Category: Les Collégiennes

Pyramidwarf is a game I made in collaboration with Samuel Boucher (alias Monsieur Eurêka) with music by Stefan Boucher at the Global Game Jam 2014 in the TAG Lab of the Concordia University, in Montréal. The version you can download here is a tweaked, split-screen version of the “party build” you can find on the GGJ website.

Windows : pyramidwarf-final-1.01-windows.zip [12 Mb]
Mac : pyramidwarf-final-1.01-mac.zip [12 Mb]

This was my first experience with Samuel in a jam, he’s a kickass vector artist currently working with Ko-Op on GNOG, which you should totally check out.

(the game was demoed at the Montréal Joue Arcade 11, too!)

We worked with Unity, as is the usual for me in game jams, and the initial idea was to make a stacking game where you’d either race the other player with a really unstable stack of little guys, or throw parts of your pyramid to the other player’s to break it up. And of course, this being a game jam, we didn’t do half of the stuff we planned for, and ended up with a super janky physics-based stacking game that happens to be silly enough to be fun!

On my side, it was my first time really exploiting Unity physics in a game. I’d done some basic rigid-body stuff and used character controllers (Volkenessen was physics based as well), but never hinges or physics-based multi-body animation. One of the fun/interesting parts to do under pressure was the walk animation using torque and impulses : the leg pushes itself up, angles up, the body gets a magical shove and the legs readjust themselves to stay upright. It’s definitely not physically correct, but it looks like a bunch of cardboard puppets and that’s exactly what we were going for!

To build the pyramid, dwarves need to go up somehow, and the way we solved that is just… teleportation. These little guys have magic on their side, and they can teleport to the first free spot of the pyramid to keep stacking up. This caused rigidbody overlapping problems that I sorta resolved by just testing a whole lot if something’s there before teleporting, and denying the move otherwise.

The “final 1.01” build I posted here is not bug-free, but it’s shippable, so here goes. I might come back to it and fix rendering issues, and maybe implement dwarf-throwing, because it still sounds so great in my head.

Enjoy!

Updated 04/07/2012 : Version 1.1 — see below for patch notes & downloads.

At long last!

Pico Battle is a game I initially made with Aliceffekt for the Prince Of Arcade event of early November 2011, which more than half a year ago. But between FEZ, Volkenessen, Diluvium and Waiting for Horus, we never took the time to actually finish it properly, until now!

In its PoA demo form, it used the same crude networking code as The Cloud Is A Lie, which requires two computers plugged in the same LAN or ideally directly by a cross-wired ethernet cable. Releasing that particular version publicly made little sense, so we decided to make a much more extensive multiplayer version.

Above, Pico Battle 2011 (albeit a terribly compressed and cropped screenshot).
And below, the version we’re releasing! :)

This game’s name might remind you of another Prince of Arcade game, this one in 2010 — Pico³. It’s the same basic idea of playing with colors, mixing and matching them, but this time in a competitive versus environment.

How To Play

Upon launching the game, you will find yourself in the Lobby, a temporary haven. You should look for an hexagon floating about the edges of your screen (right click drag to rotate around the planet) and click on it to practice against the AI. You might see circles too, they are other players and could challenge you as soon as you raise your shield.

To protect yourself against incoming attacks, find the patch of dirt marked by a black & white circle, and connect a node to it. The shield will light up, eating away at the incoming bullets with a similar hue. In the lobby, you are invisible to potential attackers as long as your shield is unpowered.

To win against your opponent, locate a patch of mushrooms and connect nodes to it — this is your cannon. It needs a minimum amount of power to be able to fire, and based on the incoming nodes, will fire bullets of various sizes and colours; easier or harder to defend against. The idea being to match the colour of incoming bullets with your shield, and to differ as much as possible from the opponent’s shield colour (which is indicated by the contour of his circular icon) with your cannon’s bullets.

Pico Battle is an entirely wordless game, and might seem offputting or hard to grasp at first. In the lobby, a robotic voice will explain the basics of the game, and take your time there to experiment with the controls and the scarce UI elements. As you get familiar with the game and its interface, you will discover strategies and enjoy it even more.

Updates

04/07/2012 — Version 1.1

• Fixed bug where the AI wouldn’t defend itself if it is challenged too quickly
• AI now raises a random shield before you attack with any colour
• Fixed graphical issue on arc-link shadows
• Escape key now quits the game if pressed in the lobby

Downloads

Windows Version – picobattle_pc.zip
Mac OS X Version – picobattle_mac.zip

The soundtrack is available on Aliceffekt’s blog entry for the game.

Updated 15/06/2012!
See bottom of the post for updated download links.

Diluvium is a game I made with Aliceffekt, Henk Boom and Dom2D as Les Collégiennes over the course of TOJam The Sevening, a 48h game jam (though we had a ~8h headstart on that) which took place between May 11th and 13th 2012.

Gameplay

Diluvium is a versus typing tactics game.
There are two summoners on the battlefield, and you are one of them. Type animal names to summon them, and they will attack the enemy’s spawns and ultimately the enemy summoner himself. The first to kill the other one wins, as these things usually are.

You can type up to three animal names in a row, which spawns a totem of these three animals. Each animal has its own stats : speed, attack power, health and intelligence. The totem is as intelligent as its most intelligent member, and health is summed up, but movement speed is averaged.

If someone spawns a dog on the playfield, nobody can spawn another dog until it dies. No duplicate animal! Thankfully you have 284 animal names to choose from, 100 of which are illustrated differently.

The game has a half-assed single-player mode that you can access by typing “LOCAL” in the connection screen. Otherwise, the game should work fine in LAN and over the Internet, as long as you open up the server’s port 10000 (I’m not sure whether Unity networking uses TCP or UDP, so go for both). The connection screen lets you know your LAN and WAN IPs as you host the game.

Things you can also enter at the connection prompt : “MUTE” to kill the music, “IDDQD” for degreelessness mode, and one other secret code which will be revealed elsewhere on the interwebs!

For more information about the commands you can enter on the splash screen, see Aliceffekt’s wiki page on Diluvium.

Development

This was the second network multiplayer game I’ve worked on that uses actual Unity networking instead of a hacked up UDP sender/receiver pair. It’s SO MUCH EASIER TO SET UP! And it works consistently, no threading bugs and random Unity crashes. Knowing this makes me much more comfortable in attempting more network-multiplayer games in jams. The Cloud Is A Lie was a nightmare to keep synchronized, it would’ve been so much easier with the built-in stuff.

We had sort of an Montréal Indie Superstar version of Les Collégiennes this time at TOJam, with FRACT‘s Henk with me on code and Dom2D as an animal portraits factory for the whole weekend. Aliceffekt and Dom’s visual styles merged really well, and having all this extra super talented manpower allowed us to create a much more ambitious game. Henk happened to have working pathfinding classes just lying around, and his deeper knowledge of Unity intricacies meant less time spent fighting bugs and oddities. It was such a great jam! ^_^

Updates

Version 1.1 – 15/06/2012

• Server Naming : You can now name your games and tell your friend to connect to it by name instead of IP! (IP still works, though)
• Anonymatching : Create a server and wait for a user, or join an anonymous server randomly!
• NAT Punchthrough : Server no longer needs to forward port 10000
• Adaptative AI : In local mode, AI opponent spawns more/less units per second depending on wins/losses
• Splash Redesign : Options better presented, no more accidental enter key press
• Balancing, a handful of new animal names supported
• Escape key quits to splash at any time during gameplay

Downloads

Diluvium v1.1 – Windows version
Diluvium v1.1 – Mac version

Enjoy!

Pico³ is a game I made with Aliceffekt (as Les Collégiennes) over the course of a month, and that we presented at the Prince of Arcade party on November 9th.

Download

Pico³ – Windows Version [6.3 Mb]
Pico³ – Mac OS X Version [11.6 Mb] (Nov. 15th Edit : Fixed the mac build, it runs now!)

Aliceffekt designed the game mechanics, levels and visuals, while I took care of all programming and procedural animations.

How to play

The game is fairly simple on the surface :

• Emitters emit cells of a primary color (red, green or blue).
• Receptors expect cells of a certain color, or color (ordered) sequence.
• You can place Projectors that redirect cells or combine them, if different cells hit the projector simultaneously.

The challenge is to combine colors at the right time, with the given resources and world layout. It becomes an intricate resource management/puzzle game, and even the simplest-looking puzzle can prove almost impossible!

There is only 13 levels in this version, which was made for a party setting. The difficulty curve proved to be very harsh for new players, and even seasoned players (like me) can’t reach the end. It’s a hard game — Aliceffekt’s trademark game design. ^_^

 
It is played with mouse+keyboard on all platforms, but also supports the Xbox 360 gamepad (either wired or wireless with an USB receiver) on Windows by using Rémi Gillig’s XInput.NET for Unity. I made my own wrapper over it to detect press/hold/down, actually the code was ripped out of my XNA code. That’s the fun part of using C# scripting, I can just share code between projects even if it’s not the same technology!

Controls

If you’re too lazy to read the tutorials :

• Right click and drag to rotate the camera round the world, scrollwheel to zoom in/out
• Left click to create a Projector, and left click on a face to select its direction
• Z to undo the last Projector (or hover any Projector and hit Z to undo that one)
• R to restart the level
• Escape to return to the first Level
• ALT+F4 or Command+Q to quit

Hope you like it, it was a a lot of fun to make and I’m already looking forward to my next Unity creation… It’s a great work environment.

The Cloud is a Lie is a game that me and Aliceffekt (our team name was “Les Collégiennes”) made at a 36-hour gamejam/competition in Québec City called Bivouac Urbain. (Last year I also attended the event, and made Stimergy with Heather Kelley).

Download

The game is available for Windows or Mac OS X. [10 and 15Mb respectively]

Controls

WASD or Arrows keys move. (you need to hold them)
Spacebar shoots.
M toggles the music.
Escape quits. (there may be a 2-5 seconds pause when quitting the game on Windows)

Gameplay

The Cloud is a Lie is a LAN multiplayer game for any number of players, but best suited for 2 to 4 players. It can be played alone too, it’s just less fun.

Otherwise, it’s like Tower Defense meets Tron.

• There is a constant flow of enemies (the spinning cyan cylinders) coming in from the end of the map, and their goal is to reach your home base.
• By moving around, the players create walls that eventually fade out, but that can slow down the enemies’ movement.
• You can shoot lasers using your headpiece/weapon, and one shot kills an enemy (but there’s a cooldown time).
• You gain experience points by killing enemies, and experience points levels up your weapon (faster kills, up to 3 attacks per shot).
• The more experience you and other players gain, the more enemies are produced.
• If an enemy makes it through your defenses to your base, every player loses a level.
• The game never ends, but eventually there’s just too many enemies, everyone falls back to level 1 and the game falls back to its initial state.

Concept

The idea was to make a multiplayer game without a server, that happens “on the wire” and free for any one to drop in or out.
So it kinda goes against the idea of cloud computing, where the client is as thin as possible and the server (or server farm) does all the work and keeps all the state. In our game, the clients are as heavy as can be, and try to maintain the state of the whole game based on the messages that are passed around.

Also, the theme of this year’s Bivouac Urbain was the song Dan Dan by Misteur Valaire. The song that is played in-game is Aliceffekt’s remix of that song, and it complements the gameplay nicely.

Post-Mortem

This year’s jam was very different from last year’s. Aliceffekt is a super-productive multi-talented artist/designer/hacker and he was quite an asset at a gamejam.
The game’s design was already decided before the jam started, so that saved us a lot of time. And 12-hours in, most of the art was already done, and I was really lagging behind. :P

It was a huge challenge to me for two main reasons :

1. It was my first real game in Unity (I only skimmed through tutorials before, but I use C# daily)
2. It also was my first network-multiplayer game, and a weird one at that.

Most of my time at the jam was spent debugging the network code, and just messing around trying not to crash Unity. Even at the end of the 36-hours, the game had pretty bad synchronization issues between clients, different enemies on-screen and lasers shooting in the void. People seemed to like it nonetheless. :D

I can’t say I regret decisions that we’ve made, or that I/we should have done things differently. It was a great learning experience, stressful but gratifying, and jumping into unknown territory like that is one of the best ways to kick yourself in the butt and learn a technology for good. I feel infinitely more confident in using Unity now than before the jam.

About the initial concept (a headless LAN multiplayer game), I’d say that it’s feasible, but keeping the clients in sync is a big challenge. I’d also say that my implementation is pretty poor and doesn’t play well with lost packets (and it uses UDP, so no guarantee) or an unstable connection. I didn’t do any kind of client-side prediction either, but I literally flood the network with packets (every client sending 10 packets a second) so interpolation isn’t really necessary if the network can stand it.

A couple of things annoyed me with Unity, but I was at such an early learning stage that I probably did things all wrong, so they’re not worth pointing out. The general thing that stood out is that Unity is fantastic when you use the built-in stuff, and less fantastic when you want to hack it your way… but everything’s possible if you have sufficient google-fu and patience. :)

Hope you like the game!