Legacy LD5

This is something I have been working on for quite some days now ...
Yes, yes, I know. "What? That dumbraptor is starting yet another game? Wont he ever just finish something?"
But I cant help it, I work on what I find fun at the time. And this has been more clear than the cavemen and nightscroll projects, no real time to bother with, no collisions, no tons of animation sprites needed that I cant all make myself but will have to at least heavily modify with tons of work put into it only to be treated as if I just stole them of the orginal game although the existing ones were totally useless for my purpose...

So anyway.


To lighten up the dark sad days (what did you expect, he's living in a slipper) of the poor hard-slacking Dinosorceror, and being in the mood, I decided to make a little game.
Where you have to build a little weesaur town.
In a slipper.
Yes, NOW you have seen everything.

Its still all wonky and there's not much it yet, but you can still already click around and see what it may be like and how you like it.

latest version before HD crash: http://download.lavadomefive.com/member ... per054.zip


What you have to do in the game? Well, its a gather-stuff kind of game, where your work time is a ressource you can use to build a town, and make it stand out enough to be notices by other wee people in the slipper and attractive enough to live in it.
Oh, and its full clickety this time. No keys, just click on a place to do something.

It still lacks a lot of features like food regrowth instead of instant unlimited supply, ability to get a sprout form plants to grow new ones, people leaving when not having enough food, being able to choose what you eat, tearing down and salvaging buildings, unclearable terrain, a temple to build and worship the foot in, lots of help screens, and of course graphics. But I like how its coming along.
And I definitely plan on finishing this one.

Well, first of all, I want to thank Blue for making a game that's based on my fantasies. He's really sweet and works so hard around here, and I lub'em for it.

Second of all, regarding his creation angst -- about starting a bunch of games, but then suddenly clicking on this corny game -- it's pretty obvious to me. I've been in the same situation many times. There's work, and there's work you wanna do. When the muse strikes, and especially when the muse is easy, it's easy to just steamroll on a project. Back when I was still working on Faibanx 3D, I got a good head of steam going when I saw that all the pieces were available at one time and just needed to be plugged in. Not only that, but the early results, the rate of progress, was fast enough to show me that it was worthwhile pumping effort into. When you've got a more difficult project that doesn't move as fast, and that doesn't have any instant gratification, is harder to chug along with. When obstacles started to show up, that's why F3D ground to a halt. Recently, I at least identified a point where a suite of decent, freeware tools became available, which would allow me to sort of build a "F3D Development Kit" to hand out to interested parties to help work on it, but...meh. Then dark times came at work, the Empire took over, and now there are servers at work I don't even have the power to turn off, much less log on to. I feel like Mr. Burns, singing his "Once I had a railroad..." song and lamenting the loss of his nuclear power plant.

Now, regarding the actual game, I'll be honest, I was surprised at how cool it was. I mean, this will actually be a playable and fun game...and it'll have SexyText(tm) to keep weesaurs randy to boot! I can see me playing this game a lot at work just to pass the time...it's got the same kind of casual appeal as solitaire or minesweeper or Bejeweled, but so far, seems to add just enough complexity to make it lots more interesting than those games and yet still keep it casual.

In otherwords, I think this will actually be a game people on the Internets(tm) will enjoy as a curious and fun game. And as I mentioned to Blue, I'd be willing to help with graphics, music, sound effects, whatever he needs that he can't work up himself.

So check it out, it's funny and enjoyable. And the Weesaur League(tm) gives it a five slipper rating!

To help early testers out a little, (espeically Dino), here is a brief little intro on people, work, and food.

Work is a very valueable ressource, as it defines how much you can do each day. Since you need food daily and getting food requires work, its requires quite some management. When you gather enough ressources to start building a structure, you need to assign work to it to, until it is finished. Depending on how much work you have left after gathering enough food, building a structure can take several days, and you can even un-assign work from a building again if it isnt finsihed yet.

You have (usually, see below) 6 units of work time availble and need 2 units of food each day. Further wee people have the same stats as you, but they only dedicate 2 units of work time to your city, because they are slackers, but in return see to getting half their food themselves. (So each additional citizen is a net gain of 1 work time.)

As those who have tried it will have noticed, your available work for the next days will depend on what you ate (even though you cannot directly choose that yet but just take it from the storage following the code for what other poeple would eat. What you eat only affects your 6 work time though, not that of your fellow wee ones. They will just be more or less happy depending on the, quantity, quality and even diversity of food. (and will in later versions leave the town if they dont like it enough).

Food comes in three different forms, Leafs, Shrooms, and Berries. (aside from the kruft of course, that is ubiquous, but not very nourishing. And regardless of what your opinion on that matter may be, your fellow citizens dont think it's very tasty.). Currently plants have an unlimited supply of food. Later in the game they will only grow it slowly though, so you have to gain access to and even plant enough plants to grow enough food to keep your people happy.
Here's a descriptions of the different type of foods, from what will go into the ingame help:

Leafs. This juicy looking moss foliage provides your main ressource of food in here as it seems. It is munched away on rather decently for herbivores, and probably about like salad for everybody else. If anything, it gets dull and boring after a while.

Shrooms. Short of microscopic to everyone else but huge to you, as about everything else here. They are sprouting in moist spots down here like, well, shrooms, and not really very appetizing. But they are food none the less, and some shrooms in between are likely even better than nothing but leafs all the time.

Berries. There's nothing unusual about this ressource, just that they are really really tiny. To everyone else. To you the single berry is about the size of a melon.
They are rather rare and grow slow, but eating such a fine food gives you more power for the next day, and when your fellow citizens get to eat berries it makes them more happy.


edit: found a glitch where clicking sent you back to the main all the time. Fixed in version 042.

Its pretty fun so far there Blue. ^^ All I'd suggest is making it run in a bigger window. Unless of course I can just do that myself, in which case I didn't look hard enough for a resize option. :3

Now I'll just get my fingers in there, and make all the wee folk into giants... ^_____^

Thanks. Yes, there's a resize button planned, both Game Maker and the code support that.
Cant promise it will look good though, as with Nightscroll I found it does weird things to the pixels, like 200% zoom making some pixels in the original into 2 pixels wide, but some also 1 and some 3. Very weird.
But maybe I can get that issue fixed with a newer version of Game Maker. Currently I have set it to 'draw between pixels' though which means everything will just be blurred.

edit: window size menu is in now. Right in the main. Enjoy and rejoice.

Hooray! I ran into a little error while I was playing 042 last night. One of the values of people on the turn results went into a negative, and the game had a shit fit. But I told it to ignore that, and it kept on playing. But the error remained every turn. ^^()

uh... mind telling me which one? In PM if you like?

I didn't write it down. I'll see if I can make it happen again, and I'll tell yah which one. :3

Nice little game there Blue

Though I've run into the same bug as Tombfyre I think, a few times.

The error message says
"ERROR in
action number 1
of Draw Event
for object main:

In script night:
Error in code at line 74:

waiting_queue[waiting_people]=i;

at position 32: Negative array index"

Once the number of people wanting homes goes below 0, any time you have enough food for everyone at the end of a day, that error pops up, and drops you to 0 food again.

I haven't pinpointed what causes the bug yet, but if i learn more, I'll let ya know

Thanks for the detailed error code. As a reward, you get some (semi-finished and only occassional) building sprites already.
I found a little index error in related code, but I sadly dont think it caused the negative amount of waiting_people. Would be nice to know what the other values are at that time. Think you can give a screenshot if it happens again?

Oh, and I gave a little free ressources so you dont have to click so long to test stuff.
download/file.php?id=512

ok, thank you ^_^
Makes it a lot faster with how often I've been restarting

I haven't been able to recreate the bug in a while, but my guess is that it has something to do with a wee person moving in, at the same time he decides to leave and say your place is clique-ish.

edit:
Never mind, finally managed to get it to do it again in 043.
(also in 045, but still trying to get shots of the days right before it happened, when it does it.)
Here's a screen shot of when it first went into negative people waiting in 043.

Bu -- ab -- th --

You give Zelitor free resources but give ME all kindsa flack when *I* asked for them?

Coming soon: +5 trainer for SlipperLife, developed by Weesaur 0-Day Piratez

Yep, that's the exact error I got as well. ^^ Looks like you beat me to it.

Well I'm at it, and even got it to happen once too, but sadly not anymore after I threw degugging information in.

Just to make that sure: The error is when the number of people waiting goes negative.
If you play on then and wait for some function to use that array that does little good, its a given that using the negative amount as an array index makes the code explode. Its where it GOES into negative that I have to find.

Each time its gone negative on me, it has been at least 30-40 turns into the game. And each turn or so it gives that error, gives you the option to abort or ignore, and goes on. The negative index continues to drop however, and keeps making that error. But its yet to crash the game or anything.