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EffBee's Plot Inventory

Based on stuff by a bunch of people but mainly mcc and ellaguro.

Here's a good portion of the games I've made for this site in the past. Titles in bold are definitely about domination. Titles in italic are kind of a stretch, and perhaps only related to domination by extreme metaphor.

Note: A few of these are spoilers maybe, so watch out.

Mel's - Get home without dying to fall damage.
Gorillaflop - Whack a burglar.
RadiclBallX - Overpower the game.
DAIRY FARMER GAIDEN: CATTLE BATTLER PINK VERSION - Shoot popsicles at the opponent cow.
Not a Romantic Comedy - Survive your crush's diabolical maze.
Jogger Stories - Become the member of a circus.
Stupid Flyguy - Kill all the Marios.
Droid Didn't Do It - Ram into Steve Jobs' face with a remote-controlled robot.
A Proper Occasion for Ripped Sprites - Grab all coins, then eat the Mushroom.
Gorillaflop: Episode 0.555647 - Whack a burglar.
KOMMANDER OF THE WINDOWS: WINDOW MAY KOMMANDER - Solve an obtuse user interface.
Klik & Activities: Santa's Workshop - Murder Santa (alt ending: destroy the Grinch's clone machine)
Cry Engine - Cry until you crash the game (secondary objective: whack floating people)
Medieval Zoo Espionage - Knock a zoo employee out, then force-feed a cake to a giraffe.
Fucuspunctophobia - Get all your blood sucked out by a giant insect.
You Must Glitch To Beat This Game - Figure out how the hell you pass each screen.
Zone Jogger - Get popsicles and avoid police officers, esp. giant ones.
Bugsss - Take over the earth.
Pretend You're Platforming - Conform to the judge's annoying rules.
Laptop Lid Roulette - Pray that the laptop doesn't explode.
I'm Not At GDC But I Made a Game Anyway - Ummm I guess this one depends on which kind of game you make.
Jesus: The Second Coming: Hamburger Flipper - Whack a giant troll and steal all his hamburgers.
Tim Allen's Gruntmaster 6000 - Get murdered by a giant cordless drill.
Jesus: The Third Coming: COME HARDER - Murder people.
Trampolelephant - Accidentally destroy a house.
Diamond Snake Jogger - Don't fall off or let the snake eat you.
Motocross TGF - Cruise through the level until you get stuck in the terrain.
Yoshi Does Drugs - Get locked in a cage and torched by Bowser.
Vector's Computer Room Sokoban - Escape the room.
Sonic Cookies RARE PROTOTYPE BETA - Go to the right.
Sonic Teaches Finding the Computer Room - Click on the computer room.
Vector's Block Ball - Discover that you are chained to the paddle.
Vector's Unchaotix - Throw Vector at a bunch of robots.
Sonic and the Green Jogger - Survive a diabolical maze.
Extreme Digital Tennis Friends - Watch a ball bounce up and down.
Shoot One Million Rockets at One Million Enemies - What the title says.
Eat Lots of Candy - Also what the title says.
Fart Racing - Win a race by farting.
Five Golden Rings - Cope with bizarre walking styles as you find each ring.
Annoying Chirping Blue Jay: Volume 1 - ...This isn't even a game.
Polite Narwhal - Don't murder any fish or break your tusk.
Annoying Chirping Blue Jay: Volume 2 - Deliver messages to people.
Combat Princess Golf - Whack an evil doctor with a golf ball.
48h - Make games while avoiding bouncing balls.
Ponies vs. Not-Ponies: A brony and a forum admin try to out-spam each other.
Go With - Get murdered by a shady man.
Jugglers Juggling Jugglers - Juggle jugglers.
Judges Judging Judges - Make judges kill each other with their own gavels.
Hot Clavicle - Set fire to tiny people.
Mow the Ice - Mow a lawn, avoid getting murdered by the owner.
Murder Thousands of Bees With a Giant Robot Mech - What the title says.
!!!!!? - The Game That Appears Second In Alphabetical Listings - Avoid getting eaten by a question mark.
Community Chainwreck 2 and 1/2: Episode 1 - Beat a man in a race, then avoid getting murdered by him.
MySharewareSoft Dubstep Maker Vista 2015 - Watch a fake satirical ad.
Grumper - Make it to the exit warp without hitting the spikes or screen edges.
Midnight Snack - Eat a giant fruit.
Pest Control in Space - Clear out a giant wasp hive.
Pest Control 360* - Clear out a giant wasp hive.
Jazz Blocks - Use blocks to direct the ball into coins and subsequently the exit.
Honey, I Shrunk the Jogger - Guide a shrunken man through a perilous house.
The Overshoe - Destroy online communities with bowling balls.
Cliché - Try to escape a room only to be placed back inside.
Springy Sproingy - Escape the island.

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Backstory

It was yet another fine morning at Ye Olde Medieval Zoo of Radioactive Superanimals and Future Sciences. Sergeant Throwshit Instructron, a member of park staff, had just finished catching some hooligans and decided to catch his breath on a bench situated in the central hub of the park. It was all part of a day's work.

A boy and his mother walked past the bench. Jimmy, as his mother called him, noticed the police officer sitting down. The boy had just learned about occupations in school and was excited to see a real police officer in person. "Wow, mom, look! It's a police officer! I've never seen one before," he shouted at his mother, who then proceeded to roll her eyes. Jimmy frantically gestured toward the police officer. "Now now, Jimmy, try to be polite," his mother intervened. She then turned to the Sergeant and addressed him in a more civil manner than her son. "I'm so sorry, officer. This is my boy's first time at the zoo." "Oh, that's quite alright," replied the officer. "How do you do, son?"

"I'm good, but what do you do all day, mister? I hear you put the bad guys in jail. That must be fun!"

"It's... tiring to say the least," sighed the officer in response. "I like my other job better (but please don't tell the people who work here). During the night, I work for the Federal Bureau of Anti-Planet Thievery."

Jimmy squinted his eyes. "The what?"

"The Federal Bureau of Anti-Planet Thievery."

"Huh?" Jimmy was trying to comprehend all these new words he has never heard of before.

"You know the planets, right? Of course you do. Well, it is our job to defend them. The bad guys like to steal our planets a lot. And sometimes the moon. It is our job to bring them to justice."

"Wow, that sounds so cool!"

"Do you have a favorite planet? We protect all kinds of planets. Also the moon."

"My favorite planet is Pluto," Jimmy shouted. The Sergeant frowned. "I'm sorry son, but Pluto isn't a planet." The boy hung his head in shame and disappointment. He was always told that Pluto was a planet! Why did that police officer have to ruin his innocent concept of nine planets by stating the opposite? The police officer had to be wrong. Pluto HAD to be a planet. He couldn't bring himself to think otherwise.

"Oh yeah, I forgot. What's your name, mister police officer?"

The Sergeant sighed. He realized that getting his name legally changed was a bad idea.

"It's... well... they call me Sergeant Throwshit--" He was then cut off by the mother's loud wailing.

"EEEEEEEEK!! Don't say those kinds of words around my son!! You should be ashamed of yourself!! It's people like you who corrupt our youth!!" The mother then proceeded to drag her son away in anger. They entered Ye Building of Genetically-Engineered Animals and disappeared.

Before the Sergeant had time to facepalm, he suddenly heard a loud commotion among the park's visitors.

It would appear that the Elephilosopher, an elephant with supernatural capacity for human thought, had finally reached a state of mental instability while mulling over conspiracy theories. "It's all a conspiracy, I tell you," shouted the Elephilosopher. "The zoo keeps us animals here and nurtures us in order to hide the truth! And then they bring humans here for the thinly-veiled purpose of entertainment to keep them ignorant! Well, the truth hides no longer! The Government wants to turn us into Soylent Green! It will be the death of us all! And they're doing all of this to mask the truth that 9/11 was an inside job! REVOLT, I say! REVOOOOLT!!"

The Elephilosopher rammed itself into the elephant pen's iron bars before busting them wide open. It then charged out of the pen, trampling over helpless park visitors. "Help! A mental asylum escapee is on the loose!! Somebody do something," the visitors shouted in horror.

Inside the nearby gorilla pen, a gorilla who was lying on the ground heard the screams of the Elephilosopher's poor victims. "Graww, graaaaaaawww," it grunted in response. The gorilla then flopped wildly back and forth. The flopping then changed to spinning. The gorilla then took off like a hyper, spinning bouncy ball, rebounding off of trees and breaking park lamps as it uncontrollably throttled toward the Elephilosopher.

The (un)wise elephant's face took on a look of pure terror as the gorilla flew toward him like a dislodged Ferris Wheel. BAM! The Elephilosopher was knocked out cold.

"Graw, graw." The gorilla then flopped back onto the ground and returned to simply lying down.

The Sergeant, having witnessed all this, approached the gorilla in awe. "That was amazing!! I mean-- you just-- I HAVE to hire you! You can be my new agent for the Federal Bureau of Anti-Planet Thievery! With flopping skills like that, I'm sure you'll be absolutely indispensable! Together we will be able to protect the galaxy's planets from being stolen! What do you say?"

"Graawwww."

"Umm, I guess that means yes."

Suddenly, the Sergeant heard a loud explosion coming from Ye Building of Genetically-Engineered Animals. He sighed, "Uh oh. Looks like I have more work to do today."

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Adventures in Lua: Part 2 - OOP

So I read a small portion of "Programming in Lua", which starts out easy enough and then becomes more and more bullshit the further you read into it. So I started skipping chapters, and then eventually decided to look elsewhere for information on OOP in Lua.

They recommended the use of metatables and goofy complicated things just to get stuff like inheritance and encapsulation working. Not my method! Relevant code is here. Any experienced Lua programmers are welcome to berate me on how my method is "too simple" and "doesn't use metatables" and stuff like that.

Next, I shall make a basic game in Love2D with this OOP method. I already have a framework in the works.

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Adventures in Lua: Part 1

So I'm more or less fed up with MMF2. Here's why:

  1. Slowness. Just try getting more than two-thousand objects interacting with each other at once. It shouldn't slow down on any modern processor, but it does.
  2. Excessive use of mouse movement and dialog windows to create anything. I swear I'm developing wrist pain from moving the mouse between all these buttons just to perform simple tasks. And a separate dialog window for each individual parameter to an action? Really?!
  3. Lack of editor or runtime on any PC operating system that isn't Windows (I could pay extra for that upcoming Anaconda runtime but why should I have to pay to fix something that's broken in the product I already paid for, which should have been fixed for free? Not to mention that this only covers the runtime, not the editor, and looks like it's being written by someone who's never used Linux before).
  4. Absolutely ludicrous method of handling for loops and anything else related to algorithms that doesn't follow a linear code path (this is also a huge performance bottleneck).
  5. Use of proprietary binary formats for data storage, which requires using an arbitrary sprite editor to "proxy" images into the game, even if I just want to use GIMP or grab random images off of the Internet or whatever, among other things. Not only that, but because everything is in one file, it works poorly with version control and collaborative services.

So seeing as I understand programming (I can probably write way better C++ code than most of my colleagues can), and I'm not on Windows anymore, it's honestly kind of bizarre that I'm still using something comparable to tinker toys.

Rant over. Time to talk about more productive things.

I want to write something that will help me do game prototyping and Trainwrecking without the pain associated with existing solutions. It will be something of my design, crafted toward my expectations for something usable for such a purpose. Now, I understand that I am starting to sound like the crazy, egomanic Linus Torvalds, Eric S. Raymond, or {insert bearded idealist here} of Glorious Trainwrecks, but so be it.

Here's what I'm planning for the design, which will either be totally awesome or really bizarre, depending on your tastes:

  1. Runtime and per-game code built on top of Lua and Love2D. I still have to research this a bit further (actually, I need to read through "Programming in Lua" - just started today), so I might not end up using these. However, I do think they're very good candidates.
  2. Game data represented as a filesystem. Hierarchical data is represented by folders on the hard disk. Image files are plain .PNG files or whatever. This means you can drag a picture of a dancing cat you found on the Internet right into a new folder in your game directory and have it immediately available for use inside your game. No import step!
  3. Textual file formats for data. Unless there's a good reason for it being binary (EG. it's a bitmap or a sound resource), it should be editable in a text editor.
  4. GUI editor for game data such as scenes, object metadata, the likes. Uses an Eclipse-esque Workspace system for managing documents except that it is directly coupled with the filesystem. You point the editor to the game's root directory and all your files will show up, ready for editing. Changes on the filesystem (EG. in an outside editor) will be immediately reflected inside the editor. Written in Qt because Qt is sexiness.
  5. Cross-platform runtime package for Windows, OS X, and Linux in one download, so no setup time, no installing extra crap, no having to download some extra client or resort to anything like Wine. But since I lack a Mac (hee hee, I rhymed), someone will need to show me how to package for OS X.

Basically, the design philosophies behind this are more or less opposite to those in, say, MarMOTS (not to say that it's bad, but I don't think it'd be useful for quick and fun prototyping, personally). I want to design something that is minimalistic yet modern and a breeze to use (once you learn how to use it), as opposed to something more nostalgic. Possibly something revolutionary. You know, like Git! ...Except that I sort of doubt I'll be able to achieve that last bit, but hey, I suppose one can dream.

Edit: I suppose this is somewhat based off of KlikPunk, except that I intend for an implemented runtime and something that doesn't require Adobe AIR to run or Windows to develop with. Also, editing scenes will be a lot like KlikPunk but you'll be doing more than just assigning positions of items. This is data that will go hand-in-hand with other data formats to produce the game.

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Laptop Lid Roulette

LaptopLidRoulette.png

Based on the recent GNOME 3 power management controversy.

Made on an operating environment that allows the user to choose what they want to do when they close the laptop lid!

Why would you do this, GNOME devs? Oh, right, because you're GNOME devs!

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Hosted: El Loco Dumas

ELD1-a.png

My online friend Arf made this thing years ago. I am uploading it here to save for posterity.

I'm not sure if I included the right cncs232.dll version. Oh well.

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Pretend You're Platforming

WhatAmIDoing.png

Inspired by this.

Use the Eight Directions Movement to control your platforming character to get to the right side of the screen! Avoid creating highly unrealistic jumps! If your movement is too unrealistic (EG. "jumping" too high), you must restart the level!

Only three levels so far, may add more levels and features if/when I get around to it.

Made in TGF.

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Planned: Not a Romantic Comedy II: (Not) Comedy Harder

I want to make a sequel to Not a Romantic Comedy.

This time, I wanna implement the full range of objects from Chip's Challenge. So it'll be sort of like playing an action-oriented Chip's Challenge, except on steroids.

In addition to the standard set of tiles, items, etc., I plan to include stuff like this.

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Bugsss

Bugsss.png

For some reason I opened Klik & Play and... I made this. I really don't know why. It's about giant bugs.

This game has processor-intensive per-pixel collision detection that simulates, with excruciating detail, hundreds of bugs clambering on top of one another! Thus, it requires hardware-accelerated fizzicks to run at full speed. Get hyper! Get Aieegyah! The Aieegyah Hyper Fizzicks Processor!

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