Anyone doing a strategy game or need a world map? Satellite photos of Hawaii make a great source for lo-fi pixel graphics:

I’m using this for the splash screen:

Feedback sought on this:

I am going to do a real time strategy game that is inspired by Starcraft and ATC Air Traffic Controller Simulator from the bsdgames package.

For the uninitiated, atc is an all keyboard-driven game to be played in your favorite terminal emulator. All of the controls are commands that you issue to individual planes attempting to get them to land. I think that by factoring out the mouse, I’ll simplify my programming a bit, and get to tickle my fetish for frenzied keyboard commands.

The rub, and this is what I want feedback on: What do people think of an entry that has no single player mode? I’m planning to run a server (or several) in San Francisco so that everyone can connect quickly and easily and begin playing immediately. By factoring out single player mode, I am avoiding having to write an AI player for the game. To my mind that is a big simplification, and will make it much more practical to finish this game in 48 hours.

The only problem is that I have no idea if this will fly. Is this acceptable to the LD community? How would I reconcile player instantiation versus the long lifecycle of the server? Should the game restart periodically? Should there be a win condition that ends the round? I can’t decide.

Please give me your opinions!

I was thinking of trying to find a calypso stream on the net and use that as my music. What do you guys think? Would that be against the rules?

So I’m thinking the game (networked multiplayer real time strategy game with trade, military, and acts of god) will be a little bit like Tigris and Euphrates. I really like that board game, and thought I’d borrow the concept of competing dynasties vying for control of a finite number of industries / institutions. In Tigris and Euphrates there is (forgive my not knowing the actual names they use in the game) farming/cultivation, religion, trade, and rule/order.

In Tigris and Euphrates, your final score is the lowest score you possess in any of these four industries/institutions. You distribute your representatives (one for each institution) among the various kingdoms in Babylon. As the kingdoms develop, your representatives earn you points for developments in the kingdom that apply to their designated institution. I don’t think I’m going to do that exactly, but what I do like the idea of doing is allowing kingdoms to merge and divide through acts of god.

So in my idea is that each player will be given a finite number of acts of god they can play. To bridge islands together, a player must invoke Global Warming Land Bridge which causes the water level to recede and reveal a land bridge beneath the surface of the ocean. This will cut off oceanic channels (changing the game board with respect to sending your ships places) and it will merge two islands. As in Tigris and Euphrates this means that leadership of the new unified kingdom/island will be contested and one of the dynasties loses out. I’m not sure of the specifics for my game, but I like this idea. The inverse operation of the Global Warming Land Bridge is not an act of god, but a simple Canal.

Anyhow, here is the screenshot I promised. It looks much cooler with motion and blinking, but Istanbul has been completely broken on Ubuntu 9.10 for over half a year now, so I can’t exactly do a screen capture of video right now

It was important for me to use this font in the first game I have attempted to make in over a year. I received this font in the final email I will ever receive from an important friend of mine.

Rest in peace

A cool (I think) interpretation of the “islands” theme just struck me: Islands of human waste! It’s a real life phenomenon: http://www.falloutearth.com/documentary/garbage-island/

Also about every 50 times or so restarting my game I notice that my compiz window manager (default on ubuntu) bails out and I have to restart because metacity causes nasty tearing in my game! If you have this problem, drop to a virtual terminal and execute:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

Or I guess do it from xterm with “nohup”

Twisted provides a network reactor framework for Python that simplifies network programming down to implementing methods on a class that inherits from one of their base classes. You can have an arbitrary number of classes and instances of those classes managing the chatter with a particular connection.

My current problem with it is that it doesn’t seem to provide an API for adding more sources of events to be handled. Pygame is equally uncooperative in this regard. I can’t, for instance, tell a Twisted reactor to listen to another arbitrary file descriptor and how to handle it. Glib has “GSources” which encapsulate this notion, and are abstracted well enough for applications which have to poll for data readiness that is unrelated to a file descriptor. Rarely in a *NIX environment will you ever have such a thing, but platforms like MSWindows have a whole slew of data sources which you can’t select() on. (That may be out of date. It’s been a long time since I’ve done MSWindows API.)

The compromise I’ll have to make for LD17 is to use a timer-driven callback which pumps my Pygame event loop. The Twisted API for this is the callLater() reactor method which accepts a timeout and a callback function as arguments.

Anyone know anything better?

Download, compile, and run sfxr with a simple command!

curl http://www.drpetter.se/files/sfxr-sdl-1.1.tar.gz | tar xz && make -C sfxr-sdl-1.1 && cd sfxr-sdl-1.1 && ./sfxr

Requires SDL

I’m also curious what you guys think about themes like “time limit” getting voted so far down. I think working within boundaries helps people be creative and a theme like “time limit,” I think, forces designers to be creative and allows a lot of flexibility. What do you guys think?

Also: I tried to complete on time for LD7 and LD17 but failed both times. Let’s hope the third time is the charm!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8g-iYGHpEA

Don’t forget to turn on speech recognition! Enable “CC,” then get the CC submenu, and choose “Transcribe Audio (BETA)”

Maybe.

I wanted to easily access a list of games that were available to be played on Linux. So I wrote this userscript at the behest of LegacyCrono in #ludumdare.

You need Firefox and Greasemonkey for this.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/93455

When you visit this page, it will be … better.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=misc_links

And you can trust this script doesn’t just vote up my game because I failed to submit one… again :\

Again! Still have never submitted an entry but made many attempts… maybe this time!

General question for everyone: Does anyone in the community use BitCoin?

(Also, does this WordPress install support polls?)

Also, I hope to submit my first entry this time!

I’ve declared intent to enter about four times before. Never finished a game and submitted! Always had fun. Here I go again!

I’ll be using vim, mercurial, sfxr, gimp, and probably WebGL and WebSockets. I might try to do 3D with Blender, and I might try to run a Node.js game server!

Black Ops 2

Black Ops 2 sucks. Play my game instead.

I’ll try to create a game for this LD48 compo. I might use any of these depending on what I want to do:

Javascript, 2D canvas

Javascript, WebGL

C or C++, gcc/msvc, SDL, OpenGL, OGLCONSOLE

C or C++, gcc/msvc, SDL, SDL_Console

If I use C or C++, I may use ENet if I think I can squeeze in multiplayer, but I doubt it. I can build binaries for GNU/Linux and recent-ish versions Microsoft Windows, I think. I will release the source code so users who don’t have a binary can try the game if they want.

If I think I can squeeze multiplayer into a Javascript game, I’ll use either Node.js or APE for the server.

I’ll probably use sfxr, GIMP, Grafx2 for sound and graphics.

Or I will try to be, again. Probably using:

D programming language (D2; gdc 4.7.3; phobos; gdb)

OpenGL 3.3

Blender 2.68

GIMP 2.6

SFXR/BFXR

I hope I can submit a finished game this time. I only submitted anything once before after trying many times to make the most of my 48 precious hours, and it only ended up having about 30 seconds of content!

Submitted earlier, though I should post a link

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=1900

I’ll try.