Homepage has been padded with another couple of old projects – go see

This time around it’s a semi-usable animation editor (for making PNG images move around in a neat way) and a video smoothing experiment (no download, but lots of text and a demo video!)

Hi! my name is Goldbuick! I just recently showed up on the ludumdare radar! I’m looking forward to participating in my first compo and I wanted to post my tool of choice.

http://qixl.demiverse.com/

Qixl currently runs on Windows. It does not run under Wine. Ports to other OS’es are planned.

Qixl is a specialized lua interpreter based off of luajit.
Basically it’s lua + additional built-in classes to manage simple graphics, audio, music and mouse/keyboard input.

Copied from my Dev Blog

So eventually you’re going to have to put in moving/walking/talking elements of various varieties in most any game. Maybe they are lemmings. Maybe they are AI controlled bot opponents in an FPS. Or maybe they are soldiers in an RTS, or enemies in a hack and slash. In any case it’s daunting to add these gameplay elements because the behaviour will ultimately require so much tweaking and experimentation. Where do you start?

Carefully creating a system for managing/handling such creatures is… somewhat uninspiring work. And worse, what kind of result do you get? Did you end up forgetting some crucial detail, or do you get a very complex, neural-net-enhanced AI that just acts stoopid? Good luck!

When you see your little guys moving around, only then do you start to see what practical changes you can make to their behaviour. It doesn’t mean you can’t have larger scale frameworks in place, it’s just that even with these frameworks (e.g., pathfinding) it’s not too obvious how to code the heuristics until you are into.

This brings me to my Golden Rule of Adding Moving Gameplay Elements:

First, just add something that stands still and you can zap.

Of course, “zap” might stand for anything. Maybe zap means clicking an RTS unit. Or talking to an NPC. But your first implementation should not worry about movement or anything. It should just create the actual unit, place it. You can start to work out your enemy placement/spawning system at this point, or start to think about how they will behave. But either way, what you really need before you can get started on any practical level is to get it placed. And in order to do that most easily, just forget everything else that will have to go into it for the time being.

I would do well to remember this in the future. This way of thinking avoids me spending all kinds of time mulling over millions of options without anything to start experimenting with. With a purely dumb element placed, purely dumbly, I am able to start the kind of wheedling experimentation neccesary to make it work.

(02:11:23 PM) philhassey: the theme voting will be in the channel .. starting around 6 hours before the compo
(02:11:39 PM) philhassey: we’ll come up with some themes around that time
(02:11:46 PM) philhassey: and then i’ll post a voting thing on my website ..
(02:11:50 PM) philhassey: theme will be released at the start
(02:12:00 PM) philhassey: then you’ve got 48 hours to do whatever ..
(02:12:45 PM) philhassey: basic idea is to spend around 12 of those hours working ..
(02:12:51 PM) philhassey: not as “intense” as a real 48 hour compo ..
(02:13:08 PM) philhassey: entries won’t be judged, but we’ll post them on the website so there is easy access and people can leave comments and junk
(02:13:18 PM) Hectigo: Sounds good
(02:13:31 PM) philhassey: i’ll post that on the site ..
(02:13:31 PM) jolle: and award trophies ^_^
(02:13:33 PM) philhassey: yeah
(02:13:37 PM) philhassey: trophies are a must
(02:14:21 PM) RobotGuy: Thanks, that’s helped alot.

You guys and your impromptu compos.

From the mailing list:

Hey,

It’s time for some more game compo good times! The compo is going to be on the weekend of Feb. 23rd. Since it’s a warm-up, there won’t be exact start and end times, just show up and have fun! Theme voting will be on the website prior to the compo.

Join #ludumdare on irc.afternet.org
www.ludumdare.com/compo/

Hope to see you there!

-Phil

I’ll be back soon. I’m just trying to minimize my distractions for the next week or so.