Infection Wars is a multiplayer game where you use an “infectatron” vehicle to bring a population of “protoplasmoid” objects over to your color. There is a (fairly dim) AI to play against, but it’s best if you’re playing splitscreen head-to-head with one or more humans. It supports up to 4 players (with multiple joysticks/gamepads, preferably, or keyboard, or mouse).

It was written using PyGame (no OpenGL), and was my first game development contest entry. For a while, I had been driving around with a license plate holder based on the game.

This came in 9th in both innovation and completeness. I’m still rather pleased at how this game turned out – it’s a pretty simple game with some easy-to-understand but unusual mechanics. A few more hours could be spent on the game to fix a few shortcomings, including the fact that sometimes the protoplasmoids get hung up on walls, and that the AI is regrettably (and nigh-unplayably) dim.

Tags: final, infection, multiplayer, pygame, python, split screen

Really, my LD9 entry was my crowning acheivment. I originally had some grand schemes to dominate the competition with a distributed networked web based magic thing. Those schemes amounted this:

All things considered, I placed fairly well.

Tags: final, humor, joke, non-entry, pygame, silly, text

I don’t know what the theme for this Non-Compo was (I think there wasn’t one), but I made a yahtzee clone. Much more than a clone, though, it is far more complicated than Yahtzee, allowing you to score a bunch of different ways.

As you can see, there are 2 colors of normal ducks, and a King Duck. So you can score in the Same column if your dice involved are the same color, the Diff column if any different ones are involved, and in the King column if the King is involved. The High column is one you can use if you ever get another column twice, but your second time is a better score than the first. It makes some sense when you play it. And to stop a die from being thrown on subsequent rolls, you put the ducks to sleep (as you can see in the picture).

This was my first actual 3D game! Well, my most finished 3D game (even though it’s not finished). Those dice are pure 3D, hand coded from scratch. Take that! Their rolling is real, not just a visual representation of a random number generator – they get a random spin on all axes when thrown, and wherever they stop when they land is what they are on. The code to interpret their facing into a number was the tricky part.

Too bad for you, you can’t play it – there is no downloadable version at this time.

Tags: allegro, dice, ducks, final, king, water, yahtzee

Probably my least-finished LD entry (not counting ones I didn’t even start), Termites is the adventuresome tale of a small band of termites on a very small screen. All you can do is wander around and chew up grass, making termite babies with which to devour the couple of buildings onscreen.

It’s kind of entertaining to enjoy the simulation a bit. This ‘game’ cannot currently be downloaded anywhere in particular.

Tags: bugs, final, growth, simulation, swarms, termites, tinyptc

As a kid sometimes while driving, I’d imagine that I could shoot lasers out of the left and right sides of the car. The goal was to hit only curbs and nothing else, by turning them on and off to avoid gaps and such.

Can a child-hood fantasy be turned into a passable play mechanic? You be the judge!

In this game you travel through the brain, stomach and anus of your loved one, who unfortunately has cancer cells spreading throughout her body. Your job is to ‘clean up’ the curb, er, cancer.

The fifteen levels are each randomly generated using different rules, in later levels, her coughing causes (sort of) neat graphical effects.

Download the game
Download the source

Tags: final

For Bathroom Teacher, I took some pics of the bathroom in the park near my house and then figured out a theme to wrap around them.

You ‘construct’ mudballs to throw at sheep when you notice they are coming out of the wrong bathroom. It’s for their own good!

It starts off a bit slow but very soon you’ll see the point of the game is to wrack up massive points with combos.

Download the game and source

Tags: final

For Bathroom Teacher, I took some pics of the bathroom in the park near my house and then figured out a theme to wrap around them.

You ‘construct’ mudballs to throw at sheep when you notice they are coming out of the wrong bathroom. It’s for their own good!

It starts off a bit slow but very soon you’ll see the point of the game is to wrack up massive points with combos.

Download the game and source

Tags: final

For once I legitimately follow the theme! In this game drunk people fall in the water and you must boat around to save them.

The catch? It’s dark and only with the help of the lighthouse beam can you see where the rocks are!

This entry is probably my best, because it’s well rounded. Smooth low-tide/day/night cycle, power-up system, sfx that fit the action (it’s was a lot of fun to voice drowning people) and I even had extra time to work in audio references to Space Taxi and Hamumu’s “koolkat bad”.

Download game and source

Tags: final

For once I legitimately follow the theme! In this game drunk people fall in the water and you must boat around to save them.

The catch? It’s dark and only with the help of the lighthouse beam can you see where the rocks are!

This entry is probably my best, because it’s well rounded. Smooth low-tide/day/night cycle, power-up system, sfx that fit the action (it’s was a lot of fun to voice drowning people) and I even had extra time to work in audio references to Space Taxi and Hamumu’s “koolkat bad”.

Download game and source

Tags: final

I happen to be at the Zoo when I got emailed the compo theme (thanks Pov) so I snapped a bunch of pics hoping I could shoe-horn them into the game, which I did.

This is kind of a WarioWare like ‘stroke’ based mini-game. You stroke your mouse (this is just sounding dirty) to knock flies off annoyed animals in a smooth motion – very, very quickly.

I played the guitar bits.

Download game and source

Tags: final

I happen to be at the Zoo when I got emailed the compo theme (thanks Pov) so I snapped a bunch of pics hoping I could shoe-horn them into the game, which I did.

This is kind of a WarioWare like ‘stroke’ based mini-game. You stroke your mouse (this is just sounding dirty) to knock flies off annoyed animals in a smooth motion – very, very quickly.

I played the guitar bits.

Download game and source

Tags: final

This was my second entry, and the first time that I got something playable. This is still one of my favorite games from LD, even though the graphics are a little simple.

TIE is a puzzle/platformer, where must build a roadway across a series of ice floes, while avoiding the exploding sheep.

You can find the game here:

http://www.vickijoel.org/ldgames/TransIcelandicExpress_U1.zip

Tags: editor, final, iceland, LD2 - Construction/Destruction, platformer, puzzle, sheep

Buttonlands was for the LD#5 contest, “Random Levels”. This was an RPG style game based on “Buttonmen” from Cheapass Games. My favorite part of this was the random map generator, which generated really nice looking results.

I also had a lot of fun with the character and location descriptions for this one.

Playable Buttonlands is here:

ButtonLands.zip

Tags: final

The theme for LD9 was ‘Build the level you play’ so I thought a neat game mechanic would be a board game in which players take turns constructing the board before they play. As it turned out, I was leaving for my honeymoon on the second day of the competition, so I really only had about 24 hours to work on the game.
With this game I did the development a little backwards. After planning a little bit, I usually jump into coding, but this time I did all the graphics first, then did the coding. I may adopt this methodology for future competitions because as I’m working on the graphics, I can think of more ideas and such.

Graphically, I think it looks pretty good. However, in terms of gameplay, this game is a little boring (as the title may suggest). I think the extra 24 hours would have helped me flesh out the ‘building stage’ part of the game, which would make the resulting game a little more fun.

Game written in Python+Pygame, here’s a zip with a win32 build and source: http://fydo.net/programming/LD9-boredBuild.zip

Tags: 24hour, boardgame, final, fydo, LD9 - Build the level you play, python

This was my entry for the LD #6 contest, “Light and Darkness”. In this small platform game, your goal is to avoid the rain drops and light up all the candles in each level.

Unfortunately, I didn’t finish the game in time, so you can’t actually complete a level (I spent too much time drawing the graphics).

The game was programmed in Delphi (using the DelphiX library) and I used Tile Studio for the graphics. You can find more screen shots and download the game (and source code) here.

Tags: 2D, darkness, delphi, final, light, platform game, Windows

Moon terraform pong was a rather half-hearted entry for the LD 8.5 warm-up compo, with the themes Moon and Anti-text. It was an experimental entry, as it was my first using the D programming language. I don’t think I spent much more than an afternoon on it.

In the game you terraform the moon by playing pong using it. Get past the opponent paddle and you gain a bit of terraforming, if it gets past your paddle it loses a bit of terraforming. Also, when blocking successfully, speed is increased and size reduced, increasing the difficulty. Granted, it starts so terribly easy it’s only be the end of the game it plays at a decent difficulty, but hey, the moon really is rather big.

The game doesn’t feature any text, but an image at the ‘title’ screen really explains it well enough. Click to start, move mouse to move paddle. Easy.

You can download Moon terraform pong. It’s for Windows and requires OpenGL.

Tags: 2D, anti-text, D, final, GLFW, moon, opengl, pong, Windows

It’s got MOON, it’s got NO TEXT, and it’s got blocky pixels, chirpy audio and all the other essentials!

This was a strange “compo”, but several interesting games came out of it and I had a good time working on mine. The 24-hour time limit was rather severly busted, but that’s fine I suppose. DQ means surprisingly little around here, especially since this compo had no voting.

As usual for me, the main idea was a technical one and involved using a sphere-mapped rectangular playing area. As one theme was “moon”, this seemed easy enough to work in. The actual game concept was undetermined until rather late in the process. At first I was thinking that maybe you’d drive across the moon in some vehicle, collecting things… but that didn’t happen, so I changed it. The final game is pretty cool imho, where you drop/stack colored chips onto the moon to make them disappear.

This all sounds very lame and boringly puzzly in theory, but the main challenge is the hideous control scheme. You don’t control your position directly, or even your speed, OR the acceleration – but the next-higher derivative! Tap right and you’ll see very little happen at first, but after a few seconds the moon starts slowly rotating in the chosen direction, and then it goes faster and faster unless you compensate in the other direction. It’s very easy to overcompensate and end up in an oscillating back-and-forth motion where you have no real grasp of what the hell you’re doing, but play the game enough and you can enter into a sort of zen state where you can “feel it” and get along pretty well. This is really essential, since you need to position yourself very accurately over the chips to avoid missing (and thereby creating a new stack which needs to be completed and removed).

Unsurprisingly, most people that tried the game hated it. Once I realized where it was going I pretty much tried to make it as evil as possible, much like a lot of old C64 games which you find in some old dusty drawer without a manual and have no idea whatsoever what to do with. You’d start a game and almost instantly die, and the controls weren’t obvious at all or severely broken. Ah, the heritage.

I’m really happy with the music though, sets the mood nicely. Imho the game is worth playing a few minutes for that aspect alone if you’re a retro geek.

Scroll down to the bottom of this post to read some instructions (that you shouldn’t really get if you want the full frustrating experience).

Download: Windows version (575 kB)

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Quick instructions: Arrow keys to move/rotate, Z to drop chips. Do not drop like-colored chips on top of each other.
There’s a small cheat which might make the controls a tad easier to grasp – type “showyou” at any point to bring up an acceleration graph in the top-right corner.

Tags: crazy hard, final, moon, music, pixels, puzzle, retro, sphere

It’s got MOON, it’s got NO TEXT, and it’s got blocky pixels, chirpy audio and all the other essentials!

This was a strange “compo”, but several interesting games came out of it and I had a good time working on mine. The 24-hour time limit was rather severly busted, but that’s fine I suppose. DQ means surprisingly little around here, especially since this compo had no voting.

As usual for me, the main idea was a technical one and involved using a sphere-mapped rectangular playing area. As one theme was “moon”, this seemed easy enough to work in. The actual game concept was undetermined until rather late in the process. At first I was thinking that maybe you’d drive across the moon in some vehicle, collecting things… but that didn’t happen, so I changed it. The final game is pretty cool imho, where you drop/stack colored chips onto the moon to make them disappear.

This all sounds very lame and boringly puzzly in theory, but the main challenge is the hideous control scheme. You don’t control your position directly, or even your speed, OR the acceleration – but the next-higher derivative! Tap right and you’ll see very little happen at first, but after a few seconds the moon starts slowly rotating in the chosen direction, and then it goes faster and faster unless you compensate in the other direction. It’s very easy to overcompensate and end up in an oscillating back-and-forth motion where you have no real grasp of what the hell you’re doing, but play the game enough and you can enter into a sort of zen state where you can “feel it” and get along pretty well. This is really essential, since you need to position yourself very accurately over the chips to avoid missing (and thereby creating a new stack which needs to be completed and removed).

Unsurprisingly, most people that tried the game hated it. Once I realized where it was going I pretty much tried to make it as evil as possible, much like a lot of old C64 games which you find in some old dusty drawer without a manual and have no idea whatsoever what to do with. You’d start a game and almost instantly die, and the controls weren’t obvious at all or severely broken. Ah, the heritage.

I’m really happy with the music though, sets the mood nicely. Imho the game is worth playing a few minutes for that aspect alone if you’re a retro geek.

Scroll down to the bottom of this post to read some instructions (that you shouldn’t really get if you want the full frustrating experience).

Download: Windows version (575 kB)

–

–

–

Quick instructions: Arrow keys to move/rotate, Z to drop chips. Do not drop like-colored chips on top of each other.
There’s a small cheat which might make the controls a tad easier to grasp – type “showyou” at any point to bring up an acceleration graph in the top-right corner.

Tags: crazy hard, final, moon, music, pixels, puzzle, retro, sphere

Ah, great compo this was. Tons of sweet games. Unfortunately that also meant fierce competition, and I only managed to snag a best position of 3rd in Fun (which is unusual for me, as I normally do better in the technical categories).

Base idea for the game was to have the level be “swarming”, for an unexpected approach. I figured there could be loose platforms drifting around in space and you’d try to jump around between them, doing… stuff. The gameplay part of it was sketchy at best.

I suppose the better part of the first day was spent getting the platform movement and interaction working, and then I think much of the second day I just sat and tweaked it, fixing bugs. The gameplay elements and final graphics/audio were added in the last two or three hours.

Windows download: 128 kB zip (exe, data, source)

Linux port: 16 kB tar/gz (needs above file for data)

Arcade build a’la Lerc.

Tags: collisions, final, jetpack, map, physics, pixels, retro, space, stars, swarms

This was my second LD48 hour entry (the first having been lost to the eather) and is pretty much the opposite of my first entry. The first had shiny 3d graphics but poor controls and gameplay. This attempts to focus purely on game play and avoids doing any graphics.

Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to balence the difficulty, so it’s very, very hard. Still worth a play if you’ve got a few minutes though, if only for the mental swirly plasma flux which may or may not have been proven to give people seizures.

More details and download link here!

Tags: final