Hubert’s Island Adventure: Mouse o’ War is now released for Windows!
You can buy the game for $9.99 right here!
You can also check out the demo first, if you’d like, by clicking right here.
You can check out the soundtrack here, and buy it for a mere $2.99!
Cheese and Bacon Games (and Hubert) would like to present a brief video, as a spectacular protest. A protestacular!
We are protesting (and trying to raise awareness of) SOPA/PIPA, some legislation currently working itself through congress. Wikipedia has a nice article that explains these laws, and why they should not be passed.
Check it out. Spread the word.
Years ago, I wrote an AI script for StarCraft. My friends and I enjoyed playing on money maps against large numbers of computer players, but were frustrated with how unchallenging the base game’s AI was on those maps. Thus, Dark AI was born. It was polished and tweaked and tested over years (very intermittently), and I’ve kept it up to date with each new version of StarCraft since then. It is extremely challenging, and it cheats like crazy. It is specifically designed for money maps, and I would not recommend playing against it in a regular game.
Today I have set it up with a page on Google Project Hosting, where my other open source stuff resides.
I’ve been running a small Minecraft server for a while now, and some time ago I wrote a little program to keep backups of the currently running world. It looks at the server’s config file to determine the currently running world, and then copies that world to a date/time-stamped folder within a folder with the world name. That way, I can easily keep backups for several worlds at once.
You can specify how many backups to keep per world (the default is 7), and each time the program is run, it backs up the world and then deletes the oldest backup if there are more backups than the set limit.
I setup a Windows task thing to run the program once a night, and so I have nightly backups for the past week for the server. It is pretty handy!
I’ve been using it for a while now, and so far it hasn’t blown up my computer or killed my server/worlds dead, so I think it is now safe to share it with the world.
I just wrote up a postmortem for Cosmic Heist over on the Ludum Dare website, and I’m going to post it here, too. So, without further ado…
So, Cosmic Heist was my entry for the recent Ludum Dare compo. It was a major success by my reckoning, as it was completed in time. That aside, however, I would like to write a little about how things went.
What went right
I spent some time coming up with a couple of interesting(ish) ideas, but ended up throwing them out before settling on what became Cosmic Heist. When I designed the game that actually ended up being made, I actually cut out tons of things, and cut even more as I developed it. This is one area that I really want to improve (I, like many others, am horrible at the “cutting things until it’s right” part), and I feel I made some good progress during this compo. I was able to reject tons of ideas, some good, some bad, but all non-essential.
I had a decent personal code base to start from, and already knew all about the language, libraries, and tools I used beforehand, so I was able to jump right in.
I left some time for play-testing and bug fixing/tweaking near the end, but ended up not needing very much of it. The game was small and simple enough that it wasn’t too buggy by the end, and my wife and I tested it some as I worked on it anyway. However, I would definitely leave this buffer time again anyway, because it really kept things stress-free.
The menus ended up looking/working/sounding great, and I added a cool animated menu background near the end that I really liked. I’ll probably use some of the work that went into that stuff off into the future in other projects.
The music turned out to not suck as much as I thought it would. That was actually my highest-scoring area in the competition, and I am still somewhat unsure what to make of that. This was my first time really making any music, and I don’t really have experience playing/reading/etc. music either. But it doesn’t sound too bad, so I am counting that as a nice success.
The controls are really fluid, and are my favorite part of the whole thing by far. The way you control the ship is great, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I actually didn’t spend much time tweaking that, and by implementing everything I needed for it, I had a whole system for various enemy ship movements, too.
What went wrong
The player’s ship is a bit oddly shaped. This makes it hard to see where you are going. I didn’t realize this at all (duh! isn’t it obvious! the ship points in the direction I drew it to point!) until people began commenting on it. Certainly something that would need to be fixed.
Some people kept looking for the shoot button. I didn’t make it very obvious (at all) that there is no shooting in the game. You just pilot your ship, and enemy ships try to plow into you.
There were a couple of features I wanted to get in, but had to cut due to time constraints. I wanted enemy ships to shoot at you, and every level was supposed to start at a shipyard, from which you had just stolen a ship.
There might be a problem with the Linux build of the game, as one person mentioned they couldn’t get it to run. Unfortunately, it runs fine for me, but I only have two machines to test it on, and they are both almost identical in both hardware and software. If anyone has or can test the game on Linux and tell me if it a) explodes, b)doesn’t run at all, or c) runs fine, I would greatly appreciate it.
Conclusion
All in all, as I said, I was very pleased with the outcome, and I even got some people to play my game, so that was really exciting. I hadn’t ever participated or followed LD until now, so I didn’t have any idea what to expect. I honestly didn’t think anyone would even see my game! Thanks to everyone who rated mine. One thing that I regret is that I didn’t have time to rate any games myself. I did play a few, and they were all great. Next time, I want to set aside some time to rate a good number of games.
Links
I recently participated in the 48 hour game making competition known as Ludum Dare (the 21st one). I succeeded, and the game I made is called Cosmic Heist. I’m now open-sourcing Cosmic Heist, and I’ve set up a page for it on the site.
Click here to see the Ludum Dare entry.
Click here to go to the game’s page on Cheese and Bacon.
Click here to go to the game’s file hosting page.
The game is licensed under the MIT License, like my other open source projects.
I have re-licensed Vendor Trash, and it is now available under the MIT License along with my other open source stuff. I’ve also migrated the game and source files to Google Project Hosting, where my other open source projects currently reside.
As always, you can find the game’s page here.
While doing some spring (summer?) cleaning, I came across several of my old projects, and I thought it would be fun to open-source them all. So, I did that tonight. You can see all of them here.
Most of them are games, but there is one simple tool, and one chat program. Actually, most of the games are pong clones. Hm.
They are all released under the MIT License, so do whatever you want with them!
I’ve made another release of Escape from the Master’s Lair, bringing the version up to Alpha 0.5.
Introducing a slew of bug fixes, balance improvements (including some major sweeping changes), and a few little features here and there, Alpha 0.5 should significantly improve the playability/fun factor of the game.
Highlights of this release:
* Fixed a few major problems with the template system. Items will now have proper attributes.
* Completely changed balance for armor and weapon stats.
* Significantly accelerated leveling.
* Player highlighting feature, for when you just can’t figure out who you are in life.
* Health bars are now easier to see.
* Darkness and dark spawning monsters are now more dangerous than ever!
You can go here to download binaries for Windows and Linux. If you just want to play the game, this is the link you want!
For more information on the game, you can check out the game’s official page here.
If you want to look at the source, it is always available via Mercurial. You can get a local copy here.
The whole thing is being released under the MIT License.
Please check it out and let me know what you think! Feedback is always welcome!
I’ve just released the first public alpha version of Escape from the Master’s Lair.
You can go here to download binaries for Windows and Linux. If you just want to play the game, this is the link you want!
For more information on the game, you can check out the game’s official page here.
If you want to look at the source, it is always available via Mercurial. You can get a local copy here.
The whole thing is being released under the MIT License.
Check it out and let me know what you think!
