My “new game every month” experiment has not been very successful. But I do try to make all the games I’ve missed so far. So here comes April’s game!
Trippy Banananana is a shooter where you put a banana in your ear. Otherwise it is pretty general game, nothing special. I was going to participate in Ludum Dare #20 with it but I ran out of time because of all school stuff I had to do. I finished it later but it was missing music. Now I got that from BurnZeZ and finally released it. Go and play it if you’re bored.
I had finally some time and interest to make a theme for this blog. It took a way longer than I imagined but now I’m pretty happy with the outcome. It has still a little quirks though. The page title, for example, is not so good and search engine friendly. And then IE support…
I’ve been interested in web design for ages but my themes are always very simple. And so is this one. No images, just black on white plus blue.
But about programming, #GPCv5 began today with themes companion and rising. I’m planning to make a little game for that, and then soon after that Ludum Dare 20 is here! Besides those compos I have a little game project that I hope to finish before LD20.
I said a week ago I would release at least one game each month and now the job for this month is done as I wrote “A gaem About lIfe” yesterday. As you can see, the graphics are absolutely stunning! The game is what it is because I made it for Mini-LD #25 which had rather an interesting theme: “The Worst Game I Have Ever Made”. The three hours I used to make it were fun and releasing something felt good too! I still might release something this month because this took only one evening and there’s still half of the month left. And 4th Game Prototype Challenge started today.
It’s been a while since the last post since I haven’t done much lately. I have, however, been programming too games: a space shooter inspired by Geometry Wars, Beat Hazard, Bullet Candy, and many more similar games and a version of The Last Moments for BlackBerry’s PlayBook Tablet. The first game is not very far from from finishing, a week of active development might be enough, but finding time and interest is not so easy. The second game does not have much to do with TLM. The story and graphics are totally different and the space ship travels up instead of going down. The main reason I started this project was this offer, where I could get a free tablet. As there’s only a week left I’m not able to finish the game on time. I still might release it for PC or later for PlayBook (it’s awesome, you can develop flash applications for it!).
The Last Moments is still the only game that I’ve ever released and releasing it has been the best thing I’ve done recently, so why I wouldn’t release more. From now on I will release at least one game a month. I try to participate in Ludum Dare compos, Experimental Gameplay Project, Game Prototype Challenge, PunkWeek, and similar things to get done as much as possible.
Starting projects is a lot harder than finishing them, which has lead to the fact that I have tens of unfinished projects. It’s also hard to keep interest for one project long enough. And if I have the interest it’s hard to concentrate. I hope I can solve these problems as soon as possible.
Okay, Ludum Dare 19 ended over three weeks ago and I still haven’t written a post about it. The results came out today so it’s good time to write something about it. Here’s random bits of different things I’d like to tell in totally random order.
Overall the compo was a success. Solely that I finished a game was a great achievement, but in addition the game was very polished and I ranked into the top 50, which was my target. My rank was #46.
All the sounds in the game were made using SFXR which is totally awesome for competitions like this. It makes making sounds so easy and fast, although I had to take some time with it to get all effects to sound good. Mostly I was worried about the sound that plays when you discover it. I knew that I needed few different variations because that is almost everything you hear while playing it. To make it sound fun I tried to make sounds to be like notes. They didn’t turn out too well but I’m still happy with them. The best sound is that when one hits a black hole.
Story
The story is the only part in the game that actually has anything to do with the theme which was “discovery”. A ship gets hit by an asteroid and it has to warn its friends about other asteroids which has to be discovered. There’s no good ending. The only options are dying or possibly save your friends and dying. I’m not sure how many have actually saw the ending since the game is hard to finish. I like that story a little even though it restricted gameplay mechanics.
Gameplay
This is where the fun part of the game is. It’s mouse only game and I’ve heard that it is easy to play even with a laptop’s touchpad. I like games which need mouse accuracy like in in this game. The biggest inspiration for the gameplay is Red Chaser (play it!).
Last hours
Just a couple hours before I applied TLM it didn’t include any gameplay elements besides asteroids. I had all kinds of upgrade ideas and such but they were not suitable for the game because of its story. I couldn’t add score multipliers as it doesn’t really have score. In the end I added a shield which is hard to use and black holes that gives you 5 points since they are “more dangerous” (shield doesn’t work against them). Both of these additions were fairly pointless, they don’t add much to the game.
Bugs
Bugs are annoying, hard to identify and hard to fix. I was lucky to have a beta tester, Marach. He found many bugs that I may not have found myself. Despite the testing there’s still one or two bugs left. The first one makes black holes almost completely useless. I started developing the game so that discovering asteroids would take some time (the red-green beam was there to indicate progress) but then I noticed it didn’t work, it wasn’t possible to catch asteroids as the delay would have been too big. It takes still some time to locate them but it’s unnoticeable. With black holes I increased the delay, which was obviously a mistake. Surprisingly nobody has said anything about this. The other problem that may be a bug is sending the score to the Kongregate. For some reason it never reaches its destination and show up on the high score list. Many people have reported this so I must investigate it later.
FlashPunk and other stuff
FlashPunk is the game library I used. I’m really happy with it, it’s so simple and so powerful. Finishing this game wouldn’t have been possible without it. Thanks Chevy Ray! All the other tools were marvelous too and I will use them the next time. Now when I know what I need to make a game I have been developing my small library since the compo ended. It contains some useful and useless classes and functions for game development. The library is open source and known as Flatsuma.
Overall
The experience of creating a game in 48 hours is something that I want to do again. Finishing a game that people like is wonderful. The weekend was very tough and so was the Monday after it but it was worth it, I recommend! The next LD will be in April and I hope I can attend that one too. But before that there will be three Mini LDs! Here’s a time lapse video of making the game.
19th Ludum Dare game making competition is starting in 6 hours. First there’s a few rounds of voting the theme, then 48 hours time to make a game, and then starts voting of the best games.
I’ve watched these compos come and go for a long time, but I still haven’t participated in any of them. I thought that this could be my first time, although I’m not sure how much time I will have. A couple of hours anyhow. I don’t really care whether my game will be good or bad (good is better of course!), it’s more important that I finish something.
I already tested Chronolapse which is a program to make a time lapse of what is happening on one’s screen. This video shows the development process of a small game I made yesterday in an hour.
There’s a list of the tools I’ll be using tomorrow. I’m not adding any music as I haven’t had time to practice making it, maybe next time.
I really got fed up writing makefiles and searching for better alternatives one day. Then I realized that it’s not hard to write a tool of my own. So, that’s what I did and now I have rambu. The best program for building C++ projects that I’ve ever had. You may not agree with that, but I enjoy using it. Or rather, I enjoy not having to worry about how to compile my projects.
Rambu is a little script used to build C++ programs. Therefore, it is similar to make or SConsbut easier to use and more automatized.
The main difference with other similar tools is that you don’t define the files you want to compile, instead you define a directory (or multiple directories). Most of time you would list all cpp-files in one directory anyway. Rambu is written in Python and configuration files are also in Python, which opens lots of possibilities. If there’s a feature that is not implemented, you can write it yourself!
Default name for a configuration file is rambuild (same as Makefile when using make). The simplest file would look like this.
release = {
sources: 'src'}
Not too hard, is it? Now, to build a C++ project is that a matter of writing “rambu” in a console window. But let’s face it, compiling a real project is never that simple.
Using this you could build an SDL game. With this file, though, running “rambu” would compile two executables. “rambu debug”, on the other hand, would produce just one output file. Cleaning files that rambu has made works by running “rambu clean”. Notice that all is not a regular target. The rules it sets are included in every target, but a target’s own rules will still override them.
Let’s take the last example, this time used to compile a library instead of executable.
As rambu can handle output file’s name automatically, on Linux this would make a file libtest.so.2.4.5 and on Windows libtest.a.
Currently rambu works only with g++ compiler, but I have planned to add support for other compilers someday. Also writing a documentation is to be done. Check out rambu here! It needs Python 2.7 (or 2.6 with argparse) and works best on Linux and Windows.
LyricShark displays the lyrics of the song that is playing in Grooveshark Desktop. It searches lyrics automatically from the Internet when you change to a next song. LyricShark works only with the desktop version of Grooveshark which means that you have to be a VIP member. But that shouldn’t be a problem since becoming a VIP doesn’t cost too much and it really is worth it.
The program may not find all lyrics, but it finds a big part of them. Some lyrics can’t be found because if a song’s name is wrong in Grooveshark (that is the case way too often).
The Windows version works out of the box and there’s no installation needed. It is just one file so even extracting is not necessary before running.
The Linux version works like the Windows version, it is just a compressed binary file. That’s not how Linux programs are usually distributed, but I didn’t have time to make it a Debian or a RPM package. Installing some libraries may be needed (for example wxWidgets and cURL). There’s a possibility that the binary doesn’t work at all, but the source is always available.
