A couple more variants..

If you use just rectangles, it doesn't work out well


Mixing ellipses, rectangles and polygons gives the best results yet at only 500k generations.

Last couple of days I've spent a lot of time fiddling with game play, adding new rules and tuning the AI. It's all starting to come together. As a bit of a relief tonight I added a bunch more international teams and pixeled them all up (strips and flags). This is the first game where the pixel art is all from me (albeit aided by follow the templates for proportions and colours provided elsewhere).

Here's the new team selection:

It's playable and quite a bit of fun. The AI isn't up to much but can win on the odd occasion. Just got to do the framework port to Android and I'm set for feedback. Getting distracted with tiny mash ups like this isn't good for my main project though :(

Here's a new little hack creation thing, it's called:

Game design help from Måns Olson.
Official Game Naming Expert: Dave Watts

Check out the applet on the main Chewb Page

Believe it or not, I'm still working on a game... some 3 weeks later. Here's the current screenie:

Combat is working now, though all my party keep getting killed as you can see above. Inventory is also sorta coming along:

How long can I keep going on the same game idea? Time can only tell.

I've just put the last levels into my final (?) 4k entry for this year's competition. Putty Shuffle is a 16 level block sliding puzzle game which incoporates the putty merge/split mechanic from my previous creation, Putty Puzzle.

I reakon it's a better more approachable version, though the visuals arn't as cute due to the 4k limit. It's applet based on the Putty Shuffle website and looks a bit like this:

So, that brings it to three entries for the year. Not bad for someone who wasn't going to enter at all this year. Check out the other two below (they both need resonably decent machines to run I'm afraid):

Keggle

4x4K

Think thats it for this year though... maybe.

My second entry for the 2009 Java 4K contest is ready to play. It's called Keggle after the the game that it's based on, Peggle.

You can either play it via Webstart here or go over to the Keggle Website to play as an applet and get some extra info.

Woo hoo for 4k games, it's so much fun!

Got my first 4k game out of the way. The aim was to:

a) Implement a 4K game to get going, I like to write more than one for each contest.
b) Write a physics system from scratch instead of porting and extending others work
c) Have fun

The first game has worked out ok, check out 4x4k. It's a simple terrain climbing truck game, balance the truck as it goes up steep slopes and complete the courses as quickly as possible. It's not turned out as fun as I'd hoped but it was a good test case for building the physics engine.

So, I used that verlet physics stuff to build a simple response simple based on primitive line/circle collision detection. The world is spatially culled, constraints are supported, restitution and friction all work correctly. I set the arbitrary goal of getting the basic physics fitting under 2k leaving 2k for the game. It came in at about 2.2k, so I had room to make the game look pretty (for a 4k entry).

All in all, a) check, b) check, c) check. Don't think it's a winner, but on to the next entry!

Markus Persson, author of Miners4k, brings us another tiny masterpiece in the form of Breaking the Tower. This amazing little game was his entry for the 48 hour Ludum Dare contest. The game plays a little like Settlers, or Black and White - i.e. it's about managing a bunch of peons to achieve a goal, in this case "breaking the tower". If you don't mind slower paced games, check this out - it really is a lot of fun packed into a tiny package.

License: Freeware
Developer: Markus Persson
Status: Complete

Sparx is a great little shooter project from Jacob Jerrik. Control your claw with WASD and aim with the mouse as hordes of enemies attack - watch the sparks fly as you blast the hell out of them. It's still in progress but whats there now is already fun. Pure Java 2D by the looks of things which makes it doubly impressive in my books.

License: Freeware
Developer: Jacob Jerrik
Status: Work In Progress