I saw all these cool timelapse videos everyone was making so this time I wanted to do one too! I made a perl timelapse script and off I went!

Only… I forgot to start it the first few hours and I lost some screens in the beginning to some technical difficulties. It’s not always a good idea to throw up a script the day before heh, heh.

Anyways, here’s the result:

Man oh man finally…

Damn I’m tired but I managed to wrap up something fun I think. Will leave the creation of various binary files and posts for tomorrow. My bed is longing for me now, or is the other way round? Can’t ever be sure can you?

I got into a big nice slump a few hours ago, too tired to do anything real productive and useful. So I quit coding/graphics whatever I was doing and I trained a bit, stretched and doing some limbering up in front of Idra vs Select. Damn Idra played well despite his rage quits. Thereafter I went to the shower and now I’m back and now I’m ready to go.

I’ve got most of the functionality done, I think, and the graphics looks fairly okay. But the game isn’t fun and the sounds are awful and I’ve got a lot to do. But it’s crunch time now baby.

Ugh I just realized how horrible my code is! I have tiles with some stuff, you can add a path and objects to it and then you can send a shockwave through them. But naturally I have separate lists, sets and some more lists for them! I think I’m gonna go with the super inefficient approach and just loop, loop, loop through them all. But we’ll see what I’ll do. Time constraint is the most important thing after all.

And it still looks mostly the same.

I read a study somewhere, sometime, that claimed really productive people slept more than others. Well I think I’m gonna give that a try here, I’ll need all the help I can get. I’ve got a lot left. Ugh.

At least I’ve got something that looks like… Something.

Wow, it’s been a hard day. I spent nearly 6 hours non stop shopping with the girlfriend and my feet, legs, arms and back hurt like hell. I’ve been trying to code and do some minor artwork but it’s all gone nowhere really, at least nowhere fast. And it looks like I’ve been going at a dead end now – it’s time for a pretty large rethinking. But it’s gonna be a fairly large project… Damnation to it all.

I feel the pain from being away from C++ and game programming for so long – I need to constantly refresh on functions, classes and whatnot. The venture into Perl, Haskell, Lisp and whatever has sure made me a better coder, but now I just feel like a damn slow one! I got off to such a great start, but now it’s falling apart a bit.

Now I have some positive things too. My girlfriend is ever supporting and I think she understands the hours I want to put into this this and tomorrow night. I think I have a really, really great idea for the game!

You’re gonna play the role of an alien or some sort of divine spirit, I was thinking of the guy from Tron Legacy who was set to create a perfect world, who has been given an imbalazer which will let him to transform plants and animals. Then you should create a system of sorts, something like a digital circuit, which will emit sounds when an animal reaches a goal or a function or similar. This way you can create all sorts of circuits, with the ultimate goal of being able to create binary algebra – so you can make a calculator or whatever. The sound thing is partly from me being lazy (don’t have to spend all day making something that sounds like music) but also so you can create your own song!

Phew.

Now it’s barbecue time and I’m preparing for a long coding night tonight.

As the compo starts 4 am for us lucky Europeans I was planning to wake up really, really early. As it often is with these things… It doesn’t really work quite well. But I did wake up somewhere between 6 and 7, which is a real feat for a night owl like me!

I’ve made a lot, a lot of progress actually. I made the bulk of the code for an isogrid (admittedly I had made something really similar for a previous unfinished game which makes it pretty damn easy) and now I have a working grid.. err it looks like a grid at least lol.

Naturally I messed up my timelapse script (I didn’t start it lol, and there was a fault in it). But now it should be fixed!

Now we’re soon going on a shopping spree but before then I hope I can get some more work done!

It’s been over a year since my last Ludum Dare and now I think it’s enough fooling around with school and other things, I want to be in again!

Not that it’s going to be easy… I promised by better half that we’re going out on a shopping spree tomorrow, and I will hurry through it (she made me promise) and then there’s Walpurgis Night so we’re gonna do some barbecue too. To top it off one of my best friends is coming over on Sunday and that’s not a lot of time left for some hardcore game making, but I will do my very best. Minimalism is the way to go I guess.

These are my tools:

1. LMMS for sound
2. My 7days fast prototyping library It’s a simple collection of useful stuff I feel help when you’re making a game. Uses SFML at it’s core for graphics, sound and whatnot.
3. mtPaint an awesome tool for pixel graphics. Hopefully I’ll come up with something remotely nice looking.

There’s nothing more to it really. I made a simple time lapse script in Perl so I can monitor my making, or lack thereof. I think I saw some script for that here for linux but I dunno, I made my own anyway. I’ll be drawing power from Raubtier, Sarah Brightman, Hans Zimmer and some classical composers (Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi etc) I think.

I hope I can find some time and get something nice done.