Cartograph
This game is from the old Ludum Dare platform. You can try viewing the original page on Web Archive
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(may not load correctly).
Cartograph
You control a ship navigating through a chain of mysterious islands. Your goal is the chart as many of of these islands as you can without crashing or running out of supplies. Additional detail is inside the included readme.txt.
Update About Graphics
It has come to my attention that the the game is not scaling up properly on some machines. This makes the graphics look extremely blurry, rather than blocky, which was the intent. This may have something to do with XP vs 7; I developed on 7, where it looks fine, but when tried on an XP machine, looked blurry. The game is still playable with the blurry graphics, it just doesn't look good at all (not that it looked "good" to start with, but you get me). As I alluded in my release notes below, I'm pretty much unavailable today (Sunday), so this is not something I'll be able to even try to fix. That's the problem with cutting an already short development time in half: little to no time spent testing or bug-fixing. I fully expect to be harshly down-graded by anyone who plays with the blurry graphics, as I should be. I suppose I'll have to chalk this one up to "lessons learned" and do better the next time. Sorry!
Notes
Made using Game Maker 8. My first time using it actually, though I have used previous versions in the past. I'm actively trying to learn some other game programming, namely C#/XNA and Objective-C/Cocos2D, but those are a long ways away from being something I enter any sort of competition with. This is my second LD attempt, with Caverns being the first. I was not even close to properly prepared for that one in retrospect; I didn't even start Friday night, and goofed around a bit on Saturday, before realizing Sunday morning that I was in trouble. I wound up with about a 66% completed game that was about 33% of my original vision. I wanted to really try at the next one, but after months of waiting, I gut punched when I found out that Exploration was taking place on the weekend I was moving. Arg!
But hey, there's always next time right? Believe it or not, I was screwed again: this weekend, I had to fly out mid-day Sunday for business over the next couple of days. Unbelievable! I swear that four out of five weekends, I just hang around the house with nothing special to do. But for some reason, LD conspires against me. I was all set to skip out yet again, when I decided, screw it, I'm going to at least TRY. I scaled back all ideas I had to the bare minimum possible: an Atari-esque arcade game. Something with no music, leaves-plenty-to-the-imagination graphics, play time of under a minute, and so on. And I made it! In retrospect, the game is actually incredibly basic for the amount of time I spent on it - I have a feeling the more experienced people on here could whip this thing out in hours, rather than a full day - but hey, everyone's got to start somewhere, eh?
You control a ship navigating through a chain of mysterious islands. Your goal is the chart as many of of these islands as you can without crashing or running out of supplies. Additional detail is inside the included readme.txt.
Update About Graphics
It has come to my attention that the the game is not scaling up properly on some machines. This makes the graphics look extremely blurry, rather than blocky, which was the intent. This may have something to do with XP vs 7; I developed on 7, where it looks fine, but when tried on an XP machine, looked blurry. The game is still playable with the blurry graphics, it just doesn't look good at all (not that it looked "good" to start with, but you get me). As I alluded in my release notes below, I'm pretty much unavailable today (Sunday), so this is not something I'll be able to even try to fix. That's the problem with cutting an already short development time in half: little to no time spent testing or bug-fixing. I fully expect to be harshly down-graded by anyone who plays with the blurry graphics, as I should be. I suppose I'll have to chalk this one up to "lessons learned" and do better the next time. Sorry!
Notes
Made using Game Maker 8. My first time using it actually, though I have used previous versions in the past. I'm actively trying to learn some other game programming, namely C#/XNA and Objective-C/Cocos2D, but those are a long ways away from being something I enter any sort of competition with. This is my second LD attempt, with Caverns being the first. I was not even close to properly prepared for that one in retrospect; I didn't even start Friday night, and goofed around a bit on Saturday, before realizing Sunday morning that I was in trouble. I wound up with about a 66% completed game that was about 33% of my original vision. I wanted to really try at the next one, but after months of waiting, I gut punched when I found out that Exploration was taking place on the weekend I was moving. Arg!
But hey, there's always next time right? Believe it or not, I was screwed again: this weekend, I had to fly out mid-day Sunday for business over the next couple of days. Unbelievable! I swear that four out of five weekends, I just hang around the house with nothing special to do. But for some reason, LD conspires against me. I was all set to skip out yet again, when I decided, screw it, I'm going to at least TRY. I scaled back all ideas I had to the bare minimum possible: an Atari-esque arcade game. Something with no music, leaves-plenty-to-the-imagination graphics, play time of under a minute, and so on. And I made it! In retrospect, the game is actually incredibly basic for the amount of time I spent on it - I have a feeling the more experienced people on here could whip this thing out in hours, rather than a full day - but hey, everyone's got to start somewhere, eh?