I’ve translated Kaiten Patissier into English for D.K., he should be releasing an English-language version in the next few days just as soon as he gets the text into the game.
For the curious/impatient, you can see the translation document here :).
Kaiten Patissier – All the bits you missed!
After entirely too long of a hiatus from this site, I’m back with my next project. And no, it’s not Muse. Again. Surprise. I guess everybody needs their own Duke Nukem/Spore clone.
It’s actually far worse that that. I’ve sold my soul to the devil and decided to create a shooter.
It’s not really a “shooter” in the generic sense, though, since you don’t really do any shooting. In lieu of shooting, the grid is now the weapon. And the only weapon. You can “shoot” pulses through it to knock enemies into each other or off of the grid completely. Larger, limited bomb-like pulses rip pretty much everything up in seconds when things get a little too hot and heavy. And destroyed enemies caused their own ripples in the grid when they explode, pushing more enemies into each other and off the edges. It gets pretty chaotic ^^.
Not really sure how far into the project I am, I’d say maybe 33% or so. A lot of it depends on how much eye candy I add later on.
Anyway, check out the screenshots below, they’ll give a better idea of what’s going on.
I got my first ever incoming link, and it’s from RUSSIA. Yes, apparently someone in Russia thought that Roach Roundup was cool enough to write about.
According to the Babelfish supplied translation, Roach Roundup is a “small, but sufficiently amusing toy”. The translation of the plot, like anything babelfish generated, is fairly amusing to read as well. I’d link it, but babelfish doesn’t seem to allow that.
Many thanks to the reviewer, this really made my day :).
The review: Логические таракашки
Roach Roundup has been updated to include music and all the other little things I left off in the initial month period because I ran out of time. You can snag it from the “Games” section on the left.
Here are the Linux and Windows builds for Roach Roundup. I finally managed to get the Windows version to link, and barely. I don’t think I’ve ever run into that kind of dependency hell before.
Only four “levels”, no sound, no music, and no gameover/success screen. Hardly an awe-inspiring release. Still I did manage to get a good bit done with the time I had over the past month, and I learned a simply ridiculous amount of useful knowledge, both from doing research during development as well as from my myriad mistakes. Next time, things will be better. It may take two or three games, but these will get fun and polished eventually, I’m promising myself that. And hey, I’ll probably revisit this in a few months when my generalized engine is done and redo it the “right” way.
As for what’s next, I’m not sure. First thing is going to be a good long nap, I’m kinda burned out right at the moment. But not too long. I’m think I’m going to start extending SplashMap into a more robust game editor in a few days after I catch my breath. Currently, it only does maps, but now that I’ve discovered Lua, I realize that with very little effort I can extend it into a full visual game editor, ala gamemaker, but one that uses OpenGL transformed sprites for everything and is tuned to do exactly what I want it to do, and very, very quickly. Most of the engine code is now in place (thanks to Roach Roundup for filling in a lot of the holes), exposing that to the mapper should be fairly easy. I realize after doing Roach that personally, it really helps me to be able to see my work as I’m doing it, bouncing back and forth between code and game design more than necessary just adds frustration to the process unnecessarily. It also makes making changes to the game design hard. Towards the end, I realized that having rooms of varying shapes would have made Roach Roundup 200% more interesting, but because I foolishly took the route of just hardcoding the room shape in instead of finishing the C++ rendering pipe for SplashMap maps, I couldn’t make the change without a prohibitively expensive amount of effort. Live and learn.
Oh, and here are the files in question. The Windows version should work fine on pretty much any 32-bit windows (95 might be a little dicey), the Linux version requires that you have the SDL and SDL_mixer libraries for whatever distribution you happen to use installed. Oh, and OpenGL drivers or else Mesa.