i don’t think derek considers this game finished yet, but i like it so much that i had to share it with you, my favorite reader.
derek yu describes his game, spelunky, as “la mulana meets nethack.” by la mulana he means “tiny man in fedora whips bats,” and by nethack he means “randomly generated levels.” but derek yu understands that what makes nethack compelling isn’t simply that each piece of the map has been picked by a dice roll (though the more i play it, the more impressed i am by how thoughtfully derek has atomized the elements of the platformer), but that scattered throughout that map are the seeds of a story: a ruby guarded by an arrow trap, a character crying for help from a high-up plateau, a giant tarantula in a randomly generated space that totally reads “lair.” even when a designer isn’t plotting out levels by hand, there are ways to shape the player’s experience.
the game also deals admirably with the potential problems of random platforming levels without taking the easy route: making the protagonist super-mobile. for example, the game is built around the law of gravity: the player always starts at the top of a level, and the exit can always be found at the bottom.
this is also one of those games, bless their hearts, where the avatar the player uses to navigate menus is the same one the player navigates in-game. and i love that kind of functional unity, as you’ve probably guessed.
courtesy niitaka at selectbutton.
11 comments
I like the shopkeeper who instead of calling the fuzz attacks at you vigorously with his machinegun.
I think it’s worth mentioning that the author went out of his way to preserve the beauty of his pixel art by including the option to triple the size of each pixel, rather than rely on the faulty scaling of an LCD screen. I’ve had to play too many beautiful pixel-centric games (Cave Story, Knytt Stories, etc.) that are partially ruined by either being far too small to play in a window, or when played in full screen, force an LCD monitor to adopt a non-native resolution, resulting in a blurry image in an incorrect aspect ratio. LCD’s are great at adapting to lower-resolution video, but terrible at rendering pixel-perfect images at anything but their native resolutions.
that’s the issue with calamity annie, in fact. since game maker upscales images to be horribly blurry, i manually resized every piece of art in the game to maintain its crispness, making the file size huge.
derek’s found a script that resizes the pixels without making them blurry, and i’m considering borrowing it for annie, though i’m not sure if it will play nice with the mouse controls.
You don’t need scripts, just adjust view_wport to be view_wview*2 and view_hport to be view_hview*2 for double pixels.
At least that’s how I think I made it in some of my older projects :)
…but better adjust the view-port settings from the room editor.
Anyways, I really enjoyed this game, I’ve always wanted to play a good platformer with random-generated levels ^^
that’s even worse! things aren’t resized correctly so “pixels” end up out of proportion, and there are seams between the tiles!
well, using the same script derek used on spelunky: it looks as though the mouse works fine.
which means that if i can work up the nerve to reinsert all of the graphics into the game and divide all the numbers by four, we’ll have a version of calamity annie that will run without memory issues on many more people’s computers.
Yeah, and it doesn’t draw lines correctly… why didn’t they make it work better?!
BTW, how does the script you’re talking about work? It draws everything in a surface and then draws the surface stretched?
that’s exactly how it works, yes.
Ohmygosh, thanks for pointing this out. You’ve made my week.
I agree that using gameplay to navigate menus is a nice touch, but it’s the interactive stores that really make it for me. (Maybe it just warms my evil little heart to be able to blow up shopkeepers and steal their goods…)
and thank you for your stone soup tiles! now i will probably try stone soup for the first time.
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