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Darren

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A member registered Dec 27, 2015 · View creator page →

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I've played all 81 other working games, and this is my pick for winner. It's complete, it has nice graphics, reasonably deep gameplay, a polished UI, and really is not too far from becoming a publishable game. Nice work, guys!

I didn't make it to the boss as it took me quite a while to realize I wasn't automatically colonizing the planets I was claiming. I might try again later with a fresh game.

Crashes immediately on load. Can we have a jar?

The story plus music breaks my heart, especially because I couldn't get my guy home. (◕︵◕)

Very nice new twist on the concept from Auditorium. With fancy graphics added, I could see this becoming a hit.

Amazing idea. Folks, don't skip this one because of the lack of desktop build. It's worth playing!

Very nice concept, and a complete game. I had trouble figuring out how the physics work. I ended floating around in small circles and never landing.

Very neat to use Inkscape as a level editor! The game is fun--the insults are demoralizing. :)

This deserves so, so many stars for the comic strip and voice-over intro. ^__^

Android version works. Good job getting the tilt controls to feel "right".

Very nice! One thing I'd suggest is putting the buttons closer together. During battle it was hard to manage my ship repairs and shooting using a laptop with trackpad.

Desktop build doesn't open, lacking main manifest attribute.

So simple, so fun! It's neat how the timing works out such that you often have to contend with the same groups of asteroids twice.

Wow at the amount of content. Reminded me a bit of Choose Your Own Adventure books from when I was a kid, because there are endings you can get by just making decisions and not even getting into trade. Awesome job!

It has great atmosphere. I echo the sentiment that I'd prefer the camera to just follow the player. Not sure if I won or not. I beat a touch boss and found Earth nearby but the game kept going.

I was alone when I tried it, so I had to imagine I was playing against someone. And in my mind at least, it was super fun! :)

Five stars from me for a complete game, being unique, and high fun factor.

The animations are great. And getting a fun stealth game working in a month is impressive! Thumbs up.

Laughed at the ending. At least it's a complete game! :)

The clean interface really stands out. Nice work!

Fun game. Interesting control scheme.

Most innovative game of the jam I've played!

Cool, you had the same idea as me to create a round world with pixel graphics by deforming it in the shader. :)

Neat idea for the game. This would be really nice if fully polished.

I'm really impressed with the level of immersion and depth of what you can do. Gotta be honest, though. The walk speed was so slow that I couldn't make myself play through it all. I'd love to see an updated version. Nice work!

It was a bit too tough for me to get very far. The character's face really cracks me up. A+ on graphics.

Really nice concept and execution. I could see it getting expanded so that each of the four types of elements has a different puzzle type.

I amazed at the depth and polish of the gameplay. Nice work!

Nice job with the color palettes. I think that really helped nail the aesthetic.

Super fun. I was on the edge of my seat!

It might be an odd thing to point out, but I love how you can just place the rooms anywhere and the halls are automatically created. Impressive amount of depth in this game.

I meant to add a continue feature for the jam and ran out of time at the end. Post-jam I will work on better balance for the random stages. Thanks for playing!

@Fivemedia, I think I've fixed it with new version 1.0.2. That's a second shader issue, apparently. I use the atan function in the fragment shader to curve the scene, but if the atan result returned is incorrect, it would result in streaking like I think you're describing. So I switched to the other version of atan (the non-atan2 version). Hopefully that gets around whatever issue was causing the streaking. Thanks for letting me know about it!

Version 1.0.1 (submitted after the jam deadline) fixes a shader bug that can crash the game on some computers after the intro screen.

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And it's submitted. A few general notes about the project.

This is the first game I've completed from start to finish. I've mostly used LibGDX for making live wallpapers, and I've been working on a game here and there in my spare time for the past year. I plan to polish this a bit, expand the length, tweak the gameplay, and publish to iPhone and Android.

I started out with a noble goal of good model/view encapsulation. Then I started using Scene2D.ui for scripting everything which works well. But as I realized it was taking too long, I started taking a lot of shortcuts. I just barely made it to the end without getting tripped up at all by some of the spaghetti. This is a small enough project that it was alright. I would not do this outside of a game jam.

I made very heavy use of JSON deserialization for describing all my assets. This worked out great for very quickly designing a lot of content for the game. It's not very clean because of the speed I was working at, but I would use a similar method in future projects.

Making pixel art is a blast, and I don't think I could have finished in time if I went for a higher-resolution style for the 2D art.

I decided on the main aliens being little squishy ball things intentionally so I could animate them quickly. When it came to the robots, I really ran out of time, so they only have a single animation. I made them round and spinny to get away with that.

I had quite a bit of planned content that I had to cut for time because it all relied on additional sprites. I plan to add some of that back in for the mobile release.

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Fun fact. Player character originally looked like this. (uniform supposed to look a bit like old Star Trek uniforms)

My 4-year-old daughter was watching and said, "Give her a pinny-tail!" (her word). Then, "Give her a smaller mouth!" And, "Make her hair black!". At that point, it was basically my final sprite, and I realized she was having me make it look like her.


(The proportions and walk animation are inspired by small Mario from SMW.)

Sneak peak of boss:


For the past two weeks, I've mostly been coding the game logic, so there wasn't anything to show. I've been filling in actual graphics the past few days, so I finally have an update to show. Here's a shot of one of the stages. There's still some placeholder art in there but it might become permanent if I run out of time. >__<

I threw an FXAA shader at it because the curved low-resolution layer looks better with it. But at this small scale you can see artifacts in high-contrast areas. If I have time, I'll have the FXAA shader's parameters adjust to the screen resolution.

So far, the art is 99% original for this project (everything except the hearts in the UI). The code is 95% original. Boilerplate and utility code has been copied from a game I've been working on in my spare time. I could see how a game jam with lenient rules like this one could go very quickly if I had some prior games to pull from. ^__^

Oh, and last night I thought I'd add a broken glass layer to the screen when you get a game over. I did a search for drawing broken glass in Gimp to get ideas about how to make it look, and this tutorial gave me the idea to take it a step further and offset the image below using a shader. I encoded offsets in the R and G channels of my glass image, and encoded black and white coloration to the cracks in the B and A channels. There's also some chromatic separation applied before the broken glass effect. 30 minute effect looks really nice!


I plan to use low resolution sprites, but I want the space station to be a torus, so each rectangular room should look rounded. To solve this problem, I wrote a shader that curves the input UV's, and a CurvedViewport class that applies the same mapping to the input touch coordinates. As long as the curvature isn't too extreme, it looks close enough to represent a section of the large torus.

I don't plan to put nice graphics in until the logic is mostly complete (I've found that results in wasted time on graphics that need to be reworked). But I did start creating my workflow for creating a texture atlas.

I use Libgdx's TexturePacker without any GUI, as I like to have full control over subdirectories for customizing the individual texture region options.

My favorite sprite editor is Cosmigo ProMotion, and it can output animated Gifs with a spare Gif for the alpha channel. These gifs can have variable frame lengths. Since TexturePacker doesn't support Gifs, I wrote a pre-processor that generates PNG files from the Gifs (merging in the alpha frames from the alpha gif). This is adapted from an old Libgdx pull request I made (but was turned down for being too specific of a use case).

Since Libgdx's Animation class doesn't accept variable length frames, I the Gif pre-processor duplicates frames as needed to get the timing to work out, and it prints out the frame length that should be used with the Animation class (a greatest common denominator of all the original variable lengths). This doesn't waste atlas space, because TexturePacker reuses identical sprites.

Here's the code. The GifProcessor looks for alpha Gif's using ProMotion's file naming scheme.

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I tried a number of simple mobile rogue-likes and dungeon-crawlers last night and got a feel for what I'd like to try. I will make it turn-based so I won't need to worry about event timing so much. There will be a grid for each screen so the camera doesn't need to scroll.

I remember when I started learning Libgdx, I read the code for Cuboc and it used a bitmap file as the level editor. I'm going to try doing that for this game. If each screen is a grid, I can mix and match left, middle, and right pieces to create random stages while easily ensuring there is always a fair solution. And if I use Gimp as my level editor, I can turn layers on and off to make sure all my combinations work reasonably well together before having to play test them.

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I'm a hobbyist developer who makes some live wallpapers in my spare time. I'll only have some time in evenings after my kids are in bed to work on this game. My initial idea is to do a simplistic roguelike where your character wakes up from hypersleep and must do basic space-chores before returning to sleep, with dangers and surprises along the way. The space station is shaped like a spinning torus, so as you progress from room to room, you end up back at the beginning - a complete day in space. A simplistic roguelike seems like something that could be coded fairly quickly with the basics and then expanded on with the time remaining. Going to start outlining the code this afternoon to gauge the feasibility.