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[slembcke]

Well... no real true plans for gameplay yet, but I've always wanted to make a decent platformer using Chipmunk physics. Going to try using OOC as the development language. It will probably end up being Mac only... Hope there are other Mac guys around to test.

I really suck at designing levels, so I figured I'd keep asset usage as simple as possible. Going to use a subset of the Oryx tiles/sprites. I think I packed everything I need into a 128x128 texture.

I'll probably just stick to a foreground and background color for each level section. But, I might colorize everything Atari style if I can't make something that looks good with just the two colors.

Items on the list of fun ideas to try:

• Dynamic shadows - I have some ideas to make this look great as a lo-fi effect
• Portals - Rendered like in ASCII Portal. Not shot with a gun, but placed by hand. Can get crazy too with moving portals and all sorts of nifty things.
• Physics based control - Wall sliding/jumping/climbing, conveyor belts, etc.
• Physics based level bits - Tilty bits, rotating things, gravity bending stuff.
• Vehicles - I want the player to be able to fly the spaceship sprite like in a Thrust-esque sections of the levels.
• Lasers - Dunno exactly what I'm going to do with these, but I implemented raycasting and I'm going to use it!

I'm a really terrible game designer, and I'm certainly starting out on the wrong foot by thinking of features instead of gameplay. Knowing me, it will end up as a neat tech demo of fun things to implement and a horrible game. :p

[Melly]

Be aware that making it Mac-only will limit the number of people that can play your game, which will certainly affect how many votes you'll get.

Still, if you must, go ahead.

[John Nesky]

I am intrigued. And I am already dual booting with Mac + Windows, and I already have MinGW set up. And I have experience making physics-based platformers. 

[dustin]

I can play it if it's mac!  Although looking at the ooc site since it just translates into straight c is there any reason for a no windows version?  What graphics library are you planning on using?

[mildmojo]

Wow, I didn't realize slembcke himself (Mr. Chipmunk) hung out here. I'm a huge Chipmunk Physics fan (with Ruby); can't wait to see what your platformer looks like.

[rfrank.nj]

hi mr chipmunk

i read that and thought 'man i should really comment on this and say "no dude why would you use a real physics engine for games that dont have real physics"'

then i realized you wrote chipmunk physics
then i felt really dumb. :|

[nunix]

Considering how tired I am of everything indie being win32-only, with me on OSX (I can boot into windows, but it's dumb and I hate doing that for a game I'll spent 20 minutes on) I will definitely be playin' your game! Votes are dumb anyway.

But now you are honor-bound to actually finish it! We've got two pages of threads here already, and none of them have anything to show for it, I think, just, "Hey I'm going to do this thing," and so often that turns out to be the most you ever see of the project. =p So go to it!

[Melly]

Multiplatform all the way.

[slembcke]

I've made a bunch of smallish platformer prototypes that implement various gameplay bits or controls, but I've never made a platformer with Chipmunk end to end. Usually I get as far as basic character controls and then give up once I start trying to make graphics for it...

Just remembered that the portal rendering demo in Unity that I posted does not work on Windows due to a bug in translating the OpenGL-like projection matrix to a DirectX one. We found a workaround eventually, but I never updated that demo. The portals we implemented for that game were hand placed assets, not fired from a gun. This allowed us quite a bit of freedom in what we could do with the portals like putting them on moving surfaces or a small portal that connects to a big portal and changes the size of things passing through. We also did crazy stuff like portals that fell on you making you go flying out the exit portal. Another idea that I liked that got scrapped from the project was having gravity always be relative to passing through portals. If you connect to a portal on the ceiling, instead of flipping the player over and falling like in Portal, let them walk on the ceiling.

I might try to make a Windows build at some point during the contest, but maintaining cross platform builds is a huge huge pain. I'm not planning on using any platform specific libraries, so it's not out of the realm of possibility. OpenGL, OpenAL, Ogg, libPNG, SDL, etc.