This is my entry for LDJAM 31. I started with the idea of saving
kitties and keeping bees out. My naturalist friend thought this was a
terrible message and that I ought to seek support from Monsanto for
doing such a thing. I thought about changing it from bees to wasps or
mosquitos. But then I didn’t want to do art, so there you have it.

I have boid swarming in this, they’re attracted to you if you have the
door open. They’re repelled if you have the door closed. On contact
with the door they die. Kill them all and more waves will come.

You can play it here.

The code is on github here.

Play the web version. How to play: press space bar. Ok, going to bed now.

I’m going to try to stream my development on this one, so you can watch me bang my head against the wall on twitch.

Username: ld: shanecelis, twitter: @shanecelis, twitch: shanecelis, website: seawisphunter.com

Language: C# (Maybe Clojure?)

Software: Unity3D, Emacs, git, OBS

Hardware: rMBP 13″, LeapMotion, Poker II

Good luck, everybody! Let that programmer art flow out of you!

I decided to use a weird tool for ludum dare this time: Mathematica. I wanted to try to a game that used dynamically generated sounds because usually I never do anything with sound. Mathematica is definitely a little weird for building an interactive application, but it gave me easy sound generation, and 3D rendering in a nice interactive development environment. It was almost kind of Lisp-y. I did find a fantastic reference for how to do interactive game programming in Mathematica taught at Rice University with a lot of examples here. Here’s an example of what playing with sounds looks like in Mathematica.

I thought I might try to do my entry Dark Maze using sound exclusively (requires free Mathematica 7 Player to play). I wasn’t the only one with the sound exclusive idea. The entry Soundscape goes in a similar direction. I ended up having some visual elements for the game. For instance, you can see yourself and the balls you throw by default, and you can also “cheat” to see the whole environment, at which point the exercise of navigating becomes trivial. I’d still like to see if it’s possible to do an audio-only form of maze navigation. Perhaps if the audio simulation were good enough to capture things like echos, or maybe it would just have to do something very artificial like different tones for different things.

I’ve included my timelapse as an embedded thing, but it’ll take a little while for the admins to make it work. Until then, here’s a link to it.

I added “ports” to make my entry easy to run on Windows and Mac OS X. Windows now has double-clickable ‘cavern.exe’, and Mac OS X comes bundled with love, so you can drag ‘cavern.love’ onto ‘love.app’. No source code changes, just some repackaging.

Thanks to those that commented remarked on why they didn’t run the game. Those encouraged me to make it easier on everyone else.

ld15-cavern-secelis-windows.zip Windows version

ld15-cavern-secelis-mac.zip Mac OS X version

p.s. I don’t know how to update the links provided on the actual entry. My hope is that an admin will see this and either show me how to do it, or that it’ll just magically happen.

Here is a timelapse of my entry. It shows some of the game at the end.

Here’s my submission for LD11.  It’s called Minimaze.  It only has 4 levels, but the basic mechanic of the game is there.  The idea is that you have a kind of snow ball that you have to guide through a maze, as you roll it it dissipates.  There are a few patches (shown in green) that will allow you to grow in size.    Click here to play. Here is the source code.

This is my entry into the Ludum Dare competition for December 16th 2007. It comes with a Windows binary and the source code. It’s not quite a game. It’s more of a game engine or toy. The commands are the cursor keys to move your selector around, and ‘u’ for up, ‘d’ for down, ‘r’ for right, and ‘l’ for left.

The game is a setup as a grid. Each cell can have animals: elephants,dogs, cats, and mice. The idea was to set of chain reactions by placing certain animals or changing which direction an animal was facing. Currently you can only change the direction animals are facing. But the animals do have behaviors that you can exercise. Dogs will chase cats; cats will run if they can. Cats will chase mice. Elephants will stampede if they see a mouse, and charge in any given direction for a short burst. Another idea to add to the game would be to have items perhaps, e.g. peanuts, bones, catnip, and cheese to persuade the creatures to move into some alignment that is favorable.

Graphically, I was trying to go for a hand drawn animation look, with the flicker that inevitably results from little mistakes on the tracing. I think if I had put a kind of sketch-pad/notebook background behind it, and finessed it a little it might have made up for my crude artistic skills. I created each of the prototypical animals using the draw-vector program I made (included with the zip file).

I only managed to get out one level, and there’s no goal. So it’s still at toy status. My excuse was I was fighting with my environment for almost all of Friday just trying to get Windows binaries from CLISP. Once I had my environment working, doing remote development with SLIME had a bad behavior which nearly forced me to go to some other development kit mid Saturday. However, once I fixed my SLIME problem, it was actually pretty fun to write it in Lisp. Oh well, maybe next time I’ll have my environment ready before hand.

Anyway, it was great to try out the competition. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot.

-Shane Celis

Toolset

• CLISP (Windows)
• lispbuilder-sdl
• Emacs + Slime (Mac OS X)