With twenty minutes to go before I have to depart for work, I sigh and admit that this competition turned out like the last one I entered. I researched lots of interesting things, thought my idea through, and managed to start on the first few lines of code before I ran out of time.

It’s been fun, and I’ll still probably try to make the game anyway. I just won’t have it up until after the contest is over.

Well, I have my idea. Advancing wall of doom? How about advancing brick 3d cube wall maze of doom! The wall would crush you, except there’s a hole in it. This hole leads into an intricate 3d maze. This maze is in sections, the exit of one leading to the entrance of another, and the maze gets tougher and tougher every time.

But keeping with the theme, it is an ever-advancing wall that you are navigating through. Instead of crushing you, this long rectangular maze is passing through an energy field that will vaporize you if you take too long.

That’s right. It’s an advancing 3d maze of doom that will vaporize you if you don’t move on to the next section in time.

So after deciding I could use blender, I set about learning what I needed to know. I figured I could make its game engine do most of the work for me, with python to generate the mazes. Not an easy feat for someone who’s never even completed a tutorial in the thing or completed anything in python to date.

First thing’s first, I set up wink and tested it out. Might as well have an easy way to screenshot.

Then I began looking up the rules.

Then I began my research…

Then, five hours later, frustrated and no closer to even starting the game than I was before, I began to think that maybe I should try PyOpenGL instead…

Hungry with no sleep, I go now to shower and head to work at wal-mart.

Last LD or two, I didn’t really give it a shot. I was expecting myself to be able to install SDL and set up myself a development environment to make a game in C++ when I’ve never done any of that before.

I wasn’t going to compete this time around either. I have work tonight and I haven’t been to sleep yet. But when I was laying in bed, thinking about the theme of this competition, thinking about the idea I had for the theme and how easy it should be to implement in something simpler like python, I suddenly got up and decided, “I’m making the game!”

First thing’s first. I’m pulling up all the relevant tutorials I can find. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna be making it in blender’s gaming engine and using python from there to do the actual programming. (It’s pretty simple graphically as well, and the python can generate the… *ahem* content for me.)

There’s about 14 hours left in the competition. I’ve got SDL installed, its includes and libraries set in visual c++, and some SDL tuts in a firefox tab.

I think I’ll start working now.

Unfortunately, I prepared myself a really awesome plate of food for nothing. I can’t find my camera!! I think I left it at my other place, so I’ll just describe the food.

Three fourths of the plate is heaped with this pasta salad type thing. It’s shell style pasta with some vegetables in it, mayo mixed in, and this bacon-bits type mix that makes it smell and taste really good. (The shells, veggies, and bacon bits were in a pre-bought box.)

The rest of the plate is taken up by green beans resting right at the edge of the pasta. The beans are laying with a horizontal alignment and are flavored with garlic salt.

I cut two squares of butter into the shapes of a capitol “L” and “D”, placing these butter letters atop the green beans to spell the initials of this most favored competition.

This is the box I’m workin’ with. I built it myself with parts ordered from newegg.

AMD Phenom 9850 BE 2.5GHz.

Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe AM2+ Motherboard.

Radeon HD 3870 with 512mb GDDR4 RAM.

4 Gb (2x 2GB) Mushkin DDR2 1066MHz RAM with 5-5-5-15 timings.

ABS Tagan BZ series 800w power supply.

Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 500Gb, 300Gb/s SATA HD.

Samsung 20x DVD+R burner.

Thermaltake Tsunami mid tower.

The only thing I don’t like about it is that it restarts on its own sometimes. The screen will just black out and it’ll boot up as if I had just turned it on. It’s either a power supply issue or it’s my bad for using a factory heat sink on the processor.