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.

Roach Roundup for Windows
Roach Roundup for Linux

And that single error message, dear readers, is the only thing between you and roach killing nirvana. This is driving me crazy, I’ve got the engine done just in time and I can’t compile it for Windows because of a linker hiccup. Wonderful. It’s way too late for me to continue beating my head against it, though, so I’ll get it compiled up as soon as I have the time and can figure out why ming is choking.

All told, though, I don’t know that it’s that big of a loss if it’s a day late. There still aren’t any sound effects, or music, and I really doubt there will be. The month is up, and for as much as I think it would be cool to extend this project as I talked about doing a few posts ago, it’s tempered by even parts of wanting to get back to work on Muse. I’ve learned a lot while working on this project. Here are just a few of the highlights:

1. Don’t attempt to design your game by typing coordinates into the source. You should use some sort of visual editing tool, preferably one that lets you edit scripts right into it. The less you have to touch the engine source, the better.
2. Use those scripts. C++ is not a good choice for the game logic most of the time, keep it to engine logic.
3. Create either your assets first, and then your code, or create your engine first, and then fill it with assets. Doing both at the same time is tricky.
4. Don’t put off verifying that compiling to windows works until the night of your deadline!
5. Don’t get stressed out about going halfways on some items of a one-month prototype.

So, yeah. In some ways, this whole experiment went better than I expected, and in some ways, it went worse. I would have liked to have gotten some more polish into the game, and some sound, but considering how badly I allowed it to billow into having menus and an intro story and everything, I’m not sure I would have had time to do both anyway.

So that’s that. I’ll post builds for Linux and Windows in a few days when I have the chance to get ming working on windows, and then it’s full speed ahead on getting enough of Muse done to put out a demo of that. Hopefully a few months at most.

Fixed it. Anybody notice the difference on the timestamps between parts one and two of this post?

I have yet to find a problem that exposing your frustration to others won’t fix :P. Humble pie FTW.

Have you ever noticed how the seemingly simplest of problems often turn out to the the hardest to debug? I mean, how hard could it be to make a roach run along a wall? Easy, right? Right?

Right?

I am so not having fun right now.

I’ve been busy the past week. Text writers, rug barriers, roach traps, oh my! Although the rug still needs it’s real texture painted, the one you see below is just a placeholder. And, I think I’m going to finish more or less on time. The more being that the engine is pretty much done, and you can menu your way from start to finish. The less being, well, there probably won’t be any levels -_-. I honestly didn’t budget any time in my original design for doing levels, as the plan had been just to use some sort of random/procedural generation for the rooms. The problem with that is, it’s not much fun defeating random rooms. Sometimes you get lucky, and everything is laid out just so, and you clear the room easily. Other times, you get frustrated because the room is quite literally impossible to beat. So I think that while the design concept and engine are rock-solid (that was the purpose of the game-in-a-month exercise, after all), without a human touch the game is little more than an (possibly) interesting tech demo. It needs human crafted stages to really bring out the best it can be, as besting another human’s creation is by far superior to simply getting lucky and occasionally defeating an aimless machine.

So what does this mean for the future? The long and the short of it is, I’m ready to take this game beyond the prototype stage. My initial fears that the mechanics would be too clunky and cumbersome to be fun have proven to be completely misguided. I’m getting a very real kick out of guiding these roaches to their final resting places via the lights. Keeping track of all the trajectories from the lamps and working them in such a way that the roaches go the way you want is not only mentally massaging, it also requires very quick decisions due to the fact that even if you completely turn out the lights, the roaches really only wait long enough for you to collect your scattered mind before moving lazily onward. And that’s if you’re lucky. It’s like a really weird mix of the feelings that I get when I play shmups and puzzle games. Smart, but with these really weird adrenaline surges every time you just barely manage to keep a rogue roach from scurrying under the couch, but still manage to keep the rest of them on track.

So here is the modified schedule. I will still be releasing a demo on Saturday showcasing what I’ve done so far and allowing people a chance to give me some feedback as well as some testing. After that, I’m going to take a few more weeks to create some hopefully stimulating room designs that will provide a variety of challenges and keep an average gamer busy for several days. I’ll also add more detail and visual/aural stimulus where appropriate. The last project I did, my editing tool Splashmap, was “completed” in roughly a month. It was serviceable, but hardly what I would call polished or even particular easy to use. An extra month later, however, and it went from night to day (except for the lack of undo/redo, I really should go back and add that). I hope to have the same kind of quality improvement with Roach Roundup. And who knows, I just may just find a better title yet again :).