LD23 is over.

My game worked out even better than I thought. I like it, it’s reasonably balanced, has a touch of innovation, and seems stable (well…aside from some users crashing on load. rrgh.)

I’d hoped to add sound and music to it, but after a small jaunt that was clearly not going to end well, so I scrapped it. Probably a good decision.

My https://github.com/jtruscott/pytality library worked very well. Only a few issues, among them the load-crash, that i’ll have to fix for next time.

Now we have a title screen! With cheesy scrolling text!

And in game:

This is coming along pretty nicely.

It’s not too photogenic, though.

Eighteen hours in. I have a plan. It’s going well.

I’m making a tower defense game, in ASCII (as i’ve been doing a lot of lately).

You’ll be defending the north and south poles (P in the image). Enemies will spawn and head over there.
Currently I have pathfinding highlights on, hence all the magenta.

After doing text console based games in Python for the last LD and Pyweek, I decided to make a library for the benefit of myself and any other brave souls who enjoy the idea of rockin’ the codepage437 character set.

https://github.com/jtruscott/pytality

I haven’t written up much end-to-end documentation, but the API has comments, unit tests, and should be pretty clean and stable. I don’t expect anyone else to actually use it this round, but I’d be delightfully surprised if someone did.

With the help of d_m, I managed to get an ncurses-backed Linux port of my LD21 compo entry to run.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=89

Requires python 2.6+ with the builtin curses module.

Note that it’s sized for an enormous terminal window; it’ll abort with a semi-helpful message if yours isn’t big enough.

That’s a lot of blank space in front of me.

But I’m already loving it.

I’ve figured out what I want to make.

I was inspired by the Shadowrun tabletop RPG, the Singularity compo game from years ago ( http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/ ), and my desire to do this in a text console.

The player will be an AI on the run, losing pursuers as it travels across the ubiquitously networked world, breaking from node to node and getting stronger.

UI will be centered around a faux-command-line shell interface, somewhat of an Uplink-style.

I’ll be doing it in Python with WConio or Curses, depending on how I feel about compatibility.

Wish me luck!

The last two LDs I tried to enter, I decided to use a new / ambitious framework, got frustrated, and failed to finish.

I’m going to kick myself out of that pattern. Whatever the theme is this time, I’m going to do it in either Pygame or straight up console text.

Although I’d love to try Python 3…

It looks like the cool thing to do is post your workstation, so I shall.

As an added bonus, enjoy the semi-recursive imagery.