this is awesome. as in awesome-amazing.

but damn, I'm stuck at path 7 when there's a happy ball, a pit and you can't rotate.

the other day I've sketched up some skeleton code which will help me with my first couple of games. today I've started working on the reimplementation of the Rectangle Rodeo based on the skeleton. Just devising the main menu structure spawned some ideas, I'll shovel them in here:
- bull is playable in one/two player(s) game
- multiple bulls / progressive bull fights with more difficult enemies
- cowboy mode (chase bull(s) to and keep them at designated area)
- customizable entities (texturizing those rectangles)

let me know what you think!

For some reason, I can't see anything but the background. Which sucks cuz this looks fun.

I'm afraid it does happen when initialization takes too long; please press Escape and hit "restart" from the menu. (what FPS (and CPS) are you getting?)

i thought it was pretty diverting; have a highscore of, like 5 though.  I don't see what use their is really to the level above the main level.

slowing down the bull, and making this multiplayer, where people can push eachother off, could be quite interesting...

thanks.=) the top level doesn't have a lot of use; I've left it there from the game's techdemo days when I wanted to see it scraaawwwwllll (to test camera clamping and the parallax effect).

I definitely want to make this a bit more progressive, starting off with a slow bull that accelerates slightly after each successful jump (then resets after falling of). But the real deal is the multiplayer, I really like the idea; I'll look into it.

updated; links are in the first post.

http://twitter.com/lumberingdream

[Downloads:]

My newest tech demo had went terribly wrong. It turned into an experimental sort of game ish. I'd like to offer it to every TIGerSaucer for the purpose of tearing to shreds and probably gluing random stuff on top of it. That'd look nice, won't it.

Controls are left right and up. Scoring goes like so: every consecutive jump on top of the big grey rectangle is one point. if you touch any other tile, floor, wall or ceiling, the points are reset. Touching of any other side of the grey rect results in bruising. Bruises have no significance at this point.

P pauses the game.
F5 switches between full screen and windowed mode, but you'll want to pause the game beforehand, because, well, you'll see anyway.

We got menus, presscape.

Screenie.


The stage is freely editable (41x36 tiles for one single screen, I haven't tried it with smaller values), you'll want to edit tilerenderer01.lds and world01.lds in the DATA subfolder, they're pretty much self explanatory. No matter how big your tile bitmaps, the rendering will go by the grid size values in the map file (world01.lds), 16x16 by default.

The start position and size of the two rects are hardcoded, x is the middle of the map, y is 2/5 for the grey, 1/2 for the red one, all of them based on the map's dimensions.

Downloads:

OS X:

Windows:

Ole!

update: we can do tiling now. screenshot and downloadables are shoveled into threadhead. Mac version is underway.

EDIT: the posted app had a bug in there. it's patched now.

Very short games

or very wide games?

VOTE OR DIE MOTHAFUCKERS

death is not the end, as we all know by now. congrats on your win!=)

on another note, thanks for those who voted for my game!

we gots a winner, this was undoubtedly the most fun to play and the most sophisticated with its growing system. although the collision handling has its faults it doesn't ruin the fun at all and had no major weird stuff with it.

the animation, as others had already pointed out, is amazing. Is it skeletal? Really impressive. care to tell more?

(btw I laughed when I've first seen the brown archeologists with the whip. Indiana Jones FTD! (D for dinner))

It's square sprite that has a little bit of texture on it, and its drawn stretched (or squashed) to just seal the gap between the forest and the water line.  It's scale is relative to the distance between the camera and the water line, and then its just multiplied through some numbers to get it exactly right.

Awesome, thanks!

that Shub-Niggurath thing - what did you use to achieve the waving effect btw?.

Construct has hardware acceleration so it can do fancy stuff like sprite mesh distortions on the fly.  I just told it to start distorting and plugged in someone else's math because I suck at math (sin and cos something something... thanks David ).  This was in lieu of actually animating it, because I didn't have time, though I like how it came out so when I do animate it for the full version I'll keep the effect as well.  There were a bunch of examples of what you can do with mesh distortion posted when the feature was first added a while back.  Waving flags, pond ripples, folding cloth, etc.  But the math is beyond me.

Thanks, man. It really is a neat effect and quite possibly looks better than frame-based animation. I'm looking at doing something similar in OpenGL but there seems to be no easy way. (Yeah, I kinda suck at maths too. )

I'm having my head in platformer clouds today; Eversion, Lost in Eldritch, Verge and now This Cursed Rock.

very neat game, loved the narrative (that you bothered to do two different sprites for the captain) and the visuals (especially that Shub-Niggurath thing - what did you use to achieve the waving effect btw?). no complaints about the ending on my part either.

I'd love to see a complete version if there's one in the pipeline.

awesome game, graphics, music, level design. I got stuck tho (at stage 5 or 6 methinks), maybe come back later. but until then, at least I've got a candidate for the third vote.

two questions, one tech, one gameplay:
- what did you use for the effect between the main layer and the first distance layer (that watery-looking thing indicating the boundary between life and death)?
- are the "secret" moves obligatory to get through the game?

this is really mindblowing, I'm seconding everything everybody said (that includes about initial acceleration tho). this game had really inspired me to get back to working on the spatial partitioning system of XRhodes.  

EDIT: spoiler self-censored (that SPOILER was a really neat addition). so yeah, top quality work overall.

I was guessing this is the best of the entries. then I got to world 6-6 and then it was a certainty. and it isn't over yet. damn you!

crazy-awesome in every aspect (okay, the distorted music gets annoying... there). extra kudos for player-friendliness.
those hand-sperms rule too.

thanks for the nightmares. you'll be remembered in my screams.

that list is not just a little bit of help. cheers for your continued awesomeness, increpare 

Played it, and while the idea is really neat it's really hard. Then again, I always sucked at asteroids.

hey Melly,
thanks for picking up the game and for commenting on it.=) from the feedbacks I've got I guess I should have named it Bitchblackoids, however there are certain techniques that help surviving longer.=)

Awesome! I love the sky gradient, reminds me of old 16-bit plaformers. The tree's sweet too!

thanks.=)

by the way,

(made this about halfway through the month to show off for a friend of mine.)