This updated version of Against the Wall includes two destinations (lift station and a settlement), clouds, xbox controller support, overhauled chunk generation, an improved save system, three new brick types (static, short, medium), and a number of other bug fixes and tweaks.
A webplayer version is not available at this time. This game works on Windows PCs.
Made for the Ludum Dare #21, the theme for this competition was "Escape." It was created in just over four days. This is the post competition version of the game.
This game was created for the Ludum Dare #21 in two days, the theme for this competition was “Escape.”
So it's been a full week. The game was down for several days after a move from one web host to another. The computer I checked it on loaded a cached version of the game file, leading me to believe it was still up! Whoops.
Also, I went to the Unity Meetup in NYC and met a few other indie developers. Specifically the folks at Muse Games Dave and Janet Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games. The Gilberts are indie game developers that mostly work in Adventure Game Studio (Dave in particular has a decade of experience with it). They recently published a game called Gemini Rue, which everyone should check out. Here is a video of Gemini Rue by GiantBomb which goes through that title's gameplay.
Muse Games makes an assortment of different games. I beta tested their latest title Creavures several months ago, and received a spot on the credits! They are currently working on a persistent multiplayer diesel-punk airship combat game called Guns of Icarus: Requium (that was a mouthful). I've seen some of the in-development content and spoke with many of the people working on it, and let me tell you that I am more than a little enthusiastic for it.
I spent the rest of my time rewriting the level saving scripts. I took a lesson or two from Minecraft and dumped my cache, opting to save the game on my hard-drive rather than constantly store all world data in the memory. This took a lot of optimization to run seamlessly. This is perfect for downloaded copies of the game, but for games playing in the web browser, saving may not be possible given all the disc space that is needed!
Also, all the textures are now stored in texture atlases with DXT1 compression. This means that I can have chunk meshes with multiple textures and limited draw calls (All stationary bricks are grouped into 64×64 objects called chunks). The compression causes some problems with the mipmaps, however, causing unsightly black splotches in the distance. There's a way around this, but it means manually creating the atlases. Not fun.
There's more, but I'm rather exhausted now. Got to wake up early tomorrow and continue this quest.
Today was spent entirely on writing a sound manager that instantiates a small number of audio sources that are repeatedly used, for footsteps, the movement of bricks, etc. I've also given the world an ambient wind sound for good measure.
Here is a screenshot. The lines on the bricks currently indicate the four levels that you can pull a brick out from the wall. The player will eventually be able to punch bricks into the wall, though this will take me a while to implement.