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Indie Game Jam Results Posted
baruz writes "You may remember a previous story on Slashdot about the Indie Game Jam organized by Chris Hecker and company. The game sources have been posted." Anyone feel like porting these to Linux?
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First title listed:
Angry God Bowling
Doug Church
This was the engine sample game that everybody got when they arrived. You roll a ball and crush the flocking people, who start following a "prophet" when they get scared.
Starting on the port this evening -- gotta get this one!
From story:
Sadly, most of the games do not have documentation for their user interfaces, and a number of the games require gamepads, usually with specific control layouts.
I'm not familiar with programming control interfaces in Linux but it seems like the lack of documentation plus the need for controllers would make this rather difficult.
Not to mention (In big, bold print):
NOTE: THESE GAMES WERE DONE AS EXPERIMENTAL GAME DESIGN RESEARCH, NOT AS FINISHED PRODUCTS. THESE ARE NOT POLISHED AND COMPLETE GAMES!
Plus some of the games used proprietary sprites from Doom 2 which are not re-distributable. Almost sounds like it would be better to start from scratch.
Other than that the games look very cool. Especially for four days of work!
Gamasutra covered this a little more in depth a while back:
Link
Anything you can do, I can do meta.
I thought they were talking about Indiana Jones games. It was the dog who was named Indy. The dog.
Play the Stock Market Drinking Game!
tcd004
That 'Flow' game listed on the results page there is worth downloading. 600kb download, and it's not as easy as it sounds. Been playing it for a little while now.
mogorific carpentry experiments
The Dueling Machine is an awesome book. Too bad there's no linux port for this game. Here's a little info on the book. The Dueling Machine
Let's see: black shirt, blue jeans black shirt, blue jeans black shirt, blue jeans black shirt, tan jeans grey shirt, blue jeans grey shirt, black shirt, white shirt (that guy in the back has a red shirt--must be gay)
They have taken those "god" games to a whole new, strange level. Angry God Bowling: be wrathful. Worship: protect embodiments of Jesus from hordes of demons who would crucify and drag them away, similar to missle commmand. Another one whose name I forgot: convert people to believing in you, then kill them, multiplayer where the god with the most dead followers wins. Was Black & White this weird?
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
"It works a bit like the old Robotron 2084 arcade game..."
"A super-RTS..."
Maybe I'm not getting the point; was this contest just to make quirky titles from standard, well-defined genres with a gimmick, or to actually make something that is completely different?
I'm not saying none of the results were original or unique; I just noticed a lot of sentences like the ones above.
The Duelling Machine stirred an old idea that I have been thinking about for a long time, but the technology hasn't been up to it: Add GPRS/3G phone/pda, sign up, and you get a target you have to find (preferably in your home town). But there is a twist, you automatically become somebody elses target, so you never know who is after you. Any venture capitalists reading this? :)
(Patent pending, patent pending, patent pending)
I mean... Yeah sure there are interesting twists, but they are just *TWISTS* from the same genre, not really anything innovative.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
48 hour competition, starting from scratch.
All entries:
http://ludumdare.com/user/viewentries.p
Winners:
http://ludumdare.com/articles/?link=v
Most fun contest I've been in. Making a playable game from scratch in 48 hours is quite the caffeine rush.
Too bad half of the games crash on startup. Were these designed for win95 or something?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
From the site:
This game was byfar the most enjoyable out of the bunch.
The use of sonar to find your enemy is brilliant! I tell you: Polish this baby up and you've got gold! (This is not a guarantee.)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
There are several open sourced games that are or were commercial. One of the most up-to-date is "Battle of Britain", a flight simulator that was written by Rowan software. When they were bought by Empire, and when it was decided they should leave the small Windows flight sim market (no joke, they now code console titles), they open sourced "Battle of Britain" and some time later "Mig Alley". These are fairly state-of-the-art, 600 000 lines games with the experience of approx 10 previous flight sims inside.
o ad/bobl icence.txt
;-).
They are windows only, but could be ported to Linux. I expect that for example the flight model and the famous artificial inteligence would port straight forward.
The main parts to port would be the directx stuff and the user interface, which is in MFC.
So I will not be accused of false advertizing, I also have to tell you that
- I am the lead developer of the non-for-profit BDG, the "Bob/ma Development Group".
- To play the complete game, you need the artwork and for that have to buy the game. However, there are demos of BoB/MA out and at least for MA you can use a recompiled exe with that.
- You may be dissapointed in the source code, since it has little comments etc.
- Unfortunately, it is not GPLed. Find the license here:
http://www.3d-raumplan.com/wk_privat/downl
The code (16MB) can be found in the download section of
http://www.simhq.com/
The BoB forum on the same site is the main hangout for the community. Also, you might want to look here:
http://www.3d-raumplan.com/FlightSim
Another open source flightsim is flightgear, see www.flightgear.org . But that does not need porting, that already runs under Linux
Not many game engines out there that could model a fluid, never mind any that have actually tried to. I found this to be a truly unique thought in game design, and very "different" even within the theme they were given. (Bear in mind I haven't played it.. )
;-)
Also, I think in some of the descriptions of the games they just couldn't help themselves when they added "it's like XXX" to the description. It's so common now to describe games in terms of other games that it's like a knee-jerk reaction. I especially had this impression in the case of Charles' Chopper which isn't really like Choplifter except for having a theme in common, but they added that description anyway.
Dueling Machine is also quite unique. On the surface it's just another shooter, yet the magic is in the one disorienting difference of having so many "noncombatants" around. This game probably wouldn't be that difficult if it was attempted with fewer than several thousand obstacle characters hiding the target... sort of 3d interactive realtime Where's Waldo? Here again is a unique concept working in symbiosis with a unique engine.
And then there's Very Serious RoboDOOM which is unique primarily because it's not so much a game a statement about games.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
* BEGIN RANT *
We all lament the lack of creativity in games these days. First off, it isn't true. There's TONS of creativity in games these days, more so than at any time after the early-1980s. Where is all this creativity going? Sports Games, Party Games, and new Immersion Arcade Games. The more "nerdy" games have completely stagnated while Dance Dance Revolution and Tony Hawk are changing everything.
The problem is, of course the nerds. Nerds, for all their wonderful taste in pop-culture weirdness, aren't really willing to try new things. We say that the RTS genre has completely stagnated, but every time a new RTS game is released, message boards fill with "bla bla bla, Starcraft was so much better. They messed this part up, they should have made it more like Starcraft." The best example I can think of is Neverwinter Nights. Now overall, professional reviewers love this game. It's the first game to ever take the D&D ruleset in (almost) all of its complexity, and actually make it easy to play in realtime. The DM system is amazing. The single player ain't half-bad either. Gamers, however, were apparently expecting a cross between Diablo 2 and Baldur's Gate. And because it was actually innovative, and wasn't a cross between Diablo 2 and Baldur's Gate, they threw a fit.
It's like scifi on TV and in Movies, If it's not exactly like Star Trek or the X Files, we won't watch it. The Matrix sequels are doomed from the start. They'll be blasted by critics everywhere if they're too much like the first movie, but if they aren't basically the same as the first movie, geeks will go up in arms.
Obsessive fans are really the worst thing that can happen to a creative medium. They pretty much single-handedly destroyed comic books as a popular medium. In 1972 Comic books were basically like the early X-Files episodes, some continuity, but more or less completely encapsulated adventures. In 2002 if a kid could even find a comic book, they would have no idea what the hell is going on, since we want to be Japan and have 3000 page running stories. The 3000 page running story is great for the fat bearded guy that works in a comic book store, and is so rude and elitist that nobody but comic book obsessives can even shop there, but it means that comics are getting almost no new fans.
* END RANT *
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
NONE of these seems to work on XP, even with Win95 mode, and doing all the stuff to download the sprites...any advice?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death