Sort of!  The theme combination is… quite something this time around, isn’t it?  I think I will definitely try to make something upon the fields of Count Webula (praise be unto Its Tanglesome Visage lest it blight us with Janus’s Curse).

I didn’t get a chance to prepare a stack or do Warmup Weekend, and I haven’t used some of the Moderne Webbe stuff in ages and haven’t tried some of it at all—dare I go for, say, Haxe + WebSockets-based multiplayer with Erlang or Haskell on the backend?  Maybe!  Maybe.  … maybe.

Ad gloriam!

Phaser. Phaser. Don’t have a documentation site that has an enormous top bar that covers up half the page. I don’t know what you Real Frontend People use, but my monitor isn’t that tall. I can’t see half of what’s going on and I can’t scroll properly because this thing is in the way and the body text scrolls behind it. Come on. Wait a minute, maybe—okay, there we go, at least the local version seems less horrific.  But why would you make your public face look so much worse?

Why do you not support me providing a canvas element for you to draw on?  In fact it seems like you specifically don’t support it.  I wanted to prearrange some things in the DOM and use it for compositing, and now I can’t.  I want to make sure the canvas goes into the right place with CSS and now it’s that much more awkward to.  Come on.

Please don’t framework-foxtrot me.  I should be able to integrate existing things on rawer levels.

It’ll be fine.  I think.  I have some ideas for procedurally growing things with small ranges of inputs being able to guide them.  I really hope I make it to multiplayer.  Hmm.  nginx+Go?  YAWS?  I really wish I’d been able to do Warmup Weekend.  Sigh.

Hmm, soft paintery background art I think I can make if I want it, and I think I might—I’ve got Art Academy on my 3DS and I can export from that and that should be good enough if I don’t need good resolutions and I like the pigment simulations it uses.  Do I want pixel-y foreground art?  Do I want to use Csound for sound effects?  Do I even have a good pixel art editor around?  Where was that tools page again?

*work work work*

I only have a small amount of implementation, because I juggled ideas for most of the day (and got distracted by some other stuff).  Now it is sleep time.  After I wake: implementing WebSockets, first cuts of raw graphics, sketching out concrete technical design for deployment, and figuring out the details of game mechanics.  The idea I’ve basically settled on is similar to one I later saw in the post stream (but then lost track of, because everything moves so fast.  Sorry!): a multiplayer game with players controlling different stations within an assembly line of sorts.  The “Two button controls” part may make it in if I can make the stations all controlled thus, and the “Growing” part is intended to involve both the widgets as they move through the level, the expansion of the level area, the implied thematic growth of a business (and resultant speedups and complexity increases), and something else which I’m not revealing in blog form yet because I think it’ll work better as a semi-surprise (though I’ve already told a few people).

But now!  Sleep.  I shall hope that things will become clearer in my dreams.

Yesterday I wound up sleeping for about ten hours, which was a bit more than I expected.  Once I woke up, there was a lot of subsequent rain which made me lethargic for a while, and then I was hammering out concepts on paper and trying to make concept sketches of UI at a local coffeeshop (hampered by forgetting to bring my eraser—I was using physical pencils for it).  Iced mocha for the win.

Today, I switched to Haxe all the way!  Suddenly.  While also having an overambitious, multiplayer game idea.  This… might be kind of foolish.  But it seems to be working acceptably from a technical standpoint, and I wasn’t keen on the idea of writing large chunks (larger, I realized, than I previously thought they’d be) of my code twice, and I also wasn’t keen on trying to use node.js without puking.  I’ve got a basic WebSocket setup going, and now I’ve been grinding out data models for the gameplay itself; I’m pretty sure I can make my core mechanic work at least enough to be playable by the jam deadline if I just keep plugging away at it.  The more experimental stuff… I don’t know yet.  Also I’m not sure how well the Haxe server side will handle many players.

Unrelatedly, I’ve now tried Pizza Hut’s red pepper crust flavor.  It’s not bad.

Sleep time once again.

Current prediction: I’ll have a toy for the basic concept, including the multiplayer elements, but maybe not the rest of it.  That’s not so bad, though—my participation this time is ultimately more for science than for completion.  (If I’d had the stack already working before, it’d have been for completion.)

Back to coding.  Maybe I’ll manage to work faster than I thought.

Argh!  Things this morning slowed me down.  And now I’m not going to make it.

Honestly—as I said in previous posts—my idea was kind of ludicrously overambitious for Ludum Dare anyway, especially after spending the entire first day coming up with it, but it was so compelling that I just had to try it for science.  And in fact I think the overall experience has been quite good for me: I’ve interacted with at least three new chunks of development stack that I hadn’t used before, I have more up-to-date loose performance data on my own abilities under jam conditions, and especially, I have a pile of notes and a partial implementation of an interesting design!  Which means I think I will probably continue making it—just not in time to submit it here.  If it ever gets polished enough to release more Properly, maybe you folks will see me post about it here anyway, too.

But for now, I have much less effective time than remains until the deadline proper, because I’m not going to be able to stay awake that long, certainly not in any state useful for continuous coding.  Since I’m not going to make the deadline, and I’m getting into areas of implementation where being clear on the model will help, further sprinting proper ceases to be useful—so it’s time to pack it in, snapshot and shut down the temporary development server, and switch to less frenzied scheduling parameters for what to do with this partially-made game next.

I’ll probably be playing other folks’s submissions once I wake up after the jam deadline and trying to make myself useful in terms of feedback, and I might write up a bit more of the specifics of my experiences too, so you might see those from me over the next few days.

See you folks around, and hopefully I’ll be back for the next one!

… number of submissions.  Two thousand, eight hundred and seventy-two?  Really?  Wow.  If I played each one for five minutes (including setup and download time and such), and then spent any time on commenting at all, I’d be playing for ten straight days!

… my notion of “maybe I’ll try some of these and comment on them afterwards” has just become something that will require some arbitrary choppage.  Realistically, make that a lot of arbitrary choppage, and that’s if my other things to do this week don’t clobber it entirely.  Sigh.  Oh well.

Well, I guess I can pre-chop whatever came in from the one person I saw who decided to beg and spam in the IRC channel at one point, at least.  (Folks, please don’t do this.  It ruins the experience.  Some promotion is okay and to be expected, but getting increasingly aggressive every time people (who are busy typing at each other in a channel with hundreds connected) don’t immediately jump on your game within thirty seconds, and then being dismissive when they tell you to settle down, is not cool.)