So my comment on Pizza Time's Monster Mash ideas and my love of Earth Defense Force 2017 has led me to

EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 1817

A KNP effort. The game play lacks that certain something, but it has some elements I dig:
* Robotron style controls
* Looming Alien Ships with Shadows
* Bugs who track you down but have to move around the buildings

I think some of these elements could be used in future games.

In the unlikely chance I can't make it to the KotM I'd like this to count as my entry...

Dance of the sugardum fairies... for the Klikth Day of Klikmas or whatever that KotM is...
you'll think you're getting mad at frustrated at the idiot fairy, but really you're getting mad at the idiot programmer and his bad excuse for a physics engine!

drag gifts to help the fairy jump and get to the christmas star.

For no particular reason other than a bit of annoyance at the difficulty of this game
(actually I got through, because I think for some reason my home computer was playing it a bit below speed) and because I actually like "flap" mechanics (see: Joust, and Balloon Flight), I made a parody mashup of Flywrench and my own Atari 2600 JoustPong in the thrill-a-minute world of: flywrenchpong
(You can also play it online).

It also features a homemade electronic soundtrack! (Made by slowing down and "wa-wa'ing" an Atari 2600 Supercharger .wav)

I think if I died tomorrow, the # of people who "get" the joke because of familiarity with both indy game flywrench and atari homebrew joustpong would go down by about 33%.

And yes, I made this exact same post nearly on TGQ and indygamer.blogspot.com.

So here is my first processing game w/ SFX.

I call it draggin.

It's based on Keith Peter's follow3 demo for processing: http://processing.org/learning/topics/follow3.html
I just liked the movement feel of that, but I'm not sure I did a great job of capturing that in the game.

You drag your draggin around defending yourself and your precious apples from marauding dot villagers.

You can also play it online here:
http://kisrael.com/2007/12/04/

So one disadvantage I have when I use Processing instead of KNP is not having a good sprite class. It's easy enough to put an image or a box anywhere on screen, but collision detections have been a pain in the ass. Also, there's some part of me saying that bounding-rectangle collisions might end up being too limiting. So I want to add a reasonable sprite class to my arsenal before sitting down to KotM.

First attempt is this:
http://kirkjerk.com/features/java/dev/sprat1/

I've decided I'm making sprats instead of sprites. It's catchy and one less letter to type.

geek notes, it first does bounding rectangle comparisons, and then pixel by pixel "alpha channel" comparison, so a transparent gif (or PNG I think, haven't tried) will do what you expect. Then I threw in the idea of manual multiple frames, since a collision algorithm will have to know about that.

I now want to make a "basic physics" sprat, w/ a bit of intertia and what not, the kind of thing that ends up being in at least half of my 'wrecks.

If all goes well I'm going to port one of my old visual basic programs as a proof of concept.

If all goes really well, I'll start seeing about a very basic platform engine.

(I think the biggest bummer with KNP is how few options you have for enemy movement. I kinda wish they put on some basic "Platform" and "8 direction" or whatever movement.)

AND BE WARNED -- I JUST FOUND A KICK ASS SOUND ENGINE FOR KNP^H^H^Hjava processing - sorry for the confusion SO MY KOTMS WILL BE EMERGING FROM THE MIME-LIKE, SILENT GHETTO THEY'VE BEEN SITTING IN FOR SO LONG. Hell, I think THIS engine even understands MP3s! (though I don't think it does any kind of streaming, so I'm kind of afraid of it.)

So i know I spent way too much time whinging about being the only guy not writing stuff in KNP for the Pirate Kart, but still I'd like to ask the (ir)regulars here: assuming I can get to a computer in time for this weekend's KotM, should I do something in Java Processing or Klik N Play?

Both have their pros and cons. I can do more and more interesting stuff in Java, though I haven't yet worked up getting the sound libraries going. KNP is more in the spirit of what everyone's doing, and I'm more like to get the abuse of clip art and sounds going.

(at some point, I'd like to get into trying to build engines more than games. I guess I'm more of a Carmack than a Romero, if you know what I mean, or at least aspire to that.)

this is so much a work in progress it's not even funny, or fun.

So one year "rince"'s entry in the Obfuscated C Contest (I'm not your damn Google, but see http://www.ioccc.org/1993/ , the "rince" files) was a program called CABBAGE, Cellular Automata Based, Beautifully Abysmal Game Environment. I'm taking an inspiration but not an implementation (on any level, and probably losing most of the elegance) from him and trying to do something similar in java. If it works you can share really lame games just by cutting and pasting strings and I have all sorts of weird debugger ideas in mind but right now it's just a heap of Java bleh. Download and fire up processing if you want to see it; I'm posting it here to try to kick my butt into finishing it, and so I can download the file instead of having to carry it around with me when I do want to work on it.

thought I'd try a blog entry.

Fun time for KotM #4

So maybe I was cheating a bit by thinking what I'd want to do. And that was: a game based on cellular automata, specifically, John Conway's Game of Life.

(Wikipedia has a great page on that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life )

I didn't think KnP was up for it so I went back to processing.org, like I did for most of the 100-in-1. (I think I got a little intimidated by what I forgot about KnP)

I warmed up in the afternoon on this: http://kisrael.com/temp/conwayice/
that's 3D plotting and rotation of generations of Life.

I thought about trying to do a platform game, I really love the idea of unsual platform game setups (esp. because of KnPs weird and wonky default behavior... too bad it's not easy to make platform-y enemies, except ones that just walk back and forth)

But anyway, the event started, and I started from scratch, except I lifted the actual life code from elsewhere. I also tried to grab some of the movement code from http://kisrael.com/features/java/cosmicarkatamari/ -- originally the player controlled quite a bit more like the ghost, but i realized making the player constrained to the grid felt better .... )

So anyway, the game. I had some different ideas, like having multiple enemies making "bombing runs", but this kind of organically emerged. The ghost farting out random blobs worked at least well as I hoped it would, in terms of triggering "Life" events. The gameplay, grab the treasure, health depletes, is nothing too special, but I think it works, more or less. Other details: the ghost is actually using a nice transparency effect. the goal cross wasn't obvious enough so I had it flash colors.

At one point, 90 minutes into it, I thought I lost EVERYTHING of the game, but few, the processing editor unlocked.

You can also see the game online at http://kirkjerk.com/features/java/conwaywest/ and the zip is at http://kirkjerk.com/features/java/conwaywest/conwaywest.zip

If you look at some of the other games I've done in Java, http://kisrael.com/features/java/ , penultimate section, it looks like I'm developing a bit of a visual style. Just like my HTML style though, it's very utilitarian, based as much on what's easy to do than aesthetic goals... just blasting text to the screen for title and/or ending screens, and score/live read outs along the top or bottom. Plus I tend to use the gray background a lot, which is kind of a "processing" thing.

So, I really liked some of the other works this time, especially the great SFX of "Klik of the Kollossus" -- the use of a tiny character was quite striking, I always dig stuff like that. And "Assassinatrix Adventures" was right sexy.