Hey, author of Cold Steel here, if you didn’t build with --release=small it hits some unreachable due to a bug in the code somewhere which I need to fix (though someone else couldn’t run it even with that flag so who knows, maybe it’s causing undefined behavior even which emerges on some setups).
I uploaded my build of it to Itch here though and it seems to work if you want to try it out.
Runs successfully with the option!
I think my assessment of it then would be: one I’m hoping to see updates for the most :)
Very nice game, well done
Did you use some kind of random or does it only seem that the obstacles are random? Afaik there os no random API in wasm4.
They are pseudorandom. You don’t really need real randomness for singleplayer videogames. If you want it to not behave in same way at the game start you can just use user input as source of seed for prng e.g. time it takes to click start button.
I do use user input actually! That line is just the initial initialization cause the rng is needed to create the starry background (which will be the same every time due to the static seed), but when the game is started the rng is re-seeded with the time spent in the menu.
Nice. I implemented a way to create a random seed with user input in wasm4: Seed Creator Showcase | WASM-4
But using timings from the user indirectly as seeding material is honestly a great idea.
I believe that’s also how the original Super Mario did it too?
I know that speedrunners always wait on the menu screen for a specific amount of time to manipulate some randomness later in the run, so even if it’s not explicitly seeded when the game starts, the randomness of the game does depend on when exactly the actual playing is started.
It’s obviously not cryptographically secure random. But in a game pseudo randomness is nothing more than a tool that is useful to some games to provide some replayablity. I find this idea genius in this very context, and I am planning to look this up in your source code and add it to me “game jam toolbox”.
Thanks for sharing and the discussion
OT: Using a PRNG was how games worked in the 80s, when the machines had no hardware for RNG. I think it was even described in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum user manual. A few hundred pages, describing the hardware, a Basic tutorial including some demo programs, a description of the memory including how the 6 KB video memory worked and the system variables, and a complete list of the Z80 opcodes. I miss this simplicity today, but this game jam reminded me of these better times.
Thank you all!
I uploaded my game as well:
Here’s a manual that may help playing the game and that creates the setting:
Looking forward to playing all your games and to looking at some source code as well.
Is there a plan toput all games on one individual page, a page dndocated to the game jam?
There is rastamo’s github.io page to play all the game, maybe there is two missing there (Neotracks by Gota7 and Steam Train by AndrewKraevskii).
Did you mean https://rastamo.github.io/ ?
Yes there is!
Once we’ll have our domain, we’ll archive each submission and make them playable online if possible.
Also, as Bruno Garcia (the creator of WASM-4) stated, don’t hesitate to upload your games to his website!
sounds great. I probably publish mine as well on wasm4.org but I would also like to play the games of the others on ae individual site.