Introducing my SpeedHack Entry: The Cannon Ball that Would Not Stop!

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It's a little bit like Nanaca Crash, but involving less chance, more skill and some horribly hacked comedy physics. It also has insane bespoke music

Blog

There's one known bug: your distance is supposed to contribute to your score, but only the rightmost three digits are used. To fix it, change

static int getscore() {
  return ballx/metre+numpeople*200+numwalls*50;
}

to

static int getscore() {
  return distancesofar/10+ballx/metre+numpeople*200+numwalls*50;
}

SpeedHack version: Source-only download | Download with static Windows binary
Fixed version: Source-only download | Download with static Windows binary

I hope you all enjoy it

Let's see.. it's a very simple game, but you made something out of it. I like the music and the wall physics.
And it's a great feeling to see the cannon ball knocking over innocent people.

Good to see somebody implemented widescreen (even if it's slightly flawed by just just chopping the top/bottom off and leaving the resolution the same!). Very good though

Yeah, good to see, but actually the widescreen didn't work for me in this game (1280x800 laptop display, doesn't support whatever resolution the game uses in widescreen).

What?

The widescreen mode is 640x400, which I thought was pretty well supported. I suppose you could hack the source to set 1280x800 and do a stretch_blit(), if you want to bother - but I'm amazed it can't just set 640x400.

Thanks for the good comments Do play it a bit more and discover the magnet and its effect if you haven't already. (It does do more than look nice, given the right conditions )

By the way, Neil, I didn't chop anything off

I feel like this is a pretty good score. I hit the tops of a lot of walls and bounced pretty high

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Ah, my mistake then, I was expecting widescreen to be a mode wider than the normal mode

btw, I like the mario party style curtains, how did you achieve that?

Once I realised you can press the space bar to jump I got to about 1800m and found it too easy, maybe you should have left out the jump option

The curtains are a bit like a mesh of points where each column of surfaces in the mesh is drawn as one unit using Allegro's polygon() function. The bottom row of points stay at the bottom of the screen and slide out, while the other points form into a series of parabolae, one for each column. See the drawcurtains() function.

The implementation calculates a lot of stuff repeatedly, but it wasn't performance-critical so I didn't feel the need to optimise it.

[EDIT]
Beat this!

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BTW, this is my favourite so far, along with Dr. Madness.

Great entry! Props for well-finished graphics and sound.

Awesome! It reminds me of the Kitten Cannon, but with better music.

I had to take this off of my work machine. It's an excellent time-waster.

I love the sound of the thug dying.

Kitten Cannon! Now that brings back memories

Thanks for the comments

Another awesome game as usually. Your polish objective was definitelly reached, it's one of the most polished SH games I've played so far. It's also pretty fun to play and the physics are not as unrealistic as you portray them. The graphics and music are pleasant and the the way that the tutorial was done is also very good.
Also, I guess I'll take the opportunity to say good things about your DUMB library. Thanks for DUMB!
Oh, and my highscore is a laughable 880 meters >:E

microcat, "as usual"? That implies you've seen my previous entries, but it says you only signed up to allegro.cc this month

But anyway, thanks

It's definitely not supported on Mac. I think 720x480 is the lowest resolution widescreen mode available in OS X, and 640x480 is the lowest resolution mode available at all.

I found the game more interesting after I realized I could press space to "jump."

You're so conceited! Perhaps he meant "just like all the other SH games", which in fact was an insult because some of these games really aren't that good.

I just got around to playing this game. I've been playing them in alphabetical order. I actually skipped a few because I was tired of playing crummy games or games that didn't work.

I loved the music! The graphics reminded me of South Park, which I don't particularly care for. The game overall is quite fun and addictive, though. It is one of the few games which I wanted to run in fullscreen, but using Windows Vista, the palette went to something funky and gray when I tried. Kudos for having it windowed by default, though. (Everyone else take note of this, please!)

My records are as follows:
Distance: 2239.0 m
People: 25
Walls: 10
Score: 7739

(Note that all of these were from the same game.)

Excellent job, entheh!

That's a common problem with full screen palettes under Vista/Allegro.

While I didn't participate, I did do extensive tests on full/wide screen before coming up with the final wording. I originally wanted to require proper detection of the aspect ratio and keep the game in line with that, but it would have been a huge chore for a three day competition where there obviously is no room for testing.

Some of the games did a few things that I found were a bad thing. At least one used a forced *_FULLSCREEN. That's really not good at all, despite the resolution. Some tried to set a mode that mimicked the current aspect ratio exactly. That's not good because 1280x1024 is the only 5:4 mode that is supported; you may end up with something like 600x480 when there's no reason to just set 640x480.

The best approach to set a fullscreen (non-window) resolution would have been to use a 4:3 resolution if a 4:3 or 5:4 ratio was found, and then to stick with the native desktop resolution if a 16:9 or 16:10 ratio was found and crop and scale accordingly. A wide screen display can typically only set its native 16:9/16:10 mode along with the popular 4:3 modes (with bars).

But yeah, Ben's game was one of the few that did a good job with wide screen. My 16:10 laptop was actually able to set the wide screen mode properly.

This is definitely a great entertainer. The music really drives this game, and I especially enjoy magnet physics. However, I noticed with widescreen + fullscreen enabled, the game became very jittery.

In the way of statistics, a 'highest bounce' high score would be nice. I hit two wall tops in a row.
'Highest Bounce': 2206.4 m

Distance: 6121.6 m
People: 50
Walls: 19
Score: 17071

My game (when ran fullscreen) just uses your desktop res (or it should) and adjust the ratio on it's own. The only odd thing about my game is that internally, the height is forever set to 768, and the width is based of the ratio it's running off of (which is Match Desktop, 4:3, and 16:9, which the last two (unless your desktop is already it) is only for windowed mode).

I've been lurking for quite some time now.

Well, what can I say?, I think I hate your game.

It is... SO DAMN ADDICTIVE!!!. I just can't stop playing it.

Congratulations!, your game is AWESOME!.

My current records:
Distance: 18212.9 People: 134 Walls: 68 Score: 45012 Highest Bounce: ~2400 m Longest Distance Whitout Pressing Space: ~4000 m

My best single game:
Distance: 18212.9 People: 117 Walls: 68 Score: 45012

By the way, I love the 'magnetizer'.

This game was addictive, I played it for about 30 minutes and got a really high score over 6,000 points.

Good Job, I like the curtain effect

Of the random SpeedHack entries that I've played, this is one of my favorites so far

pretty addictive i though i did a good "height" (about 350), but just checked the other ones heh

W00t!

Yeouch. Looking at Bob's screen shot inspired me to download the source and play it on my laptop in Linux. I love this game, it is true.

My second game in I think was the best I've ever done:
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Edit: not quite as good as kenmasters1976, but certainly better than the "beat this!" shot.
Edit2: The excessive bouncing can be a little annoying. In that game with my screen shot I bounced a LOT.

Well, if you are not willing to waste the time it takes to break a highest record, you can always take the "1000 m challenge".

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Good Luck!

EDIT: By the way, I see my "Walls" record has been broken, so I'm taking that as a challenge. I'll see you soon.

Congrats to Ben Davis on winning this year's SpeedHack event! The Cannon Ball that Would Not Stop is an excellent game and definitely deserving of the award. Well done!

Yaay, thank you It's nice to see so many people enjoying it too

The best part is modding the game. I changed it so the magnet time starts out at 1, never decreases, and all the obstacles are beans. The cannon ball goes crazy after a few seconds!

You should add more obstacle types to this, Ben.

Needs more weapons

Good Game! One question though.. (I'm such a noob) How did you acclompish the falling can and bricks wall physics?

See the source code

I got a bounce 400m high. (it seemed rather odd, but I just started playing this for keeps, so I'm still a noob)

How high have you all gotten? Whoa, nevermind. You guys must be playing this a lot!

The attached image is because I thought the score was a power of ten higher than it was.

Finally!

http://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/593436