I finished work about 15 mins before the start, haven’t slept more than 6hrs a night this week, and have spent zero time preparing a code base to work from. TIME FOR SOME LUDUM DARE!!!

What I do have:

1) 650ml + 1900ml of philips beer.

2) XCode on 27′ iMac.

3) Absolute minimal SDL + OpenGL template (will post once its pulled together)

4) Intent to make something! (Half-assed, but that is better than nothing!! woOOo!)

Looking forward to seeing what y’all make.

So what started off as a destructable terrain / mining sim, turned into an abstract shape collector turned into a space game, and now is going nowhere.

I thought I would attempt to just randomly write and play around to see what I came up with without too much direction.

Was fun while it lasted, but I feel I need to stop these fruitless efforts, take a break, come back and make an actual game.

Here are some screenshots of the “progress” (A lot of time was spent remembering basic trig, and recalling opengl, haha)

Lots of internal developments and side-tangents clearly not visible in the shots. After looking over em virtually zero visible progress in stills, but when “playing” the progress is visible.

On a side note: Anyone have some good music recommendations? HOOK ME UP WITH TEH CODE MUSIC.

7:44pm

9:54pm

12:19am

1:23am

First meal.
MEAT

My game is fun. 1277 fun at this point in time.

You can move the blue triangle.

Here is what I will be using as a base. It is my LD15 entry, stripped down to basic:

- XCode / C++ / Mac OS X (should port back to windows easily)

- SDL Graphics

- Sound

- SDL Image -> OpenGL texture loading

- Keyboard / Gamepad input

- Texture / Sprite drawing

- A 16x16px font

- A game loop

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2797357/LD19_BASE.zip

I think I will do the silly thing and find a way to adapt my idea (mining / digging / exploring / collecting game) to the theme. Seems to fit well enough!

Good chance to get hacking again. It’s been toooo loooooongggg.

So,

I haven’t prepared at all. Will be building pretty much from scratch (as I didn’t even have time to collect my LD15 entry source yet.) Need to seek out groceries. Have a birthday party to attend on sat… BUT I am going to hack something together!

bottle of water + kitten mug of coffee + das keyboard == source code

YAY!

If the theme is suitable, I may use LD19 as an opportunity to prototype out some tech and ideas related to a digging-collecting-building game I have had in mind for quite some time.

If I do enter, will likely roll my own GL code, using SDL. Copy and paste some basic code from a previous LD entry I did and go from there.

For once this compo falls on a date I can potentially take part! HUZZAH!!!!!

Nothing like a little friendly community and competition to get motivated into actually pleasure-coding again.

(wow, that sounds obscene. Especially in a low breathy voice…. pleasure coding…)

I finally finished up porting my entry for LD 15 to Mac OS X. It took a surprisingly long time (about 8 hours of work!) but amounted to virtually no change in the codebase. The code is available so hopefully someone else can save some time and avoid this nonsense.

• DevIL was removed and replaced with SDL_image.
• Sound and texture loading code was modified to work with OS X bundle path names.
• A 1 character bug causing poop to sometimes be emitted from the bats face instead of rear was fixed  (for real!)

Looks like a few people are having troubles running my entry ‘Life is Guano’

I am working on the OS X port of it right now. I will look into the problem with the windows build failing to start.

I am 99% sure this is just a library problem (I am linking against a specific version of DevIL and SDL_mixer both which I have not used in the past)

I’ll post another entry when this is fixed.

I always feel like its bad luck to use the world “final” but, in any case, this is what I’m submitting!

Windows Executable + Source Code

It’s of course lacking in a few ways, but I feel I managed to finish the essence of what I set out to and even put in some polish!

Feels good to get to rapidly hack SDL on windows again, iPhone development can get boring.

I didn’t have time to incorporate the help screens into the game, so here they are.

I haven’t really done anything LD wise other then tweak a few constants in the last 12 or more hours. Tons to do so trying to kick myself awake with an assault of food and sugar.

The last meal before I fell asleep and stopped producing:

Steak of Unproductiveness

Now with only about 9 hours left. Eeek!

Breakfast of inspiration

Caverns need to look cavernous (brown rectangles won’t do)

Game needs some scoring system so it has a point!

Game needs some sort of menu!

Top priorities for now.

“Life is Guano and Then You Die” is … “playable”

Finally have all of the core features implemented. It is actually fun!

I spent way too much time on guano colour, fruit and rock physics, and pixel art.

Now to take a bit of a break and add all that good stuff like missing art, point system, a HUD, a menu, more sound fx, help, omg so much to do.

I thought it would be interesting to post the progress in individual milestone shots, as I did not record a timelapse.

4 frames of bat animation, flapping about!

Priority #2, bat poop. The bat is emitting Guano!

Priority 3, something to poop on. Miners of course.

Blackness is boring, we need to delineate outside and inside. Added world extents and floor/roof. The Baobab appears!

Miners belong in a cave mining. Now they do. Simple arse AI added (Seek, Mine, Return, Aim, Throw)

Fruits sway in the wind, and you can eat them for more guano. mmm. fruit.

Those are the 6 big milestones so far. I’ll edit this post later to add the rest.

After I found out concept, I paniced a lot, then left and bought more food.

BULK FOOD! Turkish Delight, Asian Crackers, Trail Mix, Candied Ginger

1 hour 20 minutes in, figured a concept out.

“life is guano
and then you die”

Ate food while watching BBC series “planet earth” — the one on caves of course!

gameplay will consist of flying a bat around, eating fruit, pooping on miners, and well… dying.

spent huge hunk of time trying to do some pixel art, have a miner and 4 frames of bat animation.

4 hours in I have a bat flying around the screen with gamepad input and a flap sound.

Now that I took this break, time to code up a world, and some POOP.

Workspace, newly cleaned and arranged. PC for dev. I don’t think I’ll have time to get code compiled / running on Mac

Pre compo breakfast (at 5:30pm localtime):

My secret weapon, pre compo pie:

I spent a hunk of time today hacking myself up a proper library and deciding on what I’ll be using for LD #15, should I not wuss out at the last moment.

I am leaning towards things which I have used for the longest, this is to reduce the amount of figuring-out I have to do.

As tempting as it is to use python/pygame/macos, I have one half the experience with that, so it is best to stick to ancient and familiar technology, despite its limitations.

To implement:

• C/C++, sloppy and mixed. The way I like it!
• 2d vector graphics where possible, otherwise rotated/scaled sprites.
• Win32 (though, I would like to have it compile/run on MacOS as well. This shouldn’t be a huge problem.)

Libraries:

• SDL (sound, graphics, and input)
• OpenGL (strictly 2D and orthographic, unless I drink too many trappists and decide otherwise)
• mmgr.cpp/mmgr.h by Paul Nettle
• vector2d and related math templates by Bill Perone (I can’t seem to find a link right now!)
• MT19937 Mersenne Twister random number generator

To create:

• Photoshop for Graphics
• SFXR for Sound
• SciTE for Text
• Visual C++ 6.0 for Code
• SVN for revision control / backup

To eat:

• Water
• Trappist Beer
• Cola
• Food with nutritional content yet to be determined

Random thoughts:

I have a feeling I may regret my choice to use a gamepad/keyboard for input. But for now I will.

• Con: Mouse games have a lot of instant-appeal. Easier to get interaction “feeling right”
• Pro: Keyboard/gamepad is oldschool and works on consoles.
• Pro: Leaning back in a chair with a gamepad is more relaxing then hunching over a mouse.

I can do sound. SFXR is freaking cool. I spent a few minutes playing with it today and fell in love. This saves me from making corny sound effects into a microphone during the last minutes of the compo! Thank you DrPetter

All of the libraries, save for my starting template are freely available online. None of them resemble a game library / engine, so they are squeaky clean.

At some point I will post my starting source up for anyone interested. Hopefully there is something useful in there to be pilliaged by others during this compo, or future projects.

I’m curious to see what other people are using, or who else is using a similar (fairly heavyweight, rusty, and old) setup.

Heyo,

I have been following LD since 2002, and every single time it comes up I’m either a) busy, or b) hear about it too late. 

Looks like I heard about it early enough, and it falls right on my holiday so there is a high probability I can participate this time around!

Just a giant HELLO to everyone, I’m looking forward to seeing the entries — especially the catastrophic failures, and incomplete implementations, please do post those, I plan to!

I’m still waffling between using Python/Pygame, or C++/SDL. It will certainly be one of the sexy couples.

cheers,

    - Jacob