MUNCH

This is a simple concept game where you are an organism fighting to survive. Absorb anything smaller than you and avoid anything larger. It can be found here :

http://mtdew.wordpress.com/2007/05/21/munch-now-available-to-play/

The game graphics are dead simple and while their is no sound, there is an option to add in your own sound files so long as you name them the correct names (see more info within the game). I was tempted to flesh this out a bit more, but I had gained my concept ideas from playing 'Tasty Planet' on Retro64. I wasn't comfortable with running with a game based off someone else's work so did this as more of a personal challenge.

I still think it is a challenging fun game and thought other people might enjoy it for the simple distraction it provides.

Simple uncompress the munch.exe in the desired directory and run the program to play. It does create a simple Munch.dat file for storing highscore and game settings.

That is really good. Thank you

Nice little game.

One thing I noticed was it's difficult to unpause the game.

Nice and simple! Very good!

Sounds a bit like Flow.

Can you post a screenshot as I might blog about this on www.binaryjoy.co.uk . I was unable to capture one myself for some reason.

This is a cool little game. :)

Will go in my good mini games folder. :)

Warpy said:Wow! There is no higher praise than a positive comment from Warpy. Well done.

Simple with a nice relaxing pace - until level 3 where it's quite a challenge eating anything - for me at least ;) Good job!

This does not work on my Vista with GForce EN8500GT.
And I got the newest Nvidea drivers.

Nice man!! It would be cool to have this in Blitz3D :) with 3D organics.

Thanks for the positive remarks everyone!

impixi; The pause feature was a quick add-in simply because my hand needed a break after all the testing. I think I may have found the problem here :

While pause
	If KeyHit(25) Or KeyHit(57) Then pause = False
Wend

I've now added in a Wait(25) because I recall reading an issue where sometimes a short loop goes too fast to allow proper detections or somesuch? Anyone else corroborate or know better on that?

Grey Alien; There is a screenshot on my blog where you download the game, but the game is so 'graphics simple' that the screen shot doesn't really tell you much of the game at all - merely a bunch of red and green circle outlines. Thumbnails looks like a black screen lol

Stevie G; The more difficulty things I thought of the more complex the game started to become and I was really shooting for a very simple game. In the end I opted for level difficulty increases that utilized what was already in the game without adding in other features. There are 8 difficulty changes after which the game reverts to level 3 as the default. I personally have not made it all the way through yet starting from the beginning (have only played the upper levels by hacking them as the starting levels). With no opportunity to recover a lost life it becomes critical NOT to lose a life early on.

A request was made to make the sound files available for download but at least one of the files is something that is not mine (theme.wav). I simply put that in to have something because I am not talented at all in making music. I think the one i used was a tune that someone made using Fruity Loops or something. I look more into the sounds later and see if the size of the file would be feasable. However, this is a simplish game and I don't expect people are going to be anxiously awaiting updates and add-ons ;)

Tri|Ga|De; I'm sorry, I can't help you if it doesn't run. I use 'Graphics3D 1024,768' as my graphics setting so your problem might be either a compatibility issue with the Graphics3d call or with the screen resolution size. I *think* I might be able to run the game without the graphics3d (will have to test to make sure), but not sure at all how it would look if I change the resolution size. I'll take a look at it later when I have more time and see if it runs ok with a smaller resolution. If it does then I'll update the exe download and you can try it again.

I also noticed that there is a long delay before the game starts. If I do make another release to fix bugs then I'll make sure to put in text or something to let people know their computer hasn't locked (its building the graphics files). Originally the game simply used 'oval' to run the graphics but anything more than 25 circles and my FPS fell below 25. Once I made the ovals into images (and 50 different sizes of them in an array) then I was able to have hundreds of the buggers with very little FPS loss. That delay at the beginning is the program drawing them up.

Thanks again everyone. Glad you enjoyed it. For a benchmark - since the release my best score is 212,038 at level 6

-RIck

Just got around to trying it out. Love the game play.

272K at Level 7

Really good game... with a couple of annoyances.

The level where (I assume) the colours are swapped... really annoying to get so far then be taken out by something I don't consider sporting!

Also died at least once where I swear I didnt hit anything. Do you die if one of those yellow things decides to appear underneath you?

You have to be aware that its deadly near the edge. You stop in the middle of your dot, but that means half of you is out of sight and if there is a bad guy out of sight then you can get nailed without seeing it.

On level 4 and above the enemies have small timers. Level 4 it only effects the green ones, after that its all enemies. Whenever they are altering their direction to avoid you (and later chase you in respect with the red ones) then their timer is decreasing while they are doing that. Once it reaches 0 they drop a landmine. The landmines also have timers (a few seconds) that make them detonate and kill you if you are within their blast radius. The landmines also detonate if you get too close to them.

If you are chasing and just about ready to catch one when it drops a landmine then it means almost certain death if you are not careful. The best way to avoid this is to wait till they drop a landmine if you have been chasing them for a bit - there timer restarts once the drop the landmine.

Admittedly the AI on this could have been done better, but just keep in mind that this program was written in a matter of 2 or 3 days. It was really only meant for quick fun with a challenge for highscore.

The reasoning behind changing the colors and throwing curve balls with later levels is because it is quite easy to develop a rythm in the game play, which quickly adds to boredom. I was hoping that by increasing the difficulty in enexpected ways it would help to keep replayability up.

I guess its a good thing that I didn't consider making the small ones deadly and big ones safe in the later levels LOL.

Oh Rick,

Wanted to say I like your Millennium Remake, not played it Yet, but DL it as soon as I saw mention of it on your page, And from what Ive seen it feels like the origenal. Excpet I already seem to "Probed" one of Saturns Moons, which Im sure wasnt how the Amega version started.

And thanks for the Fundie Links, I dont know whether to Laugh or cry at some of them.

It's been a while since messing with Millennium Remake so I may be wrong, but I think one of the level settings starts you out (easy) knowing where a critical resource moon is? We crammed so hard in getting that project done in the allotted 3 months for the contest that much of it is simply blurry to me now.

Medium starts you out with the same resource locations as in the Amiga version, and hard randomly moves stuff so that you are forced to probe the entire system and not know where the good stuff is right off the bat.

Welcome for the link - I have the same problem on how to react myself alot of times.