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[adam a]

Zoo Babies

A fun and educational game about animals and IT support at the Zoo.

The game was kind of rushed at the end and poorly planned at the beginning so don't expect too much. There is a fun collect-em-up element, randomly generated box sliding puzzles and animal facts throughout.

Controls are ARROW KEYS and SPACE, and also WASD for the puzzle.

NOTE: Some people have had trouble running the game, after some investigation it seems you need both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 redistributables.



Download

Extract and run 'joebabies.exe'.

===Original Post===

Hi all,

So this probably seems like a late entry but I have been working on it for a couple of weeks. I was waiting for it to come together a bit more as the idea of the game is still a bit vague. But anyway, this is just a teaser of what might be to come.

The game is tentatively titled Zoo Babies and involves you teaching animals at the zoo to use their new computers. You've just got a job as IT support and need to help them theme their MySpace pages and create Zwinkys. Cool stuff like that. But essentially the game play will involve giving the animals simple instructions eg "go forward, turn right when you hit a wall" or "take five paces, jump and turn around". And they have to pick up pieces of the internet which fell from the sky and get them back to you. It might be reminiscent of Chu Chu Rocket, and will probably be grid based.

As you can probably see there's still a substantial amount of stuff to get done, but I have a screenshot.



There are a couple of other guys helping out who are on the forum, they might pipe up at some point.

[adam a]

Progress is being made. Currently I am trying to get transparent polygons for water. I managed to make everything transparent except the water. 

Oh dear

[jimmykane]

How did the zoo get so many gorillas, and how did they get so big?

[Synnah]

I approve of the pixellated polystyrene cut-out gorillas! Really interesting concept, too; I look forward to trying it out!

[adam a]

"New Screenshot" or "This Is What Happens When You Don't Coordinate Your Artists".

[Derek]

Jesus that screenshot really made me laugh.

[moi]

This looks awesome

[v21]

[Theta]

"New Screenshot" or "This Is What Happens When You Don't Coordinate Your Artists".

I really like the haphazard graphical style.  I suppose since it includes so many different styles, it all seems coherent, somehow.

Looks fun!

[v21]

Yes, yes, sleep. This was a classic unfocused entry. We did some good stuff, but the extent it made for a good *game* is questionable...

[0rel]

nice graphics and music!
(i was especially surprised, that the vector graphics don't really "collide" the blocky 3d)
to comment on the game aspect though, i probably should play for a little longer...

[Theta]

This didn't work for me; clicked the executable and got an error message:

Code:

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect.  Please see the application event log for more detail.

I indeed extracted properly, and am running Vista on a laptop with a pretty low-rate graphics card.

[adam a]

oh dear. We weren't able to test it on vista, it's probably some thing going on there. I'll have a look and see if there are any obvious xp to vista problems we didn't account for. In the meantime I don't suppose you can find the application event log it talks about. That may contain clues.

[increpare]

crashed for me when i tried to leave the monkey level.

also: do you have some debug keybindings still there?

also: turning on the first stage is, for me, excruciating.  is this intentional?

[adam a]

Thanks for playing the game, in answer to you questions:

When you have completed the monkey puzzle he offers you three choices. "Yes" gives you a new puzzle, "No" exits the game (this is badly labeled) and "I need to go speak to mortimer" takes you back to the first bit. I suspect you picked "no" and weren't expecting it to exit, if that's not what happened then let me know.

Debug keys: not really, you can press 'a' on the first level to go straight to a puzzle and you can also press space in the puzzle to whistle and call the gorilla towards you. That was part of a bit of a u-turn we did late on regarding the puzzle controls.

And turning: in what way excruciating? Slow, jumpy? If it's jumpy then that's just because the game is a bit slow and there's more going on in the first stage. If it's slow then that's just the speed we set it, not especially 'intentional' but the turn speed should be the same for everyone.