Shade and Shrooms

Shade and Shrooms is an implementation of the “Shade” prototyping challenge from Lost Garden (http://lostgarden.com/2008/06/shade-game-design-challenge.html).

Updates

August 1, 2008 - Revision 2 is now available!
August 26, 2008 - Revision 3 is in the pipe — read more on the blog

Download

You can download the demo (Windows only, I’m afraid) here:
/downloads/ShadeAndShrooms-Demo-R2.zip

You’ll need Microsoft’s XNA Framework, along with the current release of Direct X 9 and .NET 2 (you know: the “usual”).

Instructions

If you have an XBox360 controller, you can use the left stick to move the farmer (the short guy with the enormous head), otherwise you’ll need to maneuver with the ASDW keys.

The “goal” (such as it is, at the moment) is to collect the mushrooms growing in the shade. You can do this simply by touching a mushroom with the farmer.

Mushrooms you’ve collected will follow you around happily.

Bring the farmer to the magical, free-standing doorway to drop off any mushrooms following him.

Be careful: if a mushroom following you stays out of the shade for too long it will turn brown and wilt, eventually poofing out of existence forever.

As the sun moves (you can see the position of the sun in the circular timer in the top-left corner of the screen) the shadows on the ground will change.

At the moment, the game never “ends”, so you’ll need to hit the back button on the controller or close the window (Alt-F4 does the job) to quit.

Revision 2 Notes

It now takes less time for the sun to cross the sky (just 7 minutes) — this may or may not be the right length for a day, so it’s likely to change in later revisions
There are now two types of mushrooms, the spotted red ones and truffles (clearly the king of all mushrooms); they are each worth different amounts of money and grow and wilt at different rates
“Points” have been replaced by “money”
Smaller mushrooms are worth less than larger mushrooms of the same type, and less wilted mushrooms are worth more than badly wilted ones (so it is to your advantage to find large mushrooms and keep them fresh)
Mushrooms wilt a bit faster now (another value likely to change in the future)
Sound effects have been added
When a mushroom wilts into nothing it now does so with substantially more flare
You can pause the game at any time with the Start button or the Esc key
Many internal changes have been made, including how shadows are handled; the game should be able to handle many more shadows and mushrooms at a time now (though I haven’t ratcheted up the values for this version)

Issues and Such

The farmer can currently wander anywhere, including off the edges of the map and directly through trees. I don’t think this wandering will break anything (at least, not unless you wander in one direction for a very, very long time), but there are surprisingly few mushrooms growing in the twisting nether that surrounds the maps, and therefor not much to do out there.

Screenshots