Haha, role playing games... I enjoy games of the exact opposite type *grin*

Most people already know I enjoy puzzle games of the DOS aera, like Lemmings, One Step Beyond, Pushover, Avish, Stoneage... won't discuss those.

I played a lot of Garden Gnome Carnage (link to Youtube), an arcade scoring game from 2007 describable with "so, you're this appartment building, and...", in both the old Gamemaker version and the newer Flash version. It may look stupid, but it can be played with skill. Despite not playing for over a year, I'm still in the GGC global highscores with at most two people legitly above me (scores not divisible by 10 must be phoney), I used the nicknames Eiderdaus, Rodent from Hell, Nagetier, and Schlagetier. Maybe there are more strong players on the game console version.

These months, I've played a lot of Quadnet (screenshots and a video), an arcade DOS game, from the later 1990's. It's one of the purest games in this genre, you're a spaceship in a rectangular play area, and avoid/shoot metal spheres flying around, their number increasing over time. The player has the normal 4 keys to move in eight directions, and then 4 more keys to shoot in four directions independently from his motion. There are youtube videos with people scoring over 2 million points, I'm way below these with a highscore of 650,000.

Since a few days ago, I'm experimenting with a new key layout in Quadnet (it allows you to remap inside the game): two rows of four keys à la < v ^ > instead of the default two inverted-T layouts. This uses 8 fingers instead of 6, omitting the middle fingers' need to jump between keys. At first, this is extremely confusing in such a fast game, and I haven't even gotten half of the old highscore yet. I've been using the new layout for a week now, and have just beaten the old-layout highscore with 720,000.

geoo has suggested alternative 8-finger layouts. I probably won't use them, but new players might consider them as serious alternatives to dual < v ^ >; they seem easier to learn. One suggestion: keep inverted-T except for the up direction, which is moved to the pinky finger. Second: keep inverted-T except for the down direction, which is moved to the thumb. The whole inverted-T should be moved up in that case, e.g. qwerty Caps, Q, S, LeftAlt, and something similar for the right hand. Both of these ideas have the hands mirror each other, unlike my layout, which is not symmetric.

Screenshot of the current highscore table:



-- Simon

Hey folks,

geoo and me are creating tutorial levels these days. I've attached what we have so far.

Rubix has already made tutorial levels in the past, but their explanations use images. These can't be translated automatically. In addition, some levels were too hard, in particular the batter and cuber tutorial.

You're encouraged to playtest the attached levels. You might even show these levels to new people who've never played such a game, and see if they get stuck. These are some design criterions we had in mind:

• Use the in-level text system. Examine an attached level to see how it works, or read doc/files.txt. Leave room at the top of the level for this text (best) or lower the level height (second best).
  
• Give several opportunities in the level to execute whatever is taught.
  
• Make really obvious whatever is to be done. If there is any non-straightforward task, explain it in the text.
  
• Make it as hard as possible to kill lixes or get stuck. "Tutorial" means a safe sandbox to experiment. (As I write this, I notice that the miner/platformer level violates this too hard.)
  
• It's perfectly fine to recap a previously learned thing (we use builders in the blocker level), but more than 2 different skills per level may already cause confusion.
  
• Make the level look good. The tutorial levels might well be the most-played levels in the whole game.
  

We're planning a group of levels to introduce all the skills (currently, we've only build levels for this), another group of levels to introduce advanced game features and unobvious skill usages (Rubix's advanced tutorials are great examples for this), and a third, smaller group with introductory multiplayer levels.

Our current to-do list (read-only)

-- Simon

Hey,

We have played way too much Commander Keen 4 and 5 on hard mode. geoo: "What?! The dopefish is now able to shoot! ... Nah, I haven't seen the devil behind it." He considered making headlines with this in a biology magazine.



There are hidden stashes with approx. 10 lifes in both game's first levels. The Keen 5 stash is only accessible via the impossible pogo trick (when standing, press pogo, then immediately hold jump) to jump a tad higher. I managed this twice without thinking, but also without knowing that this works differently than normal pogo jumping. Thus, I was unable to tell geoo how to do it, who was stuck trying for 20 minutes or so. Games shouldn't have physics like this...



The delicacy of the day: scrambled eggs with roasted ham cubes, treated as a tasty bun topping. For 2 persons, use 4 eggs and 150 g of ham, and get 4-6 buns. Use lots of margarine/oil/fat when preparing this in the pot. Simon: "I will go to the bakery, will be back in 5 minutes. You do the cooking, turn on the Brownian Motion Inducer to level 3." This was way too much for a gentle roasting on a stove with maximum setting 3, so we quickly revised this to 1.

We also prepared an open-source version of Pribinacek, a Czech yoghurt: farmer's cheese and curd cheese, mixed roughly 1:1, a little bit of milk, and then lots of vanilla sugar. This is way too heavy to eat all in one sitting, and it was also too much farmer's/cottage cheese for my taste.

-- Simon

It's particularly intricate to move back and forth between 2012-03-20 and 2012-04-15, because the terrain was converted between image formats, and a few dirs/files have changed names. Most levels won't work in the old version.

Proxima has already uploaded the .exe. Edit: See my attachment for the remaining game data.

Keep this in an entirely separate dir from the up-to-date version.

-- Simon

I just released a new version with several bugs fixed, both physics bugs and other problems. See bug tracker or github commit list for details.

I renamed bitmap/ to images/ and converted all "official" images to .png. If you have terrain which neither geoo nor me is tracking, then you have to copy that manually into images/ (no need to convert to .png). Also, I renamed replay/ to replays/, again you can copy over your old stuff (but I had physics changes in the current release, so it's not as important to keep old replays).

Proxima: I could reproduce the problem (editor exit & save), this isn't fixed in the just released version, but I will do something about it. New versions will be out quicker than the current one when they don't have physics changes.

-- Simon

Hehe. The personal moods are actually captured really well with just eye positions, hair style, and arms.

-- Simon

If you put complete .DAT archives into the level tree, they will be extracted on starting the program.

If you don't want the blank levels, run the game once and exit again. Delete the .DAT archives, run the game again, and delete from the game the blank levels.

Use hotkeys for deletion and confirmation (default are [G] and [Space]).

Edit: Game shouldn't extract empty levels in the first place, noted this down.

-- Simon

Lix homepage. We do development mostly on IRC, and secondly in the forums here. The IRC channel is irc.quakenet.org #lix.

-- Simon