Tobias makes Games

Finally, Dragonflute is finished! In this game, made for the Experimental Gameplay Project “ZERO BUTTONS” theme, you control this cute little fellow:
(<– Click the dragon to download the Windows release)

As the theme of this month’s EGP and the name suggest, you don’t do this my mashing franatically on your keyboard, but but by making sounds, recorded by your microphone. I hope you have one.

The dragon will either follow the PITCH of the sounds you make (which I prefer), be it by singing, whistling or by playing an instrument, or the VOLUME (which is fun too, though the game should then rather be called Screaming At Dragons).

I’m ambivalent how this one came out. Gameplay-wise it is not top-notch, and the pitch is often off (especially when not using an instrument), on the other side I think that it shows the key-concept rather well.

I guess I’m (heavily) over 7 days, I didn’t always work day-to-day and didn’t count the time – but since the topic “pitch recognition” wasn’t too easy and required some fiddling with calibration and configuration, not to speak about the keyless interface, the overtime is understandable I guess.

The pitch recognition itself is working fairly well – good enough for a prototype, though I would’ve hoped that it worked better with humming. Oh, well.

For this game I used C++ with my beloved SFML and FMOD as sound framework.

For those interested, here is the source code in form of an Eclipse CDT Project: Source Code

Since I’m showing my game around on the TIGForums, I thought I might as well leave a post here!

Catcher is a game about (surprise!) catching things! Especially geometric forms. (In SPACE!) With two spaceships, here depicted as circles. These two spaceships are connected by an energy line, which you will use to border your enemies and open a dimension rift by closing it – and thereby defeating anything inside! It features over two dozen unique enemies on more than 30 levels.

Among the various things yet to be done, the most notably one is the tutorial. I hope you can get it together alone with a description of the keys and the menu entry “Demo“:

• X and C makes your spaceships (the blue circles) flying nearer or farther to each other
• The mouse wheel, if you have one, does the same as X and C
• Pointing the mouse makes your spaceships turn
• Clicking the mouse (left or right) makes your spaceships move

The energy line breaks when
a) one of your spaceships touches an enemy or
b) the energy line crosses another part of the energy line (remember: DON’T CROSS THE STREAMS!)
If the line broke, you can restore it by holding X (so that the spaceships touch each other).

Enough babbling, more playing:

(It is Java Web Start, so no installation or unzipping needed )

While all and every feedback is appreciated, I especially want to know:

• How do you think could the controls be improved?
• What didn’t make sense to you? What wasn’t clear? What needs to be definitly in the tutorial?
• And bonus question: Do you have any ideas regarding new enemies? (This is a bonus question because I don’t know if I will include any new enemies right now, but this will be good to know for the next version )
• Ultra-special bonus question: Anyone has an idea for a better name for the game? I’m not sure I’m content with “Catcher”, it seems kind of too general.

Still missing so far:

• Sounds/Music
• Tutorial
• Random Mode and Endless Mode need besser formulas
• General polishing

So, here is my first BIGJam 3 hour jam game/prototype/something: One Fish, Two Fish! The theme was “fish” and “attraction”.

Click the image or here to start it.

The fishies follow the cursor when they are very young (and/)or want to make a baby. If they just made one, they will evade the cursor.

It’s more a failure than a prototype (much less a game), but it was worth a try

Somehow it also qualifies for the current EGP (“Zero Buttons”), but since it isn’t any good I won’t sent it in.

Trivia: The fishies like to stick together and make babies, it seems. Click here for an image of some fishcest…

This post is the continuation of Global Game Jam 2010, or: We don’t make games, we make AWESOME games (in 48 hours).

The Game

Our final game is about obtaining as many bubbles as you can! You can do this by just peacefully collecting them, as there are many, but soon there won’t be – and then you have to dash at other players and hit them so they drop their bubbles and you (and everyone else, hurry!) can collect them. An interesting (and deceptive) mechanic is that you can go off-screen so that you don’t show, and while hidden, wander, so you deceive players about your real position – and suddenly jump out and get them! Furthermore, you can teleport a few times to the other part of the screen, and doing this while being hidden outside of the screen is a good method to sneak up on the others! (If you have read the post before: There are no alliances anymore, and there is only one kind of ball to collect.)

So without further ado, here is it: http://www.globalgamejam.org/2010/zinozini

I suggest you download the version in the “Installation Notes” below, because there are a few bugs fixed – but well, we won’t take down our 48h-state, it is also highly playable.

Your graphics card needs to support Shader 3.0 to play this game, and it is optimized to be played with Xbox 360 controllers. If you don’t have them, download it anyway, it even makes fun without them!

The game is written in C#, with XNA as framework.

Oh, and by the way, here is a Zino Zini wallpaper:

The Team

And here’s our team again, for those of you who skipped the other way-too-lengthy post:

Lars Kokemohr – Programming
Me, Tobias Wehrum – Programming
Daniel Bock – Game Design and Music/Sound
Norbert Haacks – Game Design
Additionally featuring: Phillip Gronek – Q&A Tester, Fun, Red Bull

What will be added soon

• A score screen!
• A test for Shader 2.0 (yes, 2.0. We want to make it run on 2.0, so stay tuned if you don’t support 3.0!)

Actually, we wanted to add a bunch of other stuff, for example but not limited to: A Splash Start Screen showing our splendid logo (om.nomnom games), a start menu, a credits page, preferences (sound/music on/off), a different mode without time limit, and and and… but time ran out, and since it is playable in the current state, we will only add the things named above for sure.

PS: If you ask where there key, the monkey or the donkey is, well… that is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, and therefore hard to find. (There is none. It got lost somewhere along the way of the development process, and afterwards we felt the game is too much fun to try to press a constraint in there. Earlier the balls collecting the bubbles should’ve become monkeys, but that wouldn’t go with the fine abstract look it has now.)

This month I was working on my first contest entry ever – and finally I am done! It is an entry for the Experimental Gameplay Project during this month (the theme is: “100 Things“).

My game is about a juggler who runs against his arch-enemy, the evil clown, in a juggling duel to… well, till one has 100 balls. The development took 65 hours including some part of the game design process, learning SDL.NET and the graphic creation. The music is by Deniz Akbulut.

The game written in C#, I will post a link to the source code here later on.

While I am not content with everything (the development streched over 14 days, not 7, the music is not by me, I kind of took the easy route route with the theme, just using the “100″ as an arbitrary number, and as Matthew Elvey Price says in the comments, it’s rather DDR-like), overall I am actually quite happy with the outcome. This is my first project with SDL.NET, my first project with my own graphics and my second complete (mini) game in total – and considering this, it turned out quite well! I would even go as far as say that it might actually be fun to play! (Go, try it!)

Screenshots – well, okay, just one:

Download: Juggler v1.0 (Windows)
You might need the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.

I would love to read a comment about how you liked (or didn’t like) the game! The Comment Section is just below.

…and for the next Experimental Gameplay Project I will be faster and the game will be more inventive. Promise!