A couple of setbacks yesterday evening: Shortly after my previous post my ISP went down, making it rather difficult to look up reference documentation or other material, and causing me to waste a while on the phone to them making sure it was a known issue and not just me (since they hadn’t got around to updating their service status page). After that, my IDE spontaneously started flat out refusing to compile anything. I never figured out what was wrong and ended up just deleting and recreating all its project files.

However, I managed to get my first (and, for this game, only) baddie in place. In an extreme case of programmer art, my baddies are virulent green circles that represent bacteria. They don’t look like much in the screenshot, but when animated appear pleasingly organic en masse. I have them moving around and dividing, but not yet interacting with the player at all.

What remains is to glue it all together, get the left hand side of the screen talking to the right and find out if my game mechanic actually works. I had to learn a lot of new libraries yesterday (LibGDX’s TableLayout and Scene2D, Java’s MIDI classes and some details of the MIDI spec itself), whereas everything that remains to do is a bit more abstract, so I’m quietly confident about being able to submit something on time. I have no idea yet though whether it’s going to be fun to play.

I’m starting to really enjoy this and I’m very glad I decided to take part. I could have carried on for ages last night, but I made myself go to bed at about 11pm, and woke up before 6am today raring to go. Time for a quick breakfast & shower, then on with the coding…