I'd like to get thread a bit back on track, and ask the following questions to everyone who played/finished the game:

1) How complete where the tutorial levels? Did you find something missing from them or insufficiently explained?
2) Which levels did you find the hardest and why? Or maybe they were all too easy?
3) Which level did you like the most?
4) Would you play an extended, touched-up Garbage Quest?

Well, quite likely. I'd definitely like to expand the project a bit, and add some new creatures and obstacles to the game - and along with that, more levels. 14 levels is really on the short side, but I think that creating 14 workable levels in the timeframe of Speedhack is still respectable .

In the meantime, you can make some levels of your own! You can launch the game with a '-editor' switch. That will open the simple editor I used - it's crappy, but hey, Speedhack. Left mouse button places stuff, right mouse button removes stuff, mouse wheel toggles various tiles. "S" saves to levels/edit.lv, "L" loads levels/edit.lv, "P" allows you to test-drive the level. After you're done, you can replace one of the original levels, or even add new ones (if you keep to consecutive numbers) - level 15 will get covered by level "??" once its unlocked, though, cause that's hardcoded .

The only not letting me play this game is the jumping. Really annoying, and makes me fail more than other mistakes I could make (Tend to over jump platforms, and one level had a gap you needed to jump over, and if you fell in, you had to restart. Thing was, going above on the platforms once you clear, you could over jump one and fall in said gap)

GCC on my 64-bit Linux system doesn't like you casting pointers to int... Anybody know of an easy solution?

** EDIT **

As expected, replacing [almost] ALL instances of int with long fixed those errors. I'm not sure if that will have consequences in your code. Nevertheless, I don't have A4.9 + pkg-config configured properly because when it gets to the linking stage it blows up.

I got all the unlock points. What do I do now?

Well, yeah, the frameskip settings are definitely out of wack for this game. Well, what do you know, didn't have time to test them properly .

Make a T-shirt with "I got all the unlock points and all I got is this lousy T-shirt", I suppose. Other than that, you can wait for me to get my act together and release an extended version .

A cool little game. I completed all 14 levels, but didn't manage to unlock the ?? level. The only thing I don't like is that the horizontal component of the jumping velocity; it is a bit uncontrollable at times.

So, I finally got round to fixing all the obvious bugs and problems in the competition version. The fixed version is attached, and features the following changes:

• no more deathwalking

• the baddies should no longer be able to push the bags into walls

• the jump physics are tweaked - hopefully for the better

So, if you're frustrated by the jumping in the original, you might want to get this one.

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Unfortunately, you seem to have stumbled upon an alternative, harder way to solve the puzzle. The intended way involves only two throws total, and the jumps should also be easy. Of course, perhaps I'm mistaken and the intended way is hard.

Hint:

The real problem with some of the levels is there are unintended ways of clearing them (based on game physics peculiarities, usually), but there simply wasn't enough time to test it all - not to mention to get more sensible physics working .

Seems you've included the wrong dll files, but I got it working with some files I had lying around.

Anyway, level 7 is a lot easier when doing what you suggested.

EDIT: There is still the bug where sometimes the bags or green monsters will just hang in the air instead of falling to the ground when I'm trying to drop them.

Finally found time to try it. The jumping seems better in the *-fix1 version, but the controls are still not intuitive. I think it would be better to keep movement together (i.e., up for jump). It might even be best to use FPS controls. WASD for movement (optionally space to jump) and E or F for an action key. The current controls feel awkward to me. I'd try them out that way myself to see if it works as well as I imagine it would, but I'm too exhausted to bother...

That said, it's still a very nice and polished game. I like the help notices and the intelligent game design with respect to them (albeit, I could swear the second level requires you to double-jump before the notice is accessible...).

Yeah, I too had to copy all DLLs from the original to get the fix to work. Forgot about that.

Thanks for the heads up! I've uploaded a new, hopefully working archive and linked to it from the original post. The A5 DLLs are a chore to get to work properly.

Well, FPS controls are just what you said - FPS controls. A great many 2d platformers use the scheme I use, and people playing games in the genre are quite used to it, I think. The original problem was with the way the controls worked, not with the individual key assignments, I think.

Anyway, if you want to tweak it to see if the FPS scheme is workable, all it takes is changing src/misc/Controls.h to match your preferences. You can't make up jump though - it's needed for the throws.

I'm not sure what you are refering to. The second level actually doesn't require you to use double jump - all the jumps there are short. The technique is presented on the first level, and the long jump there can certainly be cleared without double-jumping. It's possible I fscked the physics up, so the length of your jump depends on frame-rate - but I don't think that should be the case.