Your game had a great feel. I thought it stood out in many ways. I hope to be able to play it more when the bugs are killed!

I would like to thank everyone for playing and voting (not just for my game but for all the games) I had a blast competing in the contest! Thank you especially for all the feedback about Simoebic Dysentery; I hope with all of your suggestions I can make the game into something special… stay tuned for an actual release in the next couple of months!

Okay, so the current build is definitely buggy… I definitely only produced a beta-stage game in the couple of months that I’ve been involved in the contest! I am busy updating and fixing all these problems, but I will probably hold off compiling and re-distributing the program until after the contest is over, because rather than releasing and worrying about the nth degree issue or crash cause, and how I could fix it, I would rather do it all at once, add all the features King Thor and I originally talked about, and make the final game really good! In that spirit, I welcome all comments on gameplay changes, features, or ideas (or bugs… but I think we’ve got that handled alright) that any and all have about Simoebic Dysentery- either here, in an email to mojiferous@mojiferous.com, or on my own forums @ forum.mojiferous.com

TheMonkey - 03 March 2009 04:39 AM

Late ’07 MBP w/ GF 8600M, OS X 10.5.6, nothing out of the ordinary. May it have to do with running the game off the DMG?

It shouldn’t, but it is possible… Nothing is being written, so it shouldn’t have anything to do with it… (I’m glad you don’t have a PPC, because I don’t think I could track one down as easily anymore. )

It sounds like I have something buggy going on somewhere in there… I’ve just MallocDebugged the program for the last hour- I don’t have any overruns or leaks, but while running SD through the paces I did get it to seemingly freeze while loading a level- after it was slowing down for every cell lyse… strange. I’ll have to investigate further, but it sounds like 2 probable reasons- 1) graphics code or 2) rushed programming with less than a day of debug!

Thanks for the feedback guys!

No crashes for me, but the game stops on the magnifying glass when you get killed on level 3. (Even though I had extra lives left). You could get it restarted by reloading the level, but it would stop again when you get killed. I love the graphics and squishy sound effects.

Late ’07 MBP w/ GF 8600M, OS X 10.5.6, nothing out of the ordinary. May it have to do with running the game off the DMG?

Crashing you say? Can you give me more details (system version, ram, any other programs running)? I just tried it on three machines and everything seemed fine… But there may be something I’ve missed…

Looks pretty good. Remember, you can still update during voting, and you should, as loading the 2nd level or restarting a level crashes the game.

Well… I have to be up in 4 1/2 hours for work (and have a full day ahead of me,) so what is done now is what is going to be final… So here you go!
http://www.mojiferous.com/files/simoebic_dysentery.zip

The game works fairly well, and other than a whole lot of features I would have liked to add in, it works…

WASD or arrows control your movement, space bar lyses (“pops”) cells. You’re trying to get to the cell highlighted by the bouncing hand with a limited number of lyses (indicated in the lower right hand corner) Enjoy!

So the final playable contest entry is slowly coming together… The game being entered certainly won’t be feature-complete, but it should mostly work and get the idea across nominally well…

Things that haven’t worked out so well:
1) Recording the dialog- coordinating a whole group of people to one place within a one-week time-span proved much too difficult for us: our main voice actor has a pledge drive, another had sick kids, the one person we actually got recorded (other than ourselves) was a one-line character from a level somewhere in the teens…
2) non-essential/core gameplay features- making sure everything works has been more of a focus the last week (and the next few days) than adding in anti-microbial drugs, or crazy mutations
3) Finding an acceptable interface theme- I’ve slaved day and night to try to find something that looked good and worked well with the graphics of the game… Most of my ideas have turned out crappy, so I’ve settled on something for the contest release.

Thank you!

Our goal from the beginning was to make the game look and sound unique, but since my 3d modeling skills are poor (to say the least) 2d was the only way we were going to go… The idea itself lends itself to a classic casual/2d game fairly easy as well, so hopefully something worthwhile will come out of it!

This looks very…‘artsy’, is that the right non-word?
Looks like its all drawn with pencil in some doctors notebook.
Unique, I like it!

Just wanted to throw some encouragement at you.

There was a game like this on PS1, 3D Dig Dug inside of cells or something.
Saw it at E3 1998, not sure if it was ever released.
Ten years later we get it on the Mac thanks to you, without the
weirdness of the map turning in 3D and hollowing out a cube of organs.

Quick update for Tuesday:

King Thor has (completely) finished the script, and I’ve begun fitting the various pieces and parts together. There is still some editing of levels to be done, just to get everything completely together; right now there are between 12 and 15 levels, divided into 4 or 5 “worlds” or major organ groups. I’m unsure about whether we’ll label things completely accurately or, as in my last screenshot, have things like “maple syrup glands” and “beard growing organs”.

I’m currently working on getting the soundtrack going, and we’ll probably be recording voice talent this weekend now that the script is finished.

Goals for this week:
Finalize script edits and level layouts
Finish sound
Create UI elements/HUD for game information
Build AI for white blood cells
Create splash screen

Goals for next week:
Testing and refinement of all controls and gameplay

Screen of the latest build, now with white blood cells and a fully-pulsing pulse! The script is done, the soundtrack is done… There should be a playable demo within the next week, at which point I will begin to add all the neat little visual doodads and gadgets that will make the game seem more like a game. I think we’re on track to finish the game in some form by the first week of March… So hopefully, baring any major issues, we should be good for the end of the contest.

Figuring out the pulse has been the most difficult hurdle thus far; it seems easy enough to change the velocity of the blood cells within a vector depending on the “pulse”, but to make it look natural took a little tweaking. I ended up using basic acceleration and deceleration functions for each blood cell so that the pulse would appear to be a period of acceleration and not just a stop/start process. Without using complex hydraulics, I think I achieved a relatively natural looking pulse.

p.s. You can also see the new “label” attribute for each level, which (in my opinion, at least) really makes the whole look

New screen shot of the editor, now with working blood flow!