Just Photoshop.  :) 

I would draw a rough image first on one layer and then use four more layers to breakdown the image into slices.  I think I've started working out a lot of how to control the difficulty and this concept but it is a little time consuming to generate the images.  This game turned out better then I thought it would.  Strange thing about a puzzle game like this is that I had no idea how hard it would be or how fun it might be because I knew all the image slices.  So, basically I had to have some good quick feedback from people before the deadline.  The feedback helped me order the images roughly easy to hard.

Thanks for playing!

I made a new game this weekend!  It was for the mini Ludum Dare #7 competition.

I had 48 hours to create a game about the theme Cryptozoology.  I decided to make a little puzzle game:

[crypto-screenie3.jpg]

You can download the game here:

Works for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (source available as well.)

CONCEPT:

You’ve received 4 scrambled images of possible cryptids:

Use your Crypto-Computer ™ to unscramble them!

You have 1 minute to complete your task before the
evidence is lost forever. You will receive a
30 second bonus for each cryptid you discover.

Each cryptid image is made up of 4 individual pieces.
Unscramble each cryptid by clicking on the numbered boxes
to rotate a distinct piece of the puzzle image.

* Left mouse button for clockwise rotation.
* Right mouse button for counter-clockwise rotation.

Sweet!  I can't wait to check out all the new changes you've been working on for 7.12  !!!  You rock Julian.  :)

yes-- this game is very hard.  :)  That is funny you were playing it to debug the timing glitch.. hehe. 

Anyway to manually set/overide the window.mouse_x and mouse_y vars? 

Basically I'm trying to 'send' the mouse cursor to a different location / focus when certain buttons are pushed etc.  Can't seem to find a way to do this yet though.

if looping and pausing are added, well that is just great!

thanks for the follow up and the font info Julian! 

Finally got a Mac OS X and Linux (well, just the source heh!) release of the current version of this up over at my site: 

http://hybridmind.com/games/monorail-work-in-progress/

I even finally went through the process of GPLing and CCing it which was a great learning experience!

don't know how easy it is to mod this forum but I've had great luck implementing invisible captchas. They aren't even really captchas but implement this concept:

http://danbenjamin.com/enkoder/form

The above link will have other links to implementing custom stuff-- I just use their form to generate my field/key data and then plug it into the templates and backend logic to make sure there is a match. The quick story on how it works is that rather than mess around getting users to enter hard to read texts (we are just evolving better OCR!) or making humans do simply math (has anyone thought that bots can't do math? ;)   ) why not just make sure there is a javascript engine running?  Its a very simple and brilliant concept that I've found blocks almost 100% of spam bots.  It works by including a hidden form field that needs to be decoded via browser javascript.  Only really drawback in practice is that users have to have javascript running but you can always have the backend kick back a message that tells them that when they submit the form.  They can enable it and then disable it if they are really security conscious.  Anyway, most people need javascript these days it would seem. 

This helps a lot, thanks!  I think your explanation about the way you think of 0,0 to 800, 600 working makes a lot of sense.  I just was never suspecting it to work that way.  But, visualizing it as drawing pixels from the "edge" of 0,0 to the "edge" of 800, 600 makes me get why it is behaving that way.  Thanks for the example code.  It correctly runs on windows and doesn't leave a black line.  I was always knocking -1 off my dimensions and getting the black line because of the way I was thinking about it.  I never noticed until I was also drawing bitmaps that were so much wider than the screen width that it started to fill the last pixel on the right that I had left blank on my bottom most quad layer.  Rock!

Not sure I'm understanding how you are answering my question.  Are you saying that I'm seeing this "undocumented feature" because I'm trying to write a quad from 0,0 to 799,699..  and also writing out a bitmap that starts at 0,0 but is in effect 1600x600 dimensions thereby hitting the 'exclusive lower right coords' and that is why I see the 'line' of 1-pixel wide black?

Sorry I'm having trouble getting what you're telling me! ;)  If we keep having prob I will post a test program to demonstrate what I mean in case you aren't understanding me.  Thanks for the reply!

Thanks for the reply and information, I totally understand! In the meantime, if anyone else following this thread has some tiny example code of anything related I'd love to see it.  I will likely mess around anyway but code always helps.  Cool that this can be done in Gosu- I can't wait to try out some 'additive' effects in my games now.

Working on a recent ruby/gosu game I happened to notice that the window I'm creating of dimensions 800x600 isn't quite accurately respecting those dimensions from what I can tell.  It would appear that I can display a quad that actually goes from 0,0 to 800,600 and see it.  In otherwords, one would assume counting from 0 that you could only write to coord 799 in an 800 width display.  I've noticed this because I am both writing a quad layer to the background most z-layer and then rendering some bitmaps over top on the same z-layer which are wider than 800 pixels.  This in affect showed me a black line where my underlying quad wasn't quite covering.  Any thoughts on when you create an 800x600 window in gosu window init that it is really making it 801x601 ?  That is what it looks like.

nice!  those images and vid look sweet.  Any chance anyone here could post some code examples of how this is done?  I had no idea gosu could do something like this.  Are you using some special libs or rmagick?  Anything you'd want to share would be MOST appreciated!  ;)  Heck, just code is fine with me-- don't need a formal tutorial or anything.  Just thought I'd ask.  Great work either way.

Hey.. that's a great idea for a temp fix, thanks!  What I did for the Monorail game was since it was supposed to be a short level per the compo requirements, I just made my loop file larger then the level length... ;)    Used up more disk and transfer space of course, but fine for a quick deadline fix.

I'll have to check out that mod plugin you've mentioned. 

P.S. good chatting to you in the #ludumdare channel this past weekend about Gosu, thanks for you help!

Anyone got any tips on how you are supposed to get a small soundtrack (.ogg or whatever) to loop cleanly?

Having: @soundtrack.play unless @soundtrack.playing?  just isn't cutting it inside update function.  It sounds awful when you've built a nice tiny soundtrack loop that isn't supposed to skip a beat.  Well, I understand that you can't predict when the update loop will be around again I guess but have any of you out there solved this one yet?

All I could think of was to attempt to start again on the 'beat' by calculating the BPM of the soundtrack and syncing up its starting and (hopefully) replaying to the internal pulse of gosu.

Howdy folks!

Well, I just finished a 48hour game competition over at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/category/minild/minild-6-minild-2/ for the "Mini" LD #6 January 9th-11th, 2009 and I want to post the result:

You can view the specific dev blog notes of this project over on my Ludum Dare page at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/tag/train/

Here is a link to the final post: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/01/11/monorail-final/

Here is a link to the current game page with Win/Mac/Linux downloads: http://hybridmind.com/games/monorail-work-in-progress/

STORY:

You are the Hero trying to reach the head of a runaway train to get to the locomotive.  You start at the caboose and work your way along fighting off the bad guys who have taken the train over. You have to be careful not to fall off the train cars or get swept off the left side of the screen with a disconnecting train car.  Also, don't get shot!  You can get hit 3 times before you die.

CONTROLS:

* Use left and right arrow keys to move, Z to jump, and X to shoot.
* Use Game pad stick and button 1 to jump, button 2 to shoot.

BUGS / FEEDBACK:

I'd love to hear any bug reports or feedback as I'll be developing this game for a while longer still.  I listen to all suggestions and do work on these projects long after the compo deadline.  I will likely post an updated version before too long that is post-compo.

Thanks for providing further information Julian!  Hope that 'duh' wasn't because I asked something too stupid..!  ;)

This looks really polished!  I watched the you tube video and that made me wonder:  Hima, what are you using to record your app/sounds into movie?  I would like to do that I think as a way to demo a project for people w/o them having to download first in case they just wanna take a quick glance or in case they don't have the OS or setup etc and still wanna see my game. 

I tried downloading your game but that file sharing site keeps timing out on the download for me.  Will try again later.

Thanks for that link Julian.  On this topic- it seems mysterious to me that the following works:

I had courier working under Gosu by just originally doing:

@font = Gosu::Font.new(window, "Courier", 20)

The mystery to me is that I don't actually have a font file name named "Courier".  In /windows/fonts the filename is called "cour.ttf".  How did Gosu know to pick the right font?  Is there some kind of abstraction layer?  Is this an OS level thing that correctly found it?  Is it reading from the "name" of the font and not the "filename" ?

Anyway, good points on the whole legality of distributing fonts!  I think you are right that I should just use web safe fonts.  I just want to understand how Gosu will lookup the font names so I know how to call the fonts in a Gosu::Font.new call so that they grab the right web safe ones.  Any tips?

Thanks!

That would be too bad if it is abandoned, I really love it's features.  Are there any other utils with it's feature set that anyone here has tried? 

Thanks for the tip Hima-- I guess I hadn't really thought about just including fonts I want to use right in my /media directory.  Seems to work great though!

Hima,

I had the problem with rubyscript2exe that the link you posted was supposed to solve.  I also googled and found a whole bunch of suggestions but none did the trick until many hours passed.  I eventually discovered this link:

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/170355

I encountered the issue when I upgrade my winxp box recently to the latest version of the ruby one click installer.  The link above details that there was some kind of security patch which breaks something and you get that "attempt to modify frozen string error". 

The solution that worked for me was to uninstall the latest version of one-click and go back to using version ruby186-26.exe which is ruby-1.8.6-p111

I really like rubyscript2exe and was happy to be able to get it working again.  I emailed the developer of rubyscript2exe but didn't get any response on this issue either as far as attempting to alert him to maybe providing a possible work around so that people could use the latest version.

Julian and others,

Any recommendations on how to deal with unknown availability of fonts on systems?  I had been just sticking with Gosu::default_font since I saw a doc comment that it would most likely work on all systems.  Recently though, I became frustrated with the default font because it is not a fixed width font so high score tables where getting really ugly looking.  So, I load up "courier" now and that works on my windows box but I'm not sure what fonts / font names are used over win/ mac / linux etc.  Is there anything thing I can do with regard to getting a reliable fixed-width font?  Can you distribute with a font?  Is there by chance a call to Gosu::default_fixed_width_font..?  (joke) ..  Anyway, just looking for any tips anyone would want to provide on how you normally deal with fonts in Gosu / Ruby.

Thanks all!

Julian,

Thanks for the quick response!  I haven't had a chance to play your LD13 entry yet but I plan on it.  I only managed to play about 50% of the entries so far because a lot of crazy stuff happened in my life / schedule past two weeks but I'm trying to finish up as many as possible as I know I appreciate the feedback and ratings too!

As far as the sound issue goes:

I know I have suspected the sound subsystems and have made various attempts to 'mess' with them in the past.  I originally used sdl_mixer I believe as I hadn't compiled fmod support.  After running into issues I then attempted to get fmod working as I suspected it might give me better performance.  I was never sure for certain whether I got it right though so I may try again with the info you have provided.  Thanks!

As far as the font issues goes:

What you suspect would make good sense in the behavior I'm seeing.  It is performing so awful that something HAS to be wrong somewhere (could totally be something wacky on my laptop of course) but I know that my computer should be able to display a font.... with all the sprites I push around with Gosu without speed problems I shouldn't be having the game frames / updates halt for almost 1-2 seconds just to display a simple line of text..!! ;)

For now I'll just shift my dev over to my windows box and watch for any updates on this thread / topic / Gosu. Thanks again for all your efforts!

Heya everyone, (Hi Julian, this is HybridMind from the Ludum Dare community)

Was wondering if anyone might have some ideas or suggestions regarding some issues that are really dogging me when I am developing and running my Gosu projects under Ubuntu.  I'm am not 100% certain that these issues are Gosu's fault mind you but I have only noticed them while playing Gosu games.  The same issues never occur while running the identical code under Windows.

The two major issues I experience under Ubuntu/Ruby.  (same prob on Gosu versions 7.8.5 through 7.11) (same prob on last couple of Ubuntu releases)

* I experience half-second lag for the first 30 seconds or so of playing a game each time any sample.play event happens.  These eventually smooth out and seem to be fine after awhile. Works fine under windows.

* I experience about a 1-2+ second lag anytime a new call to the font.draw routine happens.  This has basically made most things I'm trying to develop crawl to a halt and I have not been able to get to the bottom of this.  Works fine under windows.

I had experienced the issue with the sound lag for a lot longer than the font problem.  This seems a more recent event.  I am not doing anything weird or non-standard that I know of.  I am following basic procedures for font and sound calls.  I try where possible to use @@vars in classes to open only one copy of sound sample or font across identical classes etc.

Any help would be great as this is really discouraging me from being able to develop away from my windows box as my linux laptop is what I use most often to dev on.  Thanks all!