Mr Blocker

Here’s my entry for LD12. It’s called Mr Blocker. The aim of the game is to build towers by dropping blocks from the top of the screen, while being hindered by earthquakes, lightning and fire.
Source
– you need Perl, SDL and SDL Perl to run this.
Linux binary
– you need SDL to run this.
Windows binary
– just run the executable within.
As I was busy this weekend, I only managed to spend about 12 hours on it. There’s no sound and the graphics are limited to coloured squares, but it’s reasonably complete. I’m afraid the gameplay isn’t terribly deep or exciting, but hopefully it will keep you entertained for a few minutes.

Thanks to everyone who played my LD12 entry, Mr Blocker. As a number of people observed (myself included), it’s not much fun. Partly this was because I was very limited on time, so I deliberately chose a very simple concept so that I could finish in time.
As the game stands, once you have a reasonable idea of how the disasters work, it’s basically a matter of coming up with a strategy to work around them and following that. The simplicity of the game means that there is little variety in useful strategies. Following a strategy just means dropping blocks in the planned places, so there is not much skill or variety in that either.
My original idea regarding the style of play was that disasters should be unstoppable: the player either builds towers specifically to be destroyed by disasters, or builds towers in such a way that the effect will be minimal. A number of people suggested adding a way to avoid disasters, or allowing a level to be completed as soon as the targets were met, rather than after the time expired. That goes against my original idea, but it might make the game more interesting.
I might release an updated version with tidied code, a readme and key repeat for dropping blocks. Thanks to Morre for pointing out the lack of automatic key repeat; I use a strange keyboard with that built in, so I didn’t notice. I won’t be adding any more levels or other features because I don’t think the game would be entertaining for long enough for them to be worthwhile.
The only complicated part of the code is that which determines whether the targets for the level have been met after the time expires. There is a little complexity in the code to determine what gets destroyed in a disaster. Mostly, the code is fairly straightforward.
Because of the simple nature of the game, I thought there might be some entertainment in working out how disasters behave. However, this seems to have caused some people confusion and frustration. In case anyone is interested, here is how they actually behave and how to deal with them:
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