Originally posted at irl.motd.org.

I wanted to post an update last night before I went home, but I was suddenly overcome with tiredness and all I could do was go to sleep. I guess I am still recovering from the assessment period and all those late nights at University.

I’ve made some progress in game play. You can control the player with the WASD keys and tiles on the map appear in yellow when they are being searched. It’s playable as a game if you know the rules, but there’s no actual detection of whether or not you’re in the areas being searched yet. That and score keeping are my goals for today, then submission.

I don’t feel I’ve put as much effort into this Ludum Dare compo as I have into previous entries. It’s nice to just relax and create something though and I’m learning all the time too.

The obligatory progress screenshot:

Originally posted at: irl.motd.org

Following the panic that was the final week of term (including approximately 20 deadlines across 3 years of Computing Science students), it’s time to relax and write a game in 48 hours again. The theme this time is: “You are the Villain”. I figured a lot of people would go for games where you’re meant to run round knocking over old ladies and generally being a nuisance to society so the angle I’m taking is that you are a villain, but you’re not very good at it and you’re about to get caught.

In LD22 I taught myself Python and PyGame and in LD24 I taught myself ncurses. This time round, I’m trying 3D graphics programming with WebGL using three.js.

So far I have a floor and a player (the player is the sphere):

The aim for the player is going to be to avoid the locations on the floor where the police are actively searching (sort of like a reverse whack-a-mole). Scoring will be based on how long you are able to avoid capture. Due to the force field around the city, you are not able to leave, so capture is going to happen eventually. Enjoy your freedom while it lasts.

I have loaded my game into a git repository now and uploaded it to GitHub. You can find the repository at: https://github.com/irl/la-cucina.

I have also uploaded some instructions and a base64 encoded archive for JS/Linux and you can find them in a gist.

Only a short update this time but this is a milestone for me as whatever happens now, I have a playable game I can submit.

Tom has now come back into the room and has started working on his entry again. Let’s hope today was as interesting, exciting and educational as yesterday.

Originally published at: http://irl.unixcab.org/blog/2012/08/26/ludum-dare-24-update-2.html

I seem to be the only one still going in Room 205 at the moment. Everyone else has gone home for some sleep before continuing. I may have made an error in marching on, but only time will tell. There’s now about 18 hours to go and I have a playable game.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts during this Ludum Dare “compo”, my game is written in pure C using ncurses. You play the role of a pizza chef that has to make pizzas. I intended to have a steep learning curve to the game and I believe I have achieved that. This forces the player to evolve, a twist on the theme where I imaging most games will have either the character in the game or game elements doing the evolving.

When I dropped into the IRC channel, the question was raised of how I would make this available to Windows users once submitted. All the development has been done on a Linux workstation, but I’m sure Windows libraries exist for ncurses and I know for a fact that gcc exists there. Still, as a bit of an experiment, I tried out compiling and running it in JS/Linux and it worked.

Over the next hour, I’ll be writing up some quick READMEs and getting my code into github. I already feel like I’ve achieved something I would normally not have done and when I got it working in JS/Linux I had to go for a walk to calm down due to being so excited.

This is what Ludum Dare is all about.

Here are some screenshots for now:

Originally published at: http://irl.unixcab.org/blog/2012/08/25/ludum-dare-24-update-1.html

The AUCS meetup is continuing and everyone is making progress. When I arrived at 12pm, everyone was already in Room 205 and busy working on their games.

Progress seems to have stalled at the moment as people are hitting blocks and tricky to solve problems now their basics are in. Tom Jones was having touble with “font rondering” (sic) but has now fixed this by not rendering fonts.

I have made good progress with my Pizza game’s UI and basic logic, although the bulk of the logic is yet to be written.

The idea is to have a high learning curve so that they player must “evolve” in order to play the game well. The difficulty of the game itself remains constant. There are no hints to key combinations that are used, although all key combinations are single key presses so shouldn’t take too long for a player to work out.

It is currently possible to prepare pizzas and cook them, but not deliver them. I’ve been working on a method of randomly generating names for people that have ordered pizzas and came up with this bash snippet that uses /usr/share/dict/words as a source of names. It filters for only proper nouns where a possesive apostrophe is used as these are likely to make good names.

As I’m writing this in pure C with ncurses, data structures all have to be created by hand. There are no “ArrayLists” or “HashSets” here. Working out how to store orders will be interesting.

I’ll also need to learn how to use ncurses windows as so far I’ve only been using the default screen.

Originally posted at: http://irl.unixcab.org/blog/2012/08/25/ludum-dare-24.html

Since Ludum Dare 22, the Aberdeen University Computing Science Society has hosted meetups in Room 205, Meston Building at the University of Aberdeen.

Our meetup started at 6pm on the 24th of August, which as I write this was now yesterday for us. We ate calzones from a local takeaway and then watched Blade Runner on the Room 205 television. After the film, we all began to brush up on our programming skills whilst waiting for the theme announcement. The Ludum Dare IRC channel was shown on the television while we waited.

The theme has now been announced: Evolution.

We made a list on our whiteboard of game ideas that immediately came into our heads. These were on the blacklist and we are not allowed to create them. We’re aiming to create games that no one else would have thought of.

I figured a lot of games would contain some element of a character evolving skills, or a civilisation evolving, or something similar to that. Instead, I’ve taken what I hope is a novel approach to the theme. In my game, it will be the physical player that is evolving whilst the elements in game remain the same. This will be achieved by creating a game with a steep learning curve.

This game will be written in C using the ncurses library and the player will play the role of a pizza chef in a takeaway pizza resturant.

I’ve recently been playing with ncurses in C with SpaceBarOS and so this seems a better choice than my original one of JavaScript with HTML canvas. The Room 205 information screen I implemented uses JavaScript with HTML canvas but I appear to have forgotten everything about it since I implemented it.

I’m about to go to sleep now, ready for an “early” start tomorrow on this game. I imagine I’ll place the code into a Mercurial repository and make it available on bitbucket for those that are interested in following the code.

Once complete, I also plan to host a telnet server to allow people to try it out without having to install all the ncurses dependancies.

Once again the Aberdeen University Computer Science Society will be hosting a Ludum Dare meet up (although attendance is restricted primarily to students of the University of Aberdeen and members of the Aberdeen University Students Association). Join us in Room 205 to jam, make a solo entry or just watch and hang out.

We have new workstations this time, the amazing monitors we had last time, and we’ve added a second webcam so even if you can’t make it in, you can still watch us from home from two angles.

You can see the write-up from our last event here.

Title Screen

If you hit a cactus, you will explode.

All the code I wrote has now been refactored. I appear to be getting the hang of the Python way of doing things. The levels are no longer hard coded, and obstacles can be placed in the maps which cause the player to explode on impact.

A third level has now been added, based in space, where you must find water for your hungover kitten friends. Other than the scoring system, everything engine-wise seems to be complete.

The code is now available in a Git repository at: https://github.com/irl/Kitten-s-Missions

Previous update: http://irl.motd.org/2011/12/ludum-dare-22/