How to create the Timed Mines from Abe's Oddysee

Just as a little test of logic on myself, I sat down for about 20 minutes and made a mine from abe's oddysee.

Well that's helpful 'innit? Just saying I made one, what good is that??

Well now i'll post and explain the logic so you guys can make them too!

The difficulty of the logic is only of an intermediate level but if this helps anyone learn then that'd be great :)

http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/6...ddyseybomb.png

For anyone that hasn't played the game, the mines go beep beep beep BOOP and flash red red red GREEN like that, and you have to tap it on the green else you set the mine off. You also can't stand on them or jump over them.

Don't worry you guys, that picture makes it look more complicated than it really is.

What's happening, is a small square of dissolve is on a flipper motion'd piston, going past those 4 vertical key switches.

Every time it triggers a keyswitch it lights up the corresponding lights and makes the beep sound. The dissolve also has an emitter on it, and it fires a paintball to the left. The paintball will hit one of two triggers, and as you can see, for 3/4s of the time the paintball will hit one trigger over the other.

The emitted paintball is fired whenever the player grabs the mine (which is a standard triggered explosive).

At the bottom right we have an OR gate. Which is when input A OR B are triggered, then C is triggered.

A is the case of the player trying to jump over the mine. (The directional player sensor switch is connected to the first piston.)

B is the case of the player mis-timing the defusing action. (The larger directional paint switch target is connected to the second piston.)

C is the bomb explodering. (The Key switch on the OR gate is connected to the explosive.)

You can either create your own OR gate from the other tutorials in this forum or get one from the LBPC Logic Pack level.

The win condition is when the player times the grab with the 4th BOOP (which should co incide with the green light being on) and the emitter fires the paintball at the smaller paintswitch which will then trigger the 3 dissolve switches.

This stops the lights flashing, the sounds beeping, the paintballs firing and break the OR switch so it can't be triggered anymore.

So there you have it, If i've not explained a bit well enough then just say and i'll make an amendment.

I was thinking of including it in a level but I don't think it'll fit well enough, but you guys should feel free to use it.:D

This is a nice little tutorial. Thanks for sharing it with us! :p

It's quite a unique little gameplay mechanic but it's probably best off for levels where you only get one chance at a section else fail condition.

I messed around with something similar to this a few months ago :)

This is great stuff and I love the diagram and explanation! Really appreciate it when people go to so much trouble to show others how stuff works! :)

Love the diagram, and seems like an interesting play mechanic. I'll look and see if I can find somewhere to put it into my level.

cool mechanic! i love the abe games! hm.. this inspired me of making those scrabs and paramites! oh and sligs! mudokons! slugs! leeches! glukkons! aaw heck, i'll make a whole level! 8D
with electric passages, drills, awesome machines, mudokon-sackbots (w000w), elevaitors and grenades! this will be something huge 8D (oh and bees! elum! bats! munks! etc... etc...)

Ah that's pretty cool, was wondering what you were talking about for a while :p

Maybe you could have one that you jump on to stop, if you hit green you get point bubbles!

Ahh, that's not even remotely as violent as my idea though :P

Hey thank you very much
This is a good contribution to the community .... Try to make a...

i loved abes oddysee it was an awesome game, maybe you could make a abes oddysee level an include it in that?

Very cool idea. It would have to be in some kind of place where you only get one chance or else you have to do something else.... or something. Or a survival level would be kinda neat. I might try and make one to fool around with! Thanks for the diagram.

Good!

Great contribution to the community!

Nice job asbestos :D

Have you got any pretty pictures of the final product or a level link that we can see them in? Because that would be pretty epic :p

Great trap! Does it lend itself very well for miniaturization? I know it will be peanuts in LBP2, but if in LBP1 you could fit that all into the device itself, you can drop those all over your level or have a boss drop them around; imagine the pressure of those piling up and having to dismantle them all.

That would be a pretty sick idea.

For LBP2 though, you could make these super easily, and you could have little green sackbots following you around that you have to converse with to get them to do what you want.

The tricky thing would be getting the level to reset every time you died (like it does in the real game).

Hey everybody. I made one of these by looking at asbestos101's diagram. If anyone is interested I have just the bomb with logic, and I also made one that will demit/remit when exploded. It's pretty instantaneous but if you played with it you could get it to look like it's falling out of the ceiling or whatever. PM me if you want and I can put it in a copyable level or something. Also in the one that I made you can't walk behind the bomb either. Thanks for the cool idea and diagram asbestos101!

Nice one dude, i'm really happy that at least one person got some use from this :P

Speaking of abe's oddysee, I was playing it at 3.50am last night with 2 of my flat mates, struggling through it.
I forgot how horribly difficult that game is to play, but its done nothing but inspire me to create a homage in LBP2 proper :)

O man thatd be sweet. I know I'd play it. I don't know if I'll actually use the bomb anytime soon or not. But it was such a cool idea that I had to make one.

Well havent made anything properly yet, but using my system knowledge it should be something to do with the timer or even the randomiser object, that are also connected to a grab sensor, connected to an microchip that emits a sound emit a different light colour but for the red it will emit a bomb to kill the player.

the only issue that you will need a it to explode on contact with the player so the player cant just cheat and walk over them

another issue is when the object is disarmed, can it be rearmed?, and if so can it explode on contact with enemies.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Asbestos101

That would be a pretty sick idea.

For LBP2 though, you could make these super easily, and you could have little green sackbots following you around that you have to converse with to get them to do what you want.

The tricky thing would be getting the level to reset every time you died (like it does in the real game).

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It's not so much "resetting the level" as "forcing the player to restart the level", but it can be done. At the start of the level, create some kind of threshold at the entrance which the player can only pass through one way. Once this threshold has been crossed, your level should trigger a permanent switch, hooked up to an AND gate. The second input on the AND gate will be a proximity switch on the Entrance side of the threshold, so that if the threshold has been crossed and the player is detected inside that room (i.e., they died and were sent back to that room), the AND gate triggers. Then, wire the AND gate into a creature brain on the Level Entrance. This will cause the player to run out of lives and bring them to the "Continue/Replay Level" menu. This obviously means you can't have any checkpoints in the level, unfortunately, but it is one semi-solution. A second way to go about it would be to capture entire pieces of the level as objects and emit them whenever the player dies using a similar method, which actually would let you use checkpoints, but it's also kind of a hassle and more susceptible to bugging out.

EDIT: Oh, and cool item! I like the idea of an Oddworld level, but I think I'll wait for LBP2. Sackbot Mudokons and Sligs would be awesome. I can just imagine chanting and watching a Sackbot flip out in the background, waiting to be possessed...

EDIT2: I decided to try and build my own variation on this, since I didn't want to use external circuitry for the bomb, particularly if I wanted to place multiple bombs, since this would consume time and space. I managed to create a self-contained circuit that's all glued straight to the bomb. Instead of the Paint-based switches, what I did was attach a thin cardboard circle to the bomb with a motor bolt. This has 4 on/off tag switches on it, controlling the lights and sound. A fifth tag switch is affixed directly under the switch that controls the green light, this one set to direction. While the green light is lit, the direction switch is activated too, setting the bomb into "diffusable mode".

The circuit has two AND gates, which we will call AND1 and AND2.

AND1 controls the diffusing of the bomb. If the bomb is diffusable and the grab switch on the bomb is activated, AND1 triggers. AND1 is wired into a protected creature brain atop the bomb, which will cause the entire bomb to dissolve, and awards the player a few points for successfully deactivating it.

AND2 is one input to an OR switch. This will activate when the bomb is grabbed, and the bomb is not in diffusable mode. The second input to the OR switch is the proximity switch atop the bomb. If AND2 or the proximity switch is activated, the bomb explodes, killing the player.

EDIT3: I made an even better variation. Here's a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX8UPIpuILc
I also published the level so you can get them for yourself, if you'd like.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fatal Gear

A second way to go about it would be to capture entire pieces of the level as objects and emit them whenever the player dies using a similar method, which actually would let you use checkpoints, but it's also kind of a hassle and more susceptible to bugging out.

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That is the method I was referring to ^^

One thing i've noticed from my aerostation levels, is that no matter how good a level is, people don't like being told to restart.
It comes across as a failure in the level design where the author can't be bothered to fix the problem, so they just say 'restart plx'.

Thats a very wicked little video you've got there too, nice job :)