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[Decipher]

Snowflake is a platformer/micro-exploration game made for the Swedish Game Awards Warmup. It's really too short because I ran out of time while thinking for different formulas to generate logically playable rooms. Thus, as you can understand, the game's whole content is procedurally generated: graphics, rooms and even the static-looking stuff (like the background) are procedural.

Snowflake is coded under 5 days from scratch without any basecode and I actually am happy to see it coming to this level.

Oh by the way, the whole game is just 13kb including the music .

Download

[Cymon]

Hmm, interesting. What did you code it in? Doesn't happen to be in C/C++ using allegro does it? 

[Decipher]

it's C using GDI (Windows' Native Graphics API),

but since GDI calls are expensive (cross-boundaries far calls) I just used GDI to flush a buffer to the screen. On top of that I coded my own little API to manipulate the buffer.

[increpare]

hmm...I can't get past the purplish/blue 'at' screen...is there some button I should press?

It looks like it might be fun, but yep...

[increpare]

oh wait, it just worked there....cute game...nice miniature

but, is there a change that the generation process mightn't terminate or something?

OH WAIT, it might be due to the fact that, when it's in the 'background' it still displays the purple rectangle, but when I switch to the foreground it displays fine.  You might want to fix that?

I think also that it might not always start focussed, for some reason?

[Decipher]

increpare: Unfortunately the generators are not all unique-guaranteed, even if I modify the seed, if the generator mis-decides for a position of the block (I'm using a rule based, logical generator. Not a random noise based one) then it will cause an infinite loop, I'll look into it. Thanks.

Edit: I just realized that you're talking about the "Inactive screen". It's intentional, it's just a way to tell people the game is inactive

[Core Xii]

According to my anti-virus software it's infested with W32/Packed_Krunchy.A

[Decipher]

It's not infested with anything... It's just a stupid virus coder is using the same packer/algorithm that I used to pack my executable.

And the stupid antivirus checks for the same bytes that the algorithm produces in every executable no matter what is the content. So, this is the issue. There's no virus or such filthy business going on...

[Xion]

Edit: I just realized that you're talking about the "Inactive screen". It's intentional, it's just a way to tell people the game is inactive

so how do you get it to start?

[Decipher]

Err select / activate the window using Alt+Tab maybe?

[increpare]

Err select / activate the window using Alt+Tab maybe?

you really should fix that focussing thing, or make the 'inactive screen' more informative...

[Xion]

ah it started...so it's really just a loading screen?

[Decipher]

Xion: No? It's a tiny platform game, why would I waste 13kb to show a loading screen? On the other hand, due to deadline and size limitations I had to use really inaccurate timers such as GetTickCount(), might be a timing issue.

Update: Now the game should force focus-on on start. The first post updated.

[increpare]

Update: Now the game should force focus-on on start. The first post updated.

hurrah!   

[Decipher]

Update 2: Due to the window class I use (or well to be more precise I "don't" use) when you click on it the game becomes inactive too, so I decided to remove top-most property completely to avoid further confusion . First post re-updated.

[Core Xii]

And the stupid antivirus checks for the same bytes that the algorithm produces in every executable no matter what is the content.

Right, as is intended. Since it's packed, there's no way to know what's really inside, and it's better to be safe than sorry.

So, I'm sorry, but you're going to have to release an uncompressed executable if you wish for me to play this thing.

What's the point of compressing executables, anyway? For the transfer over the 'net, there are much better compression schemes. And I have plenty of disk space and memory to hold even quite large programs.

[agj]

Wow, the mechanic is rather... annoying. Cute, and good idea, though.

[Melly]

Finally got to play this one. The aesthetics and the tune are both very nice, and I like that you added the flashing on the cloud like I asked you to. Makes sure I'm not taken by surprise so its fair.

Though like its been said I'm not a huge fan of the control switching mechanic.

Nevertheless it's VERY impressive for so little time coding everything from scratch with procedurally generated content.