Whoo! I finally got something on the screen — check it. — Of course this may be all I enter in.

Keith

Supposedly my posts will show up on the ld blog, i’m not sure if that is so, but we will see. I’m not promising i’ll do anything, but we shall see.

Keith

The latest Ludum Dare 48-Hour Game Development Contest is now on! The theme has been announced, and it is "Minimalist". So yeah, I'm not sure what I'm doing with that. Should be an exciting, if minimal, weekend.

It’s that time again!  The ludumdare 48 tests your game making mettle.

Well, the competition just started and the theme is “minimalist”.  Hrmmm.

Akiko is providing logistical support in the form of delicious meals which will also be documented.

You can watch my (lack of?) progress in real time here!

Woo! In a few mere hours, the 11th Ludum Dare game development competition is starting again!
This is a hectic time for gamedev compos, as the judging for Pyweek isn’t even over yet and we’re already starting on another one! Har.
I’m looking forward to this one, hopefully I can finish up all my Pyweek judging before Ludum Dare starts. It’s especially exciting because this Ludum Dare competition will be occurring during my birthday! Hooray!

Once again, the theme “Kittens” was voted out. *a big sad panda face*. Oh well, the final themes are usually pretty good, so I’m not too worried.

In addition, Ludum Dare has an optional “Timelapse Challenge” where you post a timelapse movie of yourself developing your game. If I can get my webcam working, I’m definitely going to participate in that. There is also a challenge to document everything you eat, using pictures, but I think I’ll probably sit that one out as my digital camera is out of commission.

Post a comment!

Well I’ve got a project i need to write something in Haskell for, don’t ask why. Coincidently it lines up nicely with LD 11 so I’ll be killing two birds with one stone. Of course I’ll be making a text adventure, something I’ve never done before, so I doubt this will go well. Of course, If I don’t get the time to make the binaries, no one will play it anyway. I mean, it’s haskell!

I thought I’d hop on the motivational poster bandwagon.

Actually I’m just kidding. I’ve decided to transfer control over to SteelGolem.

So another weekend and more pain! :D I threw this together from some of my old art

So soon, it's another one! Forget my crazy idea of actually doing complex code work and implementing a map-based chocolate lake. I have fine-tuned the amoeba, and I like him.



He's got eyes now! The eyes always move to the center of mass. Of course, he's an albino at the moment, but again I must remind you that I don't have artwork yet, so he's made of snowballs and has Bonehead-bullets for eyes. He's a giant creepy friend that follows you around. I'm going to make him chase down enemies instead, but he is of course very slow moving. You can constantly add to his size by spewing your Oozinator, but there's a limit (actually, it removes the oldest blobs as you fire new ones beyond the limit, so you don't actually have to stop spewing) to keep it from chewing up all the available bullets. I think a good thing to have upgrade with levels is in fact that limit. When it's low, he can't be very big, but with the limit I have set right now, he can cover about 2/3 of the screen. Of course, the blobs only live so long, so you have to constantly fuel him if you want that size.

The name I have for this weapon is The Oozinator, but in order to get both winning weapons in the game, and for logical reasons, I am going to have it replace an existing weapon - The Fonduethrower. So that's an issue... Fonduethrower is also a really good name for this weapon! The amoeba is obviously made of fondue. But I do really like Oozinator. Anyway, the Fonduethrower was originally a shotgun, but since I also have a "spread shot" weapon, which is basically a shotgun with long range, I figure it could go (but I think I'll shotgunnify that other weapon, because the slow, big blast of a shotgun is more fun than the usual rapid-fire spread shot). I had actually already made the model for the Fonduethrower, and it is perfect for the Oozinator as well, so good luck on that one.

An amoeba gun! You don't see that in Ratchet & Clank. It's a pretty far cry from Varkarrus' original Chocotsunami, but I did say your goal was to inspire me, right? And who can complain about an amoeba gun?

I got to work trying to make the Oozinator (aka the Chocotsunami) work in a fun and interesting way... here was my initial attempt:



Obviously, first off, I don't have chocolate blob graphics, so I just used the big white snowball (what Snowguys throw) as a test, figuring it was big enough to cover the area well. The results are unimpressive. It is quite fun to spew out an ocean of blobs, but they really don't have any semblance of cohesiveness or liquidity (hmmm... that makes me realize I never made them attracted to each other, only repelled to keep the lake growing. I wonder how it would be if they were attracted as well). It just looks like golf balls scattering. I suppose some of that would be improved with the different graphics, but you still get things like the left edge of the picture here, where individual blobs have dashed off from the main shape. And of course the entire shape is full of holes in various places. It really just doesn't do the job.

Wow, I just tried some basic cohesiveness code (had blobs that are further away than they should be get pulled towards each other slightly), and now it's not a lake of chocolate at all... it's an evil chocolate amoeba. You throw down some and it makes a jiggly amoeba, then you throw some more, and the amoeba rushes over to engulf the new food. That might actually be a pretty cool weapon in its own right. It's quite amusing to watch. If I added that it follows you around, it could be really entertaining. Right now, you can drag it around by firing a little bit more. It's an enormous waste of bullets, though. It fires hundreds in a matter of seconds, and they linger for about 10 seconds each.

Tomorrow, I'm going to try a whole new approach not involving bullets at all, but rather an effect on the map, much like the darkness in Supreme. That gets a little more technical, but it solves the issue of how I used up the entire bullet supply in about 10 seconds of continuous firing with this weapon.

Happyponygate is all about the community. We started off with submitting buildings to go in the city (I still haven't implemented a way to get them in, but it will happen!). Then it was time for the community to invent weapons to go in the game. That contest just ended, and I couldn't decide between the top two entries. I'm a little worried about the technical issues that one of them could cause, so depending on how it works out, I will either include a weapon that spews chocolate that spreads into a giant lake (by Varkarrus), or one that launches blocks of chocolate to use as barriers (by Ducky).

The other half of that contest, naming the weapon, didn't go as well. Unfortunately, there's a very specific style to how I've named the weapons, which you of course don't know outside of the H.R. Puffencrush and Licorice Whip (which really are both pretty much the least representative examples of the style), so nobody really came up with names that follow the style I am looking for, or at least nobody made ones that match it and at the same time fit the weapons that ended up winning! My sister suggested the name Ooze Ray which I really like for the chocolate lake gun (or actually Oozinator might be preferred...), and I don't know yet for the chocolate block gun.

But I should also mention the third winner of the contest, TyTBone, who did win for his name "The Kiss Of Death". It won't be the name of a weapon, but I have a great place to use it!

Which all leads us to the next bit of community input - the Monster Contest! Now you get to design one of the wacky minions of the Happy Ponies. I have one more contest in mind, and then hopefully I will also be able to do DumbFM like I have considered, which will mean a final giant funtest to wrap it all up. If I can come up with anything else for people to be submitting, I'll add that too. This is going to be the most community-driven game yet!

For those that didn't have time for pyweek (like me) - there is the ludumdare game development competition.

The ludumdare competition is similar to pyweek - it's what inspired pyweek.

The main differences are it's more "from scratch", it is only one weekend, and you have to do everything yourself - no teams. Also you can use any language - not just python, and everyone can select themes over three voting rounds.

The main idea is that One has to do all parts of game development - art, coding, sound, music etc, and to concentrate on the design of the game - rather than building engines. So it's a short burst of creativity, and junk food eating - with around 100 other people at the same time making their own games.


(img by MrFun).


LD 11 :: Weekend of April 18-20 - Currently doing round 2 of theme voting.

Hey, this is the last day to get an entry in for the Happyponygate Weapon Mini-Contest. Sometime tomorrowish (so okay, you have some of tomorrow too), it will be closed for all eternity! So take this opportunity to express your inner Oppenheimer by developing a chocolate-based weapon of mass destruction. I'm looking for that one perfect device, so the more the better! There's no limit on entries per person, so keep 'em coming. You may win with just a name, so get in there and get describing!

I’ll get back to the series eventually. I was expecting to work and talk about new engine stuffs. Between some spontaneous stuff, taxes, and a week of illness, I’ve not touched anything “next” since early last month. In other news, Ludum Dare 11 is this Friday. I’ve been too busy to really get [...]

$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head
269   ls
253   cd
182   kate
50   cp
48   svn
43   mkdir
23   mv
21   grep
16   gqview
13   python

A client of mine hosted with cihost recently had an outage.  (Which hasn’t ended.)  They want to move their dedicated server elsewhere.  Any suggestions?  I’ve done plenty of googling for stuff, but really, personal rec’s carry way more weight for me.  We want a host that:

• linux (LAMP stuff)
• e-mail server
• has excellent uptime
• can manage backups
• has excellent support
• can manage security
• is able to deal with a crisis (say, a backhoe digs up their fiber, they are able to get your server running somehow within half a day)

Which I suppose aren’t really extravagant demands, but anyway .. I’d appreciate any recommendations you can offer.  The hosting is for a U.S. based company, so we’ll want a host with data centers here.

Please don’t bother responding with a rec if you haven’t personally been with said host for at least 3 years.

Here’s some art that I made for my team’s pyweek 6 entry. I’ll post a postmortem after the judging is over. The time, the theme was ‘robot’.
Click to make the pictures bigger. Om nom.

Still doing artwork, having done up a couple of bullet graphics today. That may not sound like much, but after I did a couple bullets that require actual 3D models (one of which required a complete set of animations, hmm what could it be!?), I set to work on one that is based entirely in code instead. I always like to be all secretive, but it's so fun and exciting that I must share!

You see, originally, one of the weapons was the Licorice Laser. It's a homing red laser beam (yes, in video games, laser beams can home in - try Forgotten Worlds sometime). That's not really that exciting, just a constant stream of damage to one target without you doing any aiming. But last night, I had an epiphany of obviousness. Probably it helped that I had just played Ratchet 3 and got to flail around with a Plasma Whip, but I got to thinking for whatever reason, and the result is:

The Licorice Whip!

How did I not think of that name originally!? Now, it's still technically a laser as you can see (and you can also see that it is coming out of the H.R. Puffencrush at the moment), but it functions... well, not like a whip at all, but like something weird. It's very fun to use. It heads toward your cursor, so you can whip it all around the screen, and as shown in the picture, it doesn't just follow it in a straight line, it swoops all around like a rope. It looks infinitely better in motion, but for now you have to settle for pictures. It also looks a lot less angular in motion, quite sinuous in fact (unless you move really fast). It's quite jiggly too, more like a jello whip than a licorice whip, but that's exactly how I wanted it. I spent an hour tuning the numbers until it was just jiggly enough.

In the left shot, I've been swirling the cursor in circles, so the whip is making rings that pulse down the line, much like spinning a rope in real life. And speaking of ropes, the whip is not just some abstract beam, it's a physical part of the world, hence the right-hand shot - I have roped a tree! It's actually pretty hard to wrap it around things, and it can slip through, but it achieves its desired purpose: you can't hit guys through walls with it.

So in the end, it's pretty much the same effect as the original idea - you can hold it on a badguy to constantly do damage, but it's way more fun this way, and you can really cover a lot of the screen with it if you flail it around wildly. It's mesmerizing. You know you've got a good weapon when it's fun just to swing it around without any badguys. And I suspect quite a few players will do exactly that when they first get this weapon, so I am very happy with it.

This whole thing turned out amazingly well on almost the first try. That's the kind of thing that makes me enjoy making games. So much nicer than the things that never come out right at all...

Hello world!

I’m really excited to announce the first release of IndieLib game engine. It has been a lot of hard work for several years in which I have been working in this project. What started like a hobby has become in a quite robust 2d engine that I think can be useful for the gamming community, specially for the indie game developers. Because of that I want to offer it to all you for free, hopefully it will be useful for some of you.

The main purpose of IndieLib is to make the things easier for the game developer, specially for those of you that love trying new game mechanics and fast game prototyping. I was really shocked for that brave guys of the Experimental Gameplay Project and the things that I see everyday in TigSource. After seeing what these developers were able to do in just one week, I decided to start working again in and old project called LooverLib and to try to pack in the same engine lot of useful features for being able to make games really quickly using c++. What I wanted was that anybody that know a little of programming would be able to give expression to their ideas faster and easily. I know this first release hasn’t accomplished completly this purpose, but I hope to be in the correct way.

IndieLib is a c++ 2.5d engine for game development and fast game prototyping in a really easy way. Internally it uses Direct3d for hardware acceleration, but doesn’t use DirectDraw or ID3DXSprite, it directly draws textures on polygons. The engine is focused in fast 2d rendering, but also allows you to use 3d models. You can read the main features of IndieLib in the FAQ.

Do you want to see the engine in action? Well, you can just check some screenshots or to download the IndieLib_1.0_SDK and to run the tutorials that are already compiled and ready to try.

But an engine is nothing without documentation. For that, I spent lot, lot of hours documenting all the methods and making some tutorials (more will come along these months):
- Api Reference
- Wiki tutorials

I really hope that the engine will be useful for some of you and that you will make incredible games using it. I invite all you to join our forum, and I would be really happy if some of you want to contribute helping me.

Just click and download the IndieLib_1.0_SDK and start making games!

Regards,
Javier López

Well, I did artwork today, and that's the first thing I did. I don't know that it's the most productive thing to work on, but it was a lot of fun. I used a CD case I have for reference. The viewer can try to figure out exactly what case that is. The actual title screen will have those "runes" orbiting the pony head, not just sitting there. It'd be fun if the menu options did that too, but they'll probably just pop in from the side or something.

In terms of useful artwork, I didn't actually get a lot done. It turns out that creating fancy high-tech weapons takes a while. I wasn't working slowly or anything, it's just a lot to do. So I got 3 of the weapons modeled, and the 'ammunition' for one of them (because that weapon has its ammunition sticking halfway out of the barrel, so I needed to do that to make sure it matched). It's the most interesting and detailed ammunition in the game, it took longer to make than any of the guns I made. That should make you curious!

I've been having fun with making the weapons physically different. The 3 I made today, one is held like a normal gun (though a second hand is definitely needed to steady it, as it's enormous), one is upside-down like the Heavy Weapons Guy gun in Team Fortress (the handle is on top, as is a second handle for your other hand), and the third is shoulder-mounted. Of course, I think that covers all of the possible ways to hold a gun, so unless I decide one of them will be strapped to your head, they'll all be rehashes from here on out. Maybe I should do one that mounts across your waist like a steadicam. Or a backpack with two barrels coming out over your shoulders. We'll just have to see, because I've only done concept art on one of the other weapons.

I'm definitely trying to make them all enormous and look ridiculous. It's a little tricky because you run into trouble trying to get Bouapha to hold them. His first hand going on the trigger is fine, but when the gun is really big, getting his other arm somewhere to support tends to involve stretching that arm in a bad way. That's why the Puffencrush that's in the game now isn't nearly as big as I would like. I had to shrink it down so he could reach the second grip.

1. The only bit I remember from that conversation is all the stuff about Canadian global domination.  Let me tell you, if Mike Fletcher has his way, we’re doomed!  (Maybe we’re doomed either way, but be sure your passport is ready when we have to head north!)
2. I remember peaking into the pycon-dev room at one point and Doug was giving a lecture on menu structures in websites.  He said the pycon navigation was stored completely independently of all the modules used by pycon.  I think that’s great.  I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
3. I do most all my dev at home on my linux system.  My laptop last year was loaded with XP and I found it painful to do work on at pycon.  So this year, the day before pycon, I loaded it up with Ubuntu.  Which was a mistake.  It *sort* of worked, in a kind of the network didn’t exactly always work and the video driver didn’t always work .. and then it got worse .. but I won’t name names
4. Which brings me to two happier points, which are points 5 and 6 in this list.
5. Sean was quite swell and set me up a personal hard-line during the sprints when I needed to get some work done :)  Yay!
6. I was told about PyPE, which is a nifty python editor for windows :)  I’m having to do some win32 dev lately (see previous post), so having that on hand is great!  I like it.  I was able to do about 5 hours of dev on it this evening, and I think the main complaint I had was I was using a laptop keyboard.  If you like kate, this is the editor for you.

Today, I will admit to being unproductive, so in an effort to find some way to be productive, I came up with an interesting twist. I went out to the living room, dug through my PS2 games, and found every one that works as motivation/inspiration/research/rip-off material for Happyponygate, and I fired them up and played a bit. Here's what I played:

• Simpsons: Hit & Run - I was looking at how driving went, but the general notion of driving around and then hopping out to do missions was appropriate. I think it helped me a little thinking about the driving, even though they obviously have a fully implemented physics simulation for their driving (and let me tell you, there is not a lot of stuff on the web - or at least not easy to find - about coding car physics). I'm definitely going to take a simpler road on that, but little concepts like "you turn faster while braking" are certainly the kind of general rule you can take from a complex physics simulation and turn into a very simple arcade rule.
  
  
• Ratchet & Clank 2 - In this game, it turns out, your weapons only level up once! Well, I remember buying golden weapons or something later on back when I played it, but leveling them up doesn't go through a bunch of ranks. It just goes up to full, and it's done. Which is crazy, because I played for about 15 minutes and managed to level up 2 of the 3 weapons I had!
  
  
• Ratchet & Clank 3 - This game, on the other hand, has (I think) 99 levels per weapon. Or maybe you only get up to V9 in the normal game, then go up to 99 in the second run-through. Ratchet games do a great job of making a second play worthwhile, let me tell you. Anyway, it is much more appropriate with its leveling. But the real thing I got out of both Ratchet games I played was something I hadn't even thought about, but is so obvious in retrospect! You can smash objects all over the place in these games, and it's just fun! So here's a whole new angle to Happyponygate, officially. Almost every item around is going to be destroyable, and destroying them will make Loonies (that's money, not Dr. Lunatic) go flying everywhere to pick up. It's two great tastes that taste great together - wholesale destruction, and collecting shiny objects.

I had Midway Arcade Treasures handy too, for checking out Super Sprint, but I didn't actually try it yet. Seems an appropriate choice - top down 2D driving!

So right now what I am doing is formulating a depressingly large art asset list, so I know what I need to create for this game. It's nothing like Sleepless Hollow, unfortunately. Everything in this game is new (well, maybe I can borrow LL2's teddy bears...), and an entire game's worth of art from scratch is an insane amount of work. One of the things of course is to come up with lots of random objects that can be scattered around town to smash - I've already got trash cans, dumpsters, mailboxes (official ones - haven't made normal house ones yet), streetlights and phone booths. I'll need other things... newspaper racks, benches, bus stops, bushes, fire hydrants. I don't know what else, but lots of assorted town things you can smash for spare change.

Are there any adaptors for the various python database ORM models?

For example SQLObject Storm mother ORM django ORM SQLAlchemy GeniusSQL, etc.

It seems this might be a good way to reuse some models, and code for those models.

For example, say there was a SQLAlchemy Django ORM adaptor, then pylons, django, and turbogears could more easily inter operate.

Then if an adaptor for SQLObject SQLAlchemy was made SQLObject could then use the SQLAlchemy django ORM adaptor.

I guess at this point, sharing at the database level makes more sense.


update: http://code.google.com/p/django-sqlalchemy/ seems to be a work-in-progress "project to create SQLAlchemy mapping of Django models onto a SQLAlchemy backend".

Weekend of Code

All aboard the fail-train. We got a few submissions but it seems the cholate confusion meant this WOC failed. I got a few entries from the regulars but the final years were too busy, fair enough. The second years on the whole display no motivation to make games, expected. The first years however have no excuse!!

Well here is my little project, I'm currently converting it to GameCube cause I liked the little game so much I'm making it my semester project for the cube.

Version 0.9

In Other News: SUCCESS!!

Yes folks after all the hard work I finally work in the games industry. I've got a job at Mere Mortals. I was in a wonderful position where three companies were intrested and I got a choice. Overall I'm on the top of the moon.

Its all very scary but I'll try as soon as possible to get another podcast up as soon as possible but understandably I'm really busy.

So I will see you all and you will see that HARD WORK PAYS OFF! I'm finally after years and years, during my third degree and after all the work I have broken in.

Now just to prove myself.... no I dont wake up daily terrified..... what I dont....... I will succeed..... no really........ shit I'm late for work!