iconAllefant Games

About

This is the website for my Allefant project which for many years was hosted on SourceForge. It is a collection of various games I wrote over the years for short game programming competitions, such competitions usually taking about 2 days to create the complete game (code as well as art). The first such game I made was Allefant back in the year 2000. Some of the games also were worked on afterwards and polished a bit, so they are actually playable. Most are little more than a tech demo though. They are all open source.

Krampus Hack 2016

2016-12-27

Took part in the allegro.cc Krampus Hack 2016. Everyone in this game programming challenge is a secret santa and assigned another participant they are writing the game as a gift for.

Screenshot:

rm -rf wordpress

2016-02-29

Wordpress is no more. Someone managed to hack into my wordpress... and instead of trying to figure out how to pest-exterminate the database so I could run it again I decided to just rm -rf wordpress. I hacked up a quick script to dump out some of the old blog entries from the wordpress database. Maybe I'll restore the theme and some other stuff as well. But probably not :P

I really like that this website is now just static .html and nothing else. No PHP, no server side includes, no nothing. I might as well uninstall Apache now. I should have done that 10 years ago, so should be thankful to whoever demonstrated to me just how bad Wordpress really is by hacking into it. Unfortunately I don't know if they broke out of the Wordpress database and also control the rest of my server now. I probably should set it up anew when I find the time. Anyway, this is how a website should be done, and maybe some CSS and Javascript to make it look a bit more slick :)

Speedhack 2015

2015-07-01

http://speedhack.allegro.cc/blog/view/358

Speedhack 2014

2014-05-25

Hm, haven't posted here in ages... my life suddenly got busy at the beginning of 2013. Oh well, I did partake in a speedhack about a year ago so putting the game from it up. I only had a couple of hours on Sunday to make the game since I was gone all weekend, so there is no real graphics or sound effects or much of anything. screenshot The Speedhack rules were: 1. Travelling Salesman Solving a problem of that kind is the base game mechanic. 2. Character Development Hm, well, movement speed is an increasing stat. 3. Easter Egg There's a hidden skateboard upgrade. 4. Player Customization - not implemented - 5. Soviet Russia - not implemented - 6. The smaller your ZIP entry is, the fewer rules: Less than 10KB: 1 rule So I would have only needed 1 rule instead of 3.

My SantaHack entry

2012-12-24

Just made a playthrough video of my SantaHack 2012 entry called Sleigh Race.

my ABC of compo entries

2012-10-02

Hm, it's my birthday today and I got the day off work. So looking at my website. According to the sidebar to the left it looks like during my lifetime I wrote over 50 compo entries. And also, there's at least one for each letter of the alphabet. Just for fun, picking 26 entries, one for each letter and reminiscing about it...
A Allefant. My first ever compo entry (Sizehack 2000) and the one which made me love coding game compo entries. Also my favorite of all of my own games. There's also 6 sequels (well, random other compo entries I simply gave the same name because I couldn't think of anything).
B Battery. Ludumdare #9. Back when LD48 still was really small. Also one of the games with a surprising amount of gameplay, compared to my typical entries.
C Command Code. TINS 2010. Surprisingly complete game. Also the one with the most positive feedback I ever got.
D Doomed. Teamhack 2001. Now, over 10 years later, I still notice how in the back of my head I plan to finish it some day. Oh well.
E Evil. Speedhack 2007. A 3D FPS. And a somewhat weird game.
F Fruitworm. Pixelate contest 2001. Nice little Digger clone. And I think the only game where I had an actual musician making music for me.
G Gnome Guard. One of the real early LD48s, in 2002.
H Hare. Made this for some weekend compo in 2005. I forgot the name, but both X-Out and MarkR also were in it.
I Insanity. LD#4 in 2004. As so often, it wasn't really finished.
J Jetfighters. Made this together with IronBob from #allegro in 2004.
K Kaos. Well, K turned out to be the very last letter I ended up making a game with. I named my Pyweek 2012 game Kaos and was actually naming it with something K on purpose to complete my 26 letter games.
L Lawn. Pyweek 2010. I like the art I made.
M MarsFight. TINS 2003.
N Nefertem. Done for Prettyhack 2006. Hm, completely unfinished.
O Owl. LD48 #12. I quite like the round level idea I came up with.
P Photon. LD #6. I learned a lot about spending too much time on math algorithms when there's a tight time constraints.
Q Quest of the Prime Dragons. TINS 2012. Q was the second to last letter before K. I'm quite proud of this game. Wrote a raytracer from scratch again (I did that several times).
R Red, White & You. Speedhack 2011.
S Swarm. LD48 #8 in 2006. Probably my biggest achievement - I wrote a full 3D engine, with octree and collision and all, completely from scratch, on a single weekend.
T Tom. Back2Hack 2002. A complete platformer, with 12 levels.
U Ultimatum. TINS 2008. Sort of a The Settlers clone. Also tried myself at low-res pixel art.
V Velocity the Bee. SHMUP 2006. My most polished entry for sure.
W Wave Rider. Ludumdare 2009. My most innovative game I think. Also has a quite unique gameplay principle.
X X-Mas. Santahack 2011. A platformer with massive parallax scrolling. I'm somewhat disappointed that despite managing to finally do another platformer - it feels like a lot is missing.
Y Yellow and Dangerous. Pyweek #14. I really like this one, a complete puzzle game with 10 levels.
Z Zombie Master. LD#18, 2010. Quite interesting gameplay idea I think and well balanced. I played through it several times and always found it fun - maybe I should try and finish it.
 

Kaos

2012-09-15

Just submitted my pyweek game called Kaos. I also made a game for Ludumdare two weeks or so ago but instead of finishing that decided to do the pyweek first. I really wanted to try my hands at HTML5 - but I refuse to use Javascript. So I took this pyweek as a chance to play with pyjs. The game's page on the pyweek site is here: pyweek.org The game can be played here (only in Firefox/Chrome and only with a fast CPU): kaos.allefant.com While it is really slow and quite restricted for now, I like what I'm seeing from pyjs regardless. A 100% Python3 game, running in my web browser. A screenshot:

TINS 2012

2012-08-06

I took part in TINS 2012 over the weekend. There was five different rules to implement (genre requirement anachronism, artistic requirement dragons, and technical requirements saving, parallax scrolling, prime numbers). All while using the Allegro library. My interpretation of it is here:  

Pyweek #14

2012-05-18

Yay, finally finished a compo entry again! I made a little puzzle game called Yellow and Dangerous for PyWeek 14. This one was a lot of fun. I used Python 3, which just is so nice to use. Very high level, very clean syntax and my code just works as intended :) Which allowed me to do quite a lot in the limited time. Basically a complete isometric engine which uses masking to solve the old (impossible) 3d sorting problem. (Here's a picture demonstrating the problem, no matter in which order you draw the blocks x, y and z it always will be wrong: ) It probably would have been easier to do full 3d and use a regular z buffer. But I've basically been waiting for 20 years or so to do a 2d isometric engine like this - ever since I played Cadaver on the Amiga. And now I finally managed to do a 100% clone of the engine they used back then. My life is complete now. And I managed to do it in (the free time of) a week no less (well, the implementation, there's years of research in it...) :) The game itself is rather simple. During the competition someone made a mockup of a Portal like game (he never actually made the game though, unfortunately). But it prompted me to create a Companion Cube like cube as placeholder for my initial testing. And I liked it so much I kept it as the main game mechanic. The goal in each level is to place cubes on pressure plates to unlock the exit. However to do so, you need to push, pull and stack other objects. Either to move them, or to create structures which help you move. For example to create a bridge over a gap or to create some kind of stairway to climb up to a high place. I also tried using the 3D aspect in some of the levels, for example one level has a block hidden behind a bush. And another arranges platforms in a way so the isometric view makes it hard to see where they actually are. Similar to those M. C. Escher drawings.

Moosader compo 7

2012-04-16

I took part in the Moosader boards competition. Even though it was running for 4 weeks much unlike most of those other compos, I couldn't finish in time.