I finished my game in time for the jam. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=1044
If you thought that my last compo typing game was bad, this is a morse code game.
I’m an evil game designer… and loving it.

The only button that works is the spacebar.

Ok, so I’ve been busy this weekend, but I managed to get a little bit done.

I have a moon rover and it can be commanded with only the space bar (through dots and dashes a la morse code).

My collisions are still busted.

Here’s my idea for a game so far.
There’s this lonely earthling, so she sends a moon rover to the moon to look for life.
For maximum signal strength, the moon rover has one lonely button, so one must tap it in certain sequences to get the moon rover to move.

As usuall, I’ll be hacking something together in ansi C with SDL.

Vim is the only tool I plan on using, and as such, my games will most likely have pixel art sown into the source.

I’m ready to start hacking. Perhaps my game will even be psuedo 3d with oblique projection.

Cosmologicon and I have been talking over at pyweek about code review and he thought that if other people looked at each other’s code during the compo they could help each other out.

So I had the idea that there should be a game compo where everyone starts making a game and then they switch code with someone else and start working on each other’s game. Every day or so they’d switch code with someone new, and at the end of 7 days everyone would have a frankenstein of a game. People would practice reading other people’s code and in turn writing readable code for others to read.

EDIT: Here’s a link to the pyweek discussion which has now become a code review event.

I’m kinda slow at developing games because I get tangled up in the collisions and stuff. By next compo I’m gonna make a game engine.

I feel guilty making such a hard torturous game. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, so maybe I’m slowly becoming an evil game designer. Mwahahahahaha. Forcing people to type at lightning speeds is downright cruel, I should’ve at least eased them into it better. Oh well, I better be less evil next time.

For my entry the level was stored in RAM as an array of characters, and each character held 8 blocks, which means that each block only took 1-bit (on or off). So theoretically a level 1000 x 1000 would take 125 kilobytes, a 10,000 x 10,000 level would take 12.5 megabytes in RAM.

Ofcourse, saved as a text file that’s easy to edit in notepad, the same file would take over 8 times as much space.

It’s not quite as finished as I would have hoped, but it’s playable and interesting. I just didn’t have enough to make “cool” graphics.

I was so budgeted for time I finished it with 16 minutes to spare.

To play you have to type commands and then Esca (The purple rectangle) will execute them. The goal is to escape from illiteracy.

Perhaps I’ll make a post compo version later.

I’ll probably end up doing something in C and SDL and maybe Lua if I feel like the type of game I’m making would be enhanced by it. I’ll probably draw the graphics in Inkscape and Gimp. The audio will be done in either Audacity or Sox.

I hope I don’t get brought down by crazy bugs like I did last compo. :’(

I should start getting my math figured out right away so that doesn’t happen.

EDIT: Why does it keep autocorrecting my C tag to C++?

So far I’ve been trying to rewrite some example tiling and level code I made before the compo. And since I didn’t want to cheat and look at it, I’ve encountered some bizarre bugs that I didn’t have before. Well, I’ll have to do some serious coding tomorrow.

Maybe I should enter the Jam instead.

I’ve been trying out arrays in C to see how many blocks I can store for a level / game map. I decided to make an array of chars since they are guaranteed (For the most part) to be 8 bits on all platforms, and using bit shifts I split the 8 bits into 4 2 bit pieces of data. With 2 bits I have a total possibility of 4 different types of blocks for that block, that seems sufficient. I can always change the number of blocks per char to get even more types of blocks. And so if I have an array that has 64 chars, or a 64 byte array, that will hold 256 of my blocks because each char holds 4 blocks. I’ve scaled this up and I’ve been able to hold 1,073,741,824 blocks in 257Mbs of ram without my old computer choking or slowing down the rendering in the slightest (Not all the blocks are on the screen at the same time).

Yeah, I’m probably not gonna make a 1 billion block level, but it’s nice to know that I can.

I’m gonna try to do this Ludum Dare 48 hour compo using C and SDL. My editor will be vi(m) and I will be developing on Arch Linux.

I’m ready to write some (probably obfuscated) code! We’ll see how this goes.

I didn’t get to finish my game, due to some unforeseen/foreseen errands I had to do. Oh well, I better start writing a game engine for the next compo, that should make it easier.

Sad face.

Oh dear, this theme irks me. What do I do with that? Perhaps I should do Hamlet, or have it be about exploration or technolology (I don’t take technology seriously, hence the “lol” in the middle) discovering. I don’t know, perhaps I’ll just sleep on it.

This is my declaration of unsureness. Which means that if I’m not busy this weekend I will most likely participate in LD19.

Os: Arch Linux

Language: C++  (And maybe with some Lua for scripting)

Tools: G++ and make

Editor: Geany or Nano

Library: SDL

Graphics: Inkscape and Gimp

Sound: Audacity

I am using Python and Pygame for this compo. Ok, so as of now I’ve written an (Really pathetic) isometric engine for my game. I don’t know how it’s gonna turn out, but I have a penguin who may swim from island to island. Right now I can’t figure out how to layer the character and the tiles right.

So I might be busy tomorrow, and might not finish.

I figured I should do a motivational poster this time; I couldn’t find a picture, and I couldn’t think of anything motivating, so here goes:

I’ve been using Python with Pygame so far, and I’d like to make an antarctic exploration game for this ludum dare. The only problem is I have no idea how to do perfect pixel collision. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to figure this one out.

I do declare, these declarations are driving me to didactic dexterity. Therefore I hereby do dutifully declare independence from these declarations. Let these daring declarations be destroyed!!