Star Cleaner

On 1st of November 2010 the team at http://www.experimentalgameplay.com announced their new theme night and day.
It took around 10 seconds after reading the theme and I had this idea for my game Star Cleaner.

A platformer where you guide an angel, collect stars and bring them back to the sun or the moon to get them cleaned. The idea with night and day was to have the stars only shine at night and while collecting the stars you removed more and more of the lighting in your level you had to finish.
And during the day, when you can see the platforms and enemies, you can't see the stars anymore.

That sounded like a great idea to me.

To increase game acceptance and to learn something new I wanted to code the game in Java with Slick.

Only problem: I didn't know how to do lighting with Slick. But fortunately one day later a discussion raised on the Slick forums and my problem was solved within a few days. So I started.

Now it's the end of November, I spent 6 days (where day 5 was split over four days with up to one hour of coding time at all - so I counted it as one day ;-)) and the game is done.

Enjoy and tell me what you think of it!

Title screen
Just press one of the "Jump" keys to start the game. You can use W, X or Cursor up to jump.

Ingame
That's pretty easy. You can guide your angel left and right and you can jump. The jump keys are already mentioned.
For steering left and right you can either use A and D or use Cursor left and Cursor right.

Pretty straight forward. Currently there's no way to end the game or get back to the title screen, except refreshing the page :LOL:

You think the ingame levels are shit? Badly done? Too easy? Too difficult?

No problem. Create your own levels. They are just text files. And I'll explain the format. So open up your text editor, create levels and mail them to me. Don't forget to mention your name or nick name and I'll get them added to the game and upload a new version.

Here is a sample file (it's level 10 of the game):

.*.....*......O.
===..........===
.......===......
*..............*
..===....===...=
..v*v....v*v...v
......w.........
=.-....=...-...=
................
.>.*==...==*....
P?.............*
===^^^===^^^====
120
This is the final
level in my game!
Feel free to create
more and send them
to me. I'll add them
to the game!

Have fun, Thomas

Each level is made up of 12 lines with 16 characters each. Following is a line with the number of seconds you'll get as bonus seconds.

Finally come some text lines that have to fit on the message window...
Now for the character explanation:

• A dot '.' is an empty space.
• A '=' is a platform block.
• A '-' is a moving platform.
• A '*' is a star.
• A capital Oh 'O' is the sun/moon.
• The 'P' is the player.
• The '?' is the sign for the message window.
• The '>' is a crow.
• The 'w' and 'W' are right and left moving clouds.
• The '^' and the 'v' are the spikes.

I think that's all. Want to give it a try?