Best way to lose a life

David Lowe
434 Tenney Drive
Rogue River, OR
97537
j.david.lowe@gmail.com
http://www.pootpoot.net/

Judges' comments:

To build:

make dlowe

To run:

./dlowe

Try:

./dlowe
# Watch for a while if you like, then press a key within the window
# Use up and down keys to escape death

Selected Judges Remarks:

The judges lose playing this game. This entry wins!

OS X users running Mountain Lion and later will need to download and install:

http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

Q: How did we get past the variadic macro problem on a Mac?

A: Don’t use -pedantic-errors in the Makefile.

Author’s comments:

Conway’s Game of DEATH

This is a challenging, fast-paced arcade game, based on the famous Game of Life.

Story

In the game, you are Mr.C, a lightweight spaceship making a futile dash for escape from the rigid rules and predictability of life in the B3/S23 universe.

Use the up and down arrow keys to steer: collisions are fatal for Mr.C! Learn to spot incoming gliders, skim the surfaces of beehives and blocks, and give blinkers plenty of space. Things get crazier as Mr.C picks up speed… can he escape?

No. There is no winning. Sadly for Mr.C, this universe goes on forever. Just see how far you can make it!

Press ‘q’ any time to quit.

Features

casual gameplay
infinite, procedurally generated universe
progressive difficulty
animated splash screens

Limitations

Flicker, especially at high speeds, and in spite of “double-buffering” (X11 doesn’t make it possible to lock drawing to the display refresh rate.)
Cannot be run outside of the directory containing the data files (splash.d, dead.d and sprites.d).
Cannot build or run without X11 (or an X11 compatibility layer).

Wish List

Score keeping
Color
In-game instructions
Sound

Hosts Tested

Darwin 10.8.0 i386 (clang 1.6 and gcc 4.2.1)
Linux 2.6.32 i686 (clang 1.1 and gcc 4.4.3)
Linux 3.2.0 x86_64 (clang 3.0 and gcc 4.6.3)

Obfuscations

The code is formatted into a 14-cell shape which will evolve into a glider in 19 generations.

Lots of globals, including a global struct whose members have the same names as global variables.

Global variables getting reused in different contexts.

Huge and convoluted expressions, abusing ternary operators and operator precedence.

Lots of magic numbers, abuse of the relationships between magic numbers, and abuse of the arithmetic properties of magic numbers.