Here's this week's game MetaRPG. I have all the basic mechanics in place except buying equipment. Basically it is an extremely linear RPG where you just walk to the right along a set path until you win. Battles are fought automatically in the background so you don't have to do anything.
As a matter of fact, it is easier to just hold the right arrow until you win. Dying sends you back to town with full HP. You lose half your gold, but right now the only point of money is to stay at the inn and refill your HP. So just hold right.
I didn't have time for actual content creation this week because I worked 50+ hours and spent this weekend cleaning the basement. If I decide to finish this it will have multiple towns, NPCs, dungeons and many more jokes and tropes about the RPG genre. But for now it doesn't.
@Anja Hi Anja, thanks for the comments!
You lose HP when you are holding the flag because the whole thing is an abstraction of an RPG. The flag isn't an entity in the game. It represents your location in the plot. As you advance the flag you are advancing the plot. When you are walking around it is simulating the game being played in the background (your HP and MP drop because you are fighting battles and gaining experience).You move more slowly in areas you have never been before because you are exploring dungeons, reading dialog, watching cutscenes, etc. When you are moving through areas you have already cleared you move more quickly (you know your way through the mazes already because you've been through them before, you skip through dialog you've already read, no cutscenes, etc). I realize that this isn't clear in this demo. The actual game will have you moving much slower between more objects and I hope to make this more apparent.
Actually, I had an idea that might work better and be more clear. Maybe in the next version you will be walking along a line (a plotline! Get it?!?) that will turn a different color as you advance it.
I did add an undocumented feature where if you press the Q key in town it will stay at the inn, but I called my own function incorrectly (I was running out of time and didn't check how it worked) so it always fails. Oops! There will be quick keys for staying at the inn and buying equipment (another feature that is built in already but unimplemented) so you can play without the mouse.
I really like your humor and the graphical style!I´m looking forward for your additional gameplay elements.
Why do I loose HP when holding a flag? I would love to be able to use the spacebar key to visit the inn when I´m in it´s zone.
Looking great. Would be fun to see you fill that with content and jokes.
Optically, I find the borders unnecessary. And actions like using the Inn should be usable by some key instead of a button, would be more in style with the retro theme.
I did a ton of art the past couple days for my Ludum Dare entry, called Release the Monster. You play as a monster that was summoned by the nefarious Dr Destructo to investigate his minions and find the incompetent ones and destroy them! It was made in Adventure Game Studio and plays like the old Lucas Arts games (complete with 320x200 graphics!)
If you are interested in playing you can check it out here.
My first one screen point and click adventure demo is finished. I finally settled on an art style and finished all the assets that I needed to create.
The only real error remaining is that one of the arrows displays incorrectly, but that is because I changed the game resolution a dozen times and screwed up the art asset.
I've compiled the game for Windows and attached it. Just extract the zip and run the TestGame.exe to play. If you run winsetup.exe it lets you configure some display settings. It doesn't install anything. If you want it bigger run WinSetup.exe then change the filter to 4x Nearest Neighbor, or whatever zoom you prefer.
EDIT - uploaded a new version. This one has some minor bug fixes, adds a status bar that shows you clickable areas, and changes the default resolution size but more importantly adds a couple pieces of dialog that make clearing the game possible. You might stumble onto the solution in the first build randomly, but it would require just random trying of things.
So I don't think that I'm going to get any additional time to work on Catabalt this week, so I'm posting it as it is now. This is a near direct port, of my old code although with some of the additions I was able to add features that I didn't get to the first time around.
There are a couple problems still:
1. There is no main menu or game over screen. It just brings you back to the beginning and shows you your score.
2. Luxe handles collisions funny (I am doing them in a strange way though, so that might be it). Basically it is the tunneling problem where if the game is loading something or the cat moves too far between frame updates Luxe doesn't detect the hit and you randomly fall through the floor.
If I haven't scared you off, the game is here. Space, X or Z jumps.
So I finished a good portion of Catabalt. I didn't get as much done as I would like because I was traveling this weekend and ran out of time.
List of things that didn't get done:
In the spirit of publishing every week though, this is what I've got. I learned a lot about what works and what doesn't (for instance, in this game the player is actually stationary and the world moves past it. Every asset is recycled over and over again, etc.) So oh well.
Play at your own risk!
So this is kind of cheating entering the same game for two weeks in a row, but all my development time this week has been taken up with streamlining my Ludum Dare Entry and incorporating the feedback that I've received here and elsewhere. Here is a short list of the differences:
Options menu - You can adjust the length of the debate and the thinking time to make things easier or harder (that was for you @Anja).
Word list - The word list is greatly cut down from 50,000 words to about 5,000. I am a native English speaker and have a fairly extensive vocabulary and I had never seen half of the words before. Younger audiences or individuals who don't speak English as their first language can enjoy the absurdity of the debate more if they know what the words mean (Thanks for pointing this out @Stephan) Plus, I enjoy it more with the change also.
Game speed - I eliminated some of the prompts and the messages that didn't add anything to the game but did slow it down. I also reduced the default number of rounds to 6 from 10 (although you can move it back up again if you want in the options menu). Each debate takes less than half the time that it used to.
You can play the new version here.
I finally decided on my game for Ludum Dare 32 (theme: An Unconventional Weapon). It is called The Great Debate!
It will be a puzzle game disguised as a debate simulator. The debate will take place over a number of rounds and each round of the debate, the two players will be given a list of four random words and have to choose between them. Each debate will also have a secret rule that determines how the words are scored (number of letters, highest ASCII value in the word, number of duplicate letters, etc). Your job as the player is to look at the results of the scores and try to determine the rule being applied, which will in turn let you maximize your score. The winner has the highest score at the end of the debate.
I'm officially at the point where I can release Black Box beta for public consumption. This was primarily an entry for the One Game a Week streak. I made it in about 4 days over the course of about 5 hours.
Black Box is a direct copy of a board game produced by Parker Brothers in the late 70s. It is a puzzle game with the goal of discovering the location of atoms hidden within the Black Box by firing lasers in from the sides of the board. These lasers either travel straight through, bounce off of one or more atoms before coming out, reflect off one or two atoms and come out the position that it entered, or hit an atom directly. By looking at the result of these lasers you can determine where the atoms are located. The less lasers
The game is fully playable as it is. I need to add a menu, a How To Play screen, then add more polish, color changes, and different difficulty levels. If I'm feeling really ambitious I might add a high scores table or something. Maybe some relaxing music and sound effects at some point.
You can play it here.
Happy lasering!
EDIT - I finished it off. There is a "How to Play" as well as three different difficulties. I cleaned up some of the interface stuff (you can't click on the same space more than once now, for instance). There is one extremely rare case that the lasers give the wrong result and occasionally the random color generator comes up with a color extremely close to the background color so it is hard to see. I don't think I'm going back to fix it though. On to the next!
Ahh this explains alot,tx. Another idea could be to explain the reason for HP-drop/EXP-rising in your story, to add comments like "new territory exploring", "hard way" or something like that.