Hello Allegro,
The semester is closing up and we've just submitted the first playable on our Junior game, Sic Semper Tyhamis (working title). It is a physics intensive action game where you play as the big bad wolf fighting off hordes of piggies as you search for a flower.
Using the mouse, you hold right click to huff and hold left to puff. If you suck something in, you can left click to throw it. Break down houses to stop pigs from spawning (kill the little spawner block inside), or just have fun throwing a pig at another pig and watching them collapse.
The game is a bit rough right now (first playable) and there certainly are a few glitches here and there. Pig AI needs major improvement and we need some artists to make us some animations and models, and, of course, we need more and better levels, but the core mechanics are there (sucking, blowing, object reflection, air jumping, and maybe something else), so it's something.
Anyway, let me know what you think. And if you have a good idea for a title, let me know. It really needs changing at the moment.
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A piggie emerges!
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Die piggie!
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This does not look good...
The game is only on Windows right now. If I find time to make a Linux build over break, I will (which I should, considering the only thing holding me back is my HTMLEngine, which will be Linux compatible when I make the first release this month or the next.).
Anyway, enjoy.
Well, I played it, and recorded my experience with Fraps and a microphone. Except the output was 6GBs of video, so I'm trying to figure out a way to slim that down. I'll link the videos here when I've done that.
Quick summary:
Laggy
It ran at about 8FPS, which made it nearly impossible to play. 
I think it would have been fun to throw bacon around, and the music got me pumpin' 
, but the lagginess killed it 
I've got a GTX 265, triple core AMD, 4Gigs, etc, so not sure whats wrong.
Anyway, I played it all the way through despite the difficulties, so hopefully I can get this video uploaded 
Well, graphics certainly wouldn't be the bottleneck. Physics is currently quite the resource hog. We didn't quite have time to get islanding in and fully optimized, so just the few hundred or so objects there are cause slowdowns. We haven't properly multithreaded it yet either, so there's also that.
By final release next semester, we'll certainly have it running smoother.
Well, just lettin' ya know.
The audio came out a lot worse than I thought it would, because my microphone sucks, but here's my boring play test video anyway, for what it's worth:
Thank you. We haven't gotten to playtest since we got just about every actual gameplay element it (it was more of a physics tech demo until two weeks ago).
I realize now I left the sucking and blowing mechanic based on time whereas the physics is based on frames at a fixed 60fps, which was why you were having so much trouble jumping up the ledges.
Anyway, we really appreciate all the feedback. I noticed in your run through you didn't encounter any of the bomb throwing pigs at all (they were in houses which were more out of the way) so we'll definitely need to plan out our future levels better.
Out of curiosity, what would you recommend as far as the pigs being faster than you? Pig AI is going to radically change (they don't even have path finding right now, sadly), but the basic concepts (charging pigs, bomb throwing pigs, pigs which run around aimlessly) weren't under scheduled removal yet. Having all enemies slower than you would probably be too easy, I think, but if it is confusing having them go that fast, that's no good either. So...?
Anyway, thanks again.
what would you recommend as far as the pigs being faster than you?
I think that was more of a comedic notation than anything. On the other hand, it was kind of annoying not to be able to run away from the pigs, and just have them sit there humping me from behind...
You mentioned charging pigs. If the pigs were typically slower than the player, but could do quick bursts (charges) that were much faster, that would be less frustrating. That way the player can still run around and feel that they are faster than the pigs, but it still has some difficultly to it because they have to occasional dodge the pigs.