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You are a brain in a jar controlling a cockpit with your two robotic arms. What exactly are you piloting? Well, as far as everyone knows it's a ... thing. Which you can pilot. Awesome, right? It can suck enemies in one end and kill with the other.

(http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/7391/screenshot100y.jpg)

Download! (13MB, Windows Only) (http://rapidshare.com/files/218079440/Brainy_Affairs.zip)

The game is kind of laid back since you don't have a health bar or anything close to it. You just collect energy balls while avoiding black matter (black balls!). In total there are 4 types of balls which you can collect and all of these have different properties. Oh but you won't see these properties until you try to blow yourself up. Yep.

Basically, when you try to blow yourself up, you are greeted with a puzzle where all you need to do is rotate triangles to redirect the flow of combustion. The more dark matter you collect, the harder the puzzle gets.

Unfortunately, that's as far as this game goes. There's more than a couple of things that I didn't have the time to implement correctly (levels, the thing gaining size as it eats more balls, evenly spawning energy balls, an indicator for the % of types of energies consumed, a visual cue for the "Cone Of Sucking"(tm), prettier background and cockpit, etc).

Cheers! :beer:

Credits:

Line-art for the brain and his faces
Mr. Zagato (http://el-chacmool.deviantart.com/)

Music
Leandro Kalén (http://www.myspace.com/leandrokalen)

SFX
Freesound (http://www.freesound.org/)

Everything else
Kimari (http://indigostatic.wordpress.com/)

Seems interesting! Will try it out tonight.

Great IK on the arms :)

Thanks for the compliment! ... what's IK? (seriously)

The two best parts of the game would be the brain's arms and the puzzle game that appears when you explode. I wasted way too many hours playing with that thing alone.

Inverse Kinematics, I think; so it's probably about the arms being animated pretty well  :)

Yep. Woth normal animation (forward kinematics) you animate the joints directly. With inverse kinematics you position ends of limbs and work out what the joints should do subject to various constraints.

Basically you position the hands and the IK code works out where the elbows should be so the arms don't squash/stretch. That's a nontrivial problem and your solution behaves nicely.

I keep getting a "trying to draw nonexistent surface" error :(

Ah, thanks for the explanation. All you need to do to solve the IK problem is calculate one of the intersections between two circles of different radius, after that, things are relatively easy. Of course there's more than that, like having a maximum speed of movement and deciding when to lock the arms in a default position. It requires some thought and quite a bit of code, but I wouldn't label it as "hard to do".

@Xion: I knew somebody would eventually face the dreaded "trying to draw nonexistent surface" error >_>
You see, Game Maker offers this really useful tool called "surfaces" but as it turns out, if your graphic card isn't compatible, you are screwed.
The only thing in the whole game that uses surfaces is the text box system you see up there in the screenshot... so if you want, I can upload a surface-less version for ya (there won't be any text boxes on this version though)