Spelunky

Back when I was a kid, I used to play a game called Rick Dangerous 2 on my Commodore 64. Spelunky takes me right back.

Just like Rick Dangerous, you control an Indiana Jones type armed with a whip and bombs, and head into underground ruins in search of treasure. Unlike Rick Dangerous, the levels in Spelunky are Roguelike -- procedurally generated, so each journey is different, and they're difficult, so death comes quickly.

Played with a joypad, this is a great experience, with each gaming lasting 5-15 minutes (your mileage may vary, I suck at games in general).

Spelunky is being developed using Game Maker by Derek Yu, and it's freely available.

TIGForums (dev posting and downloads), Gamers With Jobs thread

Gamers With Jobs

I'm a member of a great gaming community called Gamers With Jobs, a site devoted to intelligent, mature gaming discussion. And who better to get playing my game than a bunch of intelligent, witty gamers?

With that in mind, a few days ago I created a thread inviting people to come and take a look. Naturally, I was terrified. I would say the number one thing holding this game back is myself, and my stubborn insistence that it's not actually good enough to show to people.

Judging from the response from the GWJ crowd, I was wrong. I've had so much positive feedback -- both as praise and useful bug reports. I'm really happy with the state of the game: it has a few issues here and there, but it also has a solid grounding of fun. Why else would people play it for hours at a time? It's given me a much-needed confidence boost to carry on working on it and adding in new stuff.

Since the thread went live, I've made the following changes:

• Moved to a proper local dictionary instead of leaning on Wiktionary. See this post on GWJ for more details.
• Fixed a couple of IE display bugs.
• Added hover-titles to the combat UI.
• Added a display of level requirement for weapons in shops.
• Fixed Crusader Henderson (he had no stock in his shop!)
• ...and added a bunch of stuff to The List™.

So, thanks, Goodgers!

Weapon update

Monday's update is three new low-level weapons which are now dropping from the various spiders in the spider cave and the tuffet. There's a club, a stave and a dagger, with equip requirements ranging from level one to five.

These new weapons are also the first weapons in the game to drop from monsters. Eventually I hope that most players will get their weapons from monster drops, with the shop only being there to plug the gaps.

New monster: Rastafarian Carrot

Warning: spoilers ahead. This whole blog is spoilerific, but there you go.

Tonight I added a new monster to the Capture Farmland area, the Rastafarian Carrot, which is the first in a line of mutated crops that will be popping up in the farmland. I drew a standard carrot monster (a standard carrot monster!) and it struck me that the hair/leaves looked a little like dreadlocks. So naturally the thing to do was to draw on a rasta hat.

I'm pretty pleased with the way it looks. I definitely think my artistic style is developing nicely. Obviously it's still stick man style bold and basic, but compared with some of the basics I drew, say, 6 months ago I think it's much improved. Perhaps soon I might not be rubbish!

Patch notes for Sunday, 15th June 2008

• New stylesheet revision and layout.
  
• Some IE CSS / display bugs fixed.
  
• New item tooltip window, replacing the old javascript tooltips.
  
• Hero's Rest is finally open!
• Chat has been removed for the time being.
• Updated spell checking code.
• Fixed broken graphic for the Goblin Cannibal.
• Fixed a hilarious bug whereby you could view other player's private inventory.
  

Stylin'

I'm back! Last week I installed all my development tools on my laptop again, and dusted off the code. Since then, I've implemented a new stylesheet, streamlined some of the more ridiculous HTML, and tweaked the layout a little. It now plays nicer at larger and smaller resolutions, works better in Internet Explorer, and has a smaller stylesheet (a whole 3KB slimmer!) and should be easier to maintain. That said, there's still probably a bunch of display bugs across browsers, so let me know if you've spotted anything.

The javascript item tooltips have also been removed. I wasn't very happy with them. You can now click on any item icon, anywhere in the game, and a small pop-up window will display details about the item. It's much nicer, I think, and it gives me more space to design in as new type of items and badges are added.

Player vs player

Via Kill Ten Rats:

“The ability to inflict that huge amount of actual, real-life damage on someone is amazingly satisfying” says [chief executive of the GoonFleet Corporation]. “The way that you win in EVE is you basically make life so miserable for someone else that they actually quit the game and don’t come back.”

Woo yay for PvP!