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This was my entry into last weekends ludum dare minicompo (minild 6 (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/category/minild/minild-6-minild-2/)).  Theme was monochrome, + weird/unexpected/surprise.  Also, it's made in the spirit of towlr (http://towlr.com/), so it's a little bit evil perhaps.  But winnable.

Anyways, I feel a bit silly posting this here, but I'd like to know if people can run it.  It uses OpenGL 1.5/2 with GLSL shaders, and my last foray into that territory (cubetendo (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2008/02/24/cubetendo/)) didn't work very well on some ATI cards that should've supported it, even after the supposed ATI fix mentioned in that link.  I think I know what went wrong with that now though, so let me know if this works, and if it looks like that screenshot up there.  And if anyone manages to win :P

Works fine for me. (ATI Radeon x800).

I can't, however, for the love of god figure out what I am supposed to do. :P

Great, thanks!


That's towlr :).  The aim of the game is to figure out what to do as well as how to do it.

Sounds like an intriguing concept. I might have to check that out now =)

I had to file towlr under "games I don't get."  I squelched the sound and played for about 30 seconds before I ran out of ideas.

same here. i found clicking left & right moves that one square in & out, and when your square hits another square, it gets forced to move. other than that, couldn't figure anything out.

I know there is a copy of the playground, turned upside down, and downscaled in the middle, I'm also quite sure the boxes which rotates around the middle doesn't follow what they should do in that smaller version (though that might be my brain playing a trick on me).
Now, I suppose it is about getting these mini-squares in line or something, but I have no idea how. They don't seem to react to anything I do.
Also, that square in the lower left corner bugs me because I know it must be there for a reason.

That shouldn't be there!  I guess abusing double-buffering to do render-to-texture wasn't such a good idea..  Does the downscaled image flicker?  Could you post a screenshot?

Hmm... Maybe I should have rephrased that :P, you can only see the downscaled upside down version when you hover over it with the circle or the other shapes happens to surface above it.

Like this.
(http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/8180/trommellty7.png)
(you can see the counter in the circle and a copy of the cross inside the cross).

Isn't that supposed to happen? Because if it isn't, that's a pretty neat error :D

It happened to someone else recently; I think it's related to the resizing code actually paying attention to alpha values...

also, that's what it looks like to me as well...

Haha, yeah!  It's not supposed to be like that.  I've uploaded a new version that might fix it?  Also added an icon.  Same url (http://mjaupanda.com/games/trommel/TROMMEL.zip).  Please try and let me know :)

Actually I've no idea how that bug should even be possible..  The way the display works is that it first makes that small image in the back buffer, complete with background and objects and cursor and everything, then copies that to a texture with glCopyTexSubImage2D, and finally blits a rect with that texture scaled to fit the window (which is dynamically sized based on your desktop resolution), overwriting everything, before flipping that to the front buffer.  But in your shot it looks like the small image only shines through inside the circle, cross and squares!  The pixels outside show no sign of the smaller image shining through.  Those objects are the only translucent ones, but the background is totally opaque (the shader explicitly sets 1.0 as alpha), and there's even a redundant clearing of the buffer before that's drawn.  And it couldn't be anything left from previous frames anyway since the pixels inside are smaller.  So the shining through actually happens in the upscaled version?  But the screen is opaque, it copies an opaque image.  Or it should, anyway.  It kinda looks like your OpenGL driver remembers the alpha value of the inside of the objects and lets that override the value of the background for some reason, but that doesn't make sense.  Does it?


Yeah looks like it, but as I said the background is explicitly set to opaque in the background's shader, and the buffer is cleared before with opaque alpha anyway, so there shouldn't be any non-opaque pixels left in the buffer.  Any idea what might cause this?  My fix (if it works) simply disables blending for the upscaled blit, but that shouldn't be necessary..

Yep, now it works fine.

Great, thanks again! :)

Updated the zip again btw, with a fix for an issue with "double pixels" (the first line of objects would be doubled sometimes etc).  Well, it's fixed here anyway, hope it doesn't screw up on ATI, heh

edit: turns out it does. damn.

edit again: fixed, possibly!