Because it’s fun, Fay
June 2nd, 2008, Competitions, Game Development, LuaDuring the last couple of weeks we’ve been working on a small game for TIGSource’s Procedural Generation competition. The deadline is tonight, and we are just finished! The game’s called “Because it’s Fun, Fay”, and is about a woman called Fay who has been trapped in a tower by a lonely fairy known as Cornipolous. Not interested in being anybody’s pet prisoner, Fay decisively begins to find her way out of the tower. Cornipolous knows there are many dangerous monsters around, and he doesn’t want her to get hurt, so he’s forced to assist in her escape.
You can either play yourself or cooperatively with a friend, but in both cases the objective is to get Fay and Corn to the top of the tower, where an evil boss awaits. The topic of the competition was that the game should be different every time you play, so the game’s level and boss are randomized when the game begins. Download the game here:
- Mac OS X: http://www.oxeye.se/files/stuff/BIFF_Mac.zip
- Windows: http://www.oxeye.se/files/stuff/BIFF.zip
Like the mods for Harvest, this game has been written completely in Lua. This has been an interesting experiment, and feels like an easy and quick way of testing new game ideas. You will probably see more of this from us 
Hit the jump for a screenshot from the game…
June 3rd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
The game is running really slow on my computer ( a bit like playing harvest in 4* speed when normal speed starts getting laggy, almost unplayable), any sugestions on improving the speed?
June 3rd, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Ah, that’s very good to hear actually. This is our first game written in Lua, and we have been a little unsure about it’s performance. What system do you have? /jeb
June 4th, 2008 at 6:53 am
windows xp
June 5th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Just ran through the game… fun
!
Confusing at first, I didn’t read the intro just the controls tooltip in the menu (neat BTW), so it took me a couple minute to get the character/view switch, plus to understand that Corn was here to open the way for Fay. But hey it’s good once in a while to remember the time when game designers didn’t babysit players all the way through!
Nice surprise to have a little RPG element at the end, but you really should give the option to retry just the boss… by the time I’d figured the menus (which are quite intuitive but still, at first you just click anywhere so you have to account for 2-3 noob errors… and is the ‘magic’ menu in Swedish??), he had totally whipped my butt!
… and for a compo game, I wonder how many people will.
I doubt I’ll have the patience to go through the tower a second time just to see the end-game sequence that probably isn’t exactly Hollywood-standards
Keep it up guys, hope I’ll have time to have a go at Harvest that I just discovered!
June 5th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
As usual, another great Oxeye game.
GJ with scripting in Lua.
~Liam
June 6th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Ben:
Thanks for the feedback
To retry just the end boss, open up the file called “main.lua” and change which game state it starts from (place — in front of the registerMenu and remove the — from the registerBoss thing). You’ll also need some extra powerups to be able to beat the boss, though. Look around in “main.lua”, you’ll probably find how to add them.
/jeb
June 6th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
The game ran fine on my computer (nicknamed the old bastard) and Visual Studio compiling in the background. I was shocked to realize it was using Lua as the performance was simply amazing.
So I don’t know why Feone had some trouble running the game. Maybe it’s got something to do with graphics drivers…
As for the game. I like it a lot. The graphics and animations are simply amazing. The gameplay is cool. The only annoyance is that there are couple of collision bugs… Few times they ended up ruining the game for me…. One time I fell through some tiles and ended up in a place that I couldn’t escape. But overall great job for a game made in month!
June 6th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
I tried running it on my sisters pc, worked just fine. and yes i have a 7 year old pc and my graphics card isnt very good (altough it could handle age of empires 3 without to much lag but with overheating XD) but the older software might be incompatible
June 9th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Victory
!
Thanks Jeb, I did just what you said (I guess I can now add” LUA scripter” to my resume) and beat the boss… damn he’s a tough one! but it was worth it ’cause the end-game sequence is pure awesomeness, go on everybody, finish the game and be amazed!
June 9th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Victory
!
Thanks Jeb, I did just what you said (I guess I can now add” LUA scripter” to my resume) and beat the boss… damn he’s a tough one! but it was worth it ’cause the end-game sequence is pure awesomeness, go on everybody, finish the game and be amazed!
June 18th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Lovely game! When switching between characters, it reminds me of an old game: `Lost Vikings’. However, it has a dynamic of its own, which is very nice.
Regarding the performance issues mentioned above: I use a mac Powerbook PPC G4 1.5 Ghz (which is rather old) with 1.25 Gb RAM and it runs reasonably well. So I think you’ve done a rather nice job programming, ‘despite’ Lua
August 15th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Great game lads, is there any possiblity of getting a quick translation of the magic menu to English?
August 16th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Here you go!
*** SPOILER WARNING ***
Lak = heal
Dulak = doubleheal
Uppsta = ressurect
Skold = Shield
Hast = Haste
Brann = Burn
Blixt = Lightning
August 30th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
[...] “Because it’s fun, Fay?” It was a game we made for the TIGSource Procedural Generation Competition, held earlier [...]
August 18th, 2012 at 1:52 am
Hello there!
When running the “Fay.exe” within the “BIFF.rar” file, I’m displayed with this error: (The program can’t start because MSVCR71.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem). I have attempted to put the dll within the extracted “BIFF” folder but still, no luck.
Any suggestions? I love to play this great looking title ;D
Cheers!
//Dean
August 18th, 2012 at 2:20 am
Sounds like you need visual studio ditributed runtime. On my phone så i dont know which one, but i think 2008
December 22nd, 2014 at 12:15 pm
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