Piga's New Years Dodge 'Em By Piga Software January 1, 2011 December 31, 2011 - Introduction - This is now my fourth holiday themed game. It all started with Piga's Pumpkin Carving in 2008, and began proper in October 2010 when I started what would become the released version of Piga's Thanksgiving Dinner Hunt, which I sent out on November 10, 2010. That Christmas, I released Piga's Santa Drop Down as well. I had already began brainstorming for this program beforehand, but my Christmas project had superseded it as a priority. When I started working on this, only four days before the day, I expected that I would just be prototyping it for later, but it went faster then I expected and, at Hamish Wilson's suggestion, I set out to finish it. As of right now, the only other holiday game I have really planned is a modern Gambas port of an Easter game I made in April 2007 with Game Maker 5 for Microsoft Windows. After that, it should all just be updates to my previous work. I hope you are enjoying these little efforts of mine, as I have put a lot of thought into the design of each and every one of these and have endeavoured to make a unique play experience with each. It has been a rather exhilarating experience to get so many, even if rather small, programs out the door at such a rapid pace compared to my usually rather slow rate. Next stop something bigger? Or at least not seasonal? Wait and see... + Version 1.2.0 Note + This is the new version for News Years 2011-2012, and features a more proper save and load path for score table data ("~/.piga/New-Years-HS.txt"), an in-game pause mode, a shorter more accessible final victory period, a modualized and cleaner code base, and a couple of other fixes here and there. Also, since the release of Gambas 3 is now imminent, this will probably be the last Piga Software program built with Gambas 2 - and Gambas 3 recompiles for the holiday games are likely, due to the better handling of semi-transparent pixels with GTK. Anyhow, happy new year everyone, and have a great 2012! If we are all still here by 2013, then I wish you a happy that one as well... - Gameplay - The menu animation shows a hot air balloonist casually flying up across the clouds of the night sky. The introductory cut-scene depicts him flying over into a new section of sky, only to start hearing a countdown. He is unable to react before the New Year dawns and the sky around him is filled with fireworks. That is the setup. It is the thus player's job to control the balloon, and keep it up in the air as long as possible by avoiding fireworks blasts and minding the limited amount of fuel aboard the craft. The player moves the balloon left or right with the arrow keys, which costs 1% of the balloon's fuel with each turn. Gravity is consistently pulling the balloon downward, and so to keep up in the air the player must periodically press the up key to provide an upward burst, which costs 3% of the remaining fuel each time. The player has five lives in which to attempt to keep the craft up. The player's score is calculated based on the amount of time the balloon is able to stay in the air, plus the amount of fuel that is left at the end by a quarter margin. The game can be won if the player stays up for 120 seconds (two minutes), and after that the player can take the score as is, plus the 1000 point bonus, or continue playing until all the lives are used up. - Compatible Systems - Piga's New Years Doge 'Em is built in the Gambas programming language, and thus will run on any system that the Gambas run-time will work on. This includes most POSIX systems, such as most versions of GNU/Linux including Fedora, Mandriva, SUSE, Debian and Ubuntu, as well as other Unix-like systems like FreeBSD. Sadly, at this time the Gambas run-time has not yet been properly ported to Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X, and there are no current plans for Piga Software to create a port to either of those platforms through similar BASIC type languages such as Visual Basic .Net; Gambas 3 is planned to have Mac support. Being made in Gambas, and free software, it can be edited, modified and extended on any of the compatible systems stated using the Gambas integrated development environment (IDE). Also, if anyone should wish to port the Gambas run-time to Windows, we would be in your debt and if you wish to port any of our programs, including this one, through any means to other platforms we would give you our full support. - Installation - As is stated above, this program can only be run on certain POSIX compliant systems like GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. There are four different ways to install it onto your system however. Before you try any of this though you should check and see if you have the Gambas run-time properly installed; it is available from most software repositories such as the system ones for Debian, Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu and can be built for others. Afterwards, the first option is to just run the executable "NewYears.gambas" and it should work fine through the run-time. The second option is to download the Gambas project and source code yourself and run it through the development environment; this requires that you get the Gambas IDE package. Thirdly, you can also use the GNU Autotools installer which creates the program with a GCC make-file. Finally, if you are running an RPM-enabled GNU/Linux distribution such as Fedora, Mandriva or SuSe you may download a select RPM installer from our icculus.org server. This should allow you easy installation and even get dependencies like the run-time if you do not already have it. One day we also hope to offer up DEB installers for Debian and Ubuntu systems when we have the resources to maintain a Deb system to build them on. In the mean-time, if you want an installed copy on those systems you may download the source code and load it up in the development environment and build a DEB yourself and use it. - Other Notes - At the beginning a box will ask you your name, which is to allow it to put your name into the high score table after you have completed a game, and from here you can also go and see the presently saved high scores. Clicking on the copyright label will take you to a form that shows some copyright information, as well as game credits. Clicking on the help button will load up a page with game explanations and help. You may use the check box, in the bottom right corner, to switch off the opening cutscene. The graphics used within the program are captured PNG files of the original vector SVG graphics. The menu background music comprises of three separate versions of the classic New Years song "Auld Lang Syne" at various speeds and nuances. Inside the program, they are in Ogg Vorbis format like the sound effects, but their original MIDI versions, as well as the SVGs for most of the graphics, can be found in the source code archive. - Credits - Game Concept, Programming and Editing: Graham L. Wilson Graphics Composition: Malcolm Wilson Multimedia (http://icculus.org/mwm/) Voice Recording and Music Conversion: Malcolm Wilson Multimedia Musical Soundtrack: Various Public Domain Sources Fireworks Sounds: SoundBible (http://soundbible.com/) Sound Effects: A1 Free Sound Effects (http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/) Additional Graphics: OpenClipart (http://www.openclipart.org/) openSuSe Testing: sholzy (http://whiteislandsoftware.com/) Special thanks to Benoît Minisini and the other Gambas developers. Happy holidays! Graham L. Wilson, Technical Director, Piga Software http://icculus.org/piga/ http://piga.tropicalwikis.com/ http://piga.7.forumer.com/