Looks like I’m going to have to drop out of yet another LD. Sigh.

Good luck to everyone else.

Fixed some bugs in slug so that mouse/fullscreen actually works now, and also fixed up my build system so that I could build a portable Linux executable (new build/src is here, if anyone’s interested). Assuming slug is “done” for now (haha), this means i don’t have to compile anything again for the rest of the compo, just writing Lua scripts and automatically have everything work on both Linux and Windows. Mac support would be nice too, but I don’t have a mac, so.

Now, time to get started on the actual game! I wish I had any good ideas. Guess I’ll just start making a platform engine and see where it goes from there…

I’m going to sustain myself exclusively on these things during the compo:

So, exploration. Not sure what I’m going to do yet, but it’s probably going to be a platformer of some sort. Kinda want to do something ala Monty on the Run or Dizzy, but we’ll see.

Right now though I’ll go fix some bugs in slug: Mode switching corrupts the graphics, and mouse coordinates aren’t scaled right. Might add some new features too, though I suppose I should wait until I actually need them now that the compo has started and all. In fact, I’m not even sure I’m going to use slug at all, might try to go for a Flash game again instead. Time to  make up my mind =]

Oh, and here’s some eggs I had for breakfast:

My Lua game engine thing: I call it “slug” [update: hit the slug tag for newer versions]

A bit rough around the edges and messy code, but it seems to work for what it does.  (Here’s a readme.)

Well, it’s done, I guess.  Not a lot of improvements since last time really, but it’s got interactivity now at least. Oh, and score. Also made it request about 4 pages from wikipedia per question overall, in stead of infinite.

entry page

Making a quiz type thing (using php and, uh, lua). No interactivity yet (other than reload), but it can load random pages from Wikipedia, parse descriptions, select one as an answer, and show options! Yay!

Well, this isn’t going to get finished in time, but I’m submitting what I’ve got, which isn’t much. It’s got music though.

[ entry page ]

Need sleep now.

Woke up again. This keeps happening.

Anyway, I don’t have much to show for yesterday. My code can draw animated tiles and tilemaps (scrolled) into a rectangle, but that’s about it. Oh, and maintain correct aspect ratio no matter what size it’s rendering at. Originally I wanted to support fullscreen, but apparently flash disables keyboard in fullscreen mode for some reason, so it’s not very useful unless I do a mouse-controlled game, which I probably won’t. You can still just plop the swf directly in the browser to fill the browser window though.

Also, I think I got an idea now. Don’t know if it’ll be good yet, but at least it’s something. Time to draw some gfx.

After hours of stuggling with getting flash to do what I want and some adventures in bugfixing, I now have the ability to display animated tiles and tilemaps in a clipped rectangle! Which is nice. Now I just need to make the actual game. If only I had a good idea for something doable in 48 hours. I guess I’ll just keep working and see if something turns up.

I also sampled some homemade bacon ice cream that a flatmate decided to make. This was an interesting experience. Not pleasant, but not as unpleasant as one might expect either.

I’ve now got a black screen that scales to fit the flash window, adding borders as neccessary to maintain aspect ratio and keep it in the middle and such. Might restrict it to integer multiples later, but for now it scales freely. I had to disable flash’s built-in stage scaling and positioning to make this work right, which tells me that I’m probably doing things very wrongly, but hey. Onwards!

Still no real game idea though. Will take a shower now and think about things.

So, Caverns ..  not what I was hoping for, and I’ve no idea what to make. At least not yet.

What I do know, however, is that I’m going to use flash for this compo, which will be interesting because I’ve never done anything in flash before. I don’t even know the language, so if anyone got a link to a quick reference of ActionScript 3 that’d be nice =). I did read through a tutorial over the past few days and tried out some example code though.

Right now I’m going to eat some breakfast, maybe take a shower, and then it’s up and away into the unknown! _{Or maybe down, considering the theme.}

Decided to try something today. So far it’s a box, with sand in it! Also, you can rotate it.

It’s actually kinda fun to play with already. Not much of a game though ..

Hello! For windows and linux, plus source of course. I scrapped my original game and made this instead.

Spent some time going outside, and also eating stuff.

Still, I’ve now got a black screen that tweets! This can’t possibly go wrong.

More than 12 hours in now, so I guess it’s about time to start doing things.

Actually, I’ve done one thing .. I couldn’t sleep, so I was awake when the theme was announced at 5am. And, as I checked the results of the vote, birdsong drifted in from the open window. All quiet otherwise, not even any wind. Just birdsong. A wall of it, if you will.

Birdsong… of doom!

..nah, but it was nice. Anyway, I happen to have a portable stereo recorder, so I did the logical thing and recorded some. Haven’t listened to it yet, but hopefully that went ok. So, my game will most likely feature birdsong.

Anyway, time to write some basecode.

DOWNLOAD TROMMEL! TROMMEL.zip (source + exes)
(updated since compo: only use score if score.txt is already present, remove unused GLSL var, small bugfix, ati ghost image fix, added icon, double pixel bug fix (aesthetic), and ati fix for that fix. yay opengl)

Score file is score.txt in the same dir as the exe. If score.txt is not present the game only counts moves.

You can now collect stars! They happily float around in little circles.

So that’s nice. But, there’s still a lot of stuff missing before this can be called a game, and there’s only one hour left now. Also I’m pretty tired. So, I think I’m gonna drop out again.

I know I said I would drop out, but.. Well, anyway, I can drive the car around now.

Well, left and right at least, since they use the same gfx (flipped). Need to make gfx for up and down, and uh, all the other elements that should be in the game. It’s completely unrealistic to even think this’ll be done in time, but hey.

Made some gfx and a lua-driven sprite/tile engine:

I seriously doubt I’m going to finish though, specially since I’m off to watch a movie with some friends now. There’s only a few hours left, and there’s no gameplay code at all. Spent way too much time fiddling with technical details. Gotta stop doing that.

Oh well. The other entries are looking great, looking forward to check out those =)

I’ve now got a rotating square! Wow!

Spent ages getting the OpenGL stuff right, but it seems to work now. So that’s good. The not so good is that I still haven’t started working on the actual game, but hey.

Also, had some breakfast as I realized that I yet again had neglected to eat. (I don’t usually eat four, but I was hungry.)

Also spottable: Envelope with some rough sketches for potential game design, and mysterious beige computer that might be used to make sound and music (if I can get my head around Sid Duzz’it).

Ate some dinner about an hour ago or so. Fish w/sauce inside, potatoes and some salad.

Game’s progressing slow. I’ve been fiddling with mjaulib, adding OpenGL and such. Not really done with that yet either, so I don’t think I’ll be able to start work on the actual game code until tomorrow. That doesn’t leave much time for gfx and tweaking and such, so I might have to scale down the idea(s) a bit.. Oh well, at least I’ve more time to decide what to do

Suddenly realized I hadn’t eaten anything today, so I made some food.

Still haven’t decided on an idea yet, or even started doing something, but I think it’s either going to be a pseudo-3d racing game ala lotus/outrun (though I’ve noticed other people already doing that), or a top-down driving around in maze-like streets where you possibly pick up stuff and avoid other cars or something. Either way I think I’m going to start off by extending mjaulib to support OpenGL and textures, for easy stretching and rotating and such.

Bit late maybe, but anyway.. Here’s something I’ll probably use as baselib this time.

mjaulib-ld13.zip

Pretty basic stuff, nothing too fancy. Some functions for setting up SDL, Lua, PhysicsFS, and running things at a fixed logic rate with a free video framerate (for interpolation).  You call mjau_init first, then mjau_resize, then mjau_loop and handle the rest in the callbacks. Also got a png loader so you don’t have to pull in SDL_image just for that.

My first thought when I saw what the theme would be for this MiniLD was, this is the perfect chance to finally start making that pixel/paint program I’ve been meaning to do for literally half a decade! So far I’ve gotten by with Gimp, but I really don’t like its interface, and it’s pretty obvious it wasn’t made with pixel art in mind at all, among other things. Its tablet handling is also buggy, though to be fair that’s actually a GTK issue. (On the other hand, GTK was made for Gimp, so, uh.)

Anyway, a gfx editor needs an interface. This is part of the reason it’s been delayed for so long, there just hasn’t been any cross-platform interface lib that I’ve been satisfied with, and apart from GTK’s buggy support I haven’t found any cross-platform tablet libs either. Tablet support isn’t exactly essential for a pixel editor, but if I put that in it wouldn’t be just for pixels. And it doesn’t have to be cross-platform, the Linux tablet evdev interface is pretty easy to use (or was, until Xorg started blocking it), but it’d be nice. Still, I’ve made some half-hearted false starts on a tablet-less version using a custom interface in SDL, but SDL is also limited to one window, which is really not that big of a deal either, but still, multi-window support would be nice.

While these things shouldn’t have prevented me from getting it done, they have been.. irksome. Which bothers me. That’s the problem with being a perfectionist, if you want something to be perfect the first time around you’ll never actually get anything done. But! I’ve been getting slightly better at avoiding that problem, not least of which thanks to Ludum Dare and some other game compos. If you’ve seen some of my entries you know what I mean =)

Also, SDL 1.3 has been getting to a usable state lately. It’s still in development, but it supports multiple windows and pressure-sensitive tablets, and it’s cross-platform. This kinda leaves my excuses baseless.

In short, it’s time to make this thing.

It still needs that interface, though! I actually started working on a simple library for that earlier this week with the intention of getting it done and ready to be used before the compo started, so that I could use it for my tool and maybe others could, too. While that didn’t happen, I did get some things done, and I like how it’s turning out. It’s based on SDL 1.3, using Lua for the interface. You can do stuff like this:

    Frame {
        w = 100,
        h = 100,
        Button {
            label = "Click",
            onclick = function () print "whee" end
        },
    }

But it also supports a kind of hybrid immediate mode!

    if Button{ x=10, y=5, label="Click" }.clicked then
        print "hurray"
    end

I say hybrid because I’m not sure it could be called a true IMGUI, since some things like drawing are really delayed actions (though it happens behind the scenes, so you usually don’t have to care about this). This way immediate and retained mode can be freely mixed, so you could eg. have immediate-mode stuff inside a retained-mode frame’s onhover handler, and it’d all combine seamlessly.

I call it “SIF 2″ for now, but that might change. (If you’re wondering about SIF 1, that’s an ancient project that never really got anywhere. I guess I could just call it SIF. Or probably something completely different.)

Anyway, it’s not quite ready for use yet, so now I’ve got to decide what I want to do for this MiniLD! Do I keep working on the interface lib, even though that means I cheated by starting way before the deadline? Or, do I make some other tool without using the interface lib, so I can keep it within the 48 hours? I do have an idea for another very simple tool that could possibly be slightly useful. Decisions..