Go Stand By the Stairs, So I Can Protect You
ewhac writes "It seems a programmer named Jetro Lauha, for his submission to the Assembly 2002 competition, decided to explore the realm of solid body physics simulations. So he wrote Porrasturvat -- 'Stair Dismount'. The game involves the application of force vectors to solid bodies connected by links with constrained range of motion, and observing their impact forces against other objects in the environment. ...Or, more colloquially, you push a guy down the stairs and see how much damage he takes. Apparently, any similarity between this game and the Terrible Secret of Space is entirely coincidental."
You can get really high scores in this game by finding the "bug": I'll keep the hint minimal, but if you push hard on his foot, and try to push it down and back into the stairs, there's a chance he'll get stuck for a few seconds... resulting in very high scores.
sadly the database seems to have gone down - but look at http://db.cs.helsinki.fi/~jlauha/taat/porrasturvat /score/webscores.cgi tommorrow :)
It uses the free (or to be specific LGPL) Open Dynamics Engine. A quite nice physics SDK, check it out if you are interested in physics engines.
Lol :-)
Anyway, the true story is that the idea for the game came when one work day I personally almost did a stair dismount, and we started joking with colleagues about making a game out of that..
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...Pontifex. You try and build bridges which stay up when you run trains over them. Really cool.
Go Here -> http://www.chroniclogic.com/
"If A equals success, then the formua is A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut" - A Einstein.
Woops, cocked that up! I blame Submit and Preview being right next to each other slighly more than my own crapness.
Available here on scene.org who have a complete archive of Assembly entries and most other demo compos.
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF