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