I had been anticipating VVVVVV ever since I saw the trailer on TIGSource, so naturally I was excited when it was finally released some two weeks ago. Busy me had no time to play it until a few days ago, though.

I got the demo, played it through、 and loved it. So I bought the full game.

Getting the trinket here is not as simple as it seems.

There have been complaints about the price tag ($15), but let me tell you just now; VVVVVV is bloody well the best platformer (nay, game) I have played since Super Mario Bros. 3 – and that is saying a lot, coming from me.

Everything about the game just screams “video game” (in the 1980’s meaning of the word); it’s difficult, it’s fun, it’s difficult, it’s new, it’s difficult, it’s enjoyable. Did I mention it’s difficult? Sure, I got through the game (with 21/20 trinkets) in a little over three hours, but this genre (hardcore platformery) is perhaps the genre I am most experienced in.

Few will find this place.

VVVVVV is a platformer with very, very simple controls; Arrows move you left and right, and space inverts your gravity. That is it, no powerups, no locked areas. The only thing separating you and the win is your skills – and spikes. Lots and lots of spikes.

The game is split into a plethora of rooms, each its own puzzle (although quite often, rooms combine to form more intricate puzzles). Every room that is not part of the overworld is named – and most room names are outright genius. Some make you think, some make you sigh, most make you smile. Sometimes the room names are telling a story. As with puzzles, the room names usually combine as well; “I love you / That’s why I have to kill you” or “If you fall up / Just pick yourself down”, for example.

I had a hard time doing some of the various insane (yet completely optional) rooms; While the Veni, Vidi, Vici series of rooms is a much-discussed topic on the intertubes, I personally had nearly just as much trouble with the single room “lovingly” called Edge Games. Whatever is needed to get those trinkets, right?

Edge Games.

Luckily, checkpoints are generously spread throughout the game, so there is hardly no delay retrying the same room over and over. This helps make the entire three hour gameplay much more intense – concise cutscenes, almost no backtracking (unless you want those trinkets that you didn’t get the first time around), and instant respawn. The difficulty is in the rooms themselves, not in how they are presented. This, in my opinion, is the proper way to challenge players.

This is me showing off.

Of course, I can hardly describe VVVVVV without mentioning its well-executed retro look and feel; The characters, rooms, backgrounds, music (oh, the music!) and sounds all work together to present a game that would have played exactly the same on a C64 – In fact, I wish I could play it on mine.

Imagine if VVVVVV had been released in the eighties. Terry Cavanagh (the developer) would have been a household name.

I love VVVVVV.

I haven’t been around much lately.

The image above explains everything. ’nuff said.

Hacksim has been silently put on hiatus while Akselii and I gather our senses and finish whatever the both of us are busy with at the moment. For me, that is a second round of addiction to Dwarf Fortress.

An early alpha of another visualiser for Dwarf Fortress was released not too long ago. It’s called Stonesense, and it is isometric (and therefore lush).

Such a wonderful waterfall

Now, Stonesense doesn’t make Dwarf Fortress more accessible, just more enjoyable. To quote Nektonico on the TIGSource post;

Neo : Is that…

Cypher : Dwarf Fortress? Yeah.

Neo : Do you always look at it encoded?

Cypher : Well, you have to. The image translators work for the construct program. But there’s way too much information to decode Dwarf Fortress. You get used to it… I, I don’t even see the code. All I see is… miner, mason, brewer…

I’ve had multiple 30-hour Dwarf Fortress sessions since I picked it up again, and yet I have nothing to show for it. I have a decent-running fortress, and my dwarves are currently finishing construction on the walls around this, after which a drawbridge will enable access across the now-empty mold.

When the drawbridge is completed, the mold will be filled with magma from a nearby magma pipe. Those pesky goblins have successfully assaulted my fortress for the last time!

This is the first screenshot I have to show of the hacksim game thing; massively work in progress, this shows that while the game is heavily command-line based, there will at the very least be a fancy globe for traceroute etc.

Making procedurally generated yet interesting content will be difficult. Adding a number of tailored storylines, and attaching these to semi-random servers is probably the way to go.

So far, I have been thinking about somehow gathering keywords when a server is requested. This way, google.com would be a search engine, nasa.gov a space agency, cern.ch a scientific research facility and so on. For this to be viable, servers should be put into predefined and -programmed categories.

Colours!

In this way, storylines could be specified not per-server (or per-organisation), but rather in a server-agnostic way. Imagine a generated scenario with you working for the KGB to bring down FBI!

Simple single- or few-hacks jobs should be plentiful, and available for or against most servers. And all but a select few servers (used by the game) should be hackable as well.

This will take a while. For now, enjoy the (rather bland) screenshots.

It should become the least unrealistic hacking simulation around, which isn’t saying much. We were a bit torn on whether to make the game as realistic as possible. In the end, we decided to tone down the realism a bit (still way above the other games out there) in favour of accessibility.

We haven’t really made that much (anything, really) of the game yet, so most of what I write will be mere ideas, but the game would hopefully have such features as:

• Decent amount of realistic tools (and realistic usage of these)
• Pinging real servers to generate gameplay elements
• Hacking all sorts of places, from banks over airports to government facilities, and possibly even other players
• Persistent, shared internet
• Live maps and views

The game will be able to run on the lowest mainstream resolutions, which these days appear to be 7″ netbooks. This means it will look nice at 800×480 and above. I hope to have some work-in-progress images up in the not too distant future.

You can follow the development of hacksim on github here.

Finally getting somewhere. Damage works, throwing works (but needs to be balanced), walls need a little fiddling with (there’s still only one wall, for starters). The UI is nothing like I want it to, but that’ll have to wait.

Snowball-collision works very well. Now, whenever a snowball hits either a player or a wall, it’ll splash into a rain of snow in every (available) direction. I just need to make the background less white, since as it is, it is almost as filled with snow as can be, essentially rendering this effect nearly invisible.

That's gotta hurt.

Additionally, I’ve added tiny drops of blood whenever a player is hit by a snowball. Perhaps I should make it so this only happens with large or fast-thrown snowballs. The effect looks nice though, so I’m keeping it in there for now.

Yet another visual effect (this is the last in this post, I promise), the motion trail of snowballs. This adds to the liveliness of the game, and also makes screenshots more meaningful.

I still have one or two “special” features I want to add. And then there’s the networking, of course.

The next project of mine has already begun. It is a simple snowball fight; you pick snow up with the right mouse button, and throw it with the left mouse button. Hit the opponent, but keep moving so as to avoid being hit yourself. There is even a wall there.

Instead of health, you have to keep your body temperature above 35 degrees. I hope to implement the ability to build small walls yourself, by collecting snow somehow.

A few problems already, though; I can’t quite get the mechanics right – how is it supposed to work? Right now, there’s a lobbing throw and a straight throw, but the lobbing is almost impossible to hit anything with – it’s necessary to shoot over the wall, though.

The game isn’t fun yet, sadly. There’s no point in releasing anything as of now.

I should get around to writing a collision library. That, and a user interface library should be very helpful in future projects.

This adventure/exploration game has (sadly) been added to the dump. I don’t know what my next game project will be yet.

Of course, this just means that the combined loading times are gathered in the beginning. Not a big problem per se, except for the disturbing white background (and the general ‘not responding’-ness of the game). An obvious solution used in most games; a loading screen.

It turns out that there is really no good way to use crossplatform multithreading – fork() is mainly available on *NIX systems, but doesn’t even exist on win32. I don’t know what I’ll do for now, but perhaps the user will settle with a ‘loading resources, please wait …’ splash screen. That’s the plan for now, anyway.