So as expected I didn’t get my game to a releasable state but I got some useful work done and I’m still motivated to keep working on it so I’ll carry on and probably keep posting here for now. Well done to everyone that managed to release and have made some money.

So I finally got a video made. It’s not particularly exciting but it shows off the main features so far: speed shift, pitch shift, reversing. The colours are picked at random because I haven’t got round to implementing anything more exciting yet.

Ludum Dare October Challenge 2011 – Gamplay Footage

Does anyone have any recommendations for creating footage of openGL games on linux? I’ve tried recordmydesktop and xvidcap but I’ve basically wasted two days trying to get sound and a decent frame rate out of them!

So it turns out ffts on the fly is no problem, a quick check with timeit suggests I should be able to do around 1500 a second of the size I’m trying to do and I only need to do two per frame ie about 120 if we’re locked to vsync. The problem was that pyglet seems to take sound data twice as often as it “schedules” things if you set them up using pyglet.clock.schedule so I was giving two different data chunks for the same start time.

It turns out my filter had something to do with the previous speed problem and not using it doesn’t seem to affect the sound in any other way so that’s gone. Now it just skips and jumps a bit which is annoying, that may be down to my calculations of the duration and time stamp of the returned sample or because doing real time ffts is too demanding.

I just managed to sort one of my problems while trying to implement tone changing code. It turned out that I forgot that using every second character from a string containing sound data doesn’t give you just the left channel, well not in a 16 bit stereo file. I used the excellent audioop library, that comes with python, to split the data and now it’s playing seemingly correctly although incredibly fast.

Oh well better get back to sorting this problem out.

1. Tone change code
2. Surrounding terrain
3. Texturing
4. Lighting
5. Menus
6. Game modes
7. Volume change code

Yeah I don’t think this will happen by the end of October but I’m going to keep trying. I’ll probably post a video once 1 and 7  are complete.

I’ve been working on a game for quite some time now and this seems like it might help motivate me to finish it. My plan is to produce what essentially will be a demo for PC’s (Mac’s are personal computers too!) it will have the most basic functionality of my game and after October I will continue to develop and add features and possibly release mobile versions.

The game takes a music file and procedurally produces some ‘terrain’ from it. The player can then fly through this terrain and how they fly will affect how the track plays i.e. speed, pitch, volume, tone. I plan to have a sandbox game and a couple of game modes where the aim will be to keep a certain volume, by controlling your height, or similar.

I currently am able to fly around in 3 dimensions in the terrain although it is not textured yet and there isn’t much in the way of physics implemented.