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:

  • There is some difference between how Haxe parses data between when it compiles to Actionscript vs C++ with how it parses strings. So some of the animation frames for the cat are messed up. So that's bad.
  • The boxes when you hit them lower your speed for only one frame, which at 60 FPS isn't even noticeable.
  • The controls feel wrong.

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!

http://codingadventure.net/index.php/games/catabal...

Anja8 years ago

Wow! So fast and precise, I´m very grateful to you! I`ll change the stuff at once.


Thanks alot!

Bobbo8 years ago

@Anja I just emailed you some comments as a PDF document. Let me know if anything was unclear!

Bobbo8 years ago

@Anja Hi Anja,

That would be no problem. I've got the site open now and it looks great. I love the clean presentation and the layout.

I will read over the content and send any feedback I have to the email address you provided. You should see an email from my personal email account davidmurtagh@hotmail.com

Anja8 years ago

@Bobbo, Edited Comment, to sum it up, Bobbo is a great, more than helpful guy. ;-)


Bobbo8 years ago

@Anja Good catch on the spelling. Return is one of those words that I type incorrectly every time because of muscle memory. It doesn't help that the menu and end screen were added minutes before uploading :)

@Stephan Thanks for the feedback. I agree on the player position. I didn't go back and change it because originally the camera was going to be more dynamic. In Canabalt the play area is much wider than it is tall, so I was going to emulate that by changing the play area to be 800x400 and having the camera follow the player up and down. This would also allow for some fine tuning of the player location.

I think I'm going to call this one close enough and if I want my endless runner fix just play Canabalt :)

Stephan8 years ago

Excellent. The controls feel good.

Pace is high. Ran 2940 yards, and now I'm feeling a bit wobbly. :)

Visually I think the character should be placed a bit more to the right, not directly at the edge. Should feel more comfortable, even though you have less time to react. You can see this in screenshots from Canabalt or games like Flappy Bird.

I like the cat animation.

Anja8 years ago

Not bad at all. I think the control is fast and accurat, very important for a runner game. Also the pace is smooth and well choosen.


A tiny thing::

"return" is wrong spelled at the endscreen.

More submissions by Bobbo for One Game a Week

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.


Explore Windows Version.zip1mb
5 downloads

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 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.

Play it here.

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.


Play it here!

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!

One Game a Week

Create any kind of game - each week

weekly from 2015-03-30 to 2016-03-28