About the submission:
The owliver.love file is really a renamed zip. If you unzip it, you’ll find inside:
– the Lua sources
– the images
– the sounds
– the three musics
So: archive, check; source code, check.
Custom library code: none. Everything is either the Löve engine, or code written during the compo.
List of tools and libraries:
– As stated before, the Löve game engine (a Lua wrapper for SDL). Awesome stuff. Never coded things that fast. In fact, it’s almost magical. Idea -> code -> working feature. Of course, there are always a few bugs you have to correct, but the power you feel in your hands is really amazing. Lua is amazing anyway. When you need something, just make a table. It always works ;°)
– Text editor: gEdit, with autocompletion and symbol browser plugins. Plus, of course, built-in syntax coloring.
– Compilator: none, this is Lua! (ah!) Save your Lua file, and rerun the game from the closest console. In fact, when Löve detects a crash, it doesn’t quit, but instead goes in crash mode. A “restart” button is available so you don’t even have to do “up arrow + enter” in the terminal, once the bug corrected. You gotta love Löve.
– Graphics. For the levels: pencil, paper, sharp marker pen to increase contrast, scanner, Inkscape to vectorize, resize, re-bitmapize, GIMP to colorize. And for the ingame thingies and text, Inkscape. For the intro screen text, made a screenshot of text in Abiword, then included with the guy in Inkscape.
– Level making: hand coded in the source. But made extensive use of Inkscape to get coordinates of stuff. I drew rectangles and dots in Inkscape, read their coordinates there, copied them in the level files. Them during level loading, the coordinates are converted into game coordinates. I supposed it could have been even better to parse the SVG files, but no time to explore this.
– Sound… I made all audio during the last hour… Sounds are all randomly generated with the great sfxr, in about 7 minutes. Music is made with ZynSubAddFX, a marvelous synthetisor for Linux, and QSynth, a soundfont player. Both apps controlled with my MIDI keyboard. Drums are from Hydrogen (awesome drums app for Linux), and the “mixing” is done in Audacity.
Additionnal things:
– IRC with X-Chat
– Timelapse video capture with two shell scripts:
while true; do scrot -e ‘convert $f -resize 50% $f.jpg; rm -f $f’ & sleep 20; done
and
mencoder “mf://*.jpg” -mf fps=10 -o timelapse.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=900
– Far too many motivational posters with http://wigflip.com/automotivator/
– Photos with my Kodak EasyShare C713 (stupid battery charger that I can’t find…)
– Everything done on a GNU/Linux machine running Ubuntu 8.04, except scanning the levels, since the scanner is plugged to the family’s MacMini.
– The pizza! I’ve been asked several times what kind of pizza it is. I sure looks good, but well… Just a pizza 😀 So, it’s a Buitoni “Four à pierre” Royale. I don’t know if the name is the same outside France, though.
I don’t see anything else to add yet. I’ll work on the postmortem now.
Tags: makingof
… but no ABBA. 😛
Why will it be dead? Was it used somewhere before?