The Break

48-hour game for LD22

Download

Game: break.rar (2.45 MB)

Source: break_src.rar(2.33 MB)

The idea behind the game is…well…you’ll figure it out…

Controls

Left/Right – move
Z – interact
X – jump

Troubleshooting

If you have problems getting the game to run I’d suggest installing the newest XNA 3.1 redistributable and making sure you have .net framework 3.5 installed.

Credits

Game design, code, music & gfx made by Alin Baciu (bc_alin{[@]}yahoo{[dot]}co{[dot]}uk)

This game uses Box2D XNA.

Inspiration source: Ludum Dare.

Source code

Since this is Ludum Dare, the source code is available for download above.
In order to compile it, you need XNA 4 and Visual Studio 2010
The code is under the LGPL license.

Timelapse

As a small bonus, here’s the timelapse of the creation process

Peace

Towers

1 hour and 30 minutes game for 0-hour game.

Download

towers.rar (1.1 mb)

The idea behind the game is that you have a ship (crudely represented by a square) in which you fly around the city using your mouse. Some of the towers in the city are red and will fire at you. You can’t shoot back, but if you stand close to a white tower long enough, it’ll turn green and shoot at the nearest red tower.

Controls

Move around – mouse

Credits

Game design, code & gfx made by Alin Baciu (bc_alin{[@]}yahoo{[dot]}co{[dot]}uk)

Inspiration source: Ludum Dare and 0hgame.eu.

The game itself is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

And, as a bonus, here’s the timelapse:

*le demands feedback.

Peace.

As a quick refresher, my project involved adding video decode support to the open source engine CrystalSpace. Everything turned out ok, so I’m gonna talk a bit about it.

I added video decode support through Theora, and open source video compression format. The basic idea behind my implementation was to have the main thread to render the scene, and another thread to decode video frames and convert data from the  YCbCr colorspace to RGB. Then, in the main thread, data would be written to one of the buffers, and the buffers would be swapped. I used double buffering.

If I had to give a few tips on video decoding, here’s what I’d say:

1. Threads

If you can, avoid them. Threads introduce concurrency and code that ran perfectly before, will probably run slower and you won’t know why. If you can get just the right amount of processing transferred over to another thread, you’ll get a speed boost, but you’ll have to experiment quite a bit. In my project, I used threads, because you can’t just use up the main thread (which renders and updates the scene) to do your dirty work. It worked well in the end, but it was a bit of a pain in the ass. Here’s a nice article on threads.

2. Conversion

Depending on the colorspace supported by the surface you render the video frames to, you will have to do conversion. I did it on the CPU using Look-up Tables, and it worked well, but just for the 4:2:0 pixel format. 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 were too slow to be useable. My advice, if you’re doing conversion on the CPU, is to use MMX. I ran some tests on MMX during my project, and it turned out about 2 times faster. Implementing conversion in MMX using LUTs isn’t really a hard thing, but you’ll have to watch out for different compilers. asm tags are usually different for each one. Unfortunately, I din’t have time to move conversion to MMX. In any case, here’s a paper about optimizing YUV->RGB conversion. Alternatively, you can do conversion on the GPU, using a shader. Again, I didn’t have time to implement this, but here’s a reference.

3. OpenGL

The main problem I ran into during this project is that openGL doesn’t support multi threading (as far as I know, oGL 3 and up do support it). This is a big problem. You can’t access an openGL context from outside the thread it was created in. This is annoying because, if you’re processing an openGL resource on another thread, you need to place a callback in the main thread to apply the changes, which slows you down. Admittedly, the slow down isn’t that big, but you’ll see a huge difference between single threaded implementations and multi threaded ones. For example, w/o multi threading, converting th 4:4:4 pixel format (the one used for 720p vids) was pretty fast. As soon as I moved conversion to another thread, due to the synchronization induced by this, it was now too slow to be practical.

In any case, the project turned out OK, and I’m happy with it. Learned a lot of things this summer. It was a really nice experience.

This also means I can get back to game dev Gonna post a prototype as soon as I have one

Peace

Wish me luck!

Robots nicked my stuff!

33-hour game for Ludum Dare #20.

Download

Attention! If the games runs slow, you can try turning off the background by pressing U in-game. I strongly suggest you run it on a PC that’s 2.2 Ghz or higher.

Game: robots.zip (4.8mb)

Source: robots_src.zip (5.7mb)

Instructions

The strange thing in the center is a portal, and will drop items from time to time
These items are either weapons or helpers
You shoot weapons
Helpers need to be placed or used with the right mouse button
If a dropped item is not picked up, no more items will spawn until it is
If you loose all your life, you will respawn, but the portal will loose life
The portal also looses life when robots hit it
Its life is displayed at the bottom
Your life and your current weapon and helper will be displayed top-left
When the portal dies, you die

Controls

WASD-move
Left click-fire
Right click-use helper

Troubleshooting

If you have problems getting the game to run I’d suggest installing the newest XNA 3.1 redistributable and making sure you have .net framework 3.5 installed.

Credits

Game design, code & gfx made by Alin Baciu (bc_alin{[@]}yahoo{[dot]}co{[dot]}uk)

Music: morgantj – 8-bit kung fu

Sfx were done using sfxr.

Inspiration source: Ludum Dare.

The game itself is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Source code

The source code can be found in the “robots_src.zip” archive in the download section. In order to compile it, you need Visual C# 2008 and XNA framework 3.1.
The code is under the LGPL license.

Want feedback!
Peace!

Also, here’s a timelapse of how I did it!

trololol
10-hour game by Alin Baciu

Download

troll.zip (3.64mb)

Instructions

Escape

P.S. If you know how to deal with trolls, you should be fine

Controls

Arrow keys – move

Troubleshooting

If the game doesn’t work, please install Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package.

Credits

Game Design, Code & Gfx: Alin Baciu
(bc_alin[@]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk)

Many thanks to the Internet for inventing the troll face.

Music: GOBODOBRO-Cowboy waltz

trololol uses Chorus Engine (home-brew).
The game uses Box2D, Irrklang, SDL_image and SDL.
Inspiration source: Ludum Dare.
The game itself is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Feedback!
Peace!

Explod ‘o mover
4-day game by Alin Baciu

Download

e’om.zip (3.67mb)

Instructions

Use bombs and attractor bombs to move inanimate objects around.

Controls

1/2 – select bomb/attractor bomb
Left click – place bomb/drag bomb
Right click – remove bomb
Mouse wheel or W/S (+ctrl) – adjust timing
R – run simulation

Troubleshooting

Make sure you have the latest DirectX 9.0c drivers and Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package installed.

Credits

Game Design, Code & Gfx: Alin Baciu
(bc_alin[@]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk)

Music: dupoxy – lassitude

Explod ‘o mover uses Chorus Engine (home-brew).
The game uses Box2D, Irrklang, lua and SDL.
Inspiration source: Experimental Gameplay Project.
The game itself is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

All feedback will be humbly accepted!
Peace!