My title music loop is very simple, but I think it gets the point across. The point is: YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE KILLED BY OWLS

Title Music

I hope seeing/hearing this stuff early doesn’t kill the funny for you guys when judging comes around

For anyone using flash.. let me direct your attention to a mod player which has been released recently:

http://gimme.badsectoracula.com/flashmodplayer/modplayer.html
http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?p=168442

Maybe this is what I should have been doing for the last LD… It took me two days to make and it’s based on the code of my LD11 entry (I didn’t even miss Felicity!)

Download over herely

Making “just a game” was kind of enlightening, since I didn’t have any real technical challenges to overcome and could just get on with content and putting in simple control logic to make it all come together. It’s pretty much an unthinkable project viewed in terms of what I’ve been doing the last few years, but since both development and result were enjoyable it’s a pretty clear hint that I should be doing it more often.

However, I ruin that immediately by having a natural impulse to make some kind of convenient editor/engine which would reduce the need to write copious amounts of replicated-but-slightly-modified code for instance when I want new enemy types etc. I have made these before, and each time I end up spending weeks or months working on it and then never really use it because I get increasingly unhappy with how it’s built. Still, I couldn’t possibly make a game of say 10x the complexity/scope of this one without using more structured code at the very least. And defining animations, scripted events, enemy patterns etc would quickly get tiresome and repetitive to do in code+Photoshop if you have more than one or two types to deal with. The grunt of this game (discounting image loading and input code) is a 1500-line C file, where almost all logic is directly in the main loop - wonderfully spontaneous way to work but of course breaks down with increased program size due to convoluted value/flow dependencies, loss of overview and the need to repeat code.

The fact that I did manage to create this in just two days though, and that I didn’t run into any major hickups along the way, probably says something about suitable code vs application complexity. If I had gone and made “a perfect design” with fancy classes and streamlined algorithms for everything, I would most likely not be done yet. More importantly, I probably wouldn’t even have started since such a small project doesn’t really justify that kind of work. Not without the prospect of a larger product coming out of it, and if there was one I would probably be too intimidated by the thought of that and keep trying to out-think myself in terms of what stuff I’d need to make that “great big thing” work eventually.

I think Derek Yu recently said something about coders being able to “doodle” games like artists sketch with pencil and paper, and that’s probably an important thing. A sketch is never meant to be used for anything substantial, it’s just playing around with the tools of your trade to make something spontaneous and fun. If it turns out nice then you could potentially do it again from scratch but “do it right” and expand on it if you wish - but you should definitely not be doing it the roundabout way to begin with since that would destroy the spontaneity and make it a laborious task instead of a free-minded sketch. When sketching you can only use whatever skills and processes that come natural to you, without considerable planning or conscious mental effort. Of course, with increased experience this set grows larger and some people could probably do advanced class hierarchies without thinking too much about it. All the more power to them.

Since I made this thing in such a short timespan, I have a pretty good overview of all the techniques I used and the bare-bones code needed to make them work. This could provide some extra value when designing larger game systems as I might be able to target my efforts more carefully, and not get overly general or implement pointless things. For trying out pure game ideas though, I still feel that it would be sensible for me to “sketch” in a more streamlined tool… a kind of game maker for sure, but definitely not Game Maker (for the simple reason that I’m incapable of using any tool that is close enough to what I could potentially build myself, which is a most unfortunate condition in terms of productivity… but creating a tool to fill some (possibly imagined) need of my own is just so very rewarding)

Some more project additions on my shiny new site. New design really makes adding stuff a lot more convenient compared to what I had before. Actually one of the updates is a project entry on that very system; SPCMS (the morbid can have fun looking through some source code on that one)

Mainly though, I finally got around to releasing Nitro Butts - an old game from 2005 that me and my brother made out of oldschool boredom. It’s actually quite a bit of fun and you can even do co-op if you have a gamepad and additional human around.

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 

Since the music to my game, Space Reactions, has become a little bit popular, I figured I’d tab it out for any fellow guitar players here. I haven’t got a guitar in front of me right now, but I think this is pretty accurate. I’ll update this post if I find anything wrong with it


---------------------------------------------------------
-------12~~~-----5/8\5~~-------12~~~---------------------
------------------------------------------7/9-----5/9----
----14---------7------------14----------9-------7--------
---------------------------------------------------------
-12----------5-----------12----------7--------5----------

Sounds good with some light distortion and little bit of tremolo. Enjoy!

agh! i’ve got crap-all so far and i can’t seem to think of anything that hasn’t already been done already! if i can’t think of anything decent by tomorrow morning i’m going to have to play my Come From Behind Desperation Game card.

 http://www.slayradio.org/home.php for the win!

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.