Trouble In Euclidea, a mini-game

Chances are that if you’re reading this blog, you’ve already heard of this, but I’ll put it here for archiving. :)

Trouble In Euclidea is a game I made for the TIGSource Bootleg Demake Competition as an obvious demake of Geometry Wars. My intent was to demake the graphics (by using ASCII art for everything) more than the gameplay, but it turns out most people did both, which makes much more sense as the gameplay ends up being more original and it plays less like a cheap clone. Mine kinda does. :P

I ended up with five votes in the competition, which places my game 26th out of 30 positions. It may not sound like much, but I’m really happy that I got votes at all! There are really amazing entries that scored around mine, SHADE: Ghost Academy and DamN for instance…

It was also a nice experiment in fast prototyping. I did the game in a single month, but only on weekends except for the last week. Which means I spent at most 15 days on the game, from start to finish, from graphics to game code.

I used C# 3.5, IrrKlang.NET, TV3D and my spiffy new XNA-inspired Component Framework to build it. It worked really well for me, so I decided to release the source of the whole project. As with most of my code recently, it has an almost complete absence of comments, but should be fairly self-explanatory.

Downloads

Source with libraries and content : TroubleInEuclidea_src_r4.zip (2.7 Mb)

Binaries only : TroubleInEuclidea_r4.zip (1.6 Mb)

(for those wondering, the fourth update “r4” only contains bugfixes in the component framework, a new version of IrrKlang and very little code cleanup)

Of course you’ll need .NET 3.5 installed, and TV3D requires some oft-missing DirectX DLLs which you can get with the End-User Runtimes.

Closing Notes

There are three known bugs :

• Sometimes fuschia octogonal enemies make their spawning sound, but don’t actually spawn.
• Sometimes enemies appear too close together and “bounce” very quickly, sometimes traversing the whole screen in less than a second.
• If you close the game with Alt+F4, it won’t actually close. Use the ESC key!!

There are also two achievements, read the ReadMe file for more info! :)