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Indie Game Jam 2 Physics-Based Games Released
DaFlusha writes "Chris Hecker has posted the freely downloadable games from Indie Game Jam 2 (actually the third year, as programmers start counting from 0). When the games (from the 'yearly game design and programming event designed to encourage experimentation and innovation in the game industry') were showcased during the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC 2004, I was highly impressed and couldn't wait to play the 2D-physics-based games myself. Now everyone can try them, provided you can run a Windows executable." Oh, and any game description which starts with the phrase: "The physics engine treats the hamsters kinda like a fluid" (as 'Stunt Hamsters' does) is a friend of mine.
Now here's a real real-physics game.
I have been pwned because my
STUNT HAMSTERS
No hamsters were harmed during the production of this game.
Design by: Casey Muratori with Ryan Ellis
The physics engine treats the hamsters kinda like a fluid. So you basically fire all these hamsters out of a cannon, and you pack them into different areas and then when you light them on fire, the gas that gets let out of that, displaces the fluid very violently. So you can change the structure of the level because this organic fluid explosion allows you to push blocks over and do these cool things.
I get a popup box everytime a sound even happens
When I was writing video games for a living, Hecker's physics articles in Game Developer magazine really helped me out. He knows what he's doing when it comes to this stuff. And, at least as important, he knows how to teach others to do it too.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I'll have to look for whoever wrote this genius piece of work so I can thank them profusely, I've never had so much fun exploding large piles of rodent. :)
Is this true or just some lame attempt at humor? I couldn't find any mention of it being the 3rd Game Jam, so I'm assuming this was meant as a joke. Unfortunately, the reasoning is kind of crazy: programmers don't start counting from zero, they just count offsets from the beginning of a list/array because it can be more efficient (doesn't matter nowadays, but it used to). This works out well since all integer types contain 0 as a number, so a single byte could address 8 elements instead of just 7. This contrasts with functions like strlen which count the characters in a string. strlen starts counting with 1 just like any sane human being. To summarize: the joke is not funny and untrue =)
True story.
The site appears to be slashdotted already.
:(
Bummer
I just beat it. It was challenging, but not so challenging that it wasn't fun.
I'd be really interested in learning if there's a tool or simple way to make levels for it though.
It'd probably end up with a contributing community pretty quickly if the word got around.