Since the mini LD started, I’ve been filling my time with diablo, TF2, C&C3, amusement parks, and other non-coding activities. However, I have been sneaking in coding time here and there, and am making progress on my tool, despite being well outside the ‘deadline’. I posted a gui shot to IRC, but forgot to put it here, until now!

People’s biggest complaint seems to be that it is rather dense. Well screw those people. Seriously though, it is a semi-heavy tool, but I’m hoping I’ve put it together logically. I’ll be writing instructions on how to use each part and I’d like to think that, with a little tool-tip help, each section is pretty self explanatory.

Since I haven’t really discussed it here yet, my tool, codenamed Chronolapse, creates time lapses. Right now the only working webcam library I have is windows only, but that might be addressed later. The goal is to make it a snap to make time lapses like the one below. Here is an overview featurelist:

• Synched Screenshots and Webcam Captures (can do either one or both)
• Simple ‘Annotation’ - show messages like status etc on your timelapse
• Picture in Picture - example: put your webcam shots in the corner of your screenshots
• Video - convert your images to video for you

I decided to make each of these features a seperate entity to give the user as much freedom and functionality as possible. It will add a little bit of time on the backend as you go through each ‘phase’, but it really enhances the value of the tool. Here is a picture in picture example: First, you capture your images. Instead of allowing you to pick PIP at the beginning, it just saves the two different sets of pictures. After you’re finished capturing, you can run it through the PIP section, selecting size and position (and sources). This gives you a new folder of pictures with the PIP effect. Now, if you want to go back and change where you put the PIP, it is as simple as tweaking the settings and re-doing the PIP. If PIP was built into the capture, you couldn’t change it at all. It also means you can use any program you want to do any of the steps, and CL will fill in the rest. You can capture with CL and create video with virtualdub, or capture with something else and add PIP with CL, etc etc etc. You have da powah!

Example Goal Timelapse - This wasn’t made with CL; it required 4 different tools to put it all together, plus the youtube annotation. Being able to make this using just one program (well, need to add sound separately) is the end-result goal of CL.

My LD 12 Timelapse

Timelapse. You may recognize the music

Preface

Since I’m only a few months into my game dev journey, I set a few concrete goals to ensure that I would finish with a game:

• Have gameplay decided on before bed on the night the theme was revealed
• Have gameplay/art 90% done by bed on Day 2
• Finish gameplay/art, do music, menus, polish, package, etc on the last day
• Also eat a lot of unhealthy food

The Bad

My Idea: My main concern was to make my game about owls. In the end, I accomplished this, but I should have thought it through more. After getting most of the gameplay implemented, I started to realize that the scope of my game was way too small considering the time I had as well as my ambition. I was sure that it was too late in the 48 to start over, and I lost motivation.

Motivation: (That was a pretty direct segway.) I didn’t really feel like finishing my game. I didn’t put much effort into it until night fell on Saturday (awesome). That’s when I made the game’s song, and finished gameplay for the most part.

Packaging: I provided three versions of my game: an exe made with py2exe, an app made with py2app, and a source version. I guess I need more practice with py2exe. It took me a while to get my game packaged, and I even had to change some code in the game to make it work. My py2app experience was great, but the .app ended up being over 20 megabytes large. That sucks, sorry guys.

The Good

Music: I am really happy with the way my simple song came out for my game. I had a whole other song ready, but it just didn’t fit the mood of my game. The completion of this song actually brought me out of my motivation problems in the second-half of the competition.

Code: It should be no suprise that I had no trouble implementing this game. There’s really nothing impressive about the way it works. Some aspects are even quite underwhelming, such as the collision perhaps. Overall, I got to spend some quality time with vim and python…what more could I ask for?

Motivators: This section is pretty self-explanatory.

I Had A Wonderful Time: LD12 was a blast, I learned a bit and had a great time. A success overall.

Looking Ahead

I have a lot of ideas on how I can improve for my next LD. I feel like I can make a bigger and better game. I also think I can improve the efficiency of my music recording and packaging processes.

Thanks Guys

Well, I’m back from spending last week in LA at the siggraph conference. Looking forward to playing all the entries.

Here’s a link to my timelapse video. Thanks to Daz for the ETL screencap program he posted, which I used to make this (plus ImageMagick to add timestamps).

A quick postmortem: I was using this compo as a chance to experiment with Ogre3D, so I didn’t expect to end up with something too polished, but i did hope it would be at least playable, which didnt quite happen.

What went right:

• Ogre particles — easy and they look great.
• Art assets. I tried to focus on the minimum that I would need, and they turned out pretty good.
• Learning Ogre. I learned a lot more this way than just reading docs would have taught me.
• Great theme. I had a lot of good ideas for this one (maybe too many).

What went wrong:

• Camera — I spent a lot of time messing with the camera. Afterwards, i realized I should have just went with a fixed close-to-overhead camera.
• Starting with ExampleApp was more trouble than it was worth. In the end, I wasted a bunch of time rearranging it.
• Too many ideas: The theme generated so many ideas for me, I kept changing my mind and adding things. I should have gone with a straight up tower defense.
• Too ambitious. Didn’t get first-playable until Sunday.

I posted a little list of tips on LD Survival, and ended up ignoring almost all of them.  That’s okay, I had a great time and got a bunch of experience with Ogre3D.

A technical note: I was using Ogre’s OpenGL mode during development, and noticed at the last minute that the D3D mode was much faster. So the readme encourages you to use the D3D mode. However, I didn’t realize until afterwards that it blows up after a few minutes, so if you get everything flying off the screen, switch back to OGL. I probably forgot to initialize something.

Well no video Just some time scale of how things went. Well times are not precise but close.

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Here is my timelapse video.

A few epic moments: the big ABBA chat (0:38), the epic failure of creating the level graphics in Blender, then Inkscape (2:48), the time when my friends came over to play Armaggetron and Jump’n'Bump while I was drawing the levels (4:34)…

Soundtrack: ingame music + surprise song from a band that enlightened the IRC channel with all its splendor…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1PSloOTokg

Here is my time lapse. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmz0WHqsYm4

Here is my timelapse!

Music somehow synced up very well…

H’okay, here’s the timelapse.

Music by me.

Also, if you tried (and failed) to run the newer Win32 version I uploaded this afternoon, I redid the changes with py2exe and it should all be working properly now. Linking with pygame.mixer.music turned out to be a matter of sending the correct options flag to py2exe. You can get it here.

I’ve been playing around with VirutalDub and Ulead VideoStudio and here is my timelapse video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVyJVQU9mLk (2:31)

My webcam timelapse video is available on youtube. I’m not posting the screenshots only one as it’s really boring.

A few tips for people testing my game:

Use the C key to test the alternate camera style (it’s very hard to play with it but it’s nice). EDIT: Also even in normal camera mode you use the END key to place the camera temporarily behind our blobby hero and view what lies ahead.

On the second level, you just have to get rid of the creature guarding the jump point. They always move in your direction so maybe you can trick it.

If everything else fails, use the cheat code: ctrl-shift-J makes a huge jump so you can skip levels or just have fun.

I’ve uploaded a timelapse video of me writing Breaking the Tower. You can see it here.

The music was made by me several years ago, btw. =)

Here’s my timelapse … it wasn’t all that exciting so I added a little running commentary.

LD#12: pansapiens timelapse

Congratulations to everyone who participated. I can wait to see what y’all have created ….

Some post mortem thoughts
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My first time lapse was over 10 minutes long, and so I had to cut out a lot of the repetitive images to shorten it. I also found a way to combine music with it.

Ludum Dare #12: GBGames Time Lapse

Since I can never remember the magical incantations for getting mencoder to do anything, I created a Makefile and uploaded it to the LD wiki:

http://www.ludumdare.com/wiki/ld12:linuxtimelapsemakefile

Timelapse video (37 MB AVI), with music: “Fable (Message Version)” by Robert Miles. It synchs up eerily well — the video starts to really pick up a minute in when I was doing a ton of work and had increased “shutter speed” of the timelapse.

And here’s my timelapse video.

http://www.deepflame.nl/ld12/ld12.avi

40mb, close to 1 minute long, close to 600 frames, encoded with xvid codec using VideoMach.

Enjoy.

So I’ve got around to compiling my 2GB of screenshots into a timelapse. You can see a long period at the start when visitors came round and I got absolutely no work done, but things get more and more frantic as the deadline approaches.

It looks like I never slept - but this is because there’s no screenshots from when the computer was off.

http://www.surrealix.com/ludumdare/timelapse.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6fX5zzRf9Q 

Here’s my timelapse video. The picture-in-picture part is not completely in sync with the big video, but it should be somewhat close. I cut out the parts where I was sleeping or otherwise away. Music is Scattered Progression by JDruid.

Here is my time lapse vid. I put the webcam time lapse inside the screen one and synced them up as best as I could, so it looks best in fullscreen mode. You can get the high res version here (~6.5MB)

Here’s a timelapse for my game. Watch me repeatedly fail to draw stuff, write big chunks of code that was later thrown out, and also try to make music that I decided to not put into the game! (The music just didn’t fit at all. I extended it a bit and used it in this video in stead)

Contains spoilers obviously, so play the game before watching =)

Oh, and I noticed the counter shows -1:39:49 at the end of the video. I did go a few minutes overtime (mostly upload issues though, also I started way late so please go easy on that =]), but only by a minute or two. There was a bug in the counter that caused it to count wrong when it went past the deadline. (Also, the time skips when the sleep window pops up as my PC was off then.)

Timelapse!

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=2WrnjfxFQ64

Strangely enough, very little of the final levels I shipped with are in there. I stopped recording when I rebooted about half and hour before the deadline, so you can’t see me fooling around with sfxr either =(. You can, however, see all the time I wasted on that math problem on Saturday >:).

I’m alive! I expected otherwise! And, as I begin the early stages of my undoubtedly slow recovery, I will first post the timelapse video I recorded:

And, in case that doesn’t work or you want a higher resolution: The original, 720×480 Xvid w/ mp3 audio, 76.21MB

Here’s the timelapse of the development of my entry [youtube.com], Mondrian. It spans pretty much the whole 48 hours, with one shot every 10 mins, (except the blank ones when I was sleeping with the screen on powersave).

For my own future reference:

Screenshots taken with the cronjob:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * import -window root -display :0.0 /home/pansapiens/LD11/screenshots/$(date +%F_%R).png >/dev/null 2>/dev/null

Converted to video with:

$ mogrify -format jpg -scale 840x526 *.png

$ mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=4 -o timelapse.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=800

Youtube timelapse video

Too fuzzy?? Try the high quality version here. (24 MB)
Music is a game remix of an amiga game, title: Nikamota - [Nicky Boom] Coming of Age(In the Club)

Here’s a time lapse of my desktop as I competed in Ludum Dare 11.

Here’s a youtube link.

I know, the screenshots got cropped. The program I was using to grab them wasn’t grabbing the whole screen. Sorry about that.

And yes, there’s a whole lot of downtime in there. I’m married and I have three kids. My wife made a pithy comment about my participation, which you can see in the video.

You can download a higher-quality version here.