Colorful

Colorful is a simple 2D side-shooter game, originally created in 48 hours for the Ludum Dare event, 25th edition (December 2012).

This is the "post-compo" version of the game - it has received numerous enhancements and bug fixes.

Building the game

To build Colorful, you'll need the following dependencies:

• Free Pascal Compiler
• Make
• optipng - for optimizing images
• oggenc - for encoding .wav sound effects to .ogg
• SDL libraries: SDL2, SDL2_image, SDL2_mixer
• Pascal units for SDL2

Getting the SDL2 units

Before you can build, you need to get a copy of Pascal SDL2 units. The recommended version to use can be found in the PGD SDL2-For-Pascal repository, although you're free to try compiling the game using any others.

The repo links to aforementioned headers by the means of a git submodule, so if you don't want to experiment, run the following commands:

$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

This should fetch the SDL2 headers for you.

Configuring the build

The build process includes a custom configuration script, which can be used to tailor the build process to your needs. The script takes the following options:

• --android
  Controls whether Android-specific build settings are enabled. The default value is false.

• --assets <bundle, standalone, systemwide>
  Specifies where the game should expect asset files to be located.

  • bundle: Assets are expected to be found two directory levels above the executable, like in the following structure:
    • bin/linux64
    • bin/win64
    • gfx/
  • standalone: Assets are expected to be found in the same directory, right next to the executable.
  • systemwide: Assets are expected to be found in /usr/share/suve/colorful.

  The default value is standalone.

• --debug
  Controls whether debugging features are enabled. The default value is false.

• --donate
  Controls whether the "Donate" option appears in the main menu. The default value is true.

• --fpc PATH
  Use the Free Pascal Compiler located at PATH. The default is to use fpc.

• --flags FLAGS
  Pass FLAGS to fpc. Can be specified multiple times.

• --ogg-quality QUALITY
  Encode sound effects to .ogg with this quality setting. The default value is 10.

• --platform <auto, desktop, mobile>
  Controls whether the game should be built in desktop mode (keyboard focus, no touch controls) or mobile mode (touch, extra menus for accessibility). The default value is auto, which resolves to mobile when building for Android, and desktop otherwise.

• --strip
  Controls whether the built executable should be stripped of debug symbols. The default value is false.

The option syntax is --option=value. Passing --option value will result in an error. For boolean options, the value can be omitted; it will be treated as true.

The script generates a Makefile, so once you've configured everything to your liking (or just decided to go with the defaults), you can build the game through the usual method:

$ make all

Installing the game

If you set assets to standalone (the default value) during the configuration phase, the game is ready to go. You can launch the executable found at build/colorful and enjoy yourself. Since the game stores its configuration file and savestates inside the user's home directory, it should continue to work even if moved to a non-writeable location.

If you're trying to package the game for Linux, go back and ensure you've configured assets to systemwide. If everything checks out, you can go ahead and use the install target defined in the Makefile.

$ make install [DESTDIR=]

Note that, currently, there is no support for specifying the installation prefix; it is hard-coded to /usr.

Building for Android

Android is a bit of a tough cookie. You can find all the extra code (Java/JNI glue, manifests, etc.) and build scripts in the pl.suve.colorful.android repository.

Licensing

Colorful is subject to two different licences.

• Game code (found in the src/ directory) is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation. The full text of this licence is available in the LICENCE-CODE.txt file.

• Anything not covered by the point above is made available under the terms of the "zlib with acknowledgement" licence. The full text of this licence is available in the LICENCE-ASSETS.txt file.

Random rambling

The code, as you can expect from a game made for a 48h compo, is quite crappy. Since this is a post-compo version, some cleanup has been made, functions have been moved, comments have been added. But it's still far from being state-of-the-art, so don't expect me to cover the damage if you hurt your eyes looking at it.

While getting the game to compile for Android was fairly easy, making it run in a sensible matter was a whole other issue. As such, the code is riddled with Android-specific quirks and workarounds. Some of these should be fairly obvious in what they do, but some are quite literally workarounds for behaviour I didn't bother to properly diagnose.

So anyway, feel free to read, observe, and despair. I mean, learn. Like, you know, I made a game and you didn't, so you can learn from me. Yeah.