LD48: Flies (Theme Swarm)

**cairnswm** · 01-05-2006, 03:16 PM

The Fly Swat Game
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http://www.cairnsgames.co.za/downloa...iles/flies.zip

Made by William Cairns (cairnswm) for the LudumDare 48 hour contest - April 2006

Theme: Swarms

This game creates a swarm of flies. Your goal is to kill as many flies as possible by squashing them with the fly swatter. You also have a can of insecticide to mass exterminate the flies.

You only have a limited time to kill as many flies as possible. Each time you kill flies you get some time back. The more flies you swat at a time the more time you get back (exponentially). Its also fun to see how many flies you can kill in one swat!

Useing the Insecticide to kill insects kills a lot of insects and gets some time reprieve but not as much time as with a swatter.

Total Dev time: About 10 hours.

**Traveler** · 01-05-2006, 03:41 PM

I tried it a bit, unfortunately it was not very playable. The menu worked okay, but as soon as I started the game, the whole screen started flickering like crazy.

I hope for your sake that the ld48 judges have a better experience

**cairnswm** · 01-05-2006, 05:55 PM

What spec machine do you have? It runs fine on my notebook which is very low spec. and Well on my Daughters PC - P4 3.0, GeForce 6200

**Traveler** · 01-05-2006, 07:04 PM

I used a pc at work, 2.4ghz 1gig ram and a radeon 7000 gfx card. Not exactly the greatest card in the world.

I gave it another try at home and it worked a whole lot better. The first time I didn't do that well, only 350 point or so. Second time went a lot better. I was wondering though, is right clicking to increase the size of the fly swatter a special feature? It more or less allows to you kill all flies at once and apparently gives you a timer bonus as well. Could also be a bug...

In any case, my initial report may be a case on it own. It's not very likely that the judges have a gfx card like that. I'm sorry if I got you to worry about your entry.

**cairnswm** · 02-05-2006, 05:17 AM

No problem.

I've started realising what difference the different DLL versions make to the way the games play. Your comments made me feel I put in an inclorrect SDL dll somewhere

**cairnswm** · 02-05-2006, 05:29 AM

In game screenshot

**WILL** · 02-05-2006, 07:18 AM

How practical do you think a 'Flocking' algo would be for the little game?

**cairnswm** · 02-05-2006, 07:46 AM

I basically started with a SimBee idea. Basically you run the hive by controlling the number of different types of worked bees that get born.

Due to time constraints (ie other commitments for the weekend) I didnlt have the time to finish it off. so I stitched to the Fly game using the Bee behariour that I had created. Due to the nature of the game of trying to squash as many flies at a time a flocking algorithm may have taken something away from the game. (The player wants the flies over on top of each other to get bigger squashes).

Another idea I had was to be a shark in the water trying to eat a school of fish. Then a flocking algortihm would have been great.