Mini LD #17: end?
Posted by Tenoch
March 23rd, 2010 11:56 pm
Hello everyone.
It’s now been a lot more than 48h, and I see on the compo blog that some of you have made pretty things. I guess we can call it a week-end, and gather all that’s been made.
Could an admin please set up the submission system?
EDIT: Submit Here | View All Entries
In any case, thanks a lot for your enthusiasm and participation, your help for porting the “engine”, and the hopefully wonderful games you made.
As usual, the submission system will be up for a while, so feel free to submit stuff even very late. This is a Mini LD after all. What matters is the result, not the time limit.
See you soon for more adventures (LD #17 coming up!)
Cheers,
Tenoch
I’m a little sad so few people entered this compo.
The retro engine will live on though.
Right now I want to see what my game looks like on the iPhone. So far I’ve ported audio over to Bass (which supports iPhone and has no dependencies) and I’m working on porting the sdl to version 1.3. Then I’ll take a shot at getting it going on the iPhone (probably by way of a mac port to make sure I’m familiar with the platform).
Yeah it was a nice little engine. I suspect being unfamiliar with lua might have been an obstacle for some people (it was for me). I’m not sure if this would fly on the iPhone given apple’s “no interpreted languages” rule but it would be cool to see it happen and play around with. I might try to finish “falling”, but I’d probably just port it to C since I didn’t write much code anyways.
Actually, I think you can use Lua (or any interpreted language) without problem on the iPhone, as long as the user cannot run arbitrary code. If it’s running only your dev provided source, it should be fine.
A Retro app wouldn’t be allowed, but a game based on Retro would, for instance.
Now of course that would probably be very unpractical. Retro was really just meant as a gadget for the Mini LD. However, the source is GPLv3 so feel free to reuse of modify what you find there if you want. It’s probably not a model of good practices though
If it’s GPL he can’t use it on the iPhone in any case. (Well, not by official channels anyway.)
I didn’t finish mainly because of time. The engine was functional and effective at what it was meant for (small, raster-retro games), but it did suck away time I could have used to actually make my game.
I was trying to create a arcadey sort of thing with a character that runs through a series of tunnel-like levels shooting bad guys (tactical side-scroller?). First thing I wasn’t prepared for was the exclusion of a partial blit, which would be useful for animation. Then when coding my background scrolling code (which would draw a few wall “panels” tiled along the background, at varying heights) I found out that when you blit a texture to the window with a negative X position it doesn’t draw at all. A partial blit could have been a way around this, but to work with the engine I instead programmed my interface cover the left side of the screen to hide the disappearing wall panels.
So, again, time was really my issue here. I found workarounds for my problems, and that’s what a programmer should be able to do. I might still work on this, but I don’t have much free time coming up; by the time I finish it it’s possible that nobody will understand what it is.
Moral for me: thoroughly explore the environment before trying to program a game in a limited timespan.