I’ve made a few improvements to Col-4, so that now at least I think it’s fun.

Relevant changes are:
- Smaller playing area, but higher.. kind of
- Different speed scale
- Special block
- Now middle area swappable instead of the upper one
- Preview of next block

Download source and Windows binary. Extra clarification note and reminder: this is post-48h, and shouldn’t be used for the voting.

Here’s my 10 hours entry: Col-4. It’s based on Columns, with the biggest difference being that you can swap the upper part of the playing field. This isn’t really so useful, but it can serves as a few extra lives, or half-lives, rather.

I didn’t much like the theme in the end, and that was why I didn’t start on an entry until today (well, partly — I couldn’t come up with a fun idea). And even then, I did a minimal effort. For matching the theme, there’s lots of minimalism. Columns to begin with is a very minimal game. Then I added minimal innovation that had minimal usefulness. Improvement in fun over the original is extremely minimal (probably negative). Readme is pretty minimal too. Features in game are minimal. Graphics are minimal.

Line up three or more blocks in same color to get points and remove blocks. Left/Right/Down keys to move moving block. Space to drop it. Up to rotate colors. A/D to swap upper part. Esc to quit.

Windows binary and source. Compiling for GNU/Linux shouldn’t require more than a small effort, but I’m not sure it would be worth even that.

I had supper.

It was sandwiches.

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.

I’ve finally started working on an entry. Is a column game with a weird addition. I’ve worked on it lightly for maybe four hours now, or so. We’ll see how fun it turns out.

I’ve also just had dinner. Chicken, rice, chicken gravy. Stuff. Nom nom.

It’s toast. Oh, and here’s some candy:

But it’s really from last night.

Mmm… pizza.

Well, it’s basically just a sandwich.

I still haven’t come up with any good (and fun) game ideas that fits the theme. I have come up with a few other ideas, but most of those I felt required too much from the graphics drawing side. So I still haven’t done anything, really. Motivation has been dwindling. But still much time left, and we’ll see.

I have had lunch, though.

The mashed potatoes taste much better than they look.

It’s still just sandwiches.

Mr Head and the Cow Drowning is now complete. Or as complete as it will get this weekend. I have many ideas on improvements, but they must, alas, wait. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As said earlier, the game is about drowning cows to prevent them from dying. Granted, they die anyway, but in a much more nice way, and outside the screen, mostly. Anyway, to drown cows, you must use key 1-5 to select which slot is currently bouncy, which will make any cows falling there to bounce out into the water. If you fail to catch a cow, you lose a life, but if you catch two in a row, you gain a life. You can have ten lives, and if they run out, the game is over.

During the game, Mr Head will observe and give you points and make announcements. He’s the mastermind behind everything, but exactly how is not certain. Do use his combo scheme to get many, many points. I’ve gotten 22 million as best so far. There’s no highscore in this version, but maybe I can add one later.

So, except for what has been told here, and what can be seen, there’s also a fancy intro, and mighty fine sound effects.

You probably want to download Mr Head and the Cow Drowning. Binary and source are included, the binary is for Windows, but with the right libraries and some changes to the makefile, you’ll be alright on other platforms too. Hopefully.

Also, make sure you don’t miss the Banana Ship text adventure non-entry, also made during this warmup.

I now have a scoring system, combos, and lifes, so you can get game over. And announcements. Here’s a screenshot:

What’s missing yet is some effect for non-bounced cows, lip sync for Mr Head up in the corner when announcements are made, and some balancing.

Things that would be nice, but aren’t top priority yet, is a highscore table (for scores, most drowned, highest combo etc), a nifty pause feature, a skip intro thingy, and possibly web scores, only that probably won’t happend during this weekend anyway.

Oh yes, I’ve finally reached the spot where screenshots make any sense. Huzzah! To celebrate, here’s a screenshot:

As you might see, the goal of the game is to catch the dropping cows, and bounce them out towards the water. You press the 1 to 5 keys to select which slot is bouncy. Next up is probably to implement some fancy scoring system with combos and whatnot, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, because it’s sleeping time.

I finally have an idea of a game. And not only that, I have an intro for the game ready. So now I just need to make the game!

The idea is that you should drown cows. They come flying in from one side of the screen, and you must catch them, and make them bounce into the other side where there’s water. Otherwise the cows will die as they hit the ground, and we don’t want that, now do we?

The intro is a bit weird as to fit the game and the theme well. You can try it, but maybe it’d be better to wait for the rest of the game, too, so you can enjoy it all together. Here’s an image of it to inspect while you wait:

While trying to think of a decent game to make for the Weird/Unexpected/Surprise theme (a theme I had voted for, but never expected to win, so I never thought about any real game ideas before start), I sat down at wrote Banana Ship.

It’s not meant to be a real entry, but yet follows the theme quite well. If anything, it lacks in that it’s not much of a game, you just have to figure out what to do, and it’s not much of that either. It’s more like a short story, really, but you might enjoy it for a minute or so before it ends.

You materialize out of nowhere, and have no idea who you
are, or what you are expected to do.    

You are wearing a pink sheet cut into a really ugly robe.  

All around you are filled with nothingness, except for a
small, yellow banana, floating in the air right in front
of you.  

>

Right. Didn’t get any game done this time, but I give you a fabulous non-entry called Evening Journey.

Download Evening Journey. It’s for Windows and comes with source.

How to ‘play’
Get ship (red beacon) to the jump gate (strip of green/yellow dots). You can add a thrust with right mouse button. There’s a time line at the bottom where you can select what state to do an action in (only action is the thrust). There’s infinite random levels.

What would have existed
A challenge.
Pickups.
More kinds of actions.
Actions limited by pickups.
Increasing difficulty on levels.
Levels connected so you can go back to previous level and get different pickups.

Stay tuned for post mortem tomorrow.

Sunday 19:07
I don’t think I got around to writing it down but I earlier considered the case with static vs. non-static planets and sun. Thing is that sun and planets wouldn’t really move if I used a realistic time scale, but on the other hand, it could be much more interesting that way. At the time, I decided to stay with static, but I’m think I will experiment with non-static (as that would push more important but more bothersome into the future).

Sunday 20:04
Has eaten supper. Can also report that non-static planets are tricky, because of how easy it is to not get stable orbits. However, with some math and physics, I got stable paths. Or path. With just one planet it worked anyway. With many they interfere with each other. I could make sure they’re longer from each other I guess. Oh, and there’s the ship too.

Sunday 21:21
Been a bit social.

Sunday 22:31
Been battling with multi-planet system stability and haven’t really reached a good solution, but I’ve reached ’stable enough’ for up to three planets. It’s kind of big distance between them then, and the third planets aren’t even on screen most of the time. So, that’s a lot of wasted time. Yay etc. I don’t think this will work out, because I can’t really work that much during the night. I’m pondering whether I should just turn it in as it is as a non-entry, or just add something gameplayish, but if gameplay is just a boring hack then what’s the point of the gameplay?

Sunday 23:54
Been away a little while. It’s really like 4 hours until deadline but I’m going to try shut down now. There won’t be an entry. There will be a non-entry that you can play around with for a few minutes if you want to. I’ll just get the final stuffs together for it.

Sunday 18:47
Just writing to give you another screenshot really. You can now ‘win’ a level (you can get the ‘next level’ button, only it doesn’t do anything yet), and you can run the simulation if you want to. Yeah, and the buttons are all new. Next thing would be to actually have real actions you can do to achieve the goal.

Sunday 15:33
I’ve done a few things. For example, I’ve eaten food, which was nice. More related, I’ve created a time line where you can select current state and to try things, I can set the ship velocity at any point (which can be seen in screenshot below), which is kind of cheating, but it’s just a test. The game would have less pointless actions you can do.

Sunday 13:40
Had breakfast, and added the prediction. So now we can see the path the ship will take. The good thing about this is that we can see in real time what any action we try will do for the complete path, we don’t have to wait and run it (which often is bothersome on this kinds of games). Idea is it’s also going to be possible to select a time in time when to make an action etc. Just select it on a timeline, kind of.

Sunday 12:20
Done sleeping. Tried to think last night on how to make this gamey and chain reactiony enough, but didn’t come up with something. So I need to decide if I should scrap it and do something else, try for it and see, or just give up. Giving up is the far easiest choice, but not very fun.

Been looking a bit at the progress of other games, level of completeness varies quite a lot it seems. Though most are further ahead than me, obviously.

Sunday 12:55
Worked a little, added some planets and the appearance of a jump gate. So took a screenshot showing this minimal thing.

The red thing is the ship beacon, the blue things are planets, the big yellow thing a sun, and the strip of greenish lights are the gate.

Saturday 21:19
Back from lots of cake etc etc. Was a bit distracting, even though a lot of fun.

Been thinking about my idea. I think it could be a fun game, but I’m not sure it’s actually chain reactiony enough. Need to come up with something for it. I’ll just get on coding and see what happens, I guess.

Saturday 23:19
Been coding. Have the basic structure. And gravitational forces. Most advanced so far is the ship circling the sun. I also have state cloning and so, so can probably do the path thingy without much of a problem. Is pretty tired, so will go and sleep now. Not really sure I’ll have time to make a game of this tomorrow, but we’ll see.

Saturday 12:17
So, haven’t really done much more then ending last entry, but I’ve ideas about the second game, and I want to write down. OK, idea is, you see the estimated path at all times (for the current level anyway?) and you can use your equipment at any point in time. In addition, there’s pickups available, so you don’t have everything you need to complete the game at the start, you must pick some up on the way. And… maybe I could randomize the levels. But then I wouldn’t know if they were possible to complete. Worth investigating maybe?

[insert time here]

OK, had some time wasted on running updates etc (I’m at my parents place, using their computer) so there’s some dead time. More about the actual game idea: it might be too complex. But maybe worth trying it out a little. Not sure I will have time for it today, but we’ll see.

Saturday 13:30
Got init code up. It’s actually old init code, but it’s nothing game related. Just setting up GLFW, printing text, drawing quad really. I’d just rewrite it the same anyway. Also drawn a glowy particle sprite thingy, but I think I’ll have to redo it as it’s not that great. Anyway, need to take a break now for shower and stuff.

Saturday 15:10
I’m off for food, and the off for longer (family party thingy). Has written a bit on the state stuff, and also some utility code (ptr_list / ptr_vector, kids of std::list etc that owns their content leaving memory management easier. With a another language with a gc (say D) this wouldn’t have been needed, but decided to use C++ that I’m used to, and it doesn’t take more than say 10 minutes extra anyway, and I can think about the game during it). Also ‘cheated’ a bit more, using an older vec2 class.

After having relaxing sleep and relaxing breakfast and all that, I’ve investigated current situation. The theme that’s won is Chain Reaction, and it’s won by quite a lot. It’s not the theme I most wanted, but then, whenever do you get what you most want?

So, I really don’t have very much time today to work on things, just a few hours, but with some luck I have the whole of tomorrow available.

I’ve so far made two conclusions about the theme: It’s extremely easy to come up with a non-innovative game for it. Could be a tetris/columns/pool/TIM (the list goes ever on) game. So it can be easy. But how fun would that be? But if I can’t come up with anything else decent …

I do have two ideas so far though, that’s half-way innovative. Almost. Not quite though. A bit innovative to be sure. Not a blatant rip off of existing games. Much.

So first idea I had was an explosion chain reaction game. You had different kinds of explosives and maybe something else. The explosives had different explosion radius and critical explosion radius. If another explosive is within the explosion radius (but not within critical radius) it goes off too. Then you can get a chain reaction. Goal would be to blow something up, I suppose. Thing is I’m not sure it would be such a fun game really, and I’m not sure I could keep the goal tasteful. It would be too easy to make it all goreish. Not sure I want that, even though it probably would be popular among some.

And second idea I had was you have your space ship stranded in space, without any fuel, and you need to reach your home bay. Problem is, the home bay is several jump gates (or whatever they’re called, think like in Eve) away. So in each star system, you need to get to the gate that takes you to another star system, and so on until you eventually reach your home bay. Each system is a level, but ultimately, they’re connected. In fact I could allow revisiting of star systems, and multiple paths if I were to allow multiple gates per system. Anyway, in each system, you would need to get your ship to the gate. To achieve this you can make use of your initial momentum (not much), gravitational forces from planets and the sun, and hi-tech gravity modules and explosive weaponry you can launch from the ship. Or maybe just place. Dunno for sure yet. Then the idea is to plan a level, then let it go, get to the next level, and so on. In the end you’d have the full path through all the games automatically traverseable. I’m not sure if this is enough chain reaction… and interesting enough.

Well, that’s my thoughts so far.