About the submission:<\/p>\n
The owliver.love file is really a renamed zip. If you unzip it, you’ll find inside:
\n – the Lua sources
\n – the images
\n – the sounds
\n – the three musics<\/p>\n
So: archive, check; source code, check.
\n Custom library code: none. Everything is either the L\u00f6ve engine, or code written during the compo.<\/p>\n
List of tools and libraries:<\/p>\n
– As stated before, the L\u00f6ve game engine (a Lua wrapper for SDL). Awesome stuff. Never coded things that fast. In fact, it’s almost magical. Idea -> code -> working feature. Of course, there are always a few bugs you have to correct, but the power you feel in your hands is really amazing. Lua is amazing anyway. When you need something, just make a table. It always works ;\u00b0)<\/p>\n
– Text editor: gEdit, with autocompletion and symbol browser plugins. Plus, of course, built-in syntax coloring.<\/p>\n
– Compilator: none, this is Lua! (ah!) Save your Lua file, and rerun the game from the closest console. In fact, when L\u00f6ve detects a crash, it doesn’t quit, but instead goes in crash mode. A “restart” button is available so you don’t even have to do “up arrow + enter” in the terminal, once the bug corrected. You gotta love L\u00f6ve.<\/p>\n
– Graphics. For the levels: pencil, paper, sharp marker pen to increase contrast, scanner, Inkscape to vectorize, resize, re-bitmapize, GIMP to colorize. And for the ingame thingies and text, Inkscape. For the intro screen text, made a screenshot of text in Abiword, then included with the guy in Inkscape.<\/p>\n
– Level making: hand coded in the source. But made extensive use of Inkscape to get coordinates of stuff. I drew rectangles and dots in Inkscape, read their coordinates there, copied them in the level files. Them during level loading, the coordinates are converted into game coordinates. I supposed it could have been even better to parse the SVG files, but no time to explore this.<\/p>\n
– Sound… I made all audio during the last hour… Sounds are all randomly generated with the great sfxr, in about 7 minutes. Music is made with ZynSubAddFX, a marvelous synthetisor for Linux, and QSynth, a soundfont player. Both apps controlled with my MIDI keyboard. Drums are from Hydrogen (awesome drums app for Linux), and the “mixing” is done in Audacity.<\/p>\n
Additionnal things:<\/p>\n
– IRC with X-Chat
\n – Timelapse video capture with two shell scripts:<\/p>\n
while true; do scrot -e ‘convert $f -resize 50% $f.jpg; rm -f $f’ & sleep 20; done<\/p>\n
and<\/p>\n
mencoder “mf:\/\/*.jpg” -mf fps=10 -o timelapse.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=900<\/p>\n
– Far too many motivational posters with http:\/\/wigflip.com\/automotivator\/
\n – Photos with my Kodak EasyShare C713 (stupid battery charger that I can’t find…)
\n – Everything done on a GNU\/Linux machine running Ubuntu 8.04, except scanning the levels, since the scanner is plugged to the family’s MacMini.
\n – The pizza! I’ve been asked several times what kind of pizza it is. I sure looks good, but well… Just a pizza \ud83d\ude00 So, it’s a Buitoni “Four \u00e0 pierre” Royale. I don’t know if the name is the same outside France, though.<\/p>\n
I don’t see anything else to add yet. I’ll work on the postmortem now.<\/p>\n \n
Tags: makingof<\/a><\/p>","time":"August 11th, 2008 1:31 pm","title":"Making of (kind of\u2026)"}