OK: Here's the final list of the games I got:
http://www.glbasic.com/data/boardgames_compo2009.rar (http://www.glbasic.com/data/boardgames_compo2009.rar)
Did I miss anyone?
Sorry guys, it's apparently my entry that is broken. I'll resubmit it to Gernot in about 12 hours from now when I am home after work. I'll also send him the source so he can compile it himself in case it's something funny on my system.
Hi All,
Gernot is having issues with my entry, but it plays fine on my pc.
I've uploaded it to rapidshare (sorry, it was the only free host I could think of in a hurry). Would someone mind downloading it and seeing if they can play it?
If it's working the ship placement screen looks like the attached one. If it's not, it looks like this :
http://www.glbasic.com/pix/BattleShip_103_.png.png (http://www.glbasic.com/pix/BattleShip_103_.png.png)
Anyway, please try it and tell me if it works on your end or did I just waste 4 months (in which case I will NOT be happy! )
http://rapidshare.com/files/352278133/BattleShip.rar.html (http://rapidshare.com/files/352278133/BattleShip.rar.html)
Any other comments/constructive criticism welcome! =D
[attachment deleted by admin]
It doesn't work for me on Windows 7 at all. Comes up with an error message immediately - "Battleship.exe" has stopped working" :(
I found the bug. I'll send you an email. Phew!
Thanks Gernot! I owe you a beer or lots! :booze:
Ian - I don't think the problem Gernot found is anything to do with your crash. It was a display problem he found, but not a crash.
Can you please make sure you have fontsmall.png and fontsmall.png.kern in the directory with the exe? If they're missing I think it crashes. If they're there (which they should be) then I'm stumped as to the cause. If you're happy to, I'll send you the source code and you can see if it the problem is related to it being compiled on Windows XP, or whether it's something in the source conflicting with Windows 7.
Update - Ian, can you download this .exe and see if it works? Gernot recompiled it for me and I _think_ he uses windows 7.
http://rapidshare.com/files/352312664/BattleShip.exe.html (http://rapidshare.com/files/352312664/BattleShip.exe.html)
Right. The game now works with Gernot's .EXE (i did have the fonts in the same folder BTW). But...
There are graphic problems :(
Some of these may be attributed to the screen size of the game - might be larger than the screen on my laptop (See attached images), the small text looks a bit fecked.
[attachment deleted by admin]
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! >:D
The text may be having problems due to the kerning routine. I used a kerning routine off the forum and there's a few bugs in it. I haven't seen that problem before though. The only thing that may help (but I highly doubt it will) is to delete the fontsmall.png.kern file (it _should_ get recreated at startup) and see if that fixes things. I'll be writing my own kerning routine for my next project.
At least the dodgy text looks readable (though very ugly!)
It's so disappointing to find out it's not working on other people's machines when it works like a charm on mine. At least it's helping everyone else's chances of winning I suppose :(
If people like the game enough that they want to play it past the first couple of games I'll change all the text to png images and get rid of the font kerning routines entirely. If anyone wants me to put in the effort, let me know.
Thanks Ian for testing for me too, I appreciate it.
Now I have tried your BattleShips and it all works fine except for my biggest ship won't show up when I place it, it sits there invisible. The other things I guess are due to what rules you were playing against as a kid. We were not allowed to place any ship next to anything else. Nice work though!
ok, I have all games in a zip now.
I'll update the first post, OK?
Playing in progress........ 5% :-*
Quote from: Albert on 2010-Feb-18
Playing in progress........ 5% :-*
Tried all of the entries and I must say, that BattleShip, Don't be angry human, Hippos and Mastermind (and Draco ;/ ) are the best in graphics, control and playability.
Stop the thief is very interesting, hard to control. I'm sad that Parchis can't make it :(
My favorite is
Don't be Angry Human! Well executed, really good game. Enjoy.
Apologies about the roughness of my entry, I couldn't finish and had to rush out a working build.
There are some issues but you should be able to play a complete game without too much going wrong.
Couple of additions to the README...
1. The Return or Enter keys should select options, if they don't try Space Bar or mouse buttons.
2. The "Miss a Turn" sleuth card might not be working properly but try it anyway.
3. The sound effect for the subway is too long and there will always be 2 of them, either in the same thief movement or at the end of one thief move and the beginning of another. Will look at this at the weekend.
4. The AI detectives are quite good but they are not invincible, trust me.
5. There should be a congratulations sound effect when the game is won but it's broken, probably wrong format sound file.
Probably a few other things...feel free to PM me comments and bug reports.
In my opinion Mastermind is by far the best game. Its the only one that looks really polished and feels like a "real" game. I'm very critical when it comes to details, polishing and the overall feel of a game, so i was a bit dissapointed with some of the games, but Mastermind looks really really good.
The only thing i would wish for in Mastermind are drag & drop controls, i think that would give the game a better feel.
I had no trouble with the Battleship game - ran it straight from the compressed file.
Thought it was pretty good.
Excellent games...there may not be many entries but there has clearly been a lot of work put in...
Agree that Mastermind has fantastic presentation but, for me, Battleships is the most fun ;)
Superb artwork on Draco :good:
Quote from: Nobiag on 2010-Feb-18
In my opinion Mastermind is by far the best game. Its the only one that looks really polished and feels like a "real" game. I'm very critical when it comes to details, polishing and the overall feel of a game, so i was a bit dissapointed with some of the games, but Mastermind looks really really good.
The only thing i would wish for in Mastermind are drag & drop controls, i think that would give the game a better feel.
I'm not sure I totally agree with your comments, but having "played" them all now, it would appear that all of the entrants could have done with a bit more development/testing time. An interesting collection of games. Well done and good luck to all entrants. :good:
Thanks to everyone who's commented on BattleShip so far. I'm surprised at the different results I'm hearing about from the same code across multiple machines. I'm not sure what steps I can take to resolve the issues to be honest.
Keep the comments coming - feel free to post me a PM if you don't want to clutter this thread.
Quote from: Nobiag on 2010-Feb-18
Its the only one that looks really polished and feels like a "real" game.
Nobiag, can you be a bit more specific? I spent weeks on the "polish" of BattleShip and making sure it played as much as possible like a computer version of the board game - as I'm sure others did on their games. I don't expect everyone to love my game by any means, but could you go into a little detail perhaps on what you thought the games were lacking? Feel free to PM me if you want to point out the specifics for BattleShip - constructive criticism will result in better games but without the details the developers are flying blind.
Congrats to everyone who entered!
I'm sorry because my entry is a bit poor. I'm a beginner in this language and I didn't have much free time, but I'm working to release a better version after the contest. The games are very fun and they put a lot of work on it. Good luck and thanks to all contestants. :)
FutureCow: If you want to work on your game (after the compo), the network player thing was quite unstable when I plyed with Moru yesterday of the internet. Great fun, btw!
The client sometimes (often) locked up.
Hi All,
Here's my thoughts - and they're just my opinion so feel free to ignore :D
All in all some good games there, and obviously a lot of work has gone into them.
4gewinnt : A Computer player would be a great improvement as would some way to turn the sound off.
Don't be angry human - I really like the 3D board but the dice roll needs to be 100 times faster. I'd like to see it take about 1/2 - 1 second to roll the dice rather than about 5. 1 or more computer players would be great too. It's a good 3D effect though.
Draco - The graphics on this game are great. I particularly LOVE that flame effect - how did you do it?!?! The music's great too! Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to play the game. I'd like to see some more instructions - why do you turn pieces around? What do the designs on the cards mean? Can you trap other players? Particularly - how do I find a piece of gold?
GameOfTheGoose - There seems to be a problem with rolling the dice - sometimes the pieces move a totally different number of pieces. Your board looks really nice. I know you've said it's an early version of the game. For later versions you might like to think about - more than one human player, some simple sounds as the pieces move on the board, and filling out the instructions a bit. I suppose once you played it a few times you'd know what the squares meant (eg. black plane means go back to start) - but maybe you could write on each square what they do? Or put a little icon to indicate it or something?
Hungry hippos : Clicking the moving flashing spot is painful. It would be much more fun (and like the original button masher) to be able to mash a mouse button or the keyboard continually. 2 Players (or 3 or 4) on the one keyboard would've been awesome too. I assume it was designed with the iPhone in mind in which case the interface is probably works better. I love the blinking eyes - cute touch!
Mastermind : A well presented game here. Some suggestions - as you hover over a square on the board, maybe highlight which of the four position holes (the ones that get the black and white markets) that square refers to. It's missing from the help. I couldn't work it out. Based on my screenshot attached, I thought I had light blue and pink correct, but in the last one where I put blue and pink I only got one right. Am I missing something? The board looks great though I think it would be great if you could click and drag pieces on the board.
Parchis - I couldn't play see any way to play with a keyboard / mouse so couldn't test it sorry.
Stop Thief - I love the way the pieces move, that's a great effect. It's a bit glitchy with them walking off the screen and the screen not moving sometimes though. The game plays too slow for me. I think a speed setting would be a big improvement. Also, I'd like to be able to scroll the board out so I can see it
Gernot : In regards to the network game I thought I had most of the problems fixed. I knew it sometimes crashed but I would've guessed something like 5% of the time or less perhaps? The vast majority of test games I played worked without crashing - admittedly I was playing client and server on the one pc though. I'd like to see how another game has done the network side of things. I used a state machine with the server telling the client when to change states. I know it works, but it felt like there was a lot better way I could've done it.
I'm glad you had fun with it though! That was what I was hoping to hear people say about it!
[attachment deleted by admin]
Quote from: FutureCow on 2010-Feb-19
Draco - The graphics on this game are great. I particularly LOVE that flame effect - how did you do it?!?! The music's great too! Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to play the game. I'd like to see some more instructions - why do you turn pieces around? What do the designs on the cards mean? Can you trap other players? Particularly - how do I find a piece of gold?
Hi!
I made flame effect with my own little particle engine written especially for Draco. That was the first time I wrote particle engine. Tutorial used: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2609.asp (http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2609.asp)
The menu item
Rules is missing as the descriptions of all the icons in shields, I ran out of time, sorry.
Brief rules of Draco:
- The goal is to collect a specified amount of gold (you can adjust how many)
- You get a gold coin if you step into a chamber which has a shield icon with a gold coin on it.
- There are a lot of shield with various icons, like steal a coin from next/prev player, rotate or destroy a roomcard, teleport, shortcut, travelling room, controlling another player (misdirection) and so on.
- Every turn you can choose: Move your hero or Place a card from your hand to the table.
- A room's arrows must not to point against an adjacent room's arrows. You can imagine it as the Hero enters a room the gate/door is slam to and cannot return to the previous room.
The game forces you to play all the 6 players. Sorry for that, there was a serious bug, and i had to comment out the "How many players" menu. (you can see it in the source). I've catched that bug today, so I have a better version of Draco, but I can't build a full Draco game because I have only a Demo version of glBasic. And the 5 minutes time limit is a bit short to play a full Draco match. I can upload it anywhere and one can build with full glBasic license for himself.
You can check the original board game here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/23107/drakon-3rd-edition
EDIT: I've just realized that the entries in the Boardgamecompetition.rar not recompiled with the full SDK, most of them has the DEMO watermark on it.
@FutureCow
Sorry, i didn't want to offend you. I see there is a lot of hard work put into the other games. As i said, i'm just very critical when it comes to polishing and details. Your game does play like the board game, so theres not much bad stuff i could say about the gameplay. It's more the graphics that bother me.
In the mainmenu alone there are some issues in my opinion:
- The texts of the ship descriptions are positioned at a X Value of 0, so they hit the border of the window. Same thing for the headline.
- Most of the information about the ships is useless. I know it may be a nice idea to include those informations but it looks to complex on first sight and 90% of the players won't care about those numbers anyway (once they realize they are of no importance for the game).
- In addition to the last point, the info texts of the ships just dont look good. It's all in one font (no different colors, no different sizes), even the ships names. And they are placed right on the background. Oh and the ships change too fast to read all the information anyway.
- The mouse doesn't look that great either. There are little bright pixels on its edge.
- Overall the style of some buttons, fonts, the mouse, the headline of the game just doesn't fit completely.
You see its just litte things that bother me and i know many people don't care about stuff like that or at least don't write about it on the internet. Because they try to look at things as a whole and what i'm doing is often called nit-picking. But i believe that everyone recognizes those little flaws, at least subliminally. So you just feel theres something wrong.
Thats what i mean when i write that Mastermind feels good. It feels as a commercial/professional game that could be sold.
By the way: I am currently at a school (i dont know what the school form ist called in english) for graphic designers, so i am taught to see things like that and to nit-pick. ;)
Quote from: FutureCow on 2010-Feb-19Mastermind : A well presented game here. Some suggestions - as you hover over a square on the board, maybe highlight which of the four position holes (the ones that get the black and white markets) that square refers to. It's missing from the help. I couldn't work it out. Based on my screenshot attached, I thought I had light blue and pink correct, but in the last one where I put blue and pink I only got one right. Am I missing something? The board looks great though I think it would be great if you could click and drag pieces on the board.
Isn't that the point of Mastermind? That you don't know which exact field the black and white markers refer to?
The look of games have gone badly wrong somewhere. To me it's all about playability. Good clues on what you need to do, easy to understand instructions and above all, it has to be fun to play. The visualy pleasing comes so low down on that ladder that it's not even mentioned. Most games you buy now just looks like someone went crazy with the art, copying someone elses idea, slimmed it down to just half of the original game and released it as a work of art. I don't call that professional...
Quote from: Moru on 2010-Feb-19
The look of games have gone badly wrong somewhere. To me it's all about playability. Good clues on what you need to do, easy to understand instructions and above all, it has to be fun to play. The visualy pleasing comes so low down on that ladder that it's not even mentioned. Most games you buy now just looks like someone went crazy with the art, copying someone elses idea, slimmed it down to just half of the original game and released it as a work of art. I don't call that professional...
Fun is the most important thing of course, but for me those details and the look and feel of a game is part of the fun. A game that looks and feels cheap to me, has to have a very good gameplay concept with some new ideas to really entertain me anyway. And thats hard when you have games based on board games.
Ok this forum is about programming, not about game-design as a whole, i guess. You can see that just by looking at some of the games. And for One-Man-Productions they are ok and all, but this is a competition, you can win a wiz and there was plenty of time. Thats why i really expected to see more games as polished as Mastermind.
And dont get me wrong, i dont need what is called great graphics today. I like retro-style graphics for example. Programmers dont have to be great graphic artists, but when you plan to make a game all on your own, you have to work out a concept first, consider your own skills and should not set the goals too high. And then you should at least have a bit of sense for aesthetic looks and a nice feel.
oh and btw i think draco is ok too.
My work is programming, GLBasic is for my hobby and little things.
In GLBasic forum there are over 1300 users but who write are 200 plus or minus.
This is not a polemic but only 9 users made a submission and the others ... destructive criticism ?
Yes, the level of the games aren't too high but this 9 programmers have made a game and the others 191 ?
I've dedicate my spare times to programming my game and the others ?
ponder people, ponder ;-)
Paolo
I understand what Nobiag is saying, I planned to finish my game 3 weeks before the deadline specifically to add polish.
I think perhaps Nobiag is underestimating the difficulty in 1 person writing a game...I did too!!! ;)
I spent a lot of time on the graphics for the board, a lot longer than I expected and I still didn't finish...I'm pleased with the result though...it is true to the original...I also had pathfinding algorithms, CPU player AI and thief AI to write and debug...there is a lot of work in these games that is unseen.
As for time, I think it was fair, but "plenty of time" depends on the person...if you have nothing to do, yes 4 months is plenty but if you have to work, walk the dog, enjoy Christmas time can be fleeting.
I enjoyed writing this game and I hope to have a "polished" version soon. :good:
Neurox - I think you are mistaken in believing that everything said here is negative criticism. I too congratulate each and every entrant.
I know just how difficult it is to actually create something in a short timescale for a competition (I won the GLBasic comp a couple of years back). I disagreed with Nobiag about his obvious graphical snobbery, as to me gameplay is and always has been everything. However, to be fair not all of these games are fully playable, hence my comment. There are numerous bugs and design flaws throughout, but these only show how difficult it is as a lone coder to re-create a classic game in such a short space of time - I'm pretty sure that given extra time, each entry would be significantly better.
There should be no criticism here of any games here, or of the coders. Each and every one should be thanked for putting in so much of your extremely valuable time and effort to increase the number of games produced with GLBasic.
THANKYOU :)
[@FutureCow]
Quote
GameOfTheGoose - There seems to be a problem with rolling the dice - sometimes the pieces move a totally different number of pieces. Your board looks really nice. I know you've said it's an early version of the game. For later versions you might like to think about - more than one human player, some simple sounds as the pieces move on the board, and filling out the instructions a bit. I suppose once you played it a few times you'd know what the squares meant (eg. black plane means go back to start) - but maybe you could write on each square what they do? Or put a little icon to indicate it or something?
Yes, you're right.
These are all changes / additions I need to put in the next version.
When my little free time permits. =D
[@Ian Price]
No I am not mistaken, it demonstrates the constructive criticism of FutureCow, he understood clearly what is missing.
However, I'm very surprised to see so few games. O_O
I expected that some very active programmers in messages to show their prowess but ... :whistle:
Paolo
@Nobiag,
I've taken on board what you've written, thank you for the feedback. I think you may be using the term "polish" incorrectly (at least in my book anyway! =D) - to me polish is all the little details that round out a game. They're not necessarily graphics. Polish includes things like getting all your sounds the same volume, having clear and concise instructions, making sure there's no icons getting chopped off or breaks in consistency. It does include graphics, but it doesn't mean graphics.
Having said that, while I may not agree on all your points (for example, the font for all the details on the ships was deliberately kept the same so as not to draw attention to facts that are interesting (all the details there are the real details!) but irrelevant to the gameplay. They were there simply to give a feel to the game so I didn't want to bring attention to them. I do take what you've written on board though, I appreciate you going to the effort to provide the feedback, and I will keep it in mind for the next game I write.
Thank you again.
Ian, thank you for your support of all the entrants.
Quote from: FutureCow on 2010-Feb-20@Nobiag,
I've taken on board what you've written, thank you for the feedback. I think you may be using the term "polish" incorrectly (at least in my book anyway! =D) - to me polish is all the little details that round out a game. They're not necessarily graphics. Polish includes things like getting all your sounds the same volume, having clear and concise instructions, making sure there's no icons getting chopped off or breaks in consistency. It does include graphics, but it doesn't mean graphics.
i know it doesn't mean graphics, but to be honest the graphics are the only thing bad i see in Battleship. And i just realized its the same thing with almost all the other games too. So Mastermind just stuck out to me, because its fun, the gameplay is good and in addition to that the graphics are great.
- Don't be Angry Human has nice ingame Graphics, but plays too slow and i don't like the menu graphics.
- Stop the Thief is hard to control and it just crashed. So i have to admit i didn't play a full round of it. (and there are some graphic issues again^^)
Just a little example of where the graphics really affect the gameplay: In the instructions the text is hard to read, so its no fun to read the instructions, but you definitely need to read them. And its very confusing, that you need the mouse to control in the game, when you can't use it in the menu.
- Happy Happy Hippos is actually quite fun to play. But when a round ends there could be a better way to show the winner. (and well... the graphics...^^)
- Draco looks overall very good, but there are some minor graphic issues (for example the menus aren't perfectly readable because of the background and the font). Big thing is that the rules don't work, of course he wrote them in this thread now, but they would have been important for that game. Oh and btw i like some details in this game, like the jiggling(?) dungeon pieces, when you drag them with the mouse.
- 4gewinnt: Worst thing (besides the graphics) is that the game ends after one round. But i like how the game window is called "main_tetris", made me laugh :D
oh and i really do appreciate the work that was put in all the games, especially since i did not participate and i almost never finish the games that i've started. So Neurox is right, i should stop the nagging when i can't make it better.
Quote from: Nobiag on 2010-Feb-20
- Stop the Thief is hard to control and it just crashed. So i have to admit i didn't play a full round of it. (and there are some graphic issues again^^)
Just a little example of where the graphics really affect the gameplay: In the instructions the text is hard to read, so its no fun to read the instructions, but you definitely need to read them. And its very confusing, that you need the mouse to control in the game, when you can't use it in the menu.
Thanks for the feedback :good:
In fact I'm changing the control system right now...the entire game will be playable with only the mouse (hopefully ;) ).
I have not had the build I made for the competition crash yet sorry about that...can you remember what was happening? Was it human player turn or CPU turn?
As somebody who mainly writes "board games", I found this competition very interesting.
Quote from: ynbniar on 2010-Feb-20In fact I'm changing the control system right now...the entire game will be playable with only the mouse (hopefully ;) ).
sounds good :)
Quote from: ynbniar on 2010-Feb-20I have not had the build I made for the competition crash yet sorry about that...can you remember what was happening? Was it human player turn or CPU turn?
I believe it was after a cpu player caught a thief.
oh and btw: did you take photos of the games figures and cut them out?
Quote from: Nobiag on 2010-Feb-20
oh and btw: did you take photos of the games figures and cut them out?
Yes...2 reasons for this...
1. It was easy and quick.
2. I like the way they look, though I think a shadow would be good if I could make it look OK.
In fact my original plan was to use ALL the original 70's artwork from the game but it turned out I had to draw the board myself.
In the German forum people find it unfair if only 3 judges vote. So, it would be something like "Pop Idol" shows.
So, who wants a public poll instead of that?
It's a good idea, maybe.
Gernot: I thought games will be recompiled with a full SDK, but some games still contains the DEMO watermark.
I think a public poll is a good thing! The 3 jugdes are fair too!
I think Gernot should make the decision, how the voting goes!
I think the competition rules stated that Gernot would judge and 4 months down the track is a bit late to be complaining. :)
It doesn't worry me one way or the other though!
Quote from: Kitty Hello on 2010-Feb-22
So, who wants a public poll instead of that?
Hi Gernot,
for me one way or the other are equal! :|
Can we have a poll as to whether we should have a poll? :blink:
No idea. Should we have a poll?
A poll about the poll? :help:
A poll sounds fair! :booze:
"I think the competition rules stated that Gernot would judge"
agreed
Yes, IÃ,´m for it. :)
Cheers
In the interests of fairness :-
* How do you stop people registering new accounts on the forum just to be able to vote in the poll and give themselves a better score? I doubt anyone would do anything like this, but after putting in so many days and hours of work on my game I want to know that the judging is fair.
* Can you also force people to vote for a first, second and third placing to make the scoring more fair?
From what I can see the poll options on the forum do not allow this sort of granularity with the polling. For that reason I'm going to revoke my earlier comment that I don't care and say instead that I wish the voting to stick with the rules that we accepted when we entered the competition (saying the winner would be judged and not go to a public poll). At least that way I know I either won or lost because of the quality of my game and not because of a bad voting mechanism. Also, it means anyone who loses can't complain that they lost as the rules changed after the competition (and therefore there will hopefully be no arguments!)
OK, I see. Yes, I'm doing the voting internally then. Sorry for trying to bend the rules ;)
:) All good!
I just want to ensure it's fair, I hope no one holds that against me!
I agree with FutureCow. The judges is the right option, they can be 3 or more. Polling can be prone to errors with clone users or friends.