FBGD Numbers Competition (June 2014 – August 2014), 250 $ 1st prize

[Clay Dragon]

I finally done something about my entry, reduced the complexity to make something simpler but addictive...  As you can see, I'm working on the battle engine mostly the design of that battle engine. Yes, there are some details I have to work up some more. I wasted so much time with the elements cards symbols (earth, wood) especially about their colors since I just discovered last week that FreeBasic offers so much more than only 256 colors!

But now I will start to code and present you with a playable battle engine as soon as I can. (I'm helping a friend in need right now... the sooner things will get smoother with her the faster I will present you with that battle engine!)

[ssjx]

Update (v0.4) : http://ssjx.co.uk/windows/numeria.php

Main change is that everything (game + puzzles) can now be done using the keyboard now. A few minor tweaks/fixes too.

Thanks for looking!

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Hello everyone. One week to go. Thank you for your contributions so far, but it's time to start wrapping up your entries.

I would appreciate you latest reports and estimates of completion. If you have a completed entry to show already, I recommend uploading and sharing before the deadline, because any pre-release feedback can help.

Cheers!

[Clay Dragon]

Since my last post I didn't found any time to work for my entry so I decided to resign, I'll see you next year guys!

Clay Dragon

Edit: "Can't wait to see and play your entries, though!"

[landeel]

I have added a "puzzle mode" to Numbezzled, I'm in the process of creating levels for it. My final buid will be available soon.

[ssjx]

Update (0.4b) : http://ssjx.co.uk/windows/numeria.php

Minor stuff - bug fixes, nicer title screen! Thanks for looking!

[Ryan]

I've been on the lookout for free tiles I could use to make an attractive map for a while to no avail. I finally decided to purchase some from GameDev Market, a new portal for buying / selling art and music for indie games. Great for prototyping, and they just got a new top down tileset that worked great for me. I used its sign template to create my scoring points, though ultimately I'd like for them to appear as either cities you're conquering or resources you're developing.

It still needs sound effects for cursor navigation / domino placement, but it's at least pretty to look at now. fyi, the bushes are purely for looks, no gameplay mechanic attached to them. I still haven't implemented ssjx's suggestions (sorry!) but I will in the next update. This one was all about visual improvement.

I fixed a domino placement bug (horizontal dominoes were able to be placed up and left of any other domino regardless of the numbers matching) and implemented a new scoring mechanic - if you use a double domino to cover a scoring point (e.g. a 2:2 or 3:3) then you score double points. This should make for higher scores and give you a reason to hold off on scoring while you work your way through the draw pile.

Screenshot and new demo attached!

[ssjx]

Excellent game! Scored 39!

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Damn, I closed to program before registering my score. Excellent concept, btw.

I was expecting not to be able to place the dominoes on the bushes. Also, I think I can connect to a domino on the opposite side of the map. This is intentional or? Maybe it was the last available space on the map where I could place my last domino.

[Ryan]

I was worried about that w/ the bushes seeming to be impassable. Obstacles may actually be an interesting mechanic to tease out.

I've since added a modal dialog that I can use to give rules at the start of a game for now, and it'll show your victory score when it detects you've completed a level. I'm not sure if I'll have time to determine if you're out of moves or not - the codebase wasn't built in such a way that it'd be easy to cycle through the board and find available places for dominoes to be dropped. I'll have to nail that in a future refactor.

The modal will give you a quit confirm (unless you actually X out the window) as well.

@ssjx, do you have a quick tip on how to take a screenshot? Is it just a simple bsave?

@Lachie, it actually appears there's a bug that would allow you to play any tile snug up against the edge. Looks like just a simple logic error where I had a hole in my "CheckDomino()" function - it's a falsifying check, so it'll return TRUE unless any of the myriad IF statements return FALSE first. Will fix in a minute.

For a .3 release I'd like to get high score saving so we know if we're actually improving our scores. I just played seed 1000 again (turns out it's actually one of the really fun seeds to play) and managed to score the double 3, 4, and 5! I may try to find more productive seeds now, as 57 may be the best I can do in here for a while.

[Ryan]

Well, I decided sleep wasn't in the cards tonight while I worked on some client work and decided to churn out a 0.3 release before turning in. This release includes the bug fix Lachie pointed out and a few new features:

• Use 'g' to toggle the grid on / off (see screenshot).
• Use 'd' to discard your hand and draw new dominoes (also in the screenie; play seed 1001).
• New count for the number of dominoes remaining in the draw pile. I'd like for this to be more visual in the future, but this was just a quick fix.
• High scores are saving / loading more or less properly; I went for a really simple storage system that just continually appends new high scores per seed to a text file without bothering to remove previous scores for the same seed.
  

No undo yet, ssjx, but that's the only remaining substantive feature I'll add to call this complete. As time permits I'll see about sound and music. I'll also add in a quick set of instructions for the first time the game is opened that will be accessible via '?' later on if needed. The readme has all the keys for now.

Oh, and I got 47 on seed 1001 if anyone wants to challenge me. 

[Ryan]

Sorry, I hit an upload maximum on that last post b/c of the captions in the screenshot. I've attached Dominionoes v0.3 to this post.

Oooh, and note to self, I meant to make the high scores versioned so if I ever update the game building algorithm I can ignore scores from previous versions so the high score is only for the current version of that seed.

[ssjx]

Wow, you've been busy overnight! Not sure if you've already included it (not had a chance to check the new version!), for a screen shot i just add:

Code: [Select]

if inkey="s" then bsave "screen.bmp",0


[Ryan]

Ahh, great, thanks. Will get it into the next update.

[Ryan]

Implemented a fast screenshot that catalogs them by seed with an incrementing suffixed (i.e. seed-1000-1.bmp, seed-1000-2.bmp, etc.):

Code: [Select]

#include 'vbcompat.bi'

Sub SaveScreenshot()
 
  Dim As Integer i = 0
 
  Do
    i += 1
  Loop Until FileExists("screenshots/seed-" + Str(current_game.seed) + "-" + Str(i) + ".bmp") = 0
 
  BSave "screenshots/seed-" + Str(current_game.seed) + "-" + Str(i) + ".bmp", 0
 
End Sub

Here's a screenshot of me losing.

(Converted to .png for compression.)