This would have been my second LD but I will go for the Jam instead with my brother. I’m anxious to try out my newly acquired 2d space transformation skillz in pygame (and numpy). My bro will be doing the graphics and music(not sure about his choice of tools).

I took the day off for today, I will take a day off on Monday too. It will be fun designing a game like we used to play when we were kids.

I just wrote this post for the record, I’ll catch some sleep now.

So I was just beginning to have fun. Here’s a vector type of miner race. But before anything I’ll represent you my accomplishments in game development.

-In highschool (about 7 years from now) I programmed a snake game, it included a rabbit with basic run-away algorithm aside from apples.
-One or two months ago I made a shoot’em up type of thing with pygame which you are controlling a plane and there are two monsters in screen and background is scrolling.
-And now I made this.

So I hope you won’t blame me now Strength lies in knowing your weaknesses, they say. I knew I couldn’t try anything more complicated. At least I learned some basic things.

So what I present you is a miner racing game (where one racer rides the mine tracks and the other, well, the ceiling) with real fake 2d physics and polynomial interpolation as a track editor. Cars act like roller coaster, they can’t leave the rails. Did I mentioned no sprites?

So first, what I was able to pull;

- If I had 2d physics, I needed 2d collision detection too (even though pygame can collide some stuff). So I made a fake 2d physics engine. It just calculates the impact of gravitational force and then everything is 1d. Still looks 2d.

And what doesn’t work as expected but still better than nothing

- I wanted to let the user enter an array of 2d checkpoints and then create a track from it by polynomial interpolation. Bad thing is I used Lagrange polynomials. I wanted to use them since they didn’t need any slope information. But midway I wanted to have horizontal start and finish lines. I should have gone with something smoother but I don’t really remember much of interpolation and I didn’t had time to read again.

- Appearently zooming in and out of a surface is expensive especially if the surface is big enough to hold your whole track. Something can be done if drawn polynomial tracks are optimised in some way, like rendering on-the-fly with level of detail. Still camera can track the arithmetic mean of 2 cars.

Things I would have added if I had some more time

- Fake collision detection in 1d. I was planning to have obstacles on road, throwing molotov cocktails at each other, rocks falling down(can’t think of a cavern game without this). And even changing tracks (like jumping up to the track above and hit the other car on the back)

- Calculating stuff so that I could tell if the tracks are colliding or seperated too much. Setting minimum margin so that the guys’ head don’t collide. Compare lengths of tracks. Putting vector rail woods every 10 unit and vector lights hanging down from upper track every 100 units. Simple calculus stuff like that.

- The racers (flowers on the pots) would have physics too. Like ragdolls, their heads would go back as you accelerate and hit their head to the front of the car if you lose speed suddenly.

- Everything’s ready to implement car graphics but I’m not sure if rotating surfaces work well in pygame. The tracks can have sprites too. (but someone has to draw them first, of course)

So here are some screens and a link to code if you want to try it. You’ll need numpy (scipy is not needed I guess) and pygame and a python interpreter of course.

Now that I used my extensive knowledge on high-school physics, basic calculus (taking derivative of polynomials really) and the numerical analysis course I took 2 years ago which I forgot everything except Lagrange polynomials, I can finally move onto real 2d stuff with linear algebra.

Of course I’ll fall asleep/faint on my bed first.

I was hopeless when I posted an entry message yesterday and I had work to do until a few hours ago (mostly work I should have finished Friday). However just now I have the greatest idea (something like graner’s wagon race) ! Also I’m free whole Sunday.

I wanted to learn how collision with world and physics like speed and bouncing worked in platform games. I think I’m about to make it my own way. A late start but I’ll get definitely what I want to do. I hope I can finish and give you people a little something to look at too.

I think the Numerical Analysis lessons I took will be enough for me but I didn’t write anything like this before so I appreciate any resources on f=m*a type of physics or world collision in 2D.

My first Ludum Dare…

So bored from Javascript, PHP and CSS, I was looking for something different. Sadly I don’t have experience and I didn’t had time to checkout a few basic things like implementing simple physics.

At least I can use Python and coded pygame stuff before… I’ll also use GIMP.. No sfx or music, at best I can use a mic and audacity for real life sfx.

I don’t think I’ll be able to produce something decent. Looks like I won’t be able to dedicate enough time this weekend. But at least I hope to start learning programming stuff like this so that I will be able to make something decent next time. In any case it will be a good distraction from what I have been working on lately…