Kloonigames

Few blog posts ago I mentioned that I submitted Crayon Physics Deluxe to the Independent Games Festival (which is like the Sundance equivalent of games).

And Crayon Physics Deluxe is in! It’s nominated for the Seumas McNally grand prize in the main category. And it’s nominated for the Best Student Game in the student showcase category. I’m totally blown away by all of this. It’s awesome and exciting. Congrats to all the other finalists. Which by the way you should check out, because they are just awesome.

This is the problem with making games extremly quickly (in less than 48 hours): you miss some obvious stuff. Thanks to Hamumu’s (aka. Mike Hommel) suggestions (over at the Ludum Dare site) I made some changes to M3 – Molesting the Match-3 Market.

The most drastic change is in the way the checking for matches works in the game. Now the game lets everything fall down first and then checks for matches (as suggested by Mike). I also changed the colors of blocks so that the contrasts between them should be higher now.

You can download the new version from here: M3_release2.zip (2.3 Mb) (Release 2).

Edit 19th Dec 2007: I did a small update on the game. New version is available now.

And now for the final exciting episode of my Ludum Dare blog post trilogy.

The game is done and it’s called M3 – Molesting the Match-3 Market. It’s inspiration was this blog post, which somewhat explains the name.

The idea in the game is that you’re a casual games’ level designer and it’s your job to create levels for the game, in which the players can get the maximum score without really doing anything. Because the truth is that’s what most commercially successful casual games are like. Big rewards with minimum input from the player.

This is my first “48 hour game” and I entered it for the 10th Ludum Dare 48 hour solo game development competition. The idea of the competition is to see how good of a game can you create alone, from grounds up in 48 hours. Also I overslept the first 10 hours, so for me it was a 38 hour game development competition

M3 – Molesting the Match-3 Market

Download

M3_release2.zip (2.3 Mb) (Release 2)

M3.zip (2,3 Mb) (Release 1)
M3_source.zip (0,5 Mb) (Source code of release 1)

Instructions

You’re a level designer for a casual game. Your job is to design levels so that (casual) players don’t have to do anything to get a huge score. This is the way commercially succesful casual games are being made.

Drag the pieces around and click start. The colors will be destroyed as they touch each other. Try to go for the big multiple chains.

[space] – swaps between the editor and game.
[m] – toggles sounds.

Continuing my Ludum Dare progress report.

4 hours to go: So I ended up implementing the animation system. It turned out to be a really good thing. It helped me out a lot… I even managed to constrain myself from over engineering it.

Overall things are looking pretty good. I have still some small things to do (tutorial screen), but I could probably “ship” the game as it is. Some more polish would be nice and sounds would be really cool (I’m looking at you SFXr) . I’ll probably have to sacrifice a hour to add them. It’s really hard for me to say how well the gameplay works. It’s interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s compelling enough. And now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else came up with a very similar game mechanic…

Here’s a shot from the current build:

The game will be released couple hours… If you’re in a hurry you’ll probably download it faster from the Ludum Dare blog as it will take me a little while to add it here…

And now for something completely different… I ‘m taking part in the 10th Ludum Dare competition. It’s a 48-hour solo-game-development-challenge-competition-thing. And here’s a little progress report on my game.

Now it’s the beginning of the second day. Morning so to speak. I still have something like 15 hours to go, which should be plenty, if I don’t end up wasting it by doing something idiotic. Like starting to build this elaborate animation system, which seems really tempting… I sense the presence of a Programming Succubus.

Yesterday I got off to a really slow start. I over slept and lost something like 10 hours. But I got a lot done. The gameplay is pretty much there already (little tweaks here and there) and today should be all about the “polish”.

Here’s a screenshot of the game in action…

Yeah, it’s a color matching game… I feel so ashamed.