Glorious Wreckz Garden

IndiegameGarden's picture
gwg-screenshot.jpg

Happy Birthday Glorious Trainwrecks! In this 'metagame' you can explore and experience a selection of 6 years of history of wrecks. (Some may call it game menu or game loader: well... it's more than that.) 2300+ games included!

How to start: unzip .exe file to your desktop, or any other convenient location. (Don't run from within the .zip file!)

What to do: Use keyboard or mouse to peek around. Select a game icon to download it, then again to play it. (Hold mouse button or ENTER slightly longer than usual to do this. There must be some challenge involved!) Enjoy your garden!

Challenges: If a chosen game doesn't start at all, it's probably a Klik 'n Play game (and you don't have the KNP DLLs installed?) or a 16-bit-Windows-7-unfriendly game. Your challenge is to make it work; I didn't figure it out yet... Some games have mysterious hidden icons... Some games have mysterious cryptic description text...

System requirements: Windows XP or 7 (or 8?), average decent graphics card, DirectX (at least version 9?), XNA 4.0 redistributables, .NET 4 redistributables

Author: 
Indiegame Garden
Event Created For: 
Made For: 
An event

Comments

Smedis2's picture

Oh god this is awesome

Oh god this is awesome

SpindleyQ's picture

Woah, excellent! I assume

Woah, excellent! I assume you're using the JSON feeds?

IndiegameGarden's picture

JSON feeds! That would be

JSON feeds! That would be interesting to use, but I don't know about these yet. Any pointers?
Instead I had the time of my life scraping the website with wget and some Python scripts. (I felt like that Mark student guy in that Facebook movie, in case you've seen it. But doing games instead of girls.)

SpindleyQ's picture

Sooo it's pretty ad-hoc, but

Sooo it's pretty ad-hoc, but you can GET http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/event_list.php to get a list of events, and GET http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/event.php?eventid={id} to get the list of games for a particular event. Hopefully the JSON format is pretty self-explanatory.

GloriousTrainwrecks.exe uses them, if you want to look at some example code. (Though it's kind of messy.)

IndiegameGarden's picture

Great! That should make

Great! That should make things easier.

I don't meet

the system requirements. I'd like to see it running in action though.. It'd be great if someone posted a tube video example to show how much us less than minimum required stuff holders are missing out on.

But by my edit it looks like a lot.. Healy's tiny house, bitbot's zelda demo, that aplsos game thing, that smedis thing.. A lot is going on here. and a gent with a huge bike.. That's pretty admirable so far. Animate that picture into an animated gif to really get us the sense of what we're missing out on.

IndiegameGarden's picture

Good suggestions; a video

Good suggestions; a video was already in the plans but I was distracted by doing a (for some reason...) Windows-8-style website redesign. So I'll try to do the video bit first, then :)

unfortunately

unfortunately this seems rather buggy and unresponsive.

The cursor frequently doesn't line up with the highlighted game (sometimes the games seem misaligned too), and selecting a game is way harder to install than it should be. The directions don't seem to work, it seems I need to hold down enter for a few seconds, release it, then quickly press enter again to get it to work.

The first game I played (ghost witch), the background music for the launcher drowned out the game music.

Tried a few more games today, and the last two didn't work (and I don't think it's because they were probably knp games, since my laptop still uses 32 bit vista). They installed, but then didn't play. Seemed to bring up the image the loading screen uses for a split second before going back to the menu but it doesn't display the game title or even go black

don't get discouraged though, it just needs a lot more polish.

also, I think it should probably display the uploader instead of the author field, since a lot of people (like me) seem to leave it blank. or, display both.

ps thanks for putting one of my games in a prominent position lol

IndiegameGarden's picture

Some good suggestions! And

Some good suggestions! And agree, the polish is missing. (It's a wreck, really.) Similar issues were brought up by others. The irony is that a game loader meant to load highly unpolished games, itself should be reasonably polished, efficient and functional. Or should it? That's the sort of philosophical question that is now uncovered.

Perhaps try Indiegame Garden 7 (first icon to the right of starting cursor position) if similar problems are there. Those games in there are at least all tested once :)

The misalignment problem I didn't see yet on my machine - makes it hard to fix easily...