This is the entry I developed on my limitted time for SantaHack 2011, due to finals and all that.

GiftCraft is a game heavily inspired by Star Wars Pit Droids, by Lucas Learning. The game's goal is to get all the gifts through Santa's weird classifying mechanisms to the right pipes in each room, using Direction Pods to change the direction they're going to.

Features

• 28 Levels, game autosaves as well on your latest level.

• Supports most standard resolutions, defaults to your desktop resolution. Any settings can be configured in the .ini. Resources will be downscaled to the appropiate resolution.

• Normal and Turbo speed for solving puzzles.

Download

Win32 Binary + Source code + Makefile + Game Music package.

Media

"Trailer"

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Gameplay

You can reset the gifts launched by Pausing(Space or 3), and resuming(1, 2, or Space again).

Gifts: Must direct them to the right pipes using Direction Pods. If gifts collide with each other, they'll explode and you'll feel bad for ruining Christmas.

Deployer: Spawns gift at different rates of speed depending on the room. Only spawns a finite number of gifts for each room.

Goal Pipe: Gifts must reach them to finish the current room. All gifts must reach a pipe, not even one Gift can be destroyed. Later on, pipes can only accept certain shapes of gifts.

Direction Pod: Changes the direction of any gifts that go through it. It can also direct certain types of gifts depending on color or shape.

Blockade: Only allows gifts with certain stats(color, shape, ribbon) to go through. It can also allow any gifts BUT the one with certain requirements.

Color Spray: Changes the color of both the gift AND its ribbon that goes through it. Can be used from all 4 sides.

Ribbon Transformer: Changes the color of the ribbon of the gift that goes through it, or just puts a brand new one on it.

Append

Overall, it was a really fun entry to make, even if a bit empty in some areas. It needs some more decoration on the rooms to make it feel less empty, but I think the flow of the game is so satisfying once you solve the puzzles right.

Also, it could use way more levels I guess, but I was having trouble of even solving them myself. So the pacing is pretty much like, learn a new concept, do some small levels, do one big puzzle, then start again with another new concept.

I don't expect you to try to run this on one sitting tho. The player starts to become really tired by mid-game, but you can come back to the game anytime you want since it'll save your progress.

Hope you like it, and thanks BAF for organizing SantaHack 2011.

Well this game is clearly underwhelming. Obviously the author didn't put a lot of effort into it and it lacks the depth and nuance that we've come to expect from previous SantaHack competitions. A real disappointment.

Limitted time, no doubt. Because it clearly shows.

Just... sigh...

[edit]
oops! Looks like you packaged allegro-5.0.0-monolith-mt.dll instead of allegro-5.0.3-monolith-mt.dll

Why is one of them winking at me?

Oops, I compiled that one with the makefile instead of the CB project, so I forgot about it. The makefile should work fine anyway.

In any case, I reuploaded it on the first post.

EDIT: Blast it, the uploader ate the file. Hold on. Here's the dll meanwhile.

I got it working with the 5.0.3 MSVC dll. This game's cool.

Ok I mirrored it on the first post with the right DLL now. Should be all working fine now.

Just wait until lvl 10 and start swearing at me.

This game is really fun

Spacexmas was the only game that I liked. The rest I either couldn't get to compile (linux) or were boring.

<edit> whoops.. noticed I posted in the giftcraft thread specifically.

ok while I'm here I was able to compile and play this game. Gameplay was ok but the pacing is a little slow.

Wrong thread?

EDIT: Oh nevermind. Read the edit. You mean the level pacing or the game's speed?

Both actually. Due to running in fullscreen the game is sort of laggy on my machine. The first two puzzles were quite simple but took a while to complete because I had to watch all the gifts make their way to the end.

I guess if it's laggy the faster speed option(number 2) wouldn't work right I guess, since it just uses more logic loops so it stays accurate. You can edit the resolution if you want on the .ini later if you want to give it another try.

[Display]
Width=1024
Height=768

# 0 - Fullscreen   1-Window  2-Fake Fullscreen
Mode=2

Mode 2 always defaults to the desktop resolution.

Nice

Nice, until I got to a level that is a tad impossible with my color blindness. Something about keeping my eyes open.

Oh, sorry, that kind of slipped my mind. I fixed that problem in my SH2011 entry using custom symbols on each block, but here I didn't think of it.

Just for future reference, what are the typical problems with color blindness? Is it a common set of colors with problems, or assets should have a "color-blind" mode with symbols drawn onto them? Kind of like Peggle did.
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Sounds like you reached level 10, which is one of the first moderately hard levels.

There are different types of color blindness (some types more prone to males, some to females) but for the most part it's a distortion of hue and/or a weakness at perceiving one of the R,G or B colors.

You could imagine that a full color gradient might look like this:

It is much rarer for color blindness to be a distortion of intensity. So if you had a dark red, a medium green, and a light yellow that could work. However, I wouldn't suggest sacrificing the "normal" color balance for a color blind scheme, rather creating an adaption or alternative option.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or if I'm just doing it wrong.

FYI I'm running under wine (mostly because of lazyness, but up to this point everything had worked perfectly) on ubuntu 11.10.

Great game by the way, I've come back to it a couple of times already, which is unusual for me.

@Ian:

Well now you say it, it's obvious (and you already essentially said it in your first post). I'm thinking a few too many drinks at Christmas must have killed a few brain cells.

Thanks very much.

Hey, if you did fine from lvl 10 to lvl 20, that's more than I expected everyone to do. Just to think you completed 13, 18 and 19...

Very nice game, Dario!

One question: How am I supposed to sort according to shape in level 22?

You don't. You just make them all go through all the pipes.

Ah! I thought they would be destroyed by these things if they didn't have the right shape... Okay, level 23 then

Btw. it crashes at exit on Mac OS X, but maybe it's my setup. Seems to be related to some audio cleanup:

error for object 0x101124c00: pointer being freed was not allocated

Thread 2 Crashed:
0   libSystem.B.dylib                 0x00007fff8917f9ce __semwait_signal_nocancel + 10
1   libSystem.B.dylib                 0x00007fff8917f8d0 nanosleep$NOCANCEL + 129
2   libSystem.B.dylib                 0x00007fff891dc3ce usleep$NOCANCEL + 57
3   libSystem.B.dylib                 0x00007fff891fba00 abort + 93
4   libSystem.B.dylib                 0x00007fff89113195 free + 128
5   liballegro_audio.5.0.dylib        0x0000000100141bb7 _aqueue_deallocate_voice + 71 (aqueue.m:210)
6   liballegro_audio.5.0.dylib        0x0000000100141774 al_destroy_voice + 52 (kcm_voice.c:107)
7   liballegro.5.0.dylib              0x0000000100040c71 _al_run_destructors + 81 (aintuthr.h:60)
8   liballegro_audio.5.0.dylib        0x000000010013ae45 _al_kcm_shutdown_destructors + 21 (kcm_dtor.c:47)
9   liballegro_audio.5.0.dylib        0x000000010013a3b8 al_uninstall_audio + 24 (audio.c:321)
10  liballegro.5.0.dylib              0x00000001000289dd _al_run_exit_funcs + 45 (allegro.c:128)
11  liballegro.5.0.dylib              0x0000000100049d85 al_uninstall_system + 21 (system.c:307)
12  libSystem.B.dylib                 0x00007fff8911f37f __cxa_finalize + 214
13  libSystem.B.dylib                 0x00007fff8911f28c exit + 18
14  liballegro.5.0.dylib              0x0000000100085d31 0x100026000 + 392497
15  com.apple.Foundation              0x00007fff85b4d204 _NSThread__main_ + 1429
16  libSystem.B.dylib                 0x00007fff89145fd6 _pthread_start + 331
17  libSystem.B.dylib                 0x00007fff89145e89 thread_start + 13

(edit: added error message)

Well I'll admit that I forgot to destroy the Sound cache at the end, although I did use an al_stop_all_samples before quitting the main loop to avoid any weird sound glitches. Although yeah, I will blame myself for not calling the cache cleanup.

Seeing you're in OSX, I guess you built it yourself right? Nice to see it builds correctly then. Is it allegro 5.0.0, 5.1, or some version in the middle?

EDIT: Blast it, I seem to have forgotten the solution to level 21.
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EDIT2: Also, I haven't seen the game so far at 1920x1080, even if the resources are built natively for it. Anyone got a screenshot?

It is Allegro 5.0.4.

Solution to level 21:

Here you go

Thanks, I don't know why I keep forgetting the solution to that one. It's designed with such precise numbers all around that doesn't seem to allow for an easy solution. Well, I DID make sure to solve them before adding them into the game of course.

Nice, and for this entry I used linear filtering properly this time around. I was still lugging around an old allegro5.cfg which then I realised had no effect whatsoever apparently on the filtering on the newest version. This time, it seems the visual quality of the filtering compensates nicely on lower resolutions as well, as it doesn't really look THAT different from the shot at native res like yours. Wish I had fixed that on my SpeedHack entry tho.

Really nice! The last level is taking a while. How long did it take you to come up with the levels? I imagine most of the time it takes a puzzle designer a lot longer than it takes to solve.

The bigger puzzle rooms I had sketched already before even starting coding. Given that I didn't have time to really start coding this until the 21th-22th, I spent the days from the 17th doing the game's graphics, sound, and level design. The smaller rooms used as introduction of new concepts were made quickly with the level editor.

But yeah, it takes like solving the same room 3 to 5 times to see all the different approaches the player could try and give it plenty of room to do so with the available pods. I did levels 1-10 in 1-2 hours, while it took me an entire day to make levels 10-20.

Glad to see you're enjoying it tho, you're the first person I hear of reaching the end-game! It's a bit complicated, but it's quite easy to solve if you focus on each part. Didn't want to make the last level not worthy of being the end.

About the crash on Mac OS X again, I had some time to look into it now. It's not caused by the samples not being cleaned up, but it is fixed when I put al_set_default_mixer(mixer) before al_reserve_samples(16) in your main.cpp, which is, I think, what you wanted to do anyway.

Don't know why it's crashing if that is not done, though. It's also fine just to call al_reserve_samples without creating your own mixer and voice, as this seems to create a default mixer. But why the crash? Well, I haven't used Allegro5's audio much yet.

... Now reached level 26...

edit:
Finally! The last one was a bit tougher.
Very nice game, Dario! Thank you very much!

Congrats! You've earned your rights to brag now.

Interesting, thanks for the tip. I think that's because I've been hauling some of this audio code from before A5 had its first initial stable release(same problem I was having with linear filtering), so I just tend to leave code that I don't really remember its purpose other than "making allegro work".