Hello all … I’m a LD first-timer, intending to give it a shot this time around. I suspect I’ll only really get ~24 hours of actual LD-time, due to inconvenient timezones clashing with the “Day Job”(tm) … but I’m prepared to give it a red hot go. I’ll almost certainly be using Pygame (1.8) and Rabbyt (0.8.1) … unless for some reason the theme makes me want to write a text adventure

Since I typically develop on Linux, I’ve done some preparation by making sure I can actually produce Windows executables (the catch: still requires a Windows installation somewhere). My personal py2exe and cx_Freeze ‘tutorial’ is here … it’s actually painfully detailed for something that turned out much simpler than I expected. It would be great to compare notes on crossplatform Python/Pygame experiences/successes/pitfalls with any other Ludumdarers that code on Linux.

Tags: cx_Freeze, intro, LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008, linux, py2exe

Here’s where the magic will happen 😛

Still need to do the grocery shopping !!!

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

I’m going to eat this leftover Thai green curry.

It has anything but minimal flavour.

Tags: foodphoto

Step 1: Leave the computer to start making some coffee.

Step 2: Return to computer while coffee is pouring.

Step 3: Completely zone-out making minimal techno with freebirth.

Step 4: Return, to find … er … not a minimal amount of coffee. Everywhere.

Tags: coffee, foodphoto

So here’s an early screen shot of the current state of my (puzzle?) game (it’s based on the paintings of Piet Mondrian … more about that later).

I’m currenty experimenting with the gameplay rules and mechanics … but at the moment same colour squares annilate eachother, while different colors breed when they touch, generating new squares in random positions. The player moves the black lines to allow the coloured squares to expand.

Here’s a screenshot of a glitch that shows what sometimes happens when two different colours touch and the whole system starts breeding with itself.

That’s not supposed to happen. I’ll fix it in the morning.

Tags: glitch, journal, screenshot

Coffee (lovingly prepared by my girlfriend) & Hot’n’Spicy vegetable juice. I’ll probably have some biscuits later on too.

The game is moving along, but I’ve gotta get cracking if I’m going to have something semi-finished by the end of today. Onward … to the level editor !!!!

Tags: coffee, foodphoto

Again, made for me. How appreciative am I.

Tags: foodphoto, nachos

So, I’ve been pretty quiet on IRC … because I’ve been coding and making sounds flat chat.

Here’s a screenshot of Level 5 in my game, Mondrian.

I still have TODO list to work through before I release the final:

1.  Fix collision rules (it got ugly while I was playing with ideas)
2. Allow level restart (you’d think this would be easy … well, you haven’t seen the codebase yet )
3. Make more levels (it’s important, but there is a level editor, so ….)
4. Compile the Windows version (please, please work without hitches !)
5. Upload final & bask in the glory of Ludum Dare completion !!!!!!

Tags: screenshot

A pleasant surprise … I had this made for me.

What is it about me doing LD that makes my girlfriend want to cook so much !

Tags: foodphoto

Here’s my final submission of Mondrian.

The game is heavily inspired by the visual art of Piet Mondrian, and while he wasn’t strictly a Minimalist (apparently he was a Neo-Plasticist), his works look pretty minimal to me. It also has a minimal ambient soundtrack.

You can download it here [Mondrian_by_pansapiens_LD11.zip] (runs on Windows and Linux).

Read the README in the zip. Esstentially, you just click the mouse and press ‘r’ to restart a level.

Here’s the screenshot:

Don’t let it fool you … it looks (and sounds) much prettier when in motion.

There are ten levels. I think it can be completed, but the last few levels are hard (or impossible :P). It could do with some better levels … there is an in built level editor (using the commandline switch -e). Send me some better levels !

Tools used:

Python (2.5), Pygame (1.8), Rabbyt (0.8.1) (and it’s dependency, PyOpenGL)

Played with Pyglet but hacked that code out and didn’t use it in the end.

Gvim and Eric as IDEs, SVN and Trac for source control.

The GIMP for image editing, LMMS (using the BitInvader softsynth) for sound. Sounds trimmed using Rezound, encoded with oggenc. My Ensoniq Mirage was used as a controller keyboard (should have just sampled it).

All put together on Ubuntu Linux, Hardy Heron Beta with a flaky Pulseaudio server that wasted my time (should have never upgraded before the official release date :/ ). Windows version compiled with PyMike’s PySetup.py, on Windows XP running in a VirtualBox VM. Briefly tested on Vista.

Big thanks to my girlfriend for cooking all weekend.

Now it’s sleepytime.

Tags: final

Here’s the timelapse of the development of my entry [youtube.com], Mondrian. It spans pretty much the whole 48 hours, with one shot every 10 mins, (except the blank ones when I was sleeping with the screen on powersave).

For my own future reference:

Screenshots taken with the cronjob:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * import -window root -display :0.0 /home/pansapiens/LD11/screenshots/$(date +%F_%R).png >/dev/null 2>/dev/null

Converted to video with:

$ mogrify -format jpg -scale 840x526 *.png

$ mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=4 -o timelapse.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=800

Tags: timelapse

Firstly, I’d like to thank everyone who voted for providing kind and constructive comments in the voting area. They’ve really encouraged me to continue developing this game. Keep in mind when reading my comments that I too am trying to be constructive, and I’m not trying to come across as a complete butthead. In my mind anyone who even got half a final entry completed has done an amazing thing in such a short time. Secondly, let me apologize for including a few levels that were far too hard …. actually I’m almost certain now that they were impossible.

So, I’ve prepared an updated version of Mondrian for those who’d like to play it. I thought I’d leave this release until after voting, to ensure that nobody could accidentally judge based on the non-48 hour version. You can get the latest version a my OMGWTF Games !!1! page. This new updated version includes:

• 20 tested and achievable levels, loosely ordered in increasing difficulty.
• Snappier graphical effects (subtle fades)
• Full screen mode (-f, or ‘f’ key in the game on Linux)
• Level restart with right click, spacebar or ‘r’.
• A saner level editor. Edit any level with -e command line flag.

The README in the zip gives more details.

I’ll probably continue developing this over the next few months / years. My target is to make 100 decent levels, a title screen with menus to match the command line flag functionality, a level selector, better synth sounds, and some alternative “not-so Piet-Mondrian” colour schemes (maybe a “psychedelic” visual mode ?). There are also a few different game ‘rules’ that I’d like to play with, like making the colours “swap” when unmatched colours collide, rather than grey dead squares. This would totally change the game, but make for some nice tricky logic puzzles.

As always, feedback (and custom levels !) are apprieciated, and I hope those who like puzzlers will enjoy this more polished (but still not complete) game.

Tags: mondrian, pygame, python, update

So, with all the hubris and overconfidence of a LD second-timer, I’ve made no firm plans for my participation in this compo. But I will produce something. I’m waiting for the theme to direct me.

I do have three (or four) very general ideas of what I might use:

1. Pygame + Rabbyt (the old fallback, if I decide to avoid … option 2 or 3)
2. Processing.js … but it could run too slowly if I do anything too complicated
3. Some type of browser based scene/image based puzzle/adventure game (think Myst), where the images are served up online, via Google App Engine or Turbogears. Click points encoded using a CSS hotspot grid. Maybe multiple players could interact somehow too.

Everything will be coded on Ubuntu Linux, with Gimp, Inkscape for graphics, sfxr and whatever audio tracker/softsynth takes my fancy (maybe LMMS, since I had a fairly good experience with that last time).

Also plan to use the Python debugger Winpdb for the first time on a project. I feel like it will really help, but we will see …..

BBQ Chicken, Greek Salad and Egg salad. Thinking tall thoughts. Thinking Atari 2600 … time for some research.

Oh, and while grocery shopping, I got all twitchy with excitement and managed to knock over a box of Okra at $12.99 per kg. Luckily they didn’t make me pay for it, or I’d be eating Okra-based food all weekend

Tags: foodphoto

So, I’ve been lurking on IRC but remaining mute … deep in thought (plus a little bit of Olympic mens beach volleyball … Go Australia !! .. just beat the Brazi… er… I mean Georgian team).

I saw Jach mention his whiteboard, and thought, what the hell, that may help. So fired up the Wacom and let the Gimp off it’s chain:

I’ll leave everyone else to have fun speculating the what these diagrams mean (like I even know myself yet ). It’s a likely to be a two player game, unless I can make some AI for a CPU player.

Baby peas, baby potatoes, baby carrots, baby mammal sausages.

Hidden, then revealed.

Tags: foodphoto

Here’s rough and unexciting rundown of the story so far:

• 1 PM: initially toyed with Batari BASIC, with the idea of making an Atari 2600 game. Got the compiler working, but couldn’t get the multi-sprite kernel working … which basically meant I was stuck with only two decent sprites on screen at a time. Decided to fall back on Pygame+Rabbyt, since I was lacking a coherent game design at this stage too.
• 3 PM: drew a quick picture of a possible design. A falling block/build a tower game for two people, or one person and an AI. Flip blocks between your opponents tower and your own to annihilate same coloured ones and make their tower shorter. First tower to reach the sky wins. Good potential for crazy sound and graphics, if I ever get that far. Seemed solid and simple enough that it should work, with the potential for some featuritis later on. Started coding.

• got stuck for far to long on a stupid bug where I used “def” instead of “class”. Duh ! Learn to program stoopid !
• made a buggy prototype, using my “charming programmer art” as a placeholder (aka, probably what the final entry will end up with anyway). checked it into svn, then started cleaning up the mess I had made.
• 10 PM: dinner and some Olympics.
• got the codebase basically sane, except for block flipping. it seems various lists multiplied in my dum-dum coding phase (“stack”, “active_blocks”, plus some other dumb ones I killed off and refactored around), … dealing with gamestate became unwieldy.
• 12:51 AM: still very buggy, and seems unmanageable .. time to sleep now. quite likely a re-write with a better strategy for the gamestate tomorrow.

Tags: journal

I just woke up to find my computer off … there had been a rare power failure in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Then I went to have a shower, and the bathroom clock had stopped. The problem is, the bathroom clock runs on batteries .. it wouldn’t be effected by a mains power failure.

This can mean only one thing. In the early hours of Sunday morning, I was visited by aliens.

Of course, the power failure turned off the web cam with my computer, so if they entered the room to tamper with the code or anal probe me, I have no hard evidence.

I’ve no I idea why these inter-galactic or inter-dimensional visitors want to try and stop me completing LD12, but I’m determined to get this game out to the world in ~24 hours, whatever the cost.

On the positive side, there is no data loss, and since they didn’t touch the code I can safely still enter as a solo developer ….

Two mintue noodles with mini dim sims.

I’ve been having lots of minor disasters here that have really impacted on my productivity. Around lunch time, the electricity went off again. This doesn’t happen where I live in Australia very often … geez, you’d think we were a Third World country or California with all these “brown outs”. Anyhow, I went into my workplace to use their electricity and internet connection (and the microwave for my delicious quick meal above), but didn’t manage to get much actual work done. I tried to make a quick video blog post about the saga using Cheese on Ubuntu 8.04 … but it was just buggy enough on my system that I failed to even finish that.

Driving home, I think I mentally debugged a problem I was having with collisions … back to it ….

Tags: foodphoto

Meh, too tried for details.

Tags: foodphoto, pasta