I’ve been toying around with LuaJIT lately. If you’re not familiar with LuaJIT, it’s a just-in-time compiler that not only makes your Lua code run super fast, but it also makes it possible to call native code from Lua without any native glue code at all. Pretty cool tech.

OpenGL requires some special handling though, so I made an OpenGL loader for it that handles all the dynamic loading, version differences and extensions and such for you (based on the official spec files), and added some extra code to make shaders easier to work with. I didn’t really plan on using this for LD, but hey, might as well post it now so that I have the option: ld23base.zip (zlib license)

That zip includes some example code using SDL + OpenGL to draw a spinning rectangle in pure Lua =).  I doubt anyone else will use this, but you’re of course welcome to if you want =). Please let me know if you do! It’s a bit WIP-y still, but fully usable and should be pretty straightforward if you’re familiar with SDL and OpenGL. It probably requires LuaJIT 2.0 (beta) to run, and it’s only been tested on 64-bit Linux, but it should hopefully run on anything supported by LuaJIT as long as SDL and OpenGL libs are available.

Yup, I’m in!

Anyway, I was hoping to get some basecode ready for the compo for once, but it’s still missing some critical stuff (like sound, lack of bugs, etc), and while I could post what I’ve got so far and then work more on that during the compo, I don’t see that ending well for either the basecode or any eventual game. So.. I’ll just go from scratch, or maybe try Flash again or something.

Well, almost. I do have one little thing I’ve been fiddling with lately: dgl! Calling it “basecode” is a bit of a stretch though, it’s really just a dynamic OpenGL loader and extension detector. Similar to GLEE and the like, except it’s smaller (less than 40k compiled), only covers the GL parts (no GLX/WGL/etc, you pass it a function pointer to use for resolving symbols, works great with SDL), and also it loads everything dynamically, not just extension functions (this actually makes cross-compiling from Linux to Windows much easier). Oh, and it’s a work in progress (most things work though), and I’ve given it a zlib-like license. If this sounds interesting, you can get it here: dgl-wip-ld20.tar.gz. (Not sure if I’ll actually use OpenGL for the compo yet, but I’m posting this just in case.)

And now, I’m off to replace my slightly broken Linux install with Ubuntu 11.04, new Unity interface and all. What could possibly go wrong? This is surely an excellent idea at this point in time.

[edit: turns out it wasn't. in my defense though, i really did need to fix my linux install. oh well, better luck next time..]

Well, I decided to enter what I’ve got. It’s not really a game, but you can, uh, look at planets? You might like it for a few seconds. (Some people expressed an interest in the source, which is of course included. It’s a horrible mess though, and not really the best way to do this kind of thing.. (also it’s unfinished))

Anyways, you can get it here

Woke up after having slept way too long, fixed some bugs with the planet generator and the shadows

(click for anim)

I somewhat doubt this’ll be done for the compo, or even the jam, but I’m not giving up just yet. Have some ideas.. Even if nothing comes of this though, I’ve learned a lot, so it hasn’t been a waste.

Not really sure what I’m doing here, but there will apparently be planets!

(Click the image to animate)

Everyone should do one of these. Here’s mine:

Been a while since I successfully entered an LD apparently, so I’ll try to do something about that. Haven’t decided what to use for this one yet, but hey, that’s what the first few hours of the compo is for… right?

Here’s a screenshot of my progress so far:

Also done some music bits. Most of the time has been spent working on things behind the scenes; mostly graphics processing stuff and sound mixing.

Had to disable fullscreen mode since SDL does something weird with the audio callback there (I need that to work for audio/visual synchronization, which I definitely want to do), but otherwise it actually works now. There’s even a simple level generator (wip), so for once I’m actually going to have some levels =)

If it gets done, that is. I kinda doubt this is going to be done before the deadline. Still have to add player and enemy characters, and interaction, and lots of other stuff, and I don’t know if I can do much more today. Still want to see how the game turns out though, so I’ll probably finish it sometime regardless.

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.