{"author_name":"pansapiens","cat":"MiniLD","comments":[{"author_name":"nilsf","time":"November 9, 2008 4:11 am","epoch":1226221860,"text":"Superb ending! \ud83d\ude00","spam":"N"},{"author_name":"","time":"November 9, 2008 8:32 am","epoch":1226237520,"text":"Nice… this seems to be the LD for disturbing games. You know you can cheat by just leaving the screen in windowed mode!","spam":"N"},{"author_name":"ArmchairArmada","time":"November 9, 2008 2:13 pm","epoch":1226257980,"text":"I probably deserved what I got in the end. I cheated the whole way through the game. In windowed mode you can teleport by simply moving off the window.","spam":"N"},{"author_name":"","time":"November 9, 2008 10:14 pm","epoch":1226286840,"text":"Hah! I’m honored! And I love your cover! The graphics are pretty scary and trippy.","spam":"N"},{"author_name":"","time":"November 10, 2008 1:00 am","epoch":1226296800,"text":"Hmm … you know I wasn’t that sneaky in my testing and didn’t even notice that obvious teleport exploit (*blush*) \":)\" … it’s actually a nice test of simple lateral thinking (I failed). I guess I should make ‘electric’ edges or something ….","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1226209260,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"74483","p_author":"pansapiens","p_authorkey":"198","p_urlkey":"110315","p_title":"maximalist: a cover of GBGames LD#11 \u2018minimalist\u2019 minigame","p_cat":"MiniLD","p_event":"LD13","p_time":"1226209260","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"5","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"198","us_name":"pansapiens","us_username":"pansapiens","event_start":"1228435200","event_key":"92","event_name":"LD13"},"text":"

Here’s my entry for mini-LD#5.<\/p>\n

It’s a cover of GBGames LD#11 entry, ‘minimalist’; turned evil. I like to think of it as a minimalist survival horror.<\/p>\n

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You can download maximalist and read more details here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There is a gameplay video here<\/a> … but it leaves off the surprise ending, so you still have to play the game :).<\/p>\n

The goal is to complete 25 levels an achieve the highest score possible.
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Libraries used:<\/strong> Pygame, Rabbyt (including the pygame_font.py font rendering code), my (alpha) simplemenu library.<\/a><\/p>\n

Tools used:<\/strong> The Gimp, Sfxr<\/a> (DrPetter saves the day, yet again), Audacity, oggenc<\/p>\n

I used a scanner to ‘photograph’ various objects around the house (including myself) to provide source images for further manipulation.<\/p>\n

Assests:<\/strong> “Squealer” font by Ray Larabie, A scan of my face, A scan of a carved wooden ‘skull’ box on my desk, some hand drawn sprites (exit and glowstick), me screaming into the microphone.<\/p>\n

Things I learned<\/h3>\n

Rendering fonts using the Rabbyt library is a little ugly unless you are using Pyglet for textures. I was using Pygame, so while I was able to use the pygame_font.py<\/em> code which comes with Rabbyt to render fonts, it just felt wrong<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Source control (SVN) saved my butt this time. I was happily coding away, when I realized a few revisions ago the game performance had really dropped … constant slowdowns and jitters. I checked out copies of several revisions back and tested them to see at which revision things started to go all sluggish. Then, looking at the svn diffs (using Trac), I could see that it was my implementation of the score rendering code that was the likely culprit. Sure enough, making some sensible changes fixed the slowdowns … silky smooth gameplay again \":)\"<\/p>\n

I also learned that I perform better when I’m more relaxed … I deliberately choose a very simple game to ‘cover’ so I could focus more on graphics and polish, and I wasn’t even fully committed to completing the game this weekend. Taking a laid back approach really helped (at least it felt<\/em> better).<\/p>\n \n

Tags: cover<\/a>, final<\/a>, horror<\/a><\/p>","time":"November 9th, 2008 12:41 am","title":"maximalist: a cover of GBGames LD#11 \u2018minimalist\u2019 minigame"}