Fierce Kitten Blog

What is "Candidates Be Damned"?

"Candidates Be Damned" is a game developed by Maurice and myself as a small project to get used to working together on a program before moving on to do a bigger game (like my MMO Company Simulation joke program that I keep threatening to do). It is developed using DirectDraw 7.0 in C. We used a beta copy of Whidbey (.NET 2005 Beta Codename) as the compiler and development tool.

The game is based off of the popular Bejeweled online Macromedia Flash game by PopCap Games. We slapped a political theme on top of it thanks to Lori.

To add a competitive element to the game, we have a top 20 list of playernames and their scores stored on the website here. If your score in a timed game happens to bump up into the top 20 list or knock someone off, you will be prompted to add your score to the website.

Once the election is over, we will probably change the name of the game to something else and redo the skins on it, as it will no longer be humorous after November 2nd.

Screenshots

There's not a whole lot to really show off in screenshots, but below are a few of the gameplay and interface:


Game selection screen	In-game help dialog

A hint has been revealed to the player!	Targeting a candidate's head for destruction

How the Heck Do I Play?

Basic Gameplay:
"Candidates Be Damned" is a simple game to play. Basically you have an 8 by 8 board of candidate heads of various colors. Your goal is to line up three or more heads by moving other heads around. Now the trick is that you can only swap heads that are adjacent to heads that are going to create a lineup. So you can't swap a blue head with a red head if the blue head doesn't end up next to two more blues to create a lineup. Below is an image of what you should do:

Controls:

Left Mouse Click to select a head
Right Mouse Click to deselect a head (You can also double-click)
F1 to get a hint

Types of Games:
There are two types of games, Simple and Timed. Simple has no time limit and you can play for however long you wish. It's really a practice mode, if you will. With the Timed game, you have a clock starting at 60 seconds (that's 1 minute for the "special" readers). You can not only increase your score, but increase your timer with successful lineups as well. The maximum timer allowed is 120 seconds (2 minutes). ONLY the timed game scores are capable of saving to our database. If your score doesn't meet the top 100 standards, then you will not have the saving option.

What If I'm Stuck?
Don't worry if you feel like you get stuck. You can press F1 to get a hint from the game. A huge yellow arrow will start bounding to the left of a candidate's head that could lead to a lineup. You shouldn't use this too often in your timed game though... the hint costs 50 points and 10 seconds of time!!!

Get "Candidates Be Damned"!

You may download "Candidates Be Damned" from here. The installer is less than 700kb in size and not much larger when installed. Before downloading, please read over the system requirements... and don't laugh, I have to put these up as a disclaimer because some knucklehead is bound to try to run this game on their Commodore 64 *smirk*:

Operating System: Win9X / Windows ME / Windows 2000
DirectX 7.0 or later
64MB of RAM
16 bit SVGA 4M
Sound Card
1 MB available hard drive space

Download "Candidates Be Damned" Now!