Mr Perry's Farm

Of all the TINS 2016 games that have been posted here on the forum so far, this is the one I've played the most.

Right off the bat, I like the fonts and graphics, but the mouse detection is slightly inaccurate (might be because I'm running it from Wine), some of the text overflows offscreen to the right, and I dislike that there is no windowed mode. The lack of instructions is a bit jarring, but I figured most of it out after a while. The splatter graphic is pretty satisfying, and the poems after each level are witty and humorous. The level editor is a cool addition. I'm not sure what the last few objects are (like the blue and white circles). Is level 4 supposed to be shaped like a kanji character (kind of looks like 分)?

The inclusion of instructions would make the game a lot better, in my opinion. Once I figured it all out, I had a fun time.

It's 弁/Ben from 弁当/bentou

The code supports a windowed mode, but there's no way to specify or change it without recompiling. As such, I've now updated the zip (same download link) to include a windowed executable in addition to the full-screen one. I haven't changed anything else (I left the post-competition bug in there). As I said, I had limited time for polish; sorry I didn't have time to put it in as a runtime control.

You're quite right about the weather items not being clear too. Those items cause rain, snow and sun, which cause the animals to speed up (to get out of the rain), slip around, and slow down (to enjoy the sun) respectively.

As for the mouse, I'm drawing everything to a 1920x1080 buffer and then letterboxing/pillarboxing that on to whatever screen (or window) space I have. That means I have to convert mouse events and mouse state back from actual screen (or window) space into buffer space. When it works properly, it will give you a loss of accuracy on the level of one or two pixels, but if you're seeing more than that, then it could be either a bug in my code (somewhere I forgot to do the conversion perhaps) or a symptom of Wine. My feeling is it's probably Wine and it might be specific to displays created with the ALLEGRO_FULLSCREEN_WINDOW flag. Perhaps you could test the windowed executable and see how you get on?

As for the text overflowing, well, I used to avoid TTF files at all costs for exactly that reason. Pixel fonts all the way! Most of the FunOrb games use pixel fonts, although it's possible some developers used TrueType fonts, rendered platform-specifically, especially in the later games.

More sensibly though, as TrueType fonts obviously have benefits - what would be nice is if FreeType and/or Allegro could do their own font rasterisation in a way that's consistent across platforms, or at least have an option to do so. I've just started a thread about that.

Thank you for the comments, and I'm glad you liked the bits you liked

Ah, so perhaps it's not text but the whole screen that went off the side

Thanks for testing

The items are meant to have numbers to their right

I can confirm that the image that's meant to fill the screen is shunted right by the width of your taskbar, resulting in the stuff on the right being cut off. Additionally, the system status bar at the top covers some stuff at the top. What this boils down to is that Allegro thinks it has the whole screen at its disposal, and is reporting the display size accordingly, but it doesn't.

Interesting - you've now got top and bottom clipping, instead of just top as before. But you can indeed see everything you need to see to play.

I'm struggling too.
On Ubuntu, I installed package ldc then downloaded the latest allegro and SiegeLord's DAllegro from GitHub. I could build the DAllegro lib and example program.
I then invented a Makefile for Bruce's code, basically just passing all the sources to ldc2. I then got a load of linker errors.
Eventually I found I had to add a load of `pragma(lib, ...)` clauses into Game.d for all the allegro libraries (liballegro.so et al) and libdallegro5.so.
But I think I must be doing something wrong - shouldn't the compiler be picking up the pragma-libs from inside the DAllegro library - and why do I need to include the library and the source code for DAllegro in the compilation line? ldc2's docs don't seem to be very illuminating.

[edit] OK, what I did does work but still don't know why it seems to ignore the pragmas.

I tested and it ran fine.

I played a little and ending doing evil things with tons of animals and explosives. Damn you, Chris Bruce !!

{"name":"610369","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/f\/cfdeb8199d924f57a0143ddd5d9a4df2.png","w":960,"h":540,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/f\/cfdeb8199d924f57a0143ddd5d9a4df2"}

Edit: I damn you both !!!

Killing so much poor little electronic beings made my eyes fuzzy. I blamed the first name I saw when coming back to post my report ;-)

I'm still having a hard time figuring this one out. I see animals moving, they go towards food and then reproduce when they reach it. The machine is moving around and can cause snow and rain, and explosions.

But what is the goal of the game?

I couldn't figure out the controls, or it was glitched somehow in Wine. The mouse worked, I could click start game / quit. But I couldn't click on anything anywhere, and no keyboard presses seemed to affect anything.

Man, I wish I had more time to play around with this game more.