Inkblot Shade: Ludum Dare edition

Okay, I admit it – I kinda ignored this Ludum Dare’s theme of “Start with nothing”. Having been playing around with GLSL for a couple of weeks, I really wanted to spend this Ludum Dare writing shaders rather than complicated game mechanics. And I may have had this idea floating around in my head for some time before the start date. In my defence, “nothing” is the number of points you start off with! So it’s not completely unrelated!

Making this game did lead to me learning all sorts of new things about GLSL, though. For one thing, I learned that the GLSL pow() function is only actually well defined for positive numbers – which means that if your blob-generating code relies on raising a negative number to the power of three, some machines will give you a negative number while others will just arbitrarily give you a positive number instead, so you end up with twice as many blobs and no big spaces to dodge between. At least it was a quick fix when I learned what was going on.

You are the small blob to the left of the screen. Click and hold the mouse button to move around. Each time you make it from one side to the other without falling into any larger blobs, you get one point. Post your high scores in the comments.

Or you could just sit there and stare at the gently shifting inkblot patterns. Either are good.

Downloads:
Windows
Source – Love2D archive. To run this on Linux, install Love2D, then run “love InkblotShade.love”.