RevolvoMan-4K

Contests 4K Game Competition - 2009
#1

Collect all the coins in 20 seconds(ish).

Infinite number of levels. First 26 levels are all possible getting increasingly harder. After level 26 there may be some impossible levels.

Play game as Applet here (will do WS when game is complete):
http://www.bullsquared.com/gameRevolvoMan.html

Keys
Left/Right Arrows to move left and right,
A/D to rotate screen 90 degrees clockwise and anti-clockwise .
N to skip level (only available after level 26 when some levels may not be possible).

Still WIP (couple of known issues). Currently at 3226bytes (thanks moogie, excellent tool!). May use the rest to introduce physics (acceleration when falling), or animation/better graphics, lives, or harder levels?.. Any suggestions?

Enjoy!!

#2

nice concept. it’s fun. only problem with me is that the keys controls seem to be a unreliable. often it rotates more than 90 degrees or the revolvoman movesto far.

#3

Looks good. But it seems to miss a lot of key presses, which was kind of frustrating.

#4

I played a similar game recently on Kongregate, although that one was a puzzle game (collect stuff without hitting blocks which kill you) rather than an action game (collect stuff before time runs out).

If the clock is intended to run in real-time then you may need to optimise for speed. I found that it was ticking once every 8 or so seconds on my 1.7GHz laptop (Linux, Java 6). The game also felt frustratingly slow.

I also found that the A and D keys are the wrong way round for my intuition.

Other than that my top priority would be to allow sideways movement while falling - i.e. not just testing keys when you’re aligned with the grid, and not sliding horizontally in thin air.

#5

Hey. Gave the game a quick test.
Seems like fairly good gameplay, although i’ve seen something similar before.
Your controls would in theory be better imo. In practice however i felt the keys responded randomly. Sometimes it would take a really long time for it to be able to turn again, sometimes i could walk horizontal with no ground beneath my feat. I think you should take away control during falling and turning, or shouldn’t base the game on a tilemap (or so it would seem to me.).

The different levels where of very different difficulty. I got one in the last second and the level after that i had 10 seconds to spare or something like that.

You may consider removing the time-limit and perhaps make hazzards (infinite retries though) to turn it into more of a puzzle game.
I dunno if it would work better, just thought it might be worth the try, if you didn’t already…

I think i’d invest some extra size on making the character more unique.

Very good WIP in either case. Keep up the good work! :slight_smile:

  • Scarzzurs
#6

Thanks all for the comments. It looks my 4K/game programming inexperience has been exposed :frowning:

Not sure on the key problems. I have all my keyChecks in ProcessEvent(AWTEvent e) method (and I have a Thread.sleep(16) in every loop iteration). Maybe this has different effects on different spec machines. I’ll test on a couple of faster computers to check!!.

This is where I got the idea from. After reading this thread http://www.java-gaming.org/index.php/topic,19455.msg154212.html#msg154212 I visited Kongregate and briefly played a game where you rotate the screen and thought it was a cool concept. Cant remember the game however, can you remember the game by any chance? There are 100s of games on here, cant find it… Wouldnt mind checking it again too see how/if they are similar…

Once over 8 seconds for1 tick? Oh dear… Its pretty close to 1 tick per second on my laptop (also 1.7GHz)… Will investigate this… I ‘probably incorrectly’ assumed that as I had a .sleep(16) in every loop iteration it would run at similar speeds on most specs… Again am pretty new to this!!

I’ll fix the control issues in next version (the walking during falling is one of my known issues).

[quote]The different levels where of very different difficulty. I got one in the last second and the level after that i had 10 seconds to spare or something like that.
[/quote]
I’ll check this out too… I tried to put some of medium levels after level 15 and 20-26 quite hard, but I find depending on which way you move initially some levels can be completed in 10secs or can go to the wire by 1 wrong initial move so its pretty hard to determine difficulty.

I tried both directions for the A and D as wasnt sure. I kinda feel comfortable with this rotation myself but could easily change this…

I’ll probably post my code in a couple of days if I can’t fix the keyboard issues, am sure the more experienced guys out there will spot the problems in a glance :slight_smile:

Thnx again!

#7

To be honest, I currently have a sleep(20) in the loop of the game I’m working on. However, at some point I intend to add a call to currentTimeMillis() and take into account the time required for the physics and rendering.

#8

[quote]The one I’m thinking of is http://www.kongregate.com/games/jkari/andrew-the-droid.
[/quote]
Nope, never played this one. I think there is another game a bit more similar.

ps. I think my level 24 is impossible too, so ignore my “first 26 levels are possible comment”… Slight oversight… Will fix too!

#9

I wasn’t having any key problems, and had a lot of fun with it. Cool idea!

#10

It takes a bit of getting used to, so maybe you should be kinder with the timing - 60 secs for first level?
(I never got past the first cos I kept confusing left & right… so I gave up after a few goes :slight_smile:

#11

[quote]I wasn’t having any key problems, and had a lot of fun with it. Cool idea!
[/quote]
Thnx DemonPants

New version uploaded. Improved KeyInput logic slightly, fixed the moving left/right when falling problem (cannot do so now) and fixed impossible level 24.

Hopefully a little more playable now for those experiencing problems b4.

The first level I can do in about 8 seconds… I could increase the time maybe but dont want to make it too easy either… Maybe for the first one, will see. In the next version I’ll provide alternate keys for rotating for those that dont like the ‘A’ Clockwise and ‘D’ Anti-Clockwise.

#12

As proposed here http://www.java-gaming.org/index.php?topic=20003.0, I’m reviewing your game !

***RevolvoMan-4K
/Cons:

  • the game isn’t too bad for azerty keyboard users, however it could be better ;
  • it would have been nice to be able to start the game at different levels ;
  • first levels are not so easy, and a bit more time to complete them would have been welcome.

/Pros:

  • the name “RevolvoMan” fits perfectly ;
  • the game mechanics are rather original ;
  • the design and graphics are very well done, and your game really doesn’t look the way a 4 096 octets game should ;
  • this is one of the best puzzle game I have played so far in this competition.

Overall your game is good, well polished and also very promising concerning future games I hope you’ll make, in 4 Ko or not !

#13

Hey! Thanks StephR for reviewing me game, was pleasantly suprised to see this! And yep, have 8-10 more games coming later this year! (Mostly puzzle/board!).

Question for all tho have been meaning to ask for a while. Now and again I notice this game runs very slowly… I find that closing the Browser and restarting gets it back to its more normal/playable speed. Anyone any ideas what could be causing this?

#14

To answer your question, I went to your URL http://www.stephenoreilly.net/RevolvoMan4K.html, and actually I never experimented any slowing while playing your game on my computer, which is equipped with an AMD Athlon 64X2 Dual Core Processor 4200, a very average video card and with Windows Vista. When your game is running, it usually monopolizes between 25% et 40% of the processor time. However on one session with equal conditions, it was between 50% and 75%, for some reasons I can’t explain. Yet no slowing occurred.

I don’t know much about Java programming, but I suppose this slowing problem is related to the kind of main loop used in your game.

Now courage for finishing the many games you planned - apparently you’re really not lacking inspiration !

#15

Nice gradient effects. Looks nice and polished. Nice instructions. This rotation is making me dizzy! Sometimes it rotates 180 degrees instead of just 90. The keys are too sensitive. The amount of time given seems a bit short. How about a few extra seconds? Sometimes I just miss it. How did you compress all the levels? For the randomly generated levels, how did you make sure that it is always possible to collect all the coins? I got stuck on level 9. Perhaps you should make a score based on the number of moves that you move (the fewer the better of course) instead of having a time. Interesting puzzle game.

#16

A couple of ppl mentioned the keys were sensitive (and it sometimes rotated 180 degrees instead of 90). Have tried it on 3 different computers and have not seen this so not sure what I can do here (only problem I have seen as mentioned elsewhere is it sometimes runs slowly and closing browser and restarting gets speed back to normal, not sure why, will fix one day!).

The amount of time is a little short but I intended to make it quite hard… Quite a few levels are completable with only a few seconds left so its also a test of composure. Level 9 is a little hard (maybe should have been later but possible). I have managed to complete all 50 levels only restarting a few levels on the way (but played it quite alot during development!).

There is no level compression, all levels are generated randomly but for the first 50 I store the seed in an array (so they are always the same and I was able to order them in by difficulty, I assume Java generates the same random numbers on all OS’s/versions, if not have messed up big style!). After level 50 some levels may be impossible (I dont check if they are possible) but after level 50 you can press ‘N’ to skip to the next level, not that I expect anyone to ever reach that far :wink:

#17

[quote=“steveyO,post:16,topic:32780”]
I believe Sun Java does, but anyone playing with a GNU Classpath-based version may have trouble.