Let’s make a big list of events like Ludum Dare – game compos, 48 hour compos, cool events, whatever. We all know Ludum Dare is awesome, so events like it must be awesome too!

Some events I’m aware of:

• http://pyweek.org/ : Pyweek. Inspired by Ludum Dare! (Yay!) A week long contest to make a game, but only in Python. Which is kind of a shame if you don’t use Python, but Python is a great language so you should definitely learn it. Has an event coming up in the next week or two.
• http://www.superfriendshipclub.com/ : Holds month long game “pageants” every two months.
• http://gameprototypechallenge.com/ : Week long contest to prototype a game.
• http://experimentalgameplay.com/ : Month long competition based on a theme.

It seems to be traditional to, in your postmortem, say what went right and wrong. So here goes.

Good stuff

• I managed to adhere to my schedule almost perfectly. I’ve had enough practice with timed contests by this point to know exactly how much I can accomplish in a certain amount of time, which is a huge boon.
• With two hours left, I decided to include a boss, because I felt the game ‘didn’t feel right’ otherwise. As much as a recipe for disaster as that sounds, I pulled it off, and debugged the last boss bug with only minutes to spare. Like a boss.
• Python was an incredible language for gamedev, even though I had only recently learned pygame. I was much more productive than in (say) Actionscript.
• I feel my graphics have much improved since my LD19 entry.

• Get an ergonomic keyboard!
• Care more about graphics. They really are important. Particularly, after you’ve finished with implementation, graphics are arguably the most important thing to work on.
• Porting is hard. It’s such an advantage to choose a language you don’t have to port.

Two big problems with the entry, and one thing that’s separate. I’m going to work on graphics and buying a nice keyboard (that second one is pretty easy to work on ) and I plan to really knock LD22 out of the park!

So first and foremost, I have to make an apology. I wanted to spam the LD community with tons of blog posts during game development, but I wasn’t able to. Why not? Well… (apart from the website crashing and all that… )

Python, it turns out, is an amazing language to code games in. The greatest part for me is that the iteration process from code to test to code is incredibly quick, and error fixing is a breeze. Contrast with languages like Javascript where you often have to spend comparatively more time tracking down bugs and correcting for silly errors you made (like accidentally adding an integer to a string instead of another integer).

What this means is that I was flying through code. I think that in the first 6 hours after I woke up I had written about 500 lines of code, which is an astonishing rate for me. But then I stared to notice that my wrist was starting to hurt. I kept going, figuring that it was probably nothing, but then at about 2pm I realized I needed to stop coding because my wrist was killing me.

For the first time, I had reached my limits. I had never written so much code in such a short amount of time.

This was actually really terrifying for me, and I had a ton of thoughts fly through my head. I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to finish my LD game because my wrist was going to slow me down immensely. I was worried I was going to develop RSI or carpal tunnel. I was just generally freaking out since nothing like that had happened before.

So I took a break. I went to eat lunch. Then I went and picked up a guitar and played the song you hear in the background. Then I realized my wrists still hurt, so I worked on graphics for a few hours. Then I did some google searching to see what people do in problems like these. Turns out that these kinds of problems are why people invented those weird looking ergonomic keyboards, and I conveniently had one lying around, so I used it.

That keyboard was the saving grace of the project. It is much less intensive on the wrists for some reason I can’t quite figure out – your wrists don’t move around as much for some reason. Without the keyboard, I probably would have gotten stuck halfway through, which would have been really depressing!

On the other hand, I did lose about ten hours of time that I could have really used to improve my game further. It’s a shame that it happened, but I’ve learned from it, and it’s also a mistake I won’t make again.

So, tl;dr: If you’re a coder, I highly recommend getting a split keyboard to code with, especially during competitions. Save your wrists from pain!

Finally, if you want to see what I suffered through pain to bring you, check it out: Escape Artist

I was talking with my friend earlier today and I was wondering what is the most important thing to focus on a game (after functionality): is it graphics? Innovation? Audio? Something else entirely?

So I wrote a quick script to show the correlations between all of our statistics and overall. The script is here.

The correlations are (lower is more correlated):

{'Humor': 179, 'Innovation': 66, 'Community': 158, 'Theme': 107, 'Graphics': 73, 'Fun': 23, 'Audio': 251}

Fun is obvious. If a game isn’t fun, then it’s not going to be good overall. But fun is also pretty vague and hard to define – it doesn’t give much more information than ‘overall’.

Innovation and graphics come after – these are things that are more understandable. So, conclusions: work really hard to come up with clever ideas, and spend a lot of time on the graphics.

Pretty sad to see audio come in dead last, since that’s something I worked hard on

This post is about if python and pygame is feasible for LD48. But first… an action screenshot!!

So. How good is Python/Pygame for making games?

Good parts:

• Python is a lovely language, an absolute joy to program in compared to just about anything else. It is definitely superior to any brand of ActionScript. I never got bogged down in syntax or trivialities, and bug fixing/iterating flew by.
• Programming in Vim, favorite native text editor by far*, was orders of magnitude better than being relegated to some IDE, or worse, Flash’s cobbled-together editing environment.
• I was worried that a lot of the things that I loved about the rapid development cycle in Flash would be lost in python/pygame, but I turned out to be almost completely wrong. For instance, I liked that in Flash you could just draw something and instantly have it in game, but as soon as I wrote a nice abstraction layer I had that in Pygame too. In flash I really like how you get animated sprites for free with keyframes, but that was about 5 lines in Pygame. There was some oddness about text not being multiline by default, but I managed to fix that quickly by taking some open source code. Which leads me to my next point:
• Pygame has a fairly respectable community. Every time I have encountered a bug (so far), I have managed to fix it just with a simple Google search.

Bad parts:

• One big missing thing from pygame is the wealth of neat filers and effects in Flash. I really wanted to do some nice TV static or something over my game, and make some stuff glow, but I was simply incapable, and I felt like in general my graphics were a bit worse than they could have been in Flash.
• Another really nice thing in Flash: Tweens. And then even better is the open source Tweener library for AS3 which does a lot of really slick transitions and effects. I hand coded these in Escape Artist, and Flash could have saved me some time.
• Now for the absolute worst part about python/pygame: porting. Turns out not too many people are excited about taking your raw source code and compiling it. py2exe and py2app are the standard for Windows and Mac porting, respectively, but it was still really hard to get them set up, and in fact I’m hearing reports of really obscure crashes in the Mac port – something that I’ve never encountered in my Ubuntu testing.
• It actually took about 24 hours to port, which was really sad for me since it (understandably) got no votes during that period

How the heck are the pygame users among us planning to port your game to all platforms?

I’ve been trying with py2exe and py2app and having absolutely no luck; I’ve been seeing crashes everywhere. Any tips?

It’s the end of the first day, and I’m pleasantly surprised by how development has gone so far, especially considering pygame is something I’ve essentially never touched before.

My game has stuff like

• Decent collision detection
• Maps
• Patrolling enemies
• Dialog
• Super top secret gameplay element (not really, you can go play it on github if you want)
• Open source github repo https://github.com/johnfn/ld21

The graphics are ALL placeholders right now. You’re the anomalous bottom right square inside the rectangle. The grumpyface is the enemy. I wonder what that blue thing is..? And how on earth are you ever going to ESCAPE that rectangle? I dunno…

After flirting briefly with Clojure, I’ve decided to be a little safer and do Python.

Here’s some code I’m declaring: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=RARFRZ6Z It’s a simple game engine on top of Pygame.

Tools I’ll be using:

• Python and pygame. I haven’t really used them before, so this ought to be interesting.
• Vim. All vim, all the time.
• Graphics Gale. To make the pixels. ALL OF THE PIXELS.
• FL Studio. For gorgeous background music. Or decent background music. Or…yeah.
• Maybe I’ll try my hand at sfxr. Didn’t have time last time but… yeah, we’ll see.