This is my first time participating in a Ludum Dare event. I’m hoping to have fun and do well, but it’s not starting well, as life seems to hate me. I slept in by an hour today, all my new professors are either idiots or assholes and I almost had car crash during drivers school today ( even though it wasn’t my fault)

I might have to go for the jam, as unfortunately, I am away all sunday morning/noon, which is ,I believe, right when time runs out.

Anyways, I will be using

Python withPygamefor the programming

Pain.net for the graphics

and sfxr or maybe self recorded stuff for noises.

No idea what to do about the music, I started a little synthesiser program a while ago, but I didn’t finish it. If I’ll finish it in the time remaining, I will post it here so you can use it as well

Good , but not too good 😉  ,  luck to everybody

To summarise the results of Day One, I can just agree that you are either developing a game or an engin.

I really should have started with some kind of framework instead of starting from scrap. I spend full five hours to make some tiles of the tileset appear on the screen. I was close to smashing my Laptop before I realised that i blited every tile in every position. And I was already wondering why it was running so slow, but obviously blitting 16 000 tiles at the screen is  a big diffrence from just 400 D:

Have no pictures of a working version to show, but the Idea is that you are leading a group of people colonising a planet under it’s Surface. Earth was destroyed and a navigation mistake brought them there. The planets surface so high in solar rays that it is unlivable.

You have to breed your humans wisely so that they don’t eat too much food, but can still work and are intelligent enaugh to not accidently kill themselves at work. You have to supply them with food, vitamins, shelter and energy while  keeping them away from poisonous Minerals and Magma chambers. If you breed malnourished humans, humans with bad stats or inbreed too much you will end up with a pile of degenerated retards. At least thats the plan.

After 5 hours of fixing a none existant bug I have finally found the bug that bugged up my movement code. I search my code countless times and revised and cleaned it entirly. No reason for the bug inside. After using the console for debugging I found that pygames collision detection only worked every third frame.  Some other image related modules messed up as well. I could not find a solution to this, so after all those hours I finally decided to move on and be able to release at least something, be it buggy or not. I finally added the time related events and as soon as I wrote the last character of Clock() it stuck me like a lightning. NO WAY o_o ! Could it Be O_O?!  I set the framerate to 60 and started the programm. EVERYTHING WORKED FINE! I just wasted 5 hours on a non existing bug, revising and rewriting all of the 400 lines I already had. Added 20 lines here, 20 lines there and removed them again because they fixed nothing.

But at the  same time I was really happy to have found the bug. It all had its upsides as well. My codebase is now perfectly tidy, dense and clean.

I will post some pics as soon as the first part of the gameplay is finished.

Good luck to all of you, especially to all the others struggeling with bugs 😉

First off: I will definitely not finish the game in time for the compo.

Python seems to hate me and slaps every mistake I make on my brain until I am close to crying from frustration, but then it’s like “Lol, just kidding” and I find the mistake 10 seconds after I decided to give up and call it a day. Very educational, but it gives me a headache and slows down my progress.

Anyways, here’s the first, really shitty screenshot

(or at least I hope it is, because apparently I can’t insert images)

This will be my 2.5th Ludum Dare. The first one I wasn’t good enaugh to programm anything usefull, so I didn’t submit(half one), and last LD I wanted to participate, but couldn’t long enaugh. Just imagine, there were people wanting to meet me in real life. Familiy, Friends Birthday etc. Just imagine: human contact D: yuk!  This time I have held the LD weekend free, so I’ll participate.

Now to the business part of things:

-I will train by writing the tools I want’t to use. Hopefully the extra practice will help me, but it will at least refresh my memory of the librarys. I’m trying to make a small buttons library for pygame (Python SDL Binding) and/or pyglet (Python OpenGL port +  other fancy stuff) and use it to make a simple tile editor and a tiny tool to synthesize some music. I know pygame way better, but you can only rotate sprites in pyglet -_-

-I will try to make a warmup game, but only if I finish those tools first

-An advice to myself and to everyone else: Don’t write complicated code because you think it’s clever and short, then end up debugging and ‘why u no work!!’ it  for longer than the simpler, longer code would have taken. Basicly sums up my entire last Ludum Dare

-Tools and Stuff:

-CPython 3.2

-Eclipse + pydev as IDE

-paint.net for graphics

-pygame,pyglet and the standart library

-possibly my own tools

Well that’s it, wish you all a nice LD, bye

Allmost everything is working more or less now, but I don’t have a single enemy/level/attack animation/mission so it’s pretty pointless to try to do that in the remaining time. I will try to come a bit further today and see what I can do before the jam ends, but I’m writing a 3 hour long exam tomorrow at 7.50 am and I still haven’t read the entire book the exam is going to be about. I want to rather get enaugh sleep than work all night on the game ( competition ends at aproximatly 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning in my timezone) but I wish everybody good luck who is still trying.

Today after training i showered, went to the pc, and while starting firefox, i thought ” I wonder when the next LD is going to be? It should be in May right? Better look it up, but

4 hours left

:O

Shit

No time to prepare, no time to learn new tricks, so my tools will be the same as usual:

Python in PyDev(Eclipse)

pygame and pyglet for graphics, sound, keyboard etc.

probably gimp for graphics and mypaint (great program) to use my new graphics tablet

Since my plans never work out and I work better under a little pressure anyway its maybe even better I couldn’t prepare. My last about three LDs failed horribly, two due to weird bugs and one becaus of a lack of ideas. Evolution sounded nice but I just could’t come up with any ideas. Thats why I only upvoted themes this time if could come up with something right away.

Anyways, wishing everybody good luck and a happy failture to myself

This may not look like much, but I ALLWAYS get stuck on a little unnoticable mistake when I go into a LD. It has happend 4 TIMES (!!) already, but this time I cought it early.

Pygame can be a bitch. Rect(size, location) != Rect(location, size) ;D

It’s the little things that matter, I was already furious about the odd placement of all the objects

Did I already mention I’m in? No I didn’t. Totally forgot:

Language: Python 3.2

Graphics(& and Sound hopefully): Pygame

Sprites and stuff: Paint.NET

Programming in: Eclipse with PyDev

Like I said, it does not look like much, but this little Testscreen means my little Graphics-engine-level-and-item-loader-thing is finished and working!

Good luck to everyone reading this 😉

I haven’t said this till now but: I’m in. Sight. Again. Started like five times already, never finished anything.

For anyone who really cares: Python 3.2, Pygame, Paint.NET, maybe something for the music later

Now for the interesting part:

Even though I never finished anything before, this time around I have gotten pretty far. I dislike the theme, but I had a good idea, so I am have my destination already set.

I don’t want to spoil too much, but it involves an open(automatic chunkloading:check), a procedurally generated world(Perlin Noise and terrain generator: check), knights(check) and castles (no check    ) I am really proud of what I achieved today even though I was still sleeping the first six hours (LD starts at 2:00am here) and a request for help (Stepfather: can u pls help me for an hour. pls? 3.5 hours later….) kind of took longer than expected.

WORK DONE:

1.  I have implemented a working rendering engine and a working collision detection, which stoped me from finishing the first three or so times
2. I have written a generator that gives me new chunks on demand.
3. I have pixeled the most important things in a “good-enaugh” kind of fashion, so I don’t have to worry about that for now

WHAT I LEARNED UP UNTILL NOW:

1. Generating a 4400*4400 Perlin Noise array is not a good idea with an unoptimised algorythm in an interpreted language 😀
2. Pygame.Rects don’t like to be deepcopy()ed
3. Pygame.Surfaces don’t like to be deepcopy()ed
4. Pygame does not like copy.deepcopy()
5. PYGAME DOES NOT LIKE COPY.DEEPCOPY()

TODO:

1. Remove all remaining lines containing deepcopy that stop me from getting a showable resul
2. Enemys
3. Weapons
4. Fog(shouldn’t be more than half an hour)
5. Types
6. Castles
7. Special Abilities
8. Soundeffects and maybe some music. Might fool around with the Chuck Programming Language again (Procedual Sounds and whatnot), but if time is short, I will use some other tools. Probably the one everyone is using to generate soundeffects
9. Become insane becaus Hotline Miami OST is playing on repeat

Should better go back to work now, procastination way too much time making this post 😉

Since my last post, I have not gotten much further down my todo list, because I found a shortcut that literaly made my game more than 10 times faster. I also found out that completly regenerating and rerendering everything is faster than a single disk read, so my games savegame data is now extremly small instead of entire Megabytes. As an added side effect it also made speed up the game noticably and removed the awkward stuttering. Unfortunuatly said computing shortcut also contained a typo, flipping the entire chunk grid around like crazy everytime you entered a new chunk., which has cost me a LOT of time to find. Damn you x and y, why you look so similar!

But I introduced a screenshot button, so I’v got that going for me, which is nice 😉

I might have overdone it a little with the trees and the resources during the world generation process, so I will have to tweak that a bit 😀

My placeholder art is so ugly I want to cry, but I don’t have the time to do something better or something Isometric, so that will probably only change in the post-Compo version. Also, does anybody else want to cry when he sees all the awesome screenshots everybody updloaded D: ?

It has become almost like a running gag that there is allways something stopping me from finishing a Ludum Dare. Only twice the LD was NOT on one of the few weekends I didn’t have time. This time is just the same, though this time I might only loose the last few hours. The two times I did have unlimited time, I discovered undocumented pygame and SDL bugs stopping me in my tracks. But since this is the 30th LD, I will try to finally make a submission for once.

For the tools, same as allways:

Language: Python 3.4

IDE: eclipse with PyDev

Libraries: greenlet, pygame or pySDL2,  maybe (unlikely) pyopengl if I do something 3d

Music: Don’t know yet, maybe Chuck

graphics: Paint.net

other tools: Violet UML if I think a bit more structur could be helpful, cx_Freeze to freeze my code into a standalone for Windows, Mac and Linux

I have little hope to accomplish anything. I am starting the Dare this moment, with 14 hours gone allready, coding on a 6 year old dusted laptop. The videodriver just crashed as I am writing this. Tomorrow, I will not be able to code for another few hours. All those problems and I don’t even have an idea yet.

I will be honest: the theme sucks. hard. you can interpret the theme in a million ways, all of which make for either totally boring or very time consuming games. I am pushing myself to start, but I allready want to give up.

My Laptop just died out of nowhere. It claimed the harddrive was damaged and that a full check was needed. I did so, because it would not turn on when I chose not to. It took 1 hour. A few files could not be recovered. It were my project files. Fuck everything.

Fuck this Laptop and fuck this theme, which means everything and nothing at the same time, which is completly uninspiring.

Fuck my Ipod that just died forever, not turning on again. No more music.

Fuck the World.

Note to self: Potential theme for game

In my last post I told you that all my work was gone. It were only 5 hours because I coldn’t start earlier, but I knew the theme all along. In the first 12 hours I couldn’t come up with anything, because this theme means everyting and nothing at the same time. That’s because “Connected Worlds” is more of a broad concept than a theme. More than that, even if you count it as a theme, it is a very bad one. There are one trillion ways in which you could interpret this theme, and even more ways to make a game that somehow, in some way has something to do with connected worlds. The problem is that you could just about make any game and then somehow kind of fit it into the theme.

For me, a lot of the fun was allways in the tight constrains of the Compo, but this time, more so even than with the last themes, those constrains that allways spark creativity were meaningless. Thus, I have zero motivation to start anyting again, even less then in my earlyer posts.

And I know I’m not alone in this. I can tell from the frontpage posts, from all the “So I have this and don’t know what to do with it”, “maybe I will use it, maybe not, I don’t know” and the “I kind of have something that could fit the theme” ‘s

Thus, I want to ask you, the ten people that will find this post inside the compotime frontpage mess, to watch out at the next compo what themes you vote for. Please don’t let us reapeat this.