tombed (original two-day version, with source – updated third-day version) was created for ludum dare 14 – a triannual two-day game design challenge. the theme this time round is “advancing wall of doom.” other participants, commendably, are taking that theme in clever directions, but i happen to be fond of the stages in jumping games that inspired the theme: a screen-width hazard chasing the player as she scrambles to make tight escapes. i like close calls, so i made a game about them.
conceptually, there’s a lot of mr. driller, which is a game i have always loved. as is the spirit of ludum dare, the source file is in there and you’re free to poke around. it’s sloppier than it could be because i cut as many corners scripting the opening and closing scenes as i could. i sampled pc speaker sounds again for this game. i wrote and played the melodies in zzt, which happens to have a pretty robust and straightforward language for scripting pc speaker tunes.
due to the stars lining up just right this weekend, klik of the month klub – that’s the monthly two-hour game design challenge – happened to be right in the middle of ludum dare. i took an hour and made the sentence, one of my other ideas for the advancing wall of doom that i decided probably wasn’t worth two days but might be worth an hour. this one goes out to the people at tale of tales.
ludum dare is always a rewarding and exhausting celebration of game creation. another two-day game creation event – the global game jam – happened a few months back. i didn’t participate in this one – it rubbed me the wrong way. which is to say that, from what i’ve heard, it’s very heirarchical. you’re told where to go, who to work with, what theme to work on. there doesn’t seem to be that much room for the personal creative process, which is what ludum dare (and klik of the month) are about.
40 comments
This is great.
If you shovel through the tall blue column early, you fall out of view for a second or two — bug or feature?
side-effect of the fact that the camera is tied to the wall of spikes – which it should be, because the advancing wall of doom is the star, not jane – that i decided not to correct.
you usually can’t go far offscreen because you need the spike wall to open some of the obstacles for you. so you let it catch up. it always does.
I really liked this game (Although my keyboard’s probably broken from throwing it at the wall)
I made a little review of this game on my blog if you’re interested
maybe since i have this half finished klik ill make two next month
Very funny ^^
Man, Sticky keys got activated and i had to rush through to save poor Danger Jane who patiently died over and over again until I turned it off.
sticky fingers make sticky keys, kat kent.
I really like this game. It’s really challenging, but it always stays fun and all that good stuff.
I like Ludum Dare, too. Even though the game I made may be one of the worst things ever created, I liked doing it, and it had it’s own charms.
i really want to play yours, but i don’t have powerpoint. does a solution exist ??
Microsoft released a powerpoint viewer for free that I know works. I set it as my Website if you want to check it out.
I hear there’s a way to do it through Google Docs, too, but I can’t test that because for whatever reason they think my computer is a spambot.
Really cool game. Only problem for me is when In press shift to many times,about five times,a windows screen appears and wants me to fix the shift key or so ! Causes me everytime to die ! :(
I too would like to sentence Tale of Tales to death.
I really like Tombed, but when I start up the game, the sprites are very blurry, like the ones on the screenshots on David’s blog. Is there a way to fix that?
The Global Game Jam was good for people who are:
-not jack-of-all-trades types, and
-male, due to the (lack of) hygiene and sleeping arrangements.
At least, that’s how I felt about the San Francisco branch of the thing, though I hear it was different everywhere. The theme wasn’t much more restrictive than Ludum Dare, and you were free to form your own teams.
I’m a bit surprised at how much variety you got out of these mechanics.
The Mr. Driller influence is obvious, but the other game that this most reminds me of is this 90’s shareware game called [url=http://www.nagi-p.com/nssh.html]NS-SHAFT.[/url]
Hey Strong- this is pretty useful for making anyone able to use your Powerpoint files (it packages the viewer and the file into a single stand-alone exe): http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00575.htm
ITS A HIT TIME TO MAKE ENDLESS MODE
I made a game too! Kinda got in at the last possible moment.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/04/19/5719/
Also I would like to see a two-player game from you where one player is Jane digging down and the other is Jill jumping up
After I beat Tombed and the scrolling stopped, I experienced an optical oddity in which all my windows appeared to be slowly drifting down the screen.
the reason the sprites are blurry is because game maker enlarges pixels in a very poor way. usually i use a script to resize sprites cleanly, but in ludum dare you’re expected to only use code you’ve written during the competition.
i might release a post-competition version with crisper scaling and the ability to use Z in place of shift.
i get that optical illusion too, usually when i’m watching someone else finish the game.
Hey Tombed was good keep up the good work also try to be less of a bull dyke bitch
nope
Thank you, please don’t.
Does the loading image for The Sentence implicate it’s target? If it’s only a jab, it’s funny that it actually DOES generate an interesting experience. I know you’re more a fan of Chack ‘n Pop than say, The Passage. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the mildly unsettling gender politics of a certain fairy-tale game.
Tombed is fucking great. DIGJANEDIG! The razor-sharp effiency evident in the source file is daunting.
Is there any paticular reason you stick with the default room limit of 30fps? A large part of the appeal with your games (for me) is the throwback to the joy of good Intellivision/2600/Famicom games, and these all ran a clean 60. I do notice the gap in keyboard response time and it’s occasionally a little frustrating.
“game maker enlarges pixels in a very poor way.”
Have you figured out what system/software configuration causes this? I’m sort of horrified that my own precious pixels might get filtered, and Tombed looks fine to me. Do you usually use ChevyRay’s scaling approach?
I’m still happy that you considered smashenfreude the “funnest”.
You know maybe I should start thinking of myself as a toymaker rather than a gamemaker.
Anyway, the global game jam:
It was weird. There was a bit more self-selection going on, but it was more about team co-operation than individual vision. Basically they had a few themes (respected to varying levels) you were supposed to match, and then they had some brain storming and “pitch meeting” type stuff on index cards, we tacked ‘em all to a wall, and then people clustered around the ideas they wanted to work on. It was kind of dumb in that people put themselves in categories “designer /programmer / artist / sound” without saying what their level of experience was.
Some month i should try Ludlum Dare, though I think I need to switch out of processing. My problem is I’m starting to think only in terms of 2 hour projects…
You mentioning ZZT made brought me back to my awkward years in 5th and 6th grade. Thank you!
Fun game, by the way. I’m in a love/hate relationship with the entire Driller series.
wow! That was fun and a great concept too. :) I’m not sure if this sounds assy but I don’t like shift. Annoying button, hard to press. Now that I wrote it down I don’t quite understand now but whatever.
good game!
here’s a new version with crisper pixels and the Z key and spacebar as alternatives.
it was actually surprisingly easy to get around the blurring – if you resize your game through the “global game settings” you get the blur, but if you go into individual rooms and set the port to two or three or four (in the case of tombed) times the view, the scaling is crisp. huh.
Pretty fun :) I hope you consider extending this into a longer game.
The optical effect you’re describing is called motion paralex, I think. I used to get it working in a factory at a conveyor belt, peeling gnarley bits out of beetroot. The belt stops and suddenly you’re leaning all over the place, trying to stop the world scrolling.
This is a good game. It’s nice to see a good old implementation of the theme without any obtuse imagining – some of them seemed to forget the “advancing”, the “doom”, or even the “wall” part. One of them was great, but just was about a blob smashing crates and… yeah, good job. It’s probably the game I think of when I picture the theme, although Lerc’s was interesting.
motion paralex. thats way cool i thought my eyes were fucked up for a second after i beat the game. It would be cool if you exploited that effect for one your games maybe.
Tombed is quite fun. I love the constricted play space, even if it’s probably an artifact from Mr. Driller.
For what it’s worth, I quite enjoyed the GGJ. If anything, rather than being constricting, the theme was so vague as to be meaningless. (It wouldn’t be very difficult to argue that Tombed fits quite well in the GGJ’s theme.) Past that, at least for my local site, it was run just as informally and non-hierarchically as every other game jam I’ve been a part of.
Is this a kind of a shoutout to 2600 Entombed? I haven’t played much Mr. Driller (for shame!) but the between the name and the gameplay, there’s a lot of that old Atari game
Great little bit of fun. I thought perhaps falling off screen would do you in, to force you to stay closer to the descending spikes, but no matter. Great work as always. ^.^
The game was epic, very well done. After I’d played it my eyes went all fuzzy, I think it was something to do with the falling movement. Anyway, congratulations on an amazingly addictive game.
This is somehow one of my favorites, though you spent so little time developing it. I can imagine it intensely reworked with a grand story and possibly left-to-right sequences. Then it might be absolutely grand – not that it isn’t.
Where is the source code? I can’t seem to find it…
the source is only in the original download – i didn’t pack it in with the updated version.
Freaking awesome game! Kudos!
Ah, thanks, got it now. I’m quite appreciative of source code releases, whether I end up actually using them for anything or not.
Completely awesome. I loved the game and was sad to discover it long after the voting ended.
A very very enjoyable little burst of a game.
Well done indeed!
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[...] que conozco que de verdad sabe mucho, mucho de videojuegos) ha lanzado un pequeño juego de nombre Tombed y que es un título que tiene hartas similitudes con Mr. Driller de Namco. Solo tiene una etapa y [...]
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