April 28, 2004
The IGJ2 Games
Seventeen experimental games from this year’s Indie Game Jam are now available for free download! Now you can see what all the fuss was about.
Constraints: they run on the PC, I’m guessing requiring a decent videocard, and unfortunately (but sensibly) they require a Playstation controller. And therefore also require an adapter to hook the PS controller to your PC’s USB port. I’m going to buy the adapter for $13 here; if you need a Playstation controller too, on the same site you can get a good one for $20. (Here’s a Google search for more options.)
I’ve read somewhere that the source code will be available, perhaps on sourceforge. If I found out anything I’ll post it here. Note all these games use Atman Binstock’s 2D physics engine, and several were scored by Michael Sweet.
April 28th, 2004 at 2:25 pm
A few of the games have mouse/keyboard control: Sleep wit da’ Fishes, Nebulae, Stunt Hamsters, Deadly Dance, Robot Circus sort of, and BootLooter.
April 28th, 2004 at 2:29 pm
Sean, any idea if/when the source code for the games will be made available? Also, is Atman’s engine available in general, either as freeware, shareware, commercial product? (Sean is one of the IGJ participants and organizers.)
April 28th, 2004 at 6:43 pm
Sadly, all I can say is “eventually”, although I hope soon. For source control we used subversion this year, which means converting to CVS for sourceforge may be some work–I’m not sure–and we also have to cope with the fact that the subversion DB got corrupted right as we were shutting down. We still have the last version of all the source, worst case, so we’ll definitely post something, I’m just not sure what we’ll do (especially as I’m not point on this part of things). Mainly it’s just a matter of when people find the time to work on it, and sadly it’s not a particularly high priority. (We never even posted last year’s code, although it’s not very useful without a projector, fast camera, and a proprietary run-time–which presumably lowered its priority even further.)
Atman’s 2D physics engine will be included, with full source. The entire codebase will be under gnu GPL.
One of the important things the participants learned is that physics engines can fail to be as general as you might think, and working around those limitations was a huge learning experience. (For example, the physics engine does not support bouncing–all collisions are essentially inelastic. Further, the technique Atman used to make large number of interacting objects stable also caused them to be somewhat sticky.) Halfway through the event, I thought we were going to “fail”–that most people weren’t going to come up with anything. This turned out to be around the turning point when people finally managed to interalize the limitations sufficient to really design. So while I encourage people to play with it and see up with what they can come, don’t start designing until you actually have the code.
April 28th, 2004 at 11:55 pm
Uhh, I just played BootLooter for an hour, I love it… it’s fabulous… But what’s up with Level 5? Is that supposed to be winnable?
April 29th, 2004 at 12:56 am
Hey! Chaim has a game on there! Way to not tell anybody about it, Chaim! :)
April 29th, 2004 at 5:06 pm
Man, BootLooter is really tough to control, I changed gravity late and didn’t have a chance to retweak the air control. I’m impressed at your patience.
BootLooter level 5 is bogus. (I originally built level 4 as level 5, and then when I saw I wasn’t going to have time to build another level, I copied it to level 4, accidentally leaving a copy as level 5. The gravity constants are per-level and in code, so level 5 has a lame ‘default’ gravity set… so it’s just level 4 with super-high gravity, and hence unwinnable.)
April 30th, 2004 at 6:15 pm
I just got my PS-to-PC adapter in the mail, and have been playing the other games a bit. I like them all — most addicted to BootLooter, Orange Tree, the pogo-stick game, Dancing Robots and of course Stunt Hamsters.
May 5th, 2004 at 11:50 pm
Gamasutra features an article on this year’s Indie Game Jam, describing both the frustrations and opportunities for emergent gameplay in designing around a 2D physics engine.
September 15th, 2004 at 6:14 pm
What happened to the source code release? I googled Stunt Hamsters (was hoping that people had released new levels for it of their own 3rd party making) but have come up with nothing.
February 22nd, 2005 at 2:30 pm
Yes, what happened to the source code release? I would love to at least get a look at Atman’s 2D physics engine, has it been released anywhere?
ChrisC
March 23rd, 2005 at 8:21 am
We want the source.