I spent most of this weekend doing my tax return 
Still, I thought I’d see what I could throw together in the few minutes I have spare. This game was made in about an hour in Scratch. Scratch doesn’t have any built in physics, so I had to come up with a hack for that.
My high score so far is 25 
Is there a way to embed an applet in one of these blog posts?
I made an entry for LD #26 in Scratch and used their website to host the file and the player. It’s a convenient system but unfortunately subject to the whims of their update schedule. For the next few days I’m expecting the Scratch web site to be down as they upgrade to Scratch 2.0.
So I thought I’d post up a quick guide on hosting the Scratch player (the Java player at any rate) on your own web site. Assuming you have a web site capable of serving up your files you’ll need 3 things to make it work:
Your Scratch binary file is the file that you save out from the Scratch environment when you save locally on your own machine. The Scratch applet you can get from the Scratch web site. I grabbed a copy and put it in my Dropbox if anyone needs it:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15225572/ScratchApplet.jar
As for the web page, you’ll need to write that yourself. The most likely thing to go wrong when putting this all together is paths and the folder structure. Here’s the structure I chose:
public_html/Projects/MyWebPage.html
public_html/java/ScratchApplet.jar
public_html/scratch/MyScratchFile.sb
You could use a different structure, but beware that this will mean you need to put different paths into your embed code to make it work. Here is a bare web page template that should work and you can modify to host your own Scratch files:
<html> <head> <title>My Scratch Project</title> </head> <body> <h1>My Scratch Project</h1> <div> <applet id='ProjectApplet' style='display:block' code='ScratchApplet' codebase='../java' archive='ScratchApplet.jar' height='387' width='482'> <param name='project' value='../scratch/MyScratchFile.sb'> </applet> </div> </body> </html>
I’ve uploaded my entry. This game is loosely based on the game of bar billiards. The inspiration comes from a quote in the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’ve attempted to capture the graphical style used in the TV series for the animated sequences from the Book.
My entry is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-42/?action=preview&uid=11312
And you can play it here: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/10458705/
In response to feedback I’ve made the following tweaks to my game:
You can play the updated version here: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/10575019/
The original entry is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-42/?action=preview&uid=11312
I figured a 10 second limit on gameplay might be a bit restrictive, so I plumped for 10 seconds of rocket fuel. As Neil Armstrong died on this date 1 year ago, I thought it might be fitting to base a game around the last moments of his moon landing.
As in the real moon landing, the fuel warning indicators give bogus readings due to the fuel sloshing around in the tank. Try to ignore the warning lights, you have 10 seconds of continuous burn available to make your landing. If you think you’re not going to make it, abort the mission.
It’s possible to use too much fuel landing the ship. If you do that you’ll be stuck on the moon.
My entry page is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=11312
I’ve started working on a post competition version of my game 10 second burn. If you want to play the latest version as I update it, the link is here:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/12021906/
Issues addressed in the new version:
* now easier to land
* sound effect volume reduced
* you can no longer crash into the warning messages
My plans for additional updates are:
* extra levels
* online high score table
* high score initials entry system
Additional levels will be based around geological features of the moon and maybe some fun ones too.
My initial plan for this game was to make an experience for what it would be like to be a “monster.” But when I thought about it I realised that what defines a monster is not the creature itself but our reaction to it. That led me in a somewhat relentless and melancholic direction.
My inspiration for the style of this game was the early home computer games of the 80s like Frak.
I painted the sprites in the Gimp directly onto the canvas. This was somewhat laborious. I’ll look for a better pixel editor if I decide to create any pixel animations in the future.
The only useful feature of the Gimp I used was in producing the flash effect for the lumberjack selfie.
Other than that it was all pixel by pixel painting. I’d like to have got a few more frames into the troll walk cycle to give the animations a little more bounce, but I started late and was already running short of time.
I think in depicting the troll’s death I was unconsciously influenced by the pictures of the death of Cecil the lion. I think that helped to capture the mood I was going for:
With the music I lucked out. I tried several of the tools in an attempt to create a sombre backing track. On my very first try with Otomata, as I was testing the ability to capture a wav, I got exactly the feeling I was after by pure chance. (I was unable to recreate it over several subsequent attempts.) So I edited the capture I had into a loop and went with that.
Last weekend was a particularly busy one for me. I ran two kids programming clubs on the Saturday so I really couldn’t get any enthusiasm to start until Sunday.
Unusually, I hit on an idea for the theme quickly. I’ve been doing a lot of physics simulation work recently and I thought this would be a good chance to try modelling buoyancy in a game.
Most of my effort at the beginning went in to creating the physics model. If you look inside the project, you’ll see a lot of the variables required to get this working such as the mass of the helium, the balloon itself, and the displaced volume of air. Of course all this only served to produce the final upward force which gets bigger as the balloon inflates.
The results were unexpected (to me at least.) It seems that far from giving the balloon a gentle lift, inflating by only the tiniest amount caused it to shoot up like a rocket. To make it controllable at all, I had the reduce the inflation speed to about 1/10th of a millimetre radius per second.
This tiny change meant no real visible difference between a buoyant balloon and a sinking one. So to exaggerate the effect, I actually scale the visible representation of the difference in radius of the balloon by 10,000 times. Other than that it does represent relatively realistic physics. But I did make a number of simplifications:
Time was getting on, so I moved on to modelling the bird animations. The individual frames of animation are all hand drawn using Scratch’s built in drawing tools. These tools are crude, but they do the job. As reference I found a sequence of photographs online showing the various frames of a crow in flight. I was pleased with the final animation.
Creating the crow animation frames
I later added the highlight to the beak to help with collision. (The balloon only collides with the beak, you don’t have to avoid them entirely.)
I was particularly pleased with the generation of the sound effects. My first thought was to get hold of some balloons and record some samples. It turned out to be difficult finding anywhere selling packs of balloons on a Sunday afternoon. But although I did eventually find and buy a packet, when it came to making the sound effects, I decided to give JFXR a try to see if I could synthesize the sounds I wanted. It turned out I could. More or less. But then… disaster! I had been working on a MacBook in Safari and there is a long term problem exporting audio. I soaked up several hours trying desperately to find a work around. In the end, I downloaded Firefox, remade the sounds, and then exported them from there.
By then, time was running short. I quickly put together a small audio loop for stage introduction in Otomata and rushed to get everything together before the deadline.
In summary, I wish I’d spent more time on creating and tweaking assets and less time dealing with technical issues and balloon shopping, but such is life in game development. I am pleased with the results.