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For Ludum Dare 15, I made a small game with destructible environments. It was a lot of fun to work on, so I made a post-competition version (about 5 days of work total). Here are the basics of the game:

• Shoot to destroy walls (this makes debris)
• Vacuum up debris to regain ammunition
• The vacuum works on enemy projectiles too!

Play here (http://www.x2d.org/misc/misc3/wallsFixed.html)
This was a lot of fun to work on, and I hope people enjoy it ;D. I might at some point want to make a proper game based on this. I'd love to hear whatever ideas people have about crazy new mechanics, creative ways to use destructible environments in level design, enemy ideas that could work well in this sort of game, or whatever else people come up with.

If you haven't checked out the other Ludum Dare 15 games, I'd definitely recommend it. There are like a million of them, and some of them are pretty good (I think my personal favorite is Bobo's entry) The list is here:
Ludum Dare 15 Games (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview)

The controls are still a bit screwy.... well, no I think I mean the hit detection while jumping.

However, this is remarkably improved in just a few days.  Are you planning on adding more, because I think this could really go somewhere.

There's still some very buggy behavior when colliding with walls in mid-air, yeah. I intend to fix that before calling this done.

My main motivation here was to prototype an idea I had sitting around, and find out what was fun about it, what wasn't, and what it could be like as a full game. I don't know if I'll add much beyond what's already here, but it could be fun to try some new ideas.

I didn't have any time at home today, but tomorrow I will be doing some work on this and releasing a new version.

The ideas used are very good, but there are some serious issues. The recurring one seems to be getting killed by the turrets because I was trapped in a hole created by the very same enemy. Usually getting killed after the enemy is already dead.

I assumed the collision with walls was intentional. I rationalize that since it was cheese(or not cheese..?), things may tend to stick to it? I don't know.

Dying in 1 hit was a bummer, maybe add a heart system like Zelda? 3 hits and dead? Maybe?

and to fix PureQuestion's dilemma would be to simply remove the stray bullet after the enemy is dead. I had that problem once, after not paying attention. I didn't think my enemy fired one last shot a split second before I killed him-until I pressed shift in my haste and boom dead.

I love destructive environments though. Kind of reminded me of Spewer a bit. Except with no vomit.

Couple of bugs if you're interested: if you shoot through the floor and fall down the gap you fall off the level forever. Also, when the camera moves it doesn't update the shooting location until you move the mouse again, so you soon end up firing nowhere near the mouse.

Quite fun, I enjoyed the destruction :)

I enjoyed this rather a lot! Good job  ;D

On the annoying one-hit kills, maybe your ammo/debris counter could also be your health? That way getting hit won't kill you, but take out a sizable chunk of your ammo, putting you in a not very desirable situation, which can still be easily solved by some debris farming with the enemies.

Otherwise, I really liked this game! I think it'd be awesome if it turned into something a little more ambitious!

This is really great. I love the style and simplicity of it, and it's just kinda cute

You can dig through the ground indefinitely, though. You absorb more ammo back from the dirt than you spend to upset it. It kind of breaks the game in some regards, considering you can so easily bypass all obstacles by digging around them

Morre pointed out to me that this prototypes was linked to on the IndieGames blog:
http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2009/09/browser_game_pick_the_walls_ar.html

Andy- yes, there's a counting problem in this version. In terms of design, it seems that shooting walls should yield diminishing returns, so it's not sustainable and has a cost. This isn't the case in this version because each shot fired has a fixed cost, while the amount of debris created is not always the same. Vacuuming while firing inside a tiny tunnel increases the debris produced, because each shot hits the walls cleanly instead of hitting a layer of debris.

Hmm, I think I'll go tinker for a bit and see if I can't come up with a cleaner system, thanks for getting me thinking about that.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/09/07/hip-to-be-a-square-the-walls-are-not-cheese/

Awesome game sparky. Looking forward to see where it ends up.

Thanks for the heads up, Cagey.

Hmm, the ammo counting question is kind of hairy. Does anyone have any ideas?

Currently, each projectile has a set cost (7 pixels of debris), but the yield is all over the place, which leads to problems like the one Andy Wolff pointed out.

One possible alternative is to have projectiles be free, but when they hit walls to decrement the ammunition count by the number of pixels in the explosion. That's kind of weird and could lead to situations like firing a bunch of projectiles up into the air and running out of ammunition after only half of them have hit...

Okay, I've implemented a new ammo system which should be zero loss if we vacuum up all the debris, but it's not really perfect. On top of that, there's now a rule that a certain percentage of destroyed walls fizzle instead of turning into debris. This makes tunneling less sustainable.

I'm thinking that should this turn into a larger game, the tunneling should be less viable (without ammo dumps, that is- there could still be parts tailored for tunneling).

http://www.x2d.org/misc/misc3/wallsFixed.html
(The link in the original post points here as well.)

first off.. fix the controls they feel really loose because you slide around alot. im sure this you made this intentional but i really hate it. also include the ability to control your jumps.

ok you want some crazy for your game.

how about some different walls :epileptic:

like how about a wall that can only be destroyed by enemy bullets and you have to use your magnetic powers to guide them to the walls..

or a wall that when you shoot it, it rains acid debris on your enermy and burns the ground

or a wall that produces debris that you can attract but it does not refill your ammo instead it acts like a shield

or a wall that produces healing debris

yeah..

Nice stuff. I didn't have problems with controls, unless you count trying to jump diagonally into a hole I dug for myself. My main problem was no idea what to do at first - I tried touching the exit, then digging a path out of the level... who would have thought you need to destroy it? I did it by accident the first time, and then of course tried getting to the second exit by touching it (unsuccessfully).

By the way, you should kill the player for getting out of the level.

Apart from that, the shooting and vacuuming thing looks like a nice gameplay mechanic. I suggest you do make a real game out of that, just please add some actual graphics for characters ;)

This game frustrates me, but I love it. It took me too long to figure out why some of the enemy bullets seemed to home in on me. Doh!  :facepalm:

The only problem I had with the controls is that using the arrows and mouse at the same time is tough using my laptop touch pad, so shooting and moving at the same time was awkward.

It would be interesting to see how it plays if the enemies also only took one hit to kill, but there were more of them in the level. Cheese wall destroying goodness!

<w, a, s, d> also works, would that work better on your laptop? (Sorry it's not mentioned in the in-game tutorial). I think if this turns into a full scale game it will probably have user configurable controls, which should help somewhat with this sort of problem.

I like the idea of having lots of enemies that only take one hit. That could be fun.