So I’m generally pleased with how Muncher’s Labyrinth turned out, especially bearing in mind how little time I had to put it together.
Since the original release on Sunday night, I’ve made a few more minor modifications.Most notably, there have been a few crash fixes, and in 1.0.3 I improved the Meat AI so that they behave a little more sensibly when there is more Meat than Shinies in the maze. (You can grab the 1.0.3 build over on the Muncher’s Labyrinth “Get Games” link in the sidebar)
But most of my time since Sunday has been going into trying to come up with a reliable and useful build system under Windows. As it turns out, making a build using Visual Studio Express gets me into the whole dynamic runtime “DLL Hell”problem, where many people don’t have the required versions of the redistributable runtime dlls already installed, and I can’t simply include the dlls in the application folder due to Microsoft’s SxS runtime system. And I’d really rather avoid having to learn how to put together an installer.
I have a MinGW build of Muncher’s being tested right now, and if that works, then I’ll probably move to that, since it relies on a runtime dll that’s been shipped with Windows since 95, so that’s probably a lot more safe to assume will be present. (But honestly, I still far prefer the Visual Studio IDE)
I expect that I’ll return to Muncher’s again sometime in the future. I have a bunch of ideas for improvements to it, which will be fun to try out when I’m not under a big deadline. Most notably:
- Get rid of the minimap, and instead use on-screen direction indicators to entrances
- Level progression (ie: survive with a certain number of shinies, and advance to the next level)
- I want a seamless transition from the title screen into the game; use the same maze in the title screen as in game, so we can just zoom in on it to see the action.
- Better adaptive difficulty levels.
- Improve the generation of “broken wall” particles so that the wall actually appears to shatter as you hit it.
So plenty of things to do. But I’m going to leave it for the moment, and come back in a few weeks or months, so I can see it with fresh eyes.
All done, and with nearly an hour to spare!
I spent way too much time polishing.. to the extent that I’ve spent the last hour writing a backstory.
Right now I’m putting together binary packages; expect them up within about a half hour or so. 
I’m immensely pleased with how this came out. I’ll be glowing for a week!
Grab Munchers Labyrinth from here.
Plenty more Munchers stuff has gone in in the last four hours.
Most notably, there is now music, sound, a game over sequence (it’s kind of weak, but it’s there, and it’s a whole lot less abrupt and confusing than the one from Damsel), and a whole bunch of tweaks to gameplay, including an adaptive difficulty level that makes the game more difficult when you’re doing better at it.
There are also a number of engine improvements under the hood, including a very basic implementation of visibility culling, so we’re not wasting time and effort rendering things that aren’t anywhere onscreen. (And yes, that was actually causing problems for me)I estimate that I probably have another two or three hours of work left to do before I’ll be calling this done. But right now, it’s time for a break. And food.
Stuff left to do after my break: Improve two sprites. Improve the ‘Game Over’ sequence a little. Play all the way through the game one last time, to verify that the adaptive difficulty levels are vaguely reasonable.
It’s difficult to believe how quickly progress has been made.. Here’s what’s left to do:
- Music (if any)
- Sound
- “Game Over” sequence (maybe a high score table?)
- Misc. polish
Well, I did it! From initial concept to fully playable prototype in just one day. (And I even still have several hours left in the day! But I think I’ll take a little time off to watch Iron Chef, which I taped earlier today)
I’m not going to give away the gameplay, except to say that I think this is one of the most fun games I’ve written in an awfully long time, and that I think it would extend into a more fully scaled game rather easily. And that the game is played to a finite time limit; the player has infinite lives.
Stuff that remains to be done:
- Music (if any; not sure if it’s appropriate for this game)
- Sound (need a lot of sound effects for this game)
- Title screen menu (I’ll probably blatantly steal the Asteroids one again)
- “How to play” screen.
- “Story” screen.
- General polish.
Looking very good for the release tomorrow. I might do another hour’s work on it later tonight, but for right now, Allez Cuisine!
