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[dmoonfire]

Well, I heard about this contest two weeks ago and while I have yet to complete a single game writing contest I've found, I decided to take a stab at this one. So, I got my basic game idea done. Its called Running Bomb and has the simple purpose goal of you flying (via a spaceship) a bomb as far away as possible from a large city. Your "score" is just as simple: the number of people you save.

Its a little rough-looking since it is hard to put polish on something when you don't really have a framework to work with. I have a bunch of screenshots up on my blog:

  http://moonfire.us/blog/2008/05/27/running-bomb-progress/

Procedural bits. Well, the tunnel system. It has a nice recursive tunnel system. When you reach the end, it calculates the next tunnel and moves on from there. And it remembers the state so if you go 10 tunnels forward, then go back, you'll find the tunnel you would expect there to be.

This ship itself doesn't look so hot, I'm hoping to fix that this week. And maybe some sounds, but right now, its what I'm calling a minimal game. Oh, technology: C#, Tao.*, BooGame, OpenGL, and SDL. And it works on Linux.

http://mfgames.com/games/running-bomb/running-bomb-0.2.zip

[Alex May]

Good man. Looking nice.

Would sure love some pointers on how to box stuff up in Mono - have you tried a Mac build?

[dmoonfire]

Well, you have your basic zip archive install which is what I'm initially planning on doing for this game.

For CuteGod (http://mfgames.com/games/cutegod), I made a Windows installer with all the required Tao DLL's, assemblies, and the game assets. I had one report that the latest Windows installer was missing something, but no one else said that, and I haven't made the time to check it out yet.

On the Linux side, I basically distributed source and a binary archive. The binary was just a tarball of all the assemblies and their .config file (to map from the Windows p/invokes to the Linux .so invokes) and the code.

I'm planning on cleaning that up a bit more. Since I help with Debian Mono packages, I really should do a proper Debian package. I'm planning on doing that for both this and CuteGod after some other juggling of projects; I'm finishing up a round of editing on my novel after this contest, which should give me enough time to "reset" after working on this.

As for the Mac build, I know the basics of how to do it. There is a Mono install for Linux. I should just need to package the .so's, assemblies, .config, and assets into an archive and basically do a folder/zip install (with installing Mono of course).

[Alex May]

Great. Thanks for the tips!

[dmoonfire]

Since I only have a few days left, I figured I'd update here too. Last night, I got the start of the voice overs working in code. It generates them using mbrola or festival voices and play the role of the ship's computer, traffic and police controls, and general announcements. I'm hoping to have a hundred little phrases between the four, including a couple that are "voice over plots" as the computers talk to each other as the countdown continues.

In the back story, you were "volunteered" to take the bomb out because you were the only one who was left on the dock as they tried to find someone. Mainly because you still haven't figured out how to turn on your brand new ship. This leads, of course, to some of the voice overs since in the middle of you running out of time, the computer asks if you want to register your ship. And, if I get the module code in this weekend, if you lose one of your modules, it will helpfully say "Door is ajar" when what it meant was "you just lost your right engine."

http://mfgames.com/svn/runningbomb/trunk/assets/story.txt

Well, that's the goal of course.

I also added a stress rating which is just a little measure of how panicked you "should" be at some point. Basically just a [0...1] number with 1 being "boned." I'm using that for the background color, as you get higher stress, the background turns red. Little touch, but it helps with the progression.

And finally, procedural background noise. It was an idea I wanted to always try and so I finally got it working. Basically, I grabbed a bunch of short samples (a GPL'd drum kit from Hydrogen) and threw them in a directory. Then, every time I reset the background music, I grab eight random samples and give them a random beat rhythm (bit flags, different for each sample). At the beginning, it only uses the first 4 bits in a slow sound but as the stress goes up, it speeds it up and uses more beats until you get a rapid background noise.

For a first attempt, it sounds pretty cool. Almost jazzy but not quite. Sometimes, kind of jarring, but I thought that would work out. And, every few seconds, it flips one of the bits for the rhythm, so it slowly changes as you go through the game. Then, as the countdown stops... silence.

[dmoonfire]

*sigh* Well, that was a horrible let down at the last minute. I got the game up and running. Not exciting, but still playable. You can move with the number pad (8, 6, 2, 4 for directions), brake with the 0 on the number pad and reduce your size with the enter key (also on the number pad). Grabbing a blue sphere makes you bigger and faster. Grabbing a green one slows down the clock and makes you bigger. Score is basically how far you can get from the center of the maze.

It works nicely on Linux (assuming you have all the libraries of course), but when I tried to get it running on Windows... crap. Only two features don't work: text so you can see your score and the countdown timer.

WTF the countdown timer doesn't work, I don't know. However, I'm pretty much at midnight, so this is my entry. It plays on Debian with most of Tao and Boo installed. Actually, its kind of a fun game there. I don't think its missing any other files at the moment, but I'm *not* entirely sure.

http://mfgames.com/games/running-bomb/running-bomb.zip
http://mfgames.com/games/running-bomb/Tao.FreeType.dll.config (forgot that for Linux users)

You *can* play it on Windows, but you have to pretend you have a countdown. Also, you need to install the .dll's in the bin directory into your GAC because somehow I got a screwed up assembly reference in there too (which doesn't happen on Linux either).

[Melly]

Mmm, so how do I play this properly in Windows again? I don't seem to get most of the graphics, only white boxes and empty space.

[dmoonfire]

Sorry about that, apparently the opengl texture and font thing broke badly. Which is one of those two things that seems rather critical.

To play, hit return. After a second, you'll see a blue circle in the middle. You can use "[" and "]" to adjust the zoom. To move, using the 8, 6, 2, and 4 keys on the number pad. 0 brakes and enter makes you smaller. The other blue and green circles make you faster and slow down the (Windows-only broken) counter.

Sadly, you can't see how far you've gotten, which is annoying the hell out of me and I'm trying to figure that out. It looks so nice (and plays well) on Linux, and just boxes for text on Windows. *sigh*

I have *absolutely* no clue why it is breaking on Windows.

[dmoonfire]

Note to self, do not make last-minute changes when you are exhausted.

So, apparently, I put in a little bug that involved taking the ln(0) which is infinity. So, the program very nicely assumed that I wanted to advance the time by an infinitely small amount of time instead of the proper 1:1 second. So, that was why it was broken, it *fixed* itself the first containment module you got.

As for the font rendering, no clue but it works now on my Windows machine.

I know that I didn't get it in time, but it bothered me so much that it wasn't working that I tried to get it going anyways. Take it as you will.

http://mfgames.com/games/running-bomb/running-bomb-0.1.zip

This should be a fully working Windows-friendly version of the game. Complete with text you can read, credits you can see, directions that actually aren't blobs, and a countdown that doesn't give you infinite time.

[Noyb]

Both tries ended with me unintentionally glitching through the wall.

I like how the intensity of the drumbeat increases as the timer ticks down, and the cave generation works well.

Numpad controls on my laptop keyboard are really awkward in general, requiring me to hold down a function key while treating the right side of my keyboard as a slanted virtual numpad. The actual game controls work well, and I see why both rotation and strafing would be useful. It's pretty disorienting how you rotate when you collide with a wall, although that might be your intention. I was actually surprised to survive collisions, given the whole bomb storyline.

[dmoonfire]

For speed purposes, the collision on the walls was tuned to reduce the number of physic vertexes. Probably need to tweak that, but it gets a lot slower when I turn it up because it needs to generate so many more points. Maybe I'll make that a option for those with very fast computers. It gets annoying when you glitch, mainly it happens when you move too fast into a wall, the physics step jumps you clear over it, and then you escape. You can occasionally get back by heading to a node and seeing if the new map catches you, but fixing it properly would be good.

There were two features I planned which didn't happen. First was when you hit a blue or green sphere, it was going to attach itself to your ship so you had this mass of bubbles all spinning around you as you flew. Instead of shrinking, you ejected random modules off. When I tried the attached modules, the physics engine put a torque on the modules that caused steering to be nearly impossible.

The other was damage to the modules. I ran out of time to do it, but it was kind of hinging on the "bubble" part of the ship working. In the early versions (i.e. before I started coding), I had plans for shields and weapon modules also. Obviously, those got triaged. And if that was in, then hitting the wall hard enough would cause a great big boom.

You can also see the code where you save everyone (1B people from 1 Mm to 1.99 Mm). Ideally, it would "drop the bomb" at the 1Mm mark and if you can manage to escape another 1 Mm, you win. Never happened, didn't have time. Ditto for the high score list.

[moi]

Doesn't seem to work here. Windows Vista.

[zradick]

The newer version worked for me on XP.  Interesting stuff.
I think some sort of directional indicator to let you know where you need to go is needed.  Especially with the maze re-orienting every time you hit a wall.  I like the effect, but I became hopelessly confused very quickly.  I also assumed one would want a bigger ball, but that didn't seem particularly helpful.
Keep it up!
--Zack

[dmoonfire]

Right now, grabbing the green balls makes you larger and slows down the counter so you can get further along. The blue spheres that make you larger make you go faster, but it also means you end up slamming harder on the walls.

[William Broom]

Can you make it possible to move with the arrow keys or WASD as well as the numpad? I presume it works for you otherwise you wouldn't have done it that way, but for me I find it very awkward to reach the '2' key to move down.

[dmoonfire]

http://mfgames.com/games/running-bomb/running-bomb-0.2.zip

I added both WASD, arrow key, and retained the number pad navigation. You can brake with space bar or the number pad zero. Though, it occurs to me, I really should have made a button for reduce size... *sigh* I'll get it later, that is still number pad enter.