Ludum Dare #15: Cavern Defense

Posted by Johannes Stein on Aug 31, 2009 in Games, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 0 comments

Last week-end I participated in Ludum Dare.
This time the theme was caverns.

I had the the very ambitious plan to create a turn-based strategy for two players where I slightly overestimated my abilities and the time given.

Here is a screenshot:

Download here:
Windows (5,4 MB)
Mac OS X (11,2 MB)
Linux (4 MB)

Personal notes:
I’m not entirely happy with the result, because of some pretty nasty bugs and a few features which were cut due to lack of time. So I will be releasing an update in a few days. Stay tuned.

Linux notes:
- You need libSDL, libSDL_image, libSDL_mixer, libSDL_ttf and libSDL_gfx installed on your system to run the game.

Mac OS X notes:
- For some strange reason (specific FreePascal/SDL_mixer/Mac OS X – bug) there is no sound on Mac OS X.
- Be sure to copy the application from the image file to a directory with write permissions because the game creates a log file.

I put together a PDF with random thoughts and foodphotos during development and added a short post mortem:
Click here (3 MB)

Click here to see Cavern Defense Timelapse
(I realized I hadn’t chronolapse running all time during the LD, so my timelapse is rather short.)

Play The City

Posted by Johannes Stein on Jul 24, 2009 in Applications, Development, Games, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 0 comments

I would like to share with you guys what I’ve been doing the last few months and why I didn’t participate in a few competitions like Game Jolt Shocking Contest or Mini LD #10.

It all began two months back on May 20th in school when a few volunteers including me were introduced to the idea of a business game. The goal was to develop a business idea within eight weeks with a seed money of only five euros.
Our idea: An educational game about a city. We choose Augsburg (a nice city in Germany), it was an obvious choice, because we all (our team) are studying at the university of Augsburg.
And on top of all, we won this business game. *YEAH*

Ludum Dare #14: Stickman’s Escape

Posted by Johannes Stein on Apr 20, 2009 in Development, Games | 1 comment

Das ist das zweite Spiel für den Ludum Dare Wettbewerb, welches ich innerhalb der gegebenen Zeit fertig entwickeln konnte. Trotzdem habe ich immer noch einige zeitliche Probleme gehabt, weswegen ich viele meiner ursprünglich geplanten Features streichen musste.

Um was geht es überhaupt? Der Held, das Strichmännchen ist einer Höhle gefangen, wo die “Wand des Verderbens” (wall of doom) sich langsam von oben nach unten bewegt. Um sich selbst zu retten, muss unser Held die Tür erreichen. Allerdings gibt ein Problem: Das Strickmännchen kann weder fallen noch springen. Dafür kann er Portale benutzen.

Hier downloaden (2,6 MB; Win32 und Linux 32 bit; Ausführbare Datei + Quelltext; Readme mit Kurzanleitung und eine PDF mit einigen Zeichnungen, erste Screenshots und ähnlichem, was sich als sehr kurzes Post Mortem klassifizieren lässt; Sprache: Englisch)The second competion game after my MiniLD #8 entry that I finished in time. But I still got some time management issues and I had to cut a lot of gameplay features which I originally intended to include.

So anyway, what’s this game all about? This time the hero in this game Stickman is trapped in a cave where the wall of doom is coming down from above. To rescue himself he has to get to the door at the buttom of the level. But there is one major problem: Stickman cannot jump or fall. But he can use portals.

Download here (2,6 MB; Win32 and Linux 32 bit binary included plus source code; Readme with instructions and a PDF with some drawings, first screenshot and stuff with like that which could be classified as a very short post mortem.)

I keep falling back to Ubuntu

Posted by Johannes Stein on Apr 7, 2009 in Linux, Miscellaneous, OS-related | 0 comments

Yes, it’s that time of the year again where I try different linux distributions from distrowatch. My hardware is somehow special because my primary development system is an Apple MacBook 3,1 Core 2 Duo with Intel GMA X3100 graphics.

GNOME is a must for me. First of all, I really like the GNOME desktop environment (as long as I get to use a fast computer with a lot of memory) and I’m using DropBox which only works with nautilus. (Yeah, I know, I could start the daemon manually, but I don’t want to.)

On another note: I’ve been using DropBox for about two month now and it’s absolutely amazing. For those of you who doesn’t know what DropBox is: It is a tool which sychronizes data between different systems (Mac, Linux and Windows are supported). Before DropBox came along I used an USB stick and that was kinda annoying because I had to check which files where up-to-date and which were not. And DropBox does that automatically.

Some updates…

Posted by Johannes Stein on Mar 13, 2009 in News | 0 comments

I invested a little time and finally got around porting my little LunarTower game to Linux. Still trouble on Mac OS X, though. On Mac OS X it compiles fine, but as soon as I start the application, I get an access violation. Here is the proof of the working Linux version:

And here is the Linux executable. You need to download the windows + source zip file from my previous Mini-LD post and move the Linux executable into the /bin folder. It should work; libSDL and libSDL_image need to be installed, of course. If it won’t work, let me know, maybe I can fix it.

Things that need fixing:

• Movement of the letters
• Improving damage upgrade
• Making the game more fun

Features to come:

• Improved graphics
• Adding health upgrade (upgrading the tower’s hit points)
• Highscore list
• Game needs a lot of polishing

You can count on a next release in the next two weeks.

I’ve been noticing that a lot of the visitors come from Google Groups and are wondering how well progressed my roguelike is. Yeah… about that… hmm, I don’t think I’m gonna finish before the deadline. But don’t be sad, even if I won’t be able to finish my roguelike in time, I will finish it another time.