Dave: The ordinary spaceman

By: Xander

On: March 12th, 2009

Well, where the hell to go with this one? Dave: The ordinary spaceman is a competition entry from 2008 for the Gamedev portion of the Assembly 2008 compo. I think I have that right. Whatever this was, it was from that.

Anyway, ‘Dave’ is an action-platformer which melds 2D pixels and 3D effects to create a rather interesting stylised gameplay scenario. All the 2D action takes place on a TV, which actually exists within a 3D space. Which is rather clever, and leads to some interesting play with verisimilitude. For example, the main menu of the game actually revolves around a Teletext menu, so you navigate the on-screen pages by entering combinations of three numbers. Subsequently typing the numbers to enter the game will display the game screen on the TV, slowly zooming in to full-screen.

On top of this we have a 3D remote control which allows you to perform a number of television related effects, such as rewinding, pausing and record/play which act much like you would expect them from time-manipluation mechanics in other games. You can also press the space bar to turn the TV off. This has no purpose, and scores a quick laugh for its inclusion, though it does add somewhat to the diegesis.

The remote control is the source of your powers, meaning you have to collect batteries along your travels to power your remote. So long as it’s charged you have the power to control the world. If it’s out, then one hit can kill you… dead… for realz. All in all a fantastic game! If it was finished…

Sadly being a competition entry, the game features only three incredibly short levels. It’s also not the most polished game, where collision detection is iffy at best and controls never feel particularly well thought out. Still, as proof of concept it’s worth playing through if your rig can run it (It’s a demanding little beast), it just seems kind of a shame for so much effort to be put into the engine for there to be so little actual gameplay. Hopefully this isn’t it for Dave, but we’ll just have to wait and see!

(Kudos to AuthenticKaizen for spotting this one!)

Posted in Action, Platformers, Windows

namuol

it’s a shame the demoscene isn’t more well-known, especially in this community.

sigh, here i go again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

nonetheless, i must play this.
captain_duck

This looks awesome, and im trying to download it but the download is going real slow, i think the site must be overwhelmed by the traffic or something?

Anyone have a seperate download link?
http://www.funmahol.com FunMahoL

its looking quite good to see.i will surely try it.the mobile showing at bottom right is looking very nice to show up the scores.
http://www.roachpuppy.com IceNine

Download was slow, then the game quit out after it went fullscreen. :(
niceone

Download was slow as hell. But it was worth the wait: BSOD when executed.
Chris

It worked for me on Vista with an Nvidia card.

Definitely original and stylish, but pacing needs work. After the tutorial, I started on the first real level with no electricity in my remote (IE no ability to fire my weapon, rewind, or do anything other than jump).

I died instantly the moment I touched an enemy. Apparently, there is no concept of health or lives, so I had to start the tutorial over from the main menu each time I died.

It took me two deaths just to figure out I could jump on enemies to kill them. After another death because I tried to jump on an enemy and hit a ceiling that I had thought was part of the background, I got frustrated and came here to complain.

They could have at least started me with enough power to rewind a few times. I’m sure the one life thing would be fine with that ability.
Lim-Dul

Ha, ha – I got a BSoD as well – funnily enough THE FIRST ONE EVER for me on Vista (yes, I never had any major issues with it) – congratulations, game! ;-)

The unfunny part of the BSoD was that I lost all my Firefox settings, including the ones for extensions since it was opened during that catastrophic event and something must have gotten messed up. Good that I regularly use MozBackup. :-P
http://lumberingdream.com/ !CE-9

http://pouet.net/ is an awesome source of awesomeness which I haven’t seen mentioned on TIGS yet (not in the last two years).

a personal fav, NSFW: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=10474
http://www.shockedfrog.com shockedfrog

I was kinda hoping nobody (outside of assembly ’08 visitors or pouet.net’s community, anyway) would have noticed this, since it’s Dave to the extent that the DAVE I’ve been pseudo-working on for years is no longer quite as Davey.

Anyway, I haven’t actually played the game, since the website was down at the time I originally noticed it. Downloading it now, though it’s pretty slow. Those suffering bsods, got any idea on what might be causing it?
http://www.gamespot.com/users/AuthenticKaizen/ AuthenticKaizen

good decision for giving this game a try ;)

hopefully the developers decide to expand this game…
http://www.roachpuppy.com IceNine

Blue screens in games are usually kernel mode video driver bugs. Hard for anyone to tell what it could be without driver symbols and a kernel debugger hooked.

As far as the other random crashes (like mine) I’m guessing D3D caps aren’t being checked as much as they should and it chokes on random cards.
Q

can someone explain the 1st, 3rd and 4th sentence of this post?
J

Chris: Too bad you quit so easily. All you have to do after the tutorial level is drop down and GO LEFT. You get several batteries to power up the remote right away.

And oddly enough, the game works fine on my Radeon.
UltimateWalrus

The production values in this game are super great!! Very stylish. It seems like the artist may have been inspired by games like Commander Keen and Tempest 2000 :)

The actual gameplay… well… it’s OK. I wish I didn’t have to hold the up arrow forever to do the jetpack, though :

Also, how exactly was weapon #3 supposed to be used??
Bob

Music, gameplay, anything else – nice.

But man, I’m getting good at finding exploits and glitches/bugs.
Petri Purho

The Assembly gamedev combo produces some pretty interesting games. It’s a shame that very few people (outside the scene) take notice of them when they’re released. Games that came out of Assembly gamedev: Stair Dismount, Fret on Fire, Racing Pitch, Cinnamon Beats, Kumoon, Pekka Kana II
http://www.gamespot.com/users/AuthenticKaizen/ AuthenticKaizen

indeed petri,
very fine games can be found there.

thanks for mentioning [url=http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=31554]cinnamon beats[/url] (commercial version in development by [url=http://secretexit.com/games/cinnamonbeats]secret exit[/url])

btw [url=http://pistegamez.proboards18.com/index.cgi?board=pk3]pekka kana 3[/url] was announced (but is currently kinda on hold)

also:
[url=http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=20938]zen bondage[/url] (commercial version [url=http://zenbound.com/]zen bound released for iphone[/url])

and
[url=http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=27579]globot wars[/url] (in the vein of geometry wars)

according to this [url=http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2008/09/preview_zen_bound_secret_exit.html]post on indiegames[/url] the developer of zen bondage is now part of the development team of [url=http://secretexit.com/games]secret exit[/url]
http://www.gamespot.com/users/AuthenticKaizen/ AuthenticKaizen

damn…bbcode tags dont work.
maybe some mod is kind enough to fix that?
looks pretty confusing…
Ataraxia

BSoD at execution. First ever with Vista, lol. Lost a whole lot of my work notes though….. well that’s what i get for playing games at work.
Phasma Felis

*Too bad you quit so easily. All you have to do after the tutorial level is drop down and GO LEFT. You get several batteries to power up the remote right away.*

Drop down, go left and run into a robot which kills you. Then restart, run through the tutorial, go left, try to jump over the robot, hit your head on the ceiling and get killed by the robot. Repeat half a dozen times until you get the physics straight.

Not really a friendly introduction.
Jay

BSOD with Vista :-