{"author_name":"ciw1973","cat":"LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008","comments":[],"epoch":1208690460,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"75146","p_author":"ciw1973","p_authorkey":"35","p_urlkey":"110978","p_title":"Well, I have something started","p_cat":"LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008","p_event":"LD11","p_time":"1208690460","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"35","us_name":"ciw1973","us_username":"ciw1973","event_start":"1208476800","event_key":"87","event_name":"LD11"},"text":"<p>I&#8217;d decided before the competition got under way that I wasn&#8217;t going to be have time to actually compete, and that I was going to use the weekend as an opportunity to get back up to speed with C++ after a break of around 10 years, but with the theme being &#8220;minimalism&#8221; it was just too tempting to give it a go.<\/p>\n <p>I certainly wasn&#8217;t going to have enough time to put together a decent original game in the 8 hours or so I could reasonably expect to have, and if I was going to do minimalism properly, the .EXE should be as small as possible and require no external libraries, and ideally no external resources either.<\/p>\n <p>I came up with two ideas which I thought would fit the bill:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>A version of the Atari 2600 classic &#8220;Yar&#8217;s Revenge&#8221;.<\/li>\n <li>A version of the VIC20\/C64 Jeff Minter classic &#8220;Gridrunner&#8221;.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>I opted for the second idea as it was a game I played to death back in the day, and promptly spent 5 hours last night (going to bed at 4.30am) arsing around sketching on graph paper and putting together simple animations using OpenGL primitives. Still, I now have all the graphics I&#8217;m going to need generated in code, plus a basic framework handling game state and properly timed animation. All that&#8217;s left is writing the actual game, but I&#8217;m hoping that I&#8217;ll get 5 or 6 hours tonight which should be enough for something this simple.<\/p>\n <p>After feeding it through UPX my current .EXE comes in at 13k (down from around 27k uncompressed) which I&#8217;m quite happy with, as it&#8217;s just game logic which needs to be added. Fingers crossed I&#8217;ll be able to submit something which is playable and finished at a basic level in under 15k.<\/p>\n <p>I&#8217;m only just back in now after being out since first thing this morning and have a pile of urgent things to do before I&#8217;ll have chance to do any more coding, but will try and get a screenshot or two posted up before I head back out.<\/p>","time":"April 20th, 2008 6:21 am","title":"Well, I have something started"}