Description

Munchy Ball is an arcade-style mini-game along the lines of Sega's (R) Super Monkey Ball (R). (although immensely simpler in design!) The goal is to guide your ball through the maze-like playing field, collecting bonus items as quickly as possible in order to complete each increasingly difficult level.

Play It!

Munchy Ball 320 x 240 ~2.6M (due to audio) fast cpu recommended

Here's a video of a "speed run" through level 1 if you'd rather just see it than play it.

Controls

The keyboard is NOT the ideal controller for this game. A mouse is even worse (way too much "flailing" required). A joystick would be better, a trackball would be ideal. All directional control is relative to the camera view. So the up arrow means "forward" in the camera direction, not an absolute direction on the playing field.

Use the arrow keys to move the ball, space to jump. Shift + arrow keys will rotate the view without moving the ball. Collect all of the red bonus cubes to finish the level. You'll lose a ball if you fall off the green path before all bonus cubes are collected. (hint: you can collect the last bonus cube while falling off the path)

Try setting detail to low if you experience sluggish frame rates.

History

This is still very much a "prototype, pre-alpha" version of the game. It is unfinished, but playable. All it really needs are a bunch more levels to fatten it up - a task that I just haven't had the motivation to get around to yet. (though you can make your own if you'd like, details below)

This project began as an idea for the TELIC Arts Exchange "Games For 5 Joysticks" exhibition. I thought it would be a natural for joystick control, but wasn't convinced that it would really work the way I wanted it to as far as the multiplayer aspect, so I ended up submitting Pentuby instead.

At any rate, I don't have a market for this thing, so I've decided to release it here in it's unfinished state rather than let it just die in the bit-bucket of abandoned ideas. Have fun!

Making Your Own Levels (Maps)

If you're so inclined, and want to hack around...

The "level" files are simply GIF images. So all you need to create your own levels is a paint program capable of reading/writing 16-color GIF's.

Objects in the game are specified by painting pixels with specific colors. Since you'll be working with individual pixels, you'll probably want to work in a zoomed in view.

Examine any of the map???.gif images in the data directory to familiarize yourself with the coloring scheme:

A map image must be 63x63 pixels in dimensions, and use the exact 16-color palette present in the existing map images). Only the five colors shown above are actually used by the game to represent game objects - the other palette entries (which are light magenta) are just filler and shouldn't be used.

Once you've created a map image you'll need to let the game know about it by adding it to the list of maps in MapList.pde. (sorry, the game does not "auto-detect" the available map files) Add your file wherever you wish in the list - they need not be named sequentially as the original maps are. It helps when playtesting if you insert your map as the first one, then reposition it according to difficulty afterward.

A few guidelines:

• If you place more than one player (cyan pixel) in a level, the bottom-right-most one will be used to position the player at startup.
• You can place up to 20 bonus items (red/pink pixels) per level, more than that will simply be ignored.
• "Easy" levels should span about 20x20 pixels, "medium" levels about 40x40 pixels, and "hard" levels about 60x60 pixels.
• Generally you can only get away with having one bonus out "way out" in space, intended as the last one the player will collect. If you place more than one "way out" in space it won't be possible to complete the level.
• If you place no bonus items, the level will end as soon as it begins - probably don't want that.

If you come up with any good ones, send them my way, I'd like to try them too. If I get enough, maybe I'll bundle them into the package - with proper credit given to each level-maker of course.