Well, I am sad now... I made a journal entry last Friday, explaining what I was going to be doing this weekend, and a lot of other details about it. It was a
Ludum Dare 48-Hour Game Development Contest! I don't know if anybody reading this would want to be involved, but if you did, too late now. Sorry, I think what happened is that I didn't fully submit my journal, I just previewed it and got distracted. Anyway, the contest was
here, so you can check out the entries. That site is great too, because it contains a bunch (and hopefully someday, all) of the past entries of LD contests.
The contest theme was "Chain Reaction". My entry was called
Short Fuse. I'll put it up as a game later this week with a few small enhancements, but you can grab the original contest version
here (1.1mb). It's a game where you are tasked with destroying condemned mines so kids don't wander into them. You for some reason decide to do this by carrying around a leaky powder keg, to spread powder to all the remarkably numerous explosive barrels in the mine (theoretically, this is because you're a very old miner, so you are doing it in the old-fashioned way). Then for no visible reason, the end of the line of powder lights up, and a chain reaction begins. Your goal is to blow up a certain percentage of the barrels without exploding yourself. Completing the levels is not that hard. Some are tricky, but I beat them all after a few tries. The real goal of the game is high scores, as there is gold to collect for bonus points, and score multipliers which are the real key. On "Patently Absurd" (which may run very slowly, depending on your computer!), I broke a million points!
I think it's a good game, not spectacular, so I won't be dedicating my life to it like I did with Moon Invaders. But it's fun, so give it a try. The sound effects are great, and come courtesy of DrPetter's
SFXr, an awesome little program to randomly generate computery noises. It does include a level editor, and the editor is very very very capable of totally destroying existing levels, so don't lose your zip of the original files if you plan to try the editor. And DO read the readme a lot if you want to try it.
Tech note: It may run either better or worse if you create a shortcut to it with the command line argument "opengl" to run it in openGL mode. By default it runs under directX.
