I’m in, but this time for real; the last GOD DAMN 7 TIMES something else came up unexpectedly so I could not participate. I’m not sure with which tools I am going to work though. I didn’t notice there was a compo coming up until yesterday. I just returned from my holidays and I haven’t programmed anything in 2 month, which is of course the perfect condition to participate.

Because this compo took me by surprise, I am not even sure which tools I am going to use. It’s going to be one of

Free Pascal + Lazarus, SDL2 with Pascal bindings

Free Pascal + Lazarus, OpenGL + LCL (Lazarus Component Library, most pleasant GUI library I have ever used, especially with Lazarus and it’s WYSIWYG GUI Editor)

Python 3 + PyCharm, Pygame

Python 3 + PyCharm, PySDL2

Quickly Pixeling some Sprites I will probably just use Paint.net . Since I lost all three pens for my graphics tablet, I will just pixel something dirty by mouse.

Music is going to be the last thing I do, I haven’t quite decided what to use. I will take a look at what other people use, or maybe I will do something fancy and procedual in the Chuck programming language (You can basically programm sounds and sound effects, check it out).

I will try to get some sleep soon, as the Compo starts at about 3 am here. Maybe I can squeeze in some hours of training to get my rusty fingers moving again before that.

Good luck to everyone, especially to all those participating for the first time, and those programming their engines from scratch like me.

I am not quite sure what to create. I have finally settled for the tool combination to use (good ol’ pure pygame) because I can’t be arsed to write shaders now and the amount of boilerplate SDL2 imposes in comparison to something like pyglet or pygame is artrocious.

Setting it up however was a pain, as (in this order) my Python installation became borked, easy install needed to be reinstalled repeadedly, pip just threw errors about the pip module missing(wtf?) and the project is not as heavily updated as it should be; there is not version for python 3.4 or 3.5, meaning I had to get an externally compiled .whl wheel.

However, I had plenty of time to think about the theme. This has introduced a new problem however: I can’t decide which idea to implement. Most promissing to me seems: Play as a bloodthirsty ghost haunting the new inhabitants of your castle, Play as the monster in the laborinthion protecting your vault, or Play the dragon trying to steal your great love, the princess. I hope I can decide before I finish the little amount of boilerplate code I have to write.

While i made great progress on the first day, I didn’t manage to do much of anything yesterday. I overslept, I had to go buy groceries as I just returned from a trip hours before the start of this LD, and and and. I only managed to do about 3 hours of productive work yesterday.

Alas, not all is lost. I still think I might be able to finish in time for the Jam. Might. There are still no sprites, no sounds, no music, no real levels and combat is basic at best and there is only one enemy type with a really stupid AI.

While I would like to show some screenshots, I didn’t prepare any, but there shall be some soon