Root's Eye View

Seg Fault

Death Geode Released

Here it is.

Death Geode Update 2

I've fixed up the Linux version and made a few changes to both versions to improve the general gameplay and organization. Now I'm just waiting on Mr. Clyffe's updates to the music. The game ought to be ready for release number one within a few days.

Also of note, I got some much needed inspiration and encouragement the other day and have started work on writing Balding Man again. Hopefully we'll still manage the original release date of 4/1/09.

FINALLY

It's about fracking time. I managed to trace the input problem in Death Geode to a few errors reading the config file 80 lines earlier. Once I fixed that, everything started working perfectly. Naturally, I'm a bit wary of the fact that the Linux version went on working despite this problem, so I'm going to push back the release until I've had a chance to check that out and make sure both versions are doing things correctly and identically.

I might also hold off to make some changes to the sound effects and music (available on the website). The music is certainly good; I don't mean to insult Mr. Clyffe's abilities, but I'm worried that it doesn't really fit the game.

Different Raycasting

I starting reading flatland and it inspired me to try making a 2d -> 1d raycaster. If its current for, it uses thickness to communicate depth, but later on I'd like to use 3d glasses (inspired by gamma 3d) to convey depth. This could allow for first person 2d games and I'll no doubt pick it up again later for that purpose. For now I'm trying to keep clear for Tixel when programming starts on that.



For now I'll just hand out the source with a Linux binary.

Source

Page Up/Down - angle
Right/Left Arrow keys - Forward/Backward
Up/Down Arrow keys - Straight up and down

Raycasting

Same cave, different framerate:



Each triangle is like a flashlight. This renders at 4-6ms per frame instead of 100-130ms per frame, plus it adds realistic shadows and lets me easily change the widths and direction of the light.

More

This one uses an actual randomly generated cave segment. It was actually created in several parts in order to test the ideas behind the algorithm. The whole cave would have been 20480x11520 pixels (1280x720 * 16). I only generated a 1280x720 pixel segment of that, and then used a 400x400 pixel segment of that for the lighting.



This is the whole finished cave segment.

Even More Cave Lighting

And this time it's a video!

More Cave Lightning

Later versions of this will use ray casting instead of checking every pixel. This will enable faster rendering and shadows (1600 lines vs 160000 pixels).

Death Geode

Iota wiped the micro-sweat from her techno-brow and set down her heavy Explosive Decrystallizer 18600. It had taken days of work, but she had finally cleaned away all the seed crystals and carved out the inside of the geode. Now all she had to do was lay out the nano-structure and hook up to the omninet and it would be complete.

The geode itself has been grown right at the heart of Neo Nano New York, just above the omninet's primary backbone, giving her one of the fastest connections on the planet as well as all the bosons and fermions a femto-engineer could ever want. The future was bright.

Or so it seemed.

The antiforce nano-missile and its antimatter payload felt otherwise. It felt that it was falling straight toward Neo Nano New York at ten meters per second and rising.

Moments later, Iota found herself swimming in mineral-rich hydro-water surrounded by the shattered remains of millions of geodes and seed crystals. They were all growing. She found her ED 18600 floating nearby, mumbled something bad-ass, and started decrystallizing shit.



Download: Linux (455.2 KiB)

Cave Lighting

Frame rate is really low, but it works.



I'll see about the promised Death Geode stuff later today. No promises, though.

Death Geode 1

Death Geode is almost ready for its first release. The Linux version is fully functional and the Windows version is refusing to read a particular text file, so I don't even know if it's going to work proerly when I get that hammered out. Hopefully this won't be too far away. On Wednesday I'll post some actual information about the game. For now I'll just say that Death Geode is probably the first action game we feel comfortable releasing. It still needs some work, but a little public exposure shouldn't hurt (should help).

It's Real!

Don't believe anything anyone tells you. The dark green original gameboy is real! I have proof! Google image search is lying to you. Someone doesn't want you to know about the green gameboy.

Second Law Games website is online

This is what I have been doing instead of working on Balding Man. It contains information about Second Law Games as well as finished games and some music. Information about games development will still be posted here, but finished work will be available in a better format at the website.

Notice

BLDNG MAN development will be limited to music until the beginning of November. In November, I will begin writing BLDNG MAN. In December I will script BLDNG MAN. In January I will write the Realtime Text and Raster Display (R.T.a.R.D.) Engine. In February I will polish the interface and begin testing. During March I will continue testing and polishing and our composer will be done with the music. BLDNG MAN will be released on April 1st 2009. Mark you calender, idiotkid.

Dear Nintendo,

Apology Accepted.

Sincerely,

--Second Law Games

what?

That last post is actually completely pointless and I don' t understand why I bothered to create it. I must have still been reeling from the thing.

Now I'm just reeling from the last post.

It will be a neverending chain.

Every week or so.

Purity Name Change Made Possible

I was looking at the Character Submissions thread over at TIGSource and ran into a suggestion for the character from Purity. Needless to say, I was shocked because I thought no one knew about that game. It turns out that there was another Purity before mine that I just didn't know about.
That was a big relief, but it does mean that my game's name isn't original any more. This doesn't mean I'm going to change it completely. I might just add a subtitle that never actually shows up in the game but still distinguishes it from the other one.

A GNU Dawn

In an act of extreme symbolism (which I hope will be remembered when the time comes to award the next Nobel Prize in Literature), I have ported my artgame, Freedom, to Linux.

This version brings back the window frame because there's basically no cross-platform method for positioning windows with SDL and the window kept showing up at the bottom right of my screen. Now at least it's possible to move it to a nicer location.

Download: Linux

I don't have a whole lot of LInux experience, so I don't actually know if I can just pass around the binary and assume that it will work on other computers. I don't see any immdeiate reason that it shouldn't, though. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Oh wait. You can't. Because you're the Internet Void, and only people can test the game on other machines and let me know if it works. And we both know that no one reads this.

Yet.

When the time is right...

One last thing. Basically none of the Windows versions of my games are going to run correctly under Wine because I used clock() for timing instead of SDL_GetTicks(). In the future, I plan to stick to SDL_GetTicks(), so my games ought to run just fine in Wine.

Of course, they ought to also have Linux versions that run just fine without Wine.

Edit: Linux version += easteregg

Language: English Vs English

Greetings, Internet Void,

As you have no doubt noticed (assuming you've worked out ASCII and those other encoding formats), there seems to be two versions of English floating around and a whole lot of debate over which one to use where. It's starting to seem as if bringing English over to America during the British invasion of New England (not that I have a problem with the result, it's just that the initial act was a little rude) was a bad idea. If we'd just started with a fresh new language, we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of letting English evolve into two slightly different languages due to physical and cultural separation and then debating over which one is correct, we'd just have an extra language to translate, which wouldn't be a problem at all since we seem to be handling the ones we've got right now just fine (and even some "fictional" ones).

As it is though, we've got these two almost identical languages causing a lot of pointless flamewars over at Wikipedia when really, it does not matter the slightest bit which one we use. Anyone who knows English knows that "metre" and "meter" are exactly the same thing. Some argue that "meter" should be used for measurement devices and "metre" for the unit because then you can tell them apart by spelling. So they should also be pronounced "meatur" and "meatreh" so that you can tell them apart in speech, right? Alternatively, we can all just spell them however we want and tell them apart by context.

Language is such an imprecise communication tool that it's really pointless to argue over these sorts of things anyway.

I could leave it at that pretty elegantly, but I'm not one for being articulate, so here's an example:

"Give me that screwdriver."
"Would you please hand me the screwdriver?"

These two are exactly the same but some people are inevitably going to be offended by the first one. People demand all these little embellishments that makes language in general incredibly inefficient. There's no reason for this thing called "politeness," and there's no reason (outside of "art") for this thing called "connotation."

They are both inextricably linked to language, though, and as a result the part that matters gets clouded up by all these meaningless little details, and a lot of information gets lost in a flurry of emotions.

Emotions.

We could certainly do without some of them.

The above sentiment brought to you by some of the emotions we could do with out.

And the same to that one

Etc.

Hail Polybius

everything is fine.

gearGen and Linux

I finally got around to filling that empty space on my hard drive that I've had sitting around for six months. I filled it Linux. What this means is that in the future (if I can just figure out how to use KDevelop), I will be able to offer both Linux and windows versions of my games.

It took me about two hours to install Linux. I then spent 8 hours fiddling with xorg.conf and rebooting over and over again before I realized that I could just turn off overscan on my monitor. After that, I'm pretty sure Linux is actually more "user-friendly" than either Windows or Mac. It certainly seems to have a lot more fancy graphical stuff going on. And it seems you can download and install just about anything by typing "sudo apt-get install [program name]." I mean anything. "sudo apt-get install pi" downloads and installs a program to calculate pi.

Anyway, in celebration of my new operating system, and because doing it on a calculator was really tedious, I decided to write a good old-fashioned command line program. It's called gearGen and it prints out x and y coordinates for drawing gears. Those coordinates can then be converted to images using paint or the GIMP. This ought to help a lot with making sprites for a certain game. It turns out that just opening up paint and drawing a 32x32 gear from scratch is not at all easy.





gearGen code: (C=C+1)

Game: Freedom

I have noticed something about art games: they are exactly like any other art; the artist presents the audience with a thing, and the audience digs up meaning for the thing. Since the artist's job is a fairly simple one, I decided to try taking the place of the artist.

My art game is called "Freedom." The goal is to reach the opposite side of the tunnel. Use the right arrow key to move. When the tunnel changes colors, you change direction and speed.


Download: Windows
Linux

Following the lead of other artists, I have also written an analysis of my game (though it is pretty short).

Freedom represents the journey of a nation as it struggles to remain free in an imperfect world. On the path to freedom, obstacles can cause the people to lose sight of the real goal (to go backwards). There are two ways to reach freedom. Either "stay the course" (hold right) and keep moving in whatever direction seems to be forward, or try to adapt to the rest of the world; when something goes wrong, pull out quickly and wait for the situation to resolve itself before moving forward again (press and release right as the color changes).

However, this analysis merely skims the surface of a deeper meaning. Strangely, the bitmap responsible for holding the numbers used in displaying the final score is located in the root directory instead of in the "bmp" folder. Additionally, it seems as if the images for "4" and "7" have been removed and replaced with hasty mspaint scribbles. No matter what the end result, there is always the potential for capitalism, which is supposed to enforce individuality, to corrupt the system as a whole.

One might argue that the numbers 4 and 7 were chosen at random; however, a closer look reveals that 4 and 7 were the two numbers of the "system" font that did not adapt well to the modified font used in the game. This reveals the exact nature of the capitalist corruption. Those things which do not fit, rather than being carefully (and expensively) repaired are replaced with cheaper, lower quality components.

Additionally, the hexadecimal number 47 represents the letter "G" in ASCII. If "G" is taken to means "GAMES" or "GAMEPLAY," it can be said that the corruption of hex 47 represents the state of the commercial games industry. the gameplay is cheap filler that creates simple context for beautiful graphics and the occasional "GIMMICK."

Etc.

DIL FND CUR OM DIS

Fancy Compass

At one time, I was working on a 4D graphics engine for a 4D FPS based on 50's horror movies. I developed the math for 4D to 3D perspective projections, but got distracted and didn't go much farther. I've put a little more thought into the game and started making a 4D compass to help with navigation. The game allows left/right and up/down rotation in 3 dimensions like in a normal FPS as well as side/side and back/forward rotation in the fourth dimension. The hypercube inside the sphere to reflect the player's movements. The current version works in 3 dimensions. The next step is to make an object to hold information about the cube, rotate it, project it to 3 dimensions, rotate it again, and display it.

Wow, already?

The war for the fate of the galaxy has begun! Use your Galactic Interceptor 2600 to fly around the sun and push it toward your enemy. Use the left and right arrow keys to turn and accelerate with the up arrow key. Press Right Ctrl to activate your Heat and Kinetic Energy Reflector Shield (H.A.C.K.E.R.S.) and dive toward the sun. Press the down arrow key to deploy your Space Skids and slow down. Your ship can pass through the sun four times before its Advanced Thermal and Radioactive Protection Shield (A.T.A.R.P.S.) fails completely.

This is a game of two players, one keyboard. Player one (red) uses the arrow keys and right ctrl while player two uses wasd and left shift. F actives Spirograph Mode.

If the void offers any feedback, I may very well take the time to work on improving (finishing up) the game. In fact, I may do so even if the void doesn't offer feedback and I instead have to rely on feedback from the real world.



Download: Windows (Required SDL.dll and fmod.dll)

Sound effects made with pxtone, graphics done with openGL.

SWype or Expensive Spirograph

SWype stands for Spacewar!-Type. In it's current form, the game is not much more than an expensive Spirograph (it's free, actually). You fly around the sun in a space ship. If you hit the sun, it continues in the direction you were going and you go in the other direction. The game still needs some physics and other engine refinements (accurate sun-bouncing, determining whether the sun kills you or bounces off) before I add the second player. At that time, the game will become a combination of Pong and Spacewar! Except that the ball will kill you if it hits you at the wrong time.
This is probably a good time to point out that I'm not one of those idiots who has never played Pong, but still raves about how great it is because it's "retro." I am sick and tired of most of the music in Mario. I love the retro aesthetic, but I am not a huge fan of the actual retro because most of it was garbage with a few clever ideas mixed in. Of course, the only difference today (in commercial games) is that the programmers don't also make the art and the music.
At the same time that I preach about good vs bad retro, I know that I am also preaching to an empty void. I want the empty void to be perfectly clear on where I stand here. Or at least less unclear.

Here are your screenshots:


Normal Mode

Expensive Spirograph Mode (I don't know why the background is gray in that one)

Hard Drive Update

Well, I've run a few diagnostic programs and I now know what data can be saved (the important stuff, it turns out), and what sector to stop at. I've got a new 250GB drive on the way, so when that arrives I'll see if I can't use some ghosting utility to copy the first 60% of the failed drive over to the new one, copy the data from the new one over to my backup, and then backup to the new drive.
I'm holding off on Contrecoup for the moment because I don't have 3d glasses yet and I'm still working out how I want to do the collision reaction (kill the player, randomly spin the player, push the player away, etc).
Meanwhile, I still haven't done any work on Purity, but I might do a little of that in the next couple of weeks.
Right now I'm getting ready to prototype a boss fight for another game and maybe work some on the code for the O.D.d.S.A.C.k.S. More data on that game when I release in ten years or so.
The other thing I'm doing is honing my programming skillz on Project Euler. I've finished 5 of the problems and right now my computer is around prime number 1.5 million for another. Maybe I'll go back later and figure out how to solve that one in 1 minutes instead of a few hours.

What you should take away from this, dear internet void, is that I'm still working on making video games and I might even finish one some day.

Gamma 3d; Game: Countrecoup

No progress on the hard drive, but I am working on a game. A few days after the announcement of Gamma 3d, I cam up with an idea for a game and then refined it a little after someone came up with idea of using stereoscopy for multiplayer.
The game is a racing game about getting to the hospital in the one second or so between the coup and the contrecoup from getting hit on the head. The coup damages the bits of the brain that deal with processing signals from the eyes so that at any given time only one eye functions correctly. Each time you run into something, the correct eye fails and the other becomes correct. In order to see properly, the player must close one eye or the other.
Screenshots of the game so far follow.







The controls are currently purely keyboard based, but hopefully it won't be too hard to find information on adapting them for the 360 controller.

Purity Development on Hold

My primary computer is rather ill right now, so Purity development is on hold until the issue is resolved.

The Future

It has just occurred to me today that the brilliant idea from that dream, the one I scribbled onto a piece of paper just after waking up, has similarities to an idea that another person conceived in a dream. The difference is that when he awoke and wrote it down, he was left only with a paper containing a few numbers and the phrase "all the mechanical complexity of a teapot."
The device of my dream, a simple plastic shape, literally has "all the mechanical complexity of a teapot." Could it be that this is the very same device? Could it be that this vision of the future is more than just a nocturnal hallucination?
Probably not, but I must still be prepared in whatever way I can. The things I saw in my dream must never be allowed to occur. We must always be capable of feeling pain. It is critical to our humanity.

I dreamed of a device...

Do you see this? This device represents the end of life as we know it. This device it the key to a viable powered exoskeleton. Combine this with humans modified to survive the removal of their skin, and you create powerful beings. This has the power to bring about wonderful change.

Unless, of course, the same changes that allow people to wear this armor also cause them to become corrupt. The same shark DNA that prevents bleeding and pain must also create callousness. That insensitivity, combined with the power of the machine-given strength, quickly becomes cruelty.

I don't know why they kept me in the first place. They didn't modify me for the armor, but they didn't kill me either. Not like they spoke of doing to the kid. Was I supposed to be the control group? I'll never know. They didn't like something I said and finally decided to get rid of me. I ran to the nearby town for safety, but they had already been there and killed or converted everyone. I had no choice but to grab on to the last car as it was leaving and hope for the best.

I expected to be shot at, but I never thought the bastards would sink so low as to pin me down and tickle me. Tickle me. All the training in the world is useless if you can't think. That kind of torture doesn't even require restraints.

And to think, mere days earlier the whole thing was just a small gathering of friends.

All this because of the invention of that simple plastic wheel.

Don't cross the streams...

Too late.

Gunz update

The gun class is complete and allows for variable bullet speed, bullet damage, fire rate, gun color, bullet color, and bullet number. The screenshot below shows four blue guns firing at 1/25frames, with bullet speed of 4 pixels/frame, bullet damage of one, and maximum of 50 bullets on the screen at a time for each gun. The red line at the bottom is the health meter.

Purity Guns

Having reached that point in the creation of the blue area, I have started working on coding the boss fights. Each boss will be a room with 4 major components: Gunz, Falling platforms, Cathodes, and Anodes. The goal is to touch a cathode/anode on the floor and then climb to and touch an anode/cathode on the ceiling, creating a circuit between ground on the boss and X kV on the ground. Each boss is defended by a set of Gunz that fire bullets at a constant rate. The screenshots below demonstrate that component of the boss fights.

Purity Music

I decided to fool around some with music based on Sierpinski's Gasket and found that most of what I got sounded pretty decent, but repeated after one measure. I did manage a slightly less repetitive bit that might make for some not-too-horrible metroid-esque boss music. It certainly has the dissonance. pttune.

Spoiler Alert: Mapp of the Knovvne Worlde

I have started working on a map system for Purity. Together with the save points, it work work much like the map and saves in An Untitled Story; the player will be able to transport from one save point to another as long as the two save points have both been used. This will be especially helpful in the green area.
In this version of the map, each room is given 1 pixel for every 20x20 block of tiles. The rooms with the white border contain save points. These are all the rooms I feel comfortable calling "complete."

Mapp of the Knovvne Worlde:


This version gives 1 pixel for every 4x4 block and is the highest resolution I'm likely to use. This example does not highlight the rooms with save points.

Detaylled Mapp of the Knovvne Worlde:

Game: Cells

Cells is a simple puzzle game. The player is presented with a grid of cells each containing a value and a mathemetical operation. By observing changes in value, the player must determine the operation of each cell.

Status: Complete, though the tutorial might not be very good (suggestions welcome).

Download (Windows): Cells

Game: Purity

Purity is a simple platformer about color, harmony, purity, descent/ascent, survival, nature, confusion, the inner self, order vs chaos, and probably god. It uses the GLAS Extended engine, with takes a few lines of code from the GLAS engine used in Bullet Hell and PlatClimber.

Long ago, in a stale world, the Unity, white, split from itself three colors: red, green, and blue. It allowed each color to spread to the far corners of the world. Over the years, each color grew in its own manner until finally there was no more space to fill. Then they began to fight each other for possession of the world. Unity, disappointed that its creations would claim to own parts of its world, sent the Purifier to cleanse the world of the three different colors and return the world to its original state.

Status: The engine is mostly complete and the world is about 10% complete. No music done yet; I am pretty terrible at composing and not patient enough to use Pixel's stochastic method. I'll probably come up with a music generator that uses Markov Chains or Iterated Function Systems.

Game: The Horror

The Horror is a creative re-imagining of Joseph Conrad's classic novel Heart of Darkness. Pilot your steamship down the Congo river to stop the evil Kurtz. Along the way, collect rivets, ivory, and good natives to repair your ship while using your Heart of Darkness to defend yourself from evil natives. Be careful, though. Use the Heart of Darkness too much and you'll become consumed by corruption and turn into another part of Kurtz's evil plan.

The game features procedurally generated landscapes and fancy VeCtOr GrApHiCs.

Status: Early development; on hold

Game: X-Treme Cave Explorer Deluxe Professional Edition

This game was started for the TIGSource Procedural Generation Competition, but never completed (also very buggy).

In the game, the player controls a special cave-exploring robot and explores a system of randomly generated caves. Along the way, the player collects and combines "genomes" that control the nature of the music, instruments, and landscape.

Status: Incomplete, can't guarantee it will work. At least on documented case of the game doing nasty things to a person's computer. Feel free to play with the source code.

More Info: TIGSource Thread

Game: X-Treme Sequoia Lightning Blast

While enjoying the Sequoia National Park from a lookout platform, a woman founder her hair rising from her head. Amused, her brother took her photograph. Five minutes after they left, lightning struck the platform, killing one person and injuring seven.

Based on the best-selling novel Fundamentals of Physics Sixth Edition, X-Treme Sequoia Lightning Blast reveals the truth of that day in an new interactive experience. When lightning strikes the platform, time freezes from everyone except you. Now you have no choice if you want to escape. Dodge, deflect, and absorb lightning to conquer nature and restore the normal flow of time.

Status: Engine complete. Still need graphics, sound, menus

Game: X-Treme Linear Hotplate Simulator

XLHS is a simple game about the nature of the universe and curvature of space. It places the player in the role of a metal bug on a unique hotplate; the hotplate is cold in the center and hot at the edges. As the bug moves to different areas,  it does not notice the different temperatures and corresponding changes in its own size. For the bug, the shortest distance between two points  on opposite sides of the hotplate (a straight line) is a curved path.

The title screen is a bit old. Just imaging that it says "Second Law Games" instead of "Macrosoft Etheration."

Add"church.mp3" for music.  Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden has a nice one.

Status: Complete

Download (Windows): XLHS

Game: BLDNG MAN

I still have nightmares...

I see the cave, the green monster. I am running with feet of lead and a dying 
flashlight. Behind me I here my best friend screaming in agony and in my mind's 
eye, I see bone break and flesh tear, and then see his arm on the ground. Then 
it happens.
I look back.
Just for an instant, I look back.
And when I look forward again, my hair swings out in front of my eyes, and I 
don't see it, and then I am falling, hitting my head on rocks, bashing in my 
hair follicles...
And that's where my nightmare ends.
it doesn't make it to the part where the rescue party finds my half dead at the 
bottom of that pit.
it doesn't make it to the part where they don't believe me when I tell them 
about the green monster.
it doesn't go as far as the trial, where I am found guilty of murder and 
sentenced to three months in prison.
It doesn't make it to the part where I get stabbed with a rusty shiv and lose a 
kidney.
It doesn't go that far because nightmares never get better. Only worse.

I am

Balding Man

BLDNG MAN first appeared as a joke trailer in 2004, but by popular (not really) demand, I have started working on figuring out how to make a game out of it.

Status: Still figuring out how to turn it into a game.

Game: Bullet Hell and PlatClimber

These two games are based on the GLAS engine created for the TIGSource codeblocks competition.

The first is a bullet hell platformer with unlimited double-jumps. The goal is to survive. You get more points-per-second for maintaining a higher elevation and an extra 1000 points for touching the ceiling. The final score is found in stdout.txt

The second is a simple platformer inspired by Mole's Quest. The goal is to climb falling platforms to the top of the room in the shortest time possible.

Status: Complete

Download (Windows): Gravity Hell, Platclimber