1. What OS are you using? (Windows / Linux – Include which version if you so desire but it is not necessary)
2. Are you using 32Bit or 64Bit? (This is the biggy)

I’m (probably) going to use:
Pyglet + Pymunk + Python
and I’m developing on Linux

My development will be done in https://github.com/kragniz/ld48-22

Good luck all other contestants!

OTOH, the Kobo II Tech Preview is now on-line, which means that I have a working Win32 executive, making deployment trivial. (There is no game code in kobo2.exe, only EEL with SDL, OpenGL, ChipSound, physics etc.) So, I should be able to pull this off without touching glorified assembly languages, or even running a native compiler. (Well, I might rebuild the executive with a different icon. That should be safe. I think…)

So, if I do it, here are my weapons of choice:

Language: EEL (Runs on the Kobo II executive.)
Editor: KDE Kate
Libraries: Kobo II/EELBox executive (SDL, OpenGL, ZeeSpace, ChipSound, …)
Sounds: ChipSound
Music: ChipSound
Graphics: GIMP, ZeeSpace

I just released my own programming language called MoonScript which compiles into Lua. I’ll be using that to make my game. This will be a great test to see how it works. One of the original use cases of the language was game development because there are so many engines that use Lua.

If you happen to be using Lua, then I suggest you check it out because it’s pretty awesome, works on all platforms, and I’ve written a ton of documentation.

Anyway, about my game. So far I plan to create a platformer, but depending on the theme I might switch things up. I’ll be developing on linux but using LÖVE so my result should run everywhere. I hope to do a time lapse screen capture of the entire weekend but I haven’t found software yet. I’m worried about creating graphics and music because I’m not very good at those things. Must not let them consume too much time.

Here’s the final list:

Language: MoonScript (compiles to Lua)
Editor: VIM
Framework: LÖVE
Graphics: GIMP
Music: MilkyTracker
Sounds: Audacity

Follow me on twitter for updates, and here’s a pic of me being serious:

It’s currently available on the android market and pending in a bunch of other places so I’m sitting on versions for windows, linux and osx. In all honesty I focused more on getting it ready for the igf (student edition) and less about scouting marketplaces.

“Is this the part where you tell us to buy it?” the crowd asks. Well yes actually: “Go buy it!” Or at least +1 it on the android market or tell your friends and family and that cousin George you haven’t spoken with since 3rd grade about it. Yes the one with the bigger thumb on his left hand.

Some of the features will roll out to the free (ad supported) version relatively soon (the updated graphics and music), while others will be kept a version behind(mostly new levels and such).

And here’s a trailer for you(can someone please tell me how to embed videos? the code just gets eaten up)

Thanks for reading

GAME PAGE

]]> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/10/30/urth-gets-submitted-to-all-the-things/feed/ 0 http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/09/18/cosmic-heist-postmortem/ http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/09/18/cosmic-heist-postmortem/#comments Sun, 18 Sep 2011 10:50:10 +0000 Kevin Wells http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/?p=74575 So, Cosmic Heist was my entry for the recent Ludum Dare compo. It was a major success by my reckoning, as it was completed in time. That aside, however, I would like to write a little about how things went.

What went right

I spent some time coming up with a couple of interesting(ish) ideas, but ended up throwing them out before settling on what became Cosmic Heist. When I designed the game that actually ended up being made, I actually cut out tons of things, and cut even more as I developed it. This is one area that I really want to improve (I, like many others, am horrible at the “cutting things until it’s right” part), and I feel I made some good progress during this compo. I was able to reject tons of ideas, some good, some bad, but all non-essential.

I had a decent personal code base to start from, and already knew all about the language, libraries, and tools I used beforehand, so I was able to jump right in.

I left some time for play-testing and bug fixing/tweaking near the end, but ended up not needing very much of it. The game was small and simple enough that it wasn’t too buggy by the end, and my wife and I tested it some as I worked on it anyway. However, I would definitely leave this buffer time again anyway, because it really kept things stress-free.

The menus ended up looking/working/sounding great, and I added a cool animated menu background near the end that I really liked. I’ll probably use some of the work that went into that stuff off into the future in other projects.

The music turned out to not suck as much as I thought it would. That was actually my highest-scoring area in the competition, and I am still somewhat unsure what to make of that. This was my first time really making any music, and I don’t really have experience playing/reading/etc. music either. But it doesn’t sound too bad, so I am counting that as a nice success.

The controls are really fluid, and are my favorite part of the whole thing by far. The way you control the ship is great, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I actually didn’t spend much time tweaking that, and by implementing everything I needed for it, I had a whole system for various enemy ship movements, too.

What went wrong

The player’s ship is a bit oddly shaped. This makes it hard to see where you are going. I didn’t realize this at all (duh! isn’t it obvious! the ship points in the direction I drew it to point!) until people began commenting on it. Certainly something that would need to be fixed.

Some people kept looking for the shoot button. I didn’t make it very obvious (at all) that there is no shooting in the game. You just pilot your ship, and enemy ships try to plow into you.

There were a couple of features I wanted to get in, but had to cut due to time constraints. I wanted enemy ships to shoot at you, and every level was supposed to start at a shipyard, from which you had just stolen a ship.

There might be a problem with the Linux build of the game, as one person mentioned they couldn’t get it to run. Unfortunately, it runs fine for me, but I only have two machines to test it on, and they are both almost identical in both hardware and software. If anyone has or can test the game on Linux and tell me if it a) explodes, b)doesn’t run at all, or c) runs fine, I would greatly appreciate it.

Conclusion

All in all, as I said, I was very pleased with the outcome, and I even got some people to play my game, so that was really exciting. I hadn’t ever participated or followed LD until now, so I didn’t have any idea what to expect. I honestly didn’t think anyone would even see my game! Thanks to everyone who rated mine. One thing that I regret is that I didn’t have time to rate any games myself. I did play a few, and they were all great. Next time, I want to set aside some time to rate a good number of games.

Links

Ludum Dare entry

Cosmic Heist on Cheese and Bacon (my website)

Cosmic Heist on Google Project Hosting (MIT License)

Most of you probably don’t use Linux, and might be thinking “why should I care”. But you should. It’s about freedom of choice as much as about anything else. One might think that people should be free to choose the operating system they like, without being punished by third parties. Ok, I know it’s not that simple, porting to a new OS requires an effort and some companies will have to make a cost/benefit calculation, while many others can afford to be selfless most of the time.

I  will always try to make my games multi-platform, even though I think Windows is crap and that Apple is an awful company (with good products ). Not because I think I can sell more copies, but because of you. You should be allowed to use the OS you chose, not the one I do.

This is actually my third Ludum Dare, but so far I have been totally asocial and never even introduced myself, let alone post the games, of which there was only one that was even remotely playable. Don’t ask.

But motivated by the trivial coincidence of this being LD #21 and being 21 years old myself, I have finally braved an intro. I am quite proud of that.

Let’s see if I can make a game too; shouldn’t be too hard. No pressure…

I will be working with the following tools, depending on how far I manage to go of course:

• The ever lovely LÖVE, if making a desktop game. This’ll mean lua.
• The ever…scripty…Processing.js, if making a web game. This’ll make it sort of javascript, sort of Processing.
• Inkscape, GIMP, and Mypaint for graphics.
• Blender for CGI: I won’t be making a 3D game.
• Sfxr (yay) for sound effects, and possibly Neil if daring to make music.
• My snazzy, Compiz-y desktop running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.
• Certain other non-computational implements.

I will, almost certainly, not be able to make the competition deadlines, so I’ll focus on Jam instead. And I will try to come up with something fitting the winning theme, but if I can’t…I’ll just choose another one I like and roll with it >.>

As for participation: I will silently stalk the IRC, and try to visit the Hangouts if my connection holds. I don’t have enough bandwidth (or courage) to livestream my work, but I will set up gLapse which was thoughtfully made for this very occasion!

Furthermore, I promise not to get too nervous and go into zen-procrastination-mode like I usually do during rushes.

[Also: Did I go overboard with the tags?]

My template doesn’t do much, which is sort of the point given the nature of Ludum Dare. I wanted to gather up some basic functionality that I consider to be fair to use, and probably already available to many other LD’ers using existing game engines like OGRE, etc. Using this I hope to be able to get a quicker start during the events.

I’m using Linux, C++, CMake, SFML, GLee, OpenGL, and OpenAL. Here are the features I’m going for:

• Get a window up on the screen. Admittedly, this isn’t too hard thanks to SFML.
• Load music / sound files from disk, and play them.
• Load UV texture-mapped 3D objects exported from Blender (http://blender.org/) and display them using OpenGL VBOs. The Blender export script I’ve created is included.
• Render bitmapped fonts using image files loaded from disk.
• Build either a Linux or Windows executable by changing a CMake flag (I have a mingw32 cross compilation set up, installed).

You can download my template here: ld48_template.tar.gz

If you can use this, or have time to build the sample app and give me some feedback, that would be awesome. Thanks!

-Windsor

P.S. I just read PoV’s post about packaging Linux applications. I’ll have to put some of those techniques to use in the next version of my template.

Workspace #1: Starbucks.

I’m all done for today and I still have enough caffeine in my system to keep my dreams strange. I goofed off a lot during these first few hours and didn’t get any real work done. I did come to the conclusion that my favorite audio sequencer available for Linux is now Renoise. It’s not open source, but damn if it’s not a cool piece of software. It’s not Ableton Live, but then, Live doesn’t run on Linux, and it costs three times as much. I feel a little silly sticking myself with a new tool to learn in the middle of the contest, but I’m determined to get some music in my entry, and also work completely in Linux while I do it. Good night!


#!/bin/bash
#
# Timelapse video creator.
#
# Uses the following tools: uvccapture, scrot, ffmpeg.
#
# Start recording with 'timelapse start' (continues until killed),
# compile captured frames in to a video with 'timelapse compile'.

interval=5 # delay between frames (will probably longer due to processing time)

arg=$1

if [ $arg ]; then
if [ $arg = "frame.jpg" ]; then
counter=`cat counter`
counter=`expr $counter + 1`
echo got video for frame $counter
scrot screen.png
echo got screenshot for frame $counter
composite -gravity southwest frame.jpg screen.png composite.png
convert -quality 100 -resize 800x composite.png `printf "%04d" $counter`.jpg
echo processed frame $counter
echo $counter > counter
elif [ $arg = "compile" ]; then
ffmpeg -shortest -qscale 3 -ab 192k -r 10 -i %04d.jpg -i music.mp3 video.mp4
elif [ $arg = "start" ]; then
uvccapture -oframe.jpg -x320 -y240 -q100 -c/home/win/scripts/timelapse -t$interval
fi
else
echo "timelapse "
fi


I almost completely hosed my computer today too, trying to install Arch linux to dual-boot with my Windows XP partition. Being a GRUB n00b I’d managed to render the machine completely unbootable but thankfully I was able to repair my master boot record and go back to the warm, snuggly, familiar surroundings of XP in time for the competition. In retrospect it wasn’t the best time to start juggling operating systems.

I think GRUB was having a problem with the SATA disks I’ve got configured in as a RAID using NVidia’s software RAID thingy. The disks seemed to change order before and after boot – the RAID disks appearing last in the list at first, then first in the list later – and also depending on whether I tried to boot from CD first or not. GRUB got totally confused about where to load its boot menu from, as far as I could tell.

Anyway, time to put that little problem aside and focus on making the greatest game the world has ever seen. Some of the themes were really interesting this time round. If I was a betting man I’d say the theme this time is going to end up as Exploration, but I’ve learnt to try and not think about it until the theme is actually announced.

My tools are going to be:

• Python 2.6 – mmmm Python
• Pygame – a cool 2d game library for Python
• Eclipse IDE, with PyDev plugin
• pythonutils – a small collection of miscellaneous utility classes
• pygame-fenix – a pygame wrapper library which mimmicks concepts of the Fenix language, written by Fiona
• Graphics Gale – my fave 2d sprite editor, great for animation
• The GIMP – open source paint program
• Cakewalk SONAR – I will get some music done this time!
• sfxr – mspaint for sound effects, by the awesome DrPetter
• Goldwave – for tidying up sound effects
• pyCatcher – for making a timelapse video

I think that’s the lot.

Well, I’m psyched. Are you psyched? I am really rather psyched, myself. Jolly good. Can’t wait!

I have Squeezemaze up on scratch’s site.

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Mike_W/495022

It’s a java applet that runs it (technically the java applet runs a squeak interpreter) so I think windows, linux and Mac can play that version of it.

Hello! For windows and linux, plus source of course. I scrapped my original game and made this instead.

The goal is to survive as long as possible, with the help of a few spells. how to play are in the readme.txt file.

Game depends on the ncurses library.

To make your own map, just make a text file and give it a one character long name (which is not q) and place it in the levels folder. There are some issues with large maps.

Download:RC2 – Rapidshare(Linux)

http://files.filefront.com/13631588 (linux/windows)

http://www.cymonsgames.com/pages/aworafed/FourEyes_ld14_aworafed_rc2.zip (Linux/windows)

edit: after some playtesting it seems the game take some time to get hard. a smaller map should help on that

edit2: rc2 is finished, features less health, less mana, less space, more zombies. just waiting for firefront to actually let me upload….

edit3: forgot: you will likely have to start it trough the terminal. at least me and my test person had to (in linux)

edit4: download for windows up. thanks for porting it Cymon

Here is my devlog.

And here is the linux binary&source codes. I’ll post windows binary tomorrow.

UPDATE: Windows port is here.

It’s still a couple of hours till the compo. I just can’t wait. It’ll be my first LD actually. I tried to participate in LD10 but due to some circumstances I wasn’t near my computer through the weekend.

I hope I won’t be the only one developing on a Linux powered machine Good Luck!

• Reference parameters in the Vector2 class has been set to const

• One _itoa_s() call has been changed to a sprintf() call

• The time function has been changed from clock() to (clock() * 1000 / CLOCKS_PER_SEC)

Nothing else has been changed (in order to not cheat!), so there’s still a couple of bugs in there which can be used to get higher scores etc. I’m not going to tell you where though

Linux binaries and source:

http://gustav128.googlepages.com/sailor_linux.tar.gz

I should probably mention that you can move your boat using the arrow keys and repaint it while sailing! (people often ignore the readme for some reason )

Windows exe + source (compo version; if it crashes, get the post- compo zip below)

Windows exe + source (trivial post-compo fix edition, see below)

Timelapse video

Updated with a fix version above. The game would crash if run at a bit depth lower than 24bpp, use the fix version if it does! The fix also removes a comma from brygge-s.lua to fix a copy/paste bug that prevented turning around/right when looking away from the wharf, this isn’t required to beat the game or even much noticeable though.

Tools used: kate (text), gimp (graphics), sfxr (sound)

Libraries used: SDL, SDL_image (png), SDL_mixer (ogg vorbis), Lua

Update 2: Moved photos to flickr to minimse murder on my site. Why I just didn’t upload them I’ll never know.

Only two-ish hours left, and I’m feeling sick and tired (in a literal sense).  I’ve created a game called Billy and Casey.  It’s about programming robots.

One can download this monstrosity here:

http://www.nfirvine.com/wiki/uploads/Projects/casey-0.1.0.tar.gz

If the .tar.gz extension didn’t tip you off, this one’s meant for Linux only at this point.  I’m going to spend the rest of the time trying to whip together a Windows port.  We’ll see how she goes.