I’m doing over and over and over again to be ready for the next LD.

5. Post-LD Exhaustion Syndrome
Returning to work and working on the multi-million line projects which move forward at glacial speeds after making a whole game in a weekend.. well, you probably know how that feels =)

Hi,

should work fine now.
Please download newest update: TheCrawlyCrab_c.zip