Okay! Let’s gooooo!

The main reason I’m doing the jam rather than the compo proper is because I’m hoping to get some local fairly preposterous base code (nothing application-specific) in shape the week prior, and relatedly because I’m not sure precisely what “declared and shared” means or whether it might conflict with what I’d want to do with these libraries in the future. Tools are likely to be my trusty GNU Emacs with C99 GCC/MinGW, a mutant form of Lua 5.2, SDL 2, and either OpenGL or pure software rendering. Development on Debian GNU/Linux AMD64, deployment hoped to be on {Windows, Linux} × {i386, AMD64} but we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll even manage to get a timelapse capture of the screen, though my multiple-virtual-machine setup may make that pretty difficult depending on where I end up compiling. Everything is maybe. This is what Ludum Dare is.

(The secondary reason I’m doing the jam is because timing tends to be kind of squirrelly for me. Hah.)

So, my attempts at preparation over the week got distracted a lot by Reol Lyfe things and other priorities, but now it’s time to get talons-in and beak-in on it! I still have only a partially functioning SDL 2 on Windows (the official release doesn’t exist yet, so I’m still using the version from Mercurial), so that may break my audio plans, and I’m not sure how OpenGL deployment on Windows will wind up going with random people’s systems, but I think I’m loosely on track for the rest. It’s going to be weaker-Lua stronger-C than I’d originally planned, likely. Plus, I may wind up copying some audio code from my miniLD #38 entry, depending.

Things to do during the remaining leadup time:

• Get skeleton interactive-application build more completely working (should have had this days ago)
• Pull fixes from Windows set of Darcs repositories into main home directory on Quail
• Maybe try to fix DirectSound compile for SDL
• Make sure other tools are working (GIMP? Qtractor?)

I probably won’t wind up being able to compile for Windows AMD64 or Linux i386, since I didn’t get a chance to set those up. It looks like MinGW is a bit squirrelly about producing 64-bit applications (that is, it requires that one uses the fork, and probably have two installations if one wants to do both?), which is a shame, but oh well.

Whrf. @v@

Here’s what I just did with Darcs:

1. I had a library directory with a test/scratch application in a subdirectory.
2. I just pulled only the patches making up the addition of that subdirectory to new repository,
3. used darcs move to move the files into a nicer configuration,
4. and now that’s going to turn into the skeleton that will get Ludum Dare 26 jam content shoved into it once it starts, with all the revision information from the original part preserved.

Yes, yes, I know, nothing too spectacular ultimately, but I do really ❤ Darcs sometimes.

Steamed fish, tea smoked duck, dumplings, egg rolls, Szechuan green beans—it should last the entire time, hopefully! A little later than I’d hoped getting home. USB extension cable has been located, and MIDI keyboard and drawing tablet are prepped to be connected just in case. Paper notebook turned to blank page to begin sketching out design ideas as soon as the theme begins.

Heeheeheeheehee!

Suffice it to say I have now determined that my initial idea of minimizing sensory information and forcing the player to navigate a maze through echolocation appears to be entirely infeasible with the resources immediately available to me.

Back to the drawing board!

Let me be honest: as I was voting on the themes, sweeping the ones like “Potato” and various other overspecific or difficult-to-interpret themes to the side, “Minimalism” really stood out to me as one that had a chance of winning that I actively hoped would not, as opposed to the many others that I merely didn’t like much.

The straightforward ways of interpreting “minimalism” lead at first into very small spaces, in which most of the jokes and most of the serious work are inferrable enough from each other that they’ve been played out. It is possible to extract better material by digging deeper, but especially with the time limit, it’s almost as resistant to digging as the dungeon edges in NetHack. The main ways to deal with that seem to be (a) play it straight and don’t bother avoiding repeating things and/or (b) skew the theme to turn it into something weaker attached to the side of something else. I’m fine with people doing this, and I know a lot of you find it valuable anyway, but for myself, being shoved into that corner really saps my motivation.

I think I might have made it anyway if my preparation time over the past week hadn’t been eaten away by unrelated problems coming out of the woodwork and/or if my biology were being more coöperative just now. I’ve gotten plenty of internal view on where my attempt went wrong, so it’s still been useful, but it’s time to step back and figure out how to dig further into making my shaky environment less shaky at a more relaxed pace, outside the context of a jam event.

Good jamming and compo’ing to the lot of you; I’ll be in the background lurking at the entries as they come out.

Not totally sure yet, but at least I’m tracking it a bit on IRC! I’m on a major quest right now in the rest of my life, and I can only accept sidequests that advance the plot. I think I can align my participation so that it advances the plot, but it depends on the theme, and on how much time I have. We’ll see. I’m cautiously neutral about it, and awaiting what happens while I tidy up in other places.