In response to this comment, “What no one else has said so far is … what the hell kind of class names are those? “Thing”, “Dood”, “Baddie”, and “Shoostings”? =P”

Yeah, I really don’t normally code like that. Right at the beginning, I couldn’t think of a good base class name for what became the polygons. It wasn’t the player, and it wasn’t the enemies, because it was both. I ended up just putting ‘Thing’ there to get the ball rolling, and it all went downhill and into the gutter from there. After thing came Dood for player, then Baddies, Shoostings, and Lewt.

I talked briefly about this in IRC: It was pretty funny at first, but, since I don’t normally code like that, it got to be confusing and bug-inducing later on when I couldn’t remember if I spelled it lewt or loot, dood or dude, etc… Back in college I had fun telling stories / being clever with my variable names, but generally, I recommend picking a reasonable naming scheme and sticking to it, especially with a deadline no more than 48 hours away.

Still, thanks for noticing. I hope you got a kick out of it.

Here is a windows executable I made after reading the comments from people who couldn’t wouldn’t install pygame. Sorry linux, I don’t even know where to start for you guys. It is the same version, with all the same limitations, just smashed into an exe.

EDIT: 4th times the charm :/ I think it has the right zip file linked now…

Minimalist

Well I have had 5 comments now that said that they either don’t have a Facebook account, or that they don’t want to install extra apps. This is a bit of a bummer (and I knew beforhand that I was taking a risk by choosing this path), but if I could plead with you, it is easy (and free) to create a Facebook account to play the game — Heck, you don’t even ever have to use anymore after that. You can also remove the app after adding it and playing it.

I go through the trouble of dual booting back into Windows and installing various versions of different libraries to try other people’s apps, could you please at least exert just a little effort to try my app? Thanks.

So I’ve got around to compiling my 2GB of screenshots into a timelapse. You can see a long period at the start when visitors came round and I got absolutely no work done, but things get more and more frantic as the deadline approaches.

It looks like I never slept - but this is because there’s no screenshots from when the computer was off.

http://www.surrealix.com/ludumdare/timelapse.html

Well, it’s here!

A Windows port of ‘The Butler Did It‘ is now available for download. It’s unchanged from the linux version (except the bits coded so badly the compiler wouldn’t let me get away with).

Download, run, and keep trying until it manages to start without crashing.

Windows Binary (zip, 2.5 mb)

I posted a postmortem of my experience on my blog here.  Check it out

Congratulations to everyone who finished, or even just attempted the LD11. I really enjoyed it, and will be back for more!

I’ve slept 2 hours in the last 2-and-a-bit days, and am seeing triple. Had a meeting this afternoon with three of my course advisors, and could barely stagger along in my Monday evening social sport.

Regardless, I managed to hold up long enough to also fix some show stopping bugs, and write a comprehensive guide to playing “The Butler Did It”. Original unplayable version is still available if you want to use it for judging (*ouch*), but give this one a whirl and catch a murderer.

Looking forward to a good long sleep, and then working my way through 60 minimalistic games. Probably a windows port of TBDI, too.

I’ve always been interested in minimalism in other art forms. This of course, opens another can of worms: the great debate as to whether or not videogames are, or could be, art. I actually take a more of a conservative stance than most game developers in that I don’t think games are inherently art. Videogames are a medium, just like film, television, theatre, or music or painting. These forms of media can be used to create art, or entertainment, or advertising. And for the media that are generally regarded as art (painting, music, theatre) there are artists who constantly push the boundaries of the medium. They force people—artists, critics, and ordinary people—to ask questions. “Is this art?” “Can this really be considered music?” “What is the defining characteristics of theatre?” Some in particular do this by trying to create a piece that meets the smallest possible criteria of the definition of that art form.

Samuel Beckett’s play, Breath - 25 seconds long, contains no actors, no movement, other than the curtains, and the only sounds are two cries and breathing. But it takes place on a stage, it has a script, it contains stage-direction.

Napalm Death’s song, You Suffer - Regarded as the shortest song in existence at precisely 1.316 seconds long. But it still contains all the elements of any rock/metal song: guitar, bass, drums, vocals.

John Cage’s composition, 4′33″ - A three-movement composition for any instrument (or combination of instruments), made entirely of silence. The argument being that music is composed of sound that is organized in some fashion. Whether or not silence can be considered sound is up for debate, but some people consider the ambient noise of the audience and the performance hall (or location, generally speaking) to be part of the piece. You can even buy sheet music for 4′33″. Does that make it a composition? Does that make it music?

Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings - Seven entirely blank white panels. It is still paint on canvas. Is it still art? I’ve seen it displayed in the San Francisco MoMA, so by definition, it must be high art. Some argue, just like with 4′33″, that the painting’s interaction with it’s environment—the lighting, the shadows cast on the canvas, the museum patrons staring quizzically at the empty space on the wall—are part of the piece itself.

One thing is for certain. If we cannot ask these pretentious questions about videogames, then how can we consider them art?

So what is the most basic definition we have for games? Generally, it is regarded that all games must have a goal. This does not mean that the game has to be “winnable”. Take Asteroids, for example. There is no way to win Asteroids, but the goal is to get the highest possible score.

As another example, SimCity does not have a specific goal. It has a lot of numbers that can increase and decrease, but it is ultimately up to the player to decide how they want to play and what they want to achieve. Because of this, SimCity’s designer, Will Wright, refers to it as a “toy” rather than a “game” because there are any number of ways to play with it. But it is still regularly regarded as one of the “best games of all time” by numerous critics. Does that not make it a game? Clearly, even the requirement of a goal is somewhat lenient. Is score purely a goal, or just a metric? If so, what does this say about games, like Asteroids, where scoring is the only goal? Is the goal of Asteroids to achieve the highest score, or merely to survive the constant onslaught of cosmic rocks? If the latter, does that mean the player always loses?

The second requirement of games is that they must have rules. I once read somewhere (can’t find the source off-hand) that game design is the process of adding rules to a system to make it less efficient. The classic example being that if a boxer’s goal is to get his opponent to lay on the mat for 10 seconds, the most efficient way of doing that would be to shoot the other boxer in the head. Thus rules are added to the game so that the boxer can only cause his opponent to fall by using a certain style of punches. Whether or not this is accurate description of game design, or merely a cute sound bite does not change the generally upheld conception that games are made out of rules.

Another requirement often cited is that games must have some form of player interaction. This could be as much as maintaining an entire fleet of spaceships in battle against another fleet, while trying to manage resource collection, empire expansion, and technology development, or as little as pressing a button to jump.

So, if games are defined as a goal and a set of rules with player interaction, what is the most basic, minimal implementation possible? For the sake of this contest, I’m going to limit this argument to “computer games”–that is, games that can be played on a computer.

Even the current version of my game has more than that. Since a game does not necessarily have to be winnable, or have an end-state, I can remove that part of the game, but I still need to have a goal. The current goal of the game is essentially to terminate it as fast as possible. That can still be the goal even if I take out the “game over” message and the ranking system (which take up the majority of the code). Alternately, I could make the goal to keep the game running as long as possible, similar to Asteroids, or Progress Quest. I don’t even need to keep a score inside my game as the operating system and the Process Manager already keep track of how long the game has been running.

Since the goal has changed, and therefore the rules have changed, I still need to communicate the new rules to the player somehow. My game has to have a name of some sort so to get to the most minimal state possible I’m going to make the game’s title the same as the full text of it’s instruction manual. How’s that for usability?

I still need to have player interaction, but does that mean my game has to accept input? Is the input that it takes to start the game and stop the game enough? If so, I can remove the input code as well.

So what is left? I’ve got a game, where the goal is to keep the game running as long as possible. The rules are… to keep the game running as long as possible? And the player interaction is to start and stop the game. I’d say that’s about as minimal a computer game as you can get.

Here’s the final tally:
KeepRunning
Platform: Windows (Tested on XP, 2000. Probably works with all x86 processors Win95 and greater.)
Source: 2 lines, 76 bytes (including copyright notice comment)

Executable: 5,632 bytes. (Future plans: write it in native assembly code, Linux, Mac ports.)

Screenshots:

04-20-2008 8:40PM EST
With just over an hour left before the deadline I am taking a small break before I try and finish this one out. I have implemented all the features I wanted to and even a few I wasn’t planning on. I ran into a couple big speed bumps but I worked around them and I think I did alright. My story is not going to be finished I know that right now. I don’t want to end it abruptly so it leaves me with one option… Submitting an unfinished game. This really isn’t that big of a surprise to me considering this time yesterday I did not know a thing about coding and couldn’t tell you the first thing about python. I am proud of what I have accomplished though and hope that next time I can finish.

04-20-2008 11:00PM EST
Finally got the game submitted. I had alot of trouble uploading it for some reason so NegativeGeForce hosted it for me and I guess I made it(?) Anyways, I have learned alot within the past 24 hours and really had alot of fun. I didn’t get to complete the story but I was able to create a presentable game from scratch in less that 24 hours without knowing anything about Python. I am really looking forward to learning more and hopefully will be able to join up next time around.

Good luck to all of you who participated in Ludum Dare 11 and I hope only the best in the future.

This is a whodunnit. Minimal clues, minimal interaction, and a very minimal appearance.

A crime has been committed in Lord Fletcher’s manor. Someone has been murdered.

Upon arriving at the scene, you are told who is deceased, where their body was found, and what they were murdered with. You must interview the residents, trace their movements, and ascertain the identity of the killer.

The murderer, being unlikely to confess, will fabricate lies. The innocent residents, however, will tell the truth. By careful deduction and investigation, you will slowly build up a picture of the crime, and catch the guilty party.

Pretty screenshot.

Playable Version : Ubuntu Binary + Source (rar, 1.8mb)

Windows Port : Windows Binary (zip, 2.5mb)

It may crash on startup, so keep trying until it runs :/

Under linux, you’ll need OpenSceneGraph-1.2.2 to compile it (apt-get libopenscenegraph-dev)

(The originally uploaded version had major bugs in the interface, making the game unplayable. If you really want, you can still grab it here)

windows exe in zip file

run leap.exe to play

source code and media in zip file

run leap.py to play (PyGame and Python required, but should run on mac and linux then)

feel free to do whatever you want with the source code and media

Press SPACEBAR to jump, avoid falling tanks -that’s it!

I was working on this until there was 15 minutes left, so this is mighty unfinished. But it is playable and at least okay to look at. I think it has a lot of potential…

I haven’t ever used py2exe before so I’m sorry for the mess of a zip file. Just run leap.exe. Hopefully it works for you guys, it works on my end.

Leap was(is) planned to include more of a strategy element with raising blocks and a real objective.  Initially I thought it up of being reference to Kierkegaardian existentialism  and the “leap of faith” (notice the religious icon blocks in the spritesheets..) and the initial leap from objectivity (notice the emotionless faces and math symbols in the grasshopper’s home…) to the hearts, love platform that you can’t reach in the beginning.  Tanks and money and gameplay and love were going to make some statement about religion, but none of that is probably evident in this buggy “physics” demo.  And it may not actually be successful as a thoughtful philosophical game if it does get there… hopefully I can make it fun at least :). I like the grasshopper in anycase!

I spent 50/50 graphics and programming on this. I should’ve spent more time programming!  Since this is the second program I’ve ever written with user input, I think it isn’t too bad for roughly 20 or more hours work.  Sadly this is more finished than my first game that I’m still making with PyGame after starting 3 months ago with python.

All in all this competition was a lot of fun and a lot of work, I’m getting the hell out of this apartment! I can’t wait to play the other games and maybe download an IRC client and join the group, since I didn’t have time to do that this weekend!

Good game everyone!,

Devon

Here I give you my MUD in a facebook app.  I have long loved MUDs and thought the idea of a mud fit the theme well.  Even though it is on the web, everything is pretty close to real time.

It has the following features:

1.  Walking around rooms
2. Talking and emoting
3. Attacking monsters and other users
4. When you get enough experience you can train to be stronger
5. Leader board

To play, you will need a facebook account, and go to this link:

http://apps.facebook.com/minimud/

Add the app to your profile, then create a character and then click the game tag to play.  Once in type “help” to get a list of commands and get going.

It is also more fun to play with others, so bring a friend along for more fun!

1 hours 48 minutes remaining

Screenshots are in! I’ve tweaked the AI a lot and I really like where it is right now, although its pretty damn hard if you aren’t used to it. Next on the list is making an easy and medium mode :).

This was taken from inside the game:

Yay!

After many, many, many hours, the murder generator is now working. It will generate, consistent with the house, a mystery for you to solve. I’ve now got 2 hours to write an interface for it, and until that happens (or doesn’t, depending on how well things go), here’s a screenshot of the console.

Exciting! It shows where each person was over time, and then an output of the logic used to solve the murder. Note that it generates this differently each time (aren’t I proud).

Oh and a footnote. It seems to have developed memory issues, and crashes nearly 50% of the startups. At this stage, this is something people will have to live with :/

3:15 PM 4/20/2008 - Next step: more optimizations.

Source Code: 44 lines, 1,065 bytes
Optimizations: Going to hold off on this one, since I’m likely to change the design.

Executable: 40,960 bytes
Optimizations: In my haste, I realized I’d posted the Debug version. Switching to Release and tweaking the project settings got me all the way down to 6,144 bytes. That’s an 85% improvement! Awesome!

Design:
When talking about videogame minimalism, one of my favorite examples is Wario Ware. Each of Wario Ware’s microgames (the meta-game is another issue in itself) gives a one-word instruction, and makes the player figure out the rules, mechanics, and goals from that instruction, and from the game itself (in around five seconds, no less). Nowadays, even the most complex games, built by teams of hundreds of developers, have very little in the way of prior instructions. This is mainly because players just want to jump into playing a game without reading about how the game is supposed to work. Most of the time, a player with some previous experience with games can experiment with different inputs, observe the feedback from those inputs, and infer the controls. By playing and watching the game for a few minutes a player can usually figure out the goals of the game. Players are basically doing a pattern-matching search over the game-element archetypes that they have already experienced. This is not to say that this process is inherent in a game’s design, however. There is often significant effort put into designing the game’s input and output in a such a way to hasten the player’s understanding of how to play the game.

The main point here, though, is that it is not required of a game to tell the player exactly how to play. The player is often left to themselves to figure out how a game works. Given that, I think I can safely remove about half of my game. The player does not need to be prompted, I can just have the game wait for their input, and from the response to their input, they can learn the rules.

Doing this let me cut out another 5 lines of code.

Here’s the new tally:
Executable: 6,144 bytes, surprisingly this isn’t any smaller. Crazy. Computers are indistinguishable from magic….
Source: 39 lines, 901 bytes

1:00 PM 4/20/2008 - Okay, six hours to go. Looking at my original design for Resident Evil FLT_MIN, it’s clear that I’m going to have to make a few changes. Obviously, to avoid copyright issues, I need to change the name. For now I’ll give it the working title “RE FLT_MIN”. Also, it seems like it would take only a few minutes to come up with a prototype using Flash. Unfortunately, I don’t know Flash. Plus, even though the design seems somewhat minimal, it can easily be made *more* minimal. First off, look at all those fancy graphics. Font rendering? What was I thinking?

2:20 PM 4/20/2008 - Alright, I’ve got the first version of the game up and running. I still need to do some debugging, and put it through some usability testing… maybe a focus group. I want to post a shot of the source code, but unfortunately it doesn’t all fit on a single page. I suppose at this stage, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to do some optimization.

2:25 PM 4/20/2008 - Was able to cut code down by removing some unnecessary #includes. Also, I think it’s bad style to have un-braced if statements, but doing so cut down a large amount of vertical space.

2:55 PM 4/20/2008 - Okay. First prototype version is ready to download and play.

Here is the entire source:

I’ve added a hints mechanism that pops up at the bottom of the screen giving gameplay tips as you play. It randomly shows a tip every 15 seconds, and only shows each time twice.

I also added a stats system, which you can view on the pause screen or when you lose. They don’t get you anything, but it is fun to see the breakdown of how everything went.

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.

Well, at least breakfast doesn’t need working collision code to be yummy. I’m thankful for the small things ya know?

I ate this while detailing out new collision code algorithms for MinMo on a notepad. Then, I went for a brief bike ride around the neighborhood while thinking about them. Time to implement!

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.

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.

(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…

The house is now generated, both graphically and topologically (so characters no longer teleport between rooms on opposite sides of the house).

One worry I have is that these short ‘whodunnits’ are going to prove too difficult or unintuitive for most people to solve. I guess it’s a very specific target audience.

I’ve been pretty secretive, not wanting to show off my tech, but it’s occurred to me that it doesn’t really matter that much; So, here’s the current status of my game:

I’m very happy with the tech, it’s performing admirably with even dozens of  sprites on my system - I’m basicly making an asteroids game, but  I think this counts as minimal (it’s so minimal it doesn’t even have a background, ha!) - Just finished the majority of the asteroid code (creation / movement / collision), and I’m now going on to make a ship and a way to shoot. Which I expect won’t take too long. I’m expecting to complete sound effects but I don’t think I’ll get to music.