Hey!

I apparently managed to set up cross compilation on my Ubuntu machine, so now comes my mini LD 5 entry, for you Windows users.

Grab it here.

Double click “run.bat” to play the game.

See my previous post for more information about the game.

(Note: this is my first experience with cross compilation and pretty much with Windows binaries in general. I may not have done it right or optimaly, but it seems to work. If anyone comes up with a better way to do it, please let me know.)

Enjoy!

This is a cover of BenW’s Chain reaction:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2007/12/16/finally-finished/

Since I met Ludum Dare only at the last compo, I don’t really have a “favorite entry” yet, so I picked one that seemed nice, and changed the gameplay, added personal things, etc.

Here is the thing: revenge.zip

EDIT: see here about a Windows version

The goal is to blow the tiles marked by the pulsating squares. If there is only one, fine, but later there will be more, and the tiles marked have to be blown at the same time! To do this you take advantage of the chain reactions provoqued by the terrible Invisible Walker!

It just runs around the world, on the outside tiles, clockwise, and starts explosions as it goes.

To bring these explosions to the marked tiles, you can first move yourself, with arrow keys. You can also move some tiles: with X and V you rotate the 8 tiles around you. And with arrow keys while pressing C, you shift whole rows or columns. Beware: rows, columns and “ring around you” have to be full before they can be moved! No holes!

About holes…  Just don’t walk in them, or your life counter (right side of the screen) will decrease.

The similar counter on the left is the level counter. Of course, difficulty increases with levels…

Technical sadness:

The game is written in Lua and uses a personal lib that itself uses SDL and co. I included a compiled version of the library, made on Ubuntu. I have no idea if it’s going to work on another Linux machine, or even another Ubuntu, so be sure to read the README if you need to compile it yourself.

I unfortunately have no Windows machine available, nor Mac OS X, so no binaries for those. However, it is supposed to be portable, so if anyone manages to make it work, don’t hesitate to send me your binaries, so I can share them.

More details about the compo later.

I spent the last few weeks coding evöL, a very small game engine in Lua.

It contains all the basic stuff I usually do with SDL, but in a light Lua API, which means super fast game prototyping. At least that’s what I found when I tried Löve, a game engine in Lua based also on SDL, last LD. Problem is that Löve uses hardware accelerated graphics, and on my Eee PC, I get terrible performance.

So I made my personal lib, inspired by Löve, and with a lot less feature. You can get it here.

The SVN version is really more recent and has a lot of new features.

EDIT: I just packaged and uploaded version 1.0 to the Gna project page. It is the latest snapshot of the SVN. Yay for evöL!

It runs on GNU/Linux, but it should run on Mac OS and Windows, since SDL and Lua are both portable. You just have to get your IDE/compiler/whatever to compile and link the lib correctly.

Here is my timelapse video.

A few epic moments: the big ABBA chat (0:38), the epic failure of creating the level graphics in Blender, then Inkscape (2:48), the time when my friends came over to play Armaggetron and Jump’n'Bump while I was drawing the levels (4:34)…

Soundtrack: ingame music + surprise song from a band that enlightened the IRC channel with all its splendor…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1PSloOTokg

About the submission:

The owliver.love file is really a renamed zip. If you unzip it, you’ll find inside:
- the Lua sources
- the images
- the sounds
- the three musics

So: archive, check; source code, check.
Custom library code: none. Everything is either the Löve engine, or code written during the compo.

List of tools and libraries:

- As stated before, the Löve game engine (a Lua wrapper for SDL). Awesome stuff. Never coded things that fast. In fact, it’s almost magical. Idea -> code -> working feature. Of course, there are always a few bugs you have to correct, but the power you feel in your hands is really amazing. Lua is amazing anyway. When you need something, just make a table. It always works ;°)

- Text editor: gEdit, with autocompletion and symbol browser plugins. Plus, of course, built-in syntax coloring.

- Compilator: none, this is Lua! (ah!) Save your Lua file, and rerun the game from the closest console. In fact, when Löve detects a crash, it doesn’t quit, but instead goes in crash mode. A “restart” button is available so you don’t even have to do “up arrow + enter” in the terminal, once the bug corrected. You gotta love Löve.

- Graphics. For the levels: pencil, paper, sharp marker pen to increase contrast, scanner, Inkscape to vectorize, resize, re-bitmapize, GIMP to colorize. And for the ingame thingies and text, Inkscape. For the intro screen text, made a screenshot of text in Abiword, then included with the guy in Inkscape.

- Level making: hand coded in the source. But made extensive use of Inkscape to get coordinates of stuff. I drew rectangles and dots in Inkscape, read their coordinates there, copied them in the level files. Them during level loading, the coordinates are converted into game coordinates. I supposed it could have been even better to parse the SVG files, but no time to explore this.

- Sound… I made all audio during the last hour… Sounds are all randomly generated with the great sfxr, in about 7 minutes. Music is made with ZynSubAddFX, a marvelous synthetisor for Linux, and QSynth, a soundfont player. Both apps controlled with my MIDI keyboard. Drums are from Hydrogen (awesome drums app for Linux), and the “mixing” is done in Audacity.

Additionnal things:

- IRC with X-Chat
- Timelapse video capture with two shell scripts:

while true; do scrot -e ‘convert $f -resize 50% $f.jpg; rm -f $f’ & sleep 20; done

and

mencoder “mf://*.jpg” -mf fps=10 -o timelapse.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=900

- Far too many motivational posters with http://wigflip.com/automotivator/
- Photos with my Kodak EasyShare C713 (stupid battery charger that I can’t find…)
- Everything done on a GNU/Linux machine running Ubuntu 8.04, except scanning the levels, since the scanner is plugged to the family’s MacMini.
- The pizza! I’ve been asked several times what kind of pizza it is. I sure looks good, but well… Just a pizza So, it’s a Buitoni “Four à pierre” Royale. I don’t know if the name is the same outside France, though.

I don’t see anything else to add yet. I’ll work on the postmortem now.

20:37
Back from dinner. No photo, batteries dead.

22:22
Colorized three levels. I hope I can make it…

23:02
One level to go. IRC log:

<Tenoch> Codexus> only 6 hours left ._. PANIC! PANIC!!!!!! –> me too buddy, me too…
<Dragowlene> what say you
<Deepflame> It’s 40mb and xvid encoded
<Dragowlene> with 7 levels
<Dragowlene> can I call my game final?
<Tenoch> !D
<Dragowlene> somebody who’s tried it
<Tenoch> my levels are empty…
<Tenoch> like… empty
<lexaloffle> Edwardowlka - I had trouble getting anything to work too. That’s not haXe’s fault though — I really don’t understand Flash. Or OOP for that matter @_@
<Tenoch> Are there logs of the chat during the compo time?
<Tenoch> that’s something I’d want to show my children.
<Tenoch> when I have some.

23:43
All levels colorized. Made a clouds background, with multi parallax. Oh yeah.

05:41
Yeah right. Finished. Now a bit of sleep before completing blog, journal and postmortem.

In the 23:43 -> 05:41 hole, I made a loooot of things. That is, all the gimmicks inside the game, the trooper, the winning conditions, texts, interlevels barriers, some gameplay, difficulty ajustments (too much adjusted, apparently), etc.

Then in the last hour or so, sounds and three musics. Oh my gawd.

I don’t have photos for this last part, since I had other things to do, and also, because the batteries are dead and I don’t have a charger.

See you soon for the postmortem :°)

(edited for repackaging)

Here it is… Description comes later. I’m already late because I couldn’t upload the stupid file.

All in one Windows binaries:

Get it here. Unzip. To run, drag owliver.love on love.exe

Game and engine separated (required for Linux users):

Get the game file (OS-neutral) here: http://noe.falzon.free.fr/static/owliver.love

And get the Löve engine:

• Windows users: installer is here. When it’s installed, double click on owliver.love to run the game.
• Linux (Ubuntu/Debian): a .deb is here. When installed, run “love owliver.love” in a terminal.
• Linux (other distros): sources are here. Compile, then run “love owliver.love” in a terminal.

Post deadline update:

I have been told that the game was too difficult to play some levels. I checked, and yes, a bug due to last minute savage editing made the lightnings very difficult to repair. Here is a post deadline version with this bug corrected, plus cosmetic details (level names, global offset for “correct” transition between levels).

I post it so you can enjoy the game anyway, and reach the last level, which was quasi unreachable in the other version.

You can get the Windows all in one binaries, or the Löve game file. Installation/running is the same as above, where stuff is named “owliver-postLD” instead of “owliver”.

13:31
Drawn three levels. But they are not in the game yet!

20:02
OK, long afternoon. Friends were there. I made 4 more levels for the game. Hand drawn, scanned, vectorised, re-bitmapised, made floor detection aware. They don’t have colors yet, though. They don’t have content either. Had to code all the level transition stuff. Not that easy.

Next step: draw some gimmicks to throw in. Or go to eat…

13:05
Back to work with new ideas from my lunch break. Paper and pencil rule.

13:32
I now have bluish gimmicks that change state if you press space while touching them… What will they reveal to be? Ah ah, mystery!

14:21
Argh, almost done nothing since the last line… This is *bad*! Quick, let’s start the organisation of data into levels.

14:42
Operationnal level loader. Based on Lua tables in separate files, it creates level “objects” ready to use.

15:43
Mmm, not sure what I’ve done since last line… Variable floor size, maybe. It could be shower time, for instance.

16:09
Back from the shower. I know what to do.

16:57
Succesful implementation of game modes, and a basic menu with nothing in it but white noise.

17:43
Back from little snack. Ate a chocolate bar. Cheap imitation of the well known “Lion”. Tiger, they call it. Mwahaha the joke.

18:22
Conversion of coordinates from Inkscape to the ingame system during loading. Will simplify much the level making. Well, apart from the graphics, of course…

20:51
Back from dinner. Ate a good ol’ pizza in front of the Simpsons. I kinda feel like I lost a lot of time doing nothing this afternoon. I should go to sleep.

12:20
IRC log:

* Le sujet de #ludumdare est : Ludum Dare - http://www.ludumdare.com - Towering over the Olympics - Ludum Dare 12 - Theme: THE TOWER !!!
* Sujet de #ludumdare défini par PoV!Mike@14.28.86.64.velcomdsl.ca le Sat Aug  9 17:52:46 2008
<Tenoch> AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH, by all the mighty god of DOOM!!!!
<Tenoch> I slept 15 hours
* edwardoka aborts
<edwardoka> Cheers guys, good luck with your projects
* edwardoka (Edward@host217-42-161-242.range217-42.btcentralplus.com) a quitté #ludumdare
<Tenoch> gods*
<Tenoch> and still no graphics
<Tenoch> go go go go go
<mjau> i haven’t even started yet =/
<Amaroq> Ah. Here’s the tut I was reading about how to write a particle engine. http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/lesson28/index.php
<Tenoch> 16 hours 42 minutes left –> AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
<Amaroq> Don’t worry Tenoch. I haven’t started STILL. xD
<Tenoch> anyway: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

And yeah, breakfast at noon. Bad, I know.

Sorry, but facing this new problem, I could not resist making another poster…

- What is your name?

- Tenoch

- What is your quest?

- Looting the closest store for more or less advisable food.

And then cooked a little while watching the Olympic Games:

Let’s get back to work now. I found that I was more productive with paper and pencil, in front of the teevee and with things to chew than in front of the computer… I got a redirection for my game. Yay. Let’s code now.

09:01
I seriously need to find what to do next, instead of playing with the jetpack guy and idling on IRC while making posters. 1 days 19 hours 59 minutes left. Oah, that’s a lot.

09:20
Starting some collision detection code. I hate it. But I need it too.

09:22
First backup. My backup system is as follows: regular copy on the external hard drive, plus FTPing to the family computer downstairs. Paranoia, yes.

09:43
Colision detection works with rectangular shapes. Yay. It was pretty easy, actually, once you realise you should check for non collision cases instead of the opposite (http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article735.asp)

10:10
Randomly generated platforms, all with colision detection. Maybe it will need a bit of optimisation…

10:33
Getting a bit slow at innovating stuff. Maybe it’s time to make a blog entry and take a walk.

(thanks sulix for the word and the idea)

07:01
Moment of actual laughing hysteria, subsequent to a ABBA related chat on IRC. “OK i’m really sleep deprived. i’m actually considering the title ‘the super great ABBA tower of DOOM’”. Don’t laugh, it might come out this way.

07:14
I may have a serious ABBA based idea. Anyway, it’s an idea and I’m in desperate need of ideas.

08:something
Breakfast. Both photos are from my kitchen. One I ate, the other I didn’t. Sort wisely.

08:a bit more
OK, I have a stick man with a jetpack which responds to gravity and keyboard. Now I need gameplay. And focus.

I’m relying on the power of ABBA to give me a cool idea before long. Breakfast photos coming.

Oh, and seen on IRC:

The most important place of the week-end:

Beds matter. They do.

The compo starts at 5am here in Europe… I intented to sleep a bit before getting to work, but I couldn’t close the eye. Too much excitement I guess… However, managing sleep is probably an important part of the competition. Working tired gives bad results.

A little motivation for all the ones doing the http://hundredpushups.com/ program:

(starring my fellow Nestor, psych support for the week end)

I see that a lot of people here are new, just like me, so it will probably be a very interesting week end.

I intend to use the Löve game engine, which is a Lua wrapper for SDL (it’s a little bit more, actually, but I love SDL and Lua, so I couldn’t not love Löve). If I fail, I can still fall back to my usual C + SDL or Objective-C + SDL setup.

Other than that:

- Multi OS (I’m on Linux, but Löve is for Windows and soon Mac OS X too)

- Graphics (or lack thereof) with GIMP and Inkscape

- Music/sound (or reeaally probable lack thereof) with several Linux audio tools, including Audacity, Ardour, ZynAddSubFX, a MIDI keyboard and a mic (I’m supposed to be a musician, but…). I hope I won’t lure myself into losing too much time for music.

- Photos for the food contest, and to show my messy environment.

- Idling on IRC.

- Sleep. What for? The compo starts at 5am here, anyway.

- Erm.

Oh by the way:

Oh, and please vote for Evolution. It seems to be a nice theme (and yeah, I have an idea for it…)