I’m in. The entirety of the plan is: Write game, and FINISH PROJECT BEFORE END OF DEADLINE.

Tools:
Server side: emacs/jed; python; some fastcgi implementation that I worry about later.
Client side: multiple browsers (modern) and I don’t care if IE doesn’t work. _Period._ Jquery. Debug tools.
Code side: Textmate; ipython; git.
Mindmap/brainstorm side: android tablet awesome notes.
drawing side: android tablet + autodesk sketch, maybe graphx2, maybe gimp, maybe photoshop.

Now, I need to prepare some stuff, go to the store, be sure I’ve got bread or rice stuff, apples; I have beer and I should avoid that and gin; I have tea.

Topic wise: I’m fine with any. I’ve pre-thought out some ideas. Those ideas work surprizingly well with most any concept I can throw at it; so the mindmap/brainstorm bit will be … unruly.

I need to set out music for the next 2 days. Scenesat may have periods of “crap I do not want to listen to right now” and I should _avoid_ EYEHATEGOD due to the darkness (outside.) Really I may just do the whole weekend with drone and the occasional period of xpander.

Oh, and, I should update all the server side components and be sure I’m all set for that. Yep. I think I’m fairly well set for planning. I wonder how exporting that stuff from the tablet will work… should see that too.

Tags: plan

as I’m going to get _sleep_ before the start. And certain preparation steps are still going on (due to certain things not being set up, due to earlier things and adjustments of work area and so on.)  Or in other words: No, I wasn’t set up.

Also I may have to swap to another keyboard, this one seems to have some issues with some keys. But I may not. I’m unsure. I am going to sleep.

I may wake up and read the announcement of the theme, and then think on that while. We’ll see.

Tags: plan

sleep: 0  ideas: 810383757

So I woke up and there were some seriously strange ideas there about the game not knowing the theme. Now, it’s alone, so… yeah. The wargame takes it.

Now, I’ll brainstorm while sleeping a bit more since I’ve had … well I haven’t really had any sleep and that is neccesary. But I have a _general_ concept of how this should work, and I need to keep the methods of … stuff low, or it won’t get done.

so the brain will work on this while I sleep and we’ll note what I get when I awaken.

this was still not the plan for doing this but well. With the start time I guess it was inevitable

I have now fleshed out the entire game, with an idea of each of the characters and their goals and why, the playfield/planet, the way they move and conquer, and the way they win.

I’m unsure on balance just yet.  I do know the Aliens have the toughest time winning, but they also have unlimited troops.  Unsure on the virus yet, baby and doctor are probably just fine.

Rules are done, but not in code.

Time to figure out how to translate design to code (:

I decided it would be good for documentation sake that I get the stuff published now, to show progress.  Asked on irc, didn’t get ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ so went ahead and set up a gitorious account (thought I had one, or a github, but apparently no.) and started preparing the initial commit.  All went well until…

Apparently, the android tablet and my sd cards don’t like each other, so exporting the planning documents from there didn’t go well. So then, “oh we’ll just use bluetooth and push to the G5” … but the G5 has no bluetooth. And I don’t want to futz with setting up bluetooth on this box, or any other box, so I went and got the USB bluetooth dongle. I have 3.

If anyone knows where my 3 bluetooth dongles went, let me know.

That took too long, followed by the need to get food into me. (Not from hunger but from “nutrients. now.” )

Anyway it’s up now:

https://gitorious.org/ld22-alone

Now I _really_ need to get some code in.

I forgot to include the killchart. I’ve also redone it as png because it’s easier to see (and I don’t use excel.)

Using that and the other bits I laid out the db bits – now in MY head, there’s a lot of logic that is tied into that, which you can’t see. It’s in my head, though, and it will come out. It’s hard to explain but when you think of how the database interacts and that’s the way the game flows, well, um, it does describe it to me.

Now I am going to write up a description or draw a pic or two because I keep doing that in my head and I should get it down – it’s starting to interfere.

ok this is odd, I think I’ve actually documented everything before coding. That’s just… BIZZARRE.

Anyway, the character types are all pretty much laid out, described, and rules laid down.

This could actually now be played as a board game. So, time to make the board (: And pieces, and all that.

It's dark and the android camera said "OOH! I THE BLUR! YES!"

Look ma, it’s dark.

Now let’s do some actual server-side work.

Tags: deskphoto

Database parts done. Well, design wise. I need to write some objects to handle the various things, but that shouldn’t be that difficult given … well, except that I am now tired.

I had tool issues. That I covered in a post I will post in the post mortem.

Overall, at this point, I’m doing – better than usual, which is to say, I’m not where I should be.

I sleep, then wake, and work on objects and game code. There are some gfx I should play with (meaning draw/playing) and, well… I need to sleep a bit and then I will work more.

• I still suck at concentrating and not drifting off on a related tangent in my head
• ipython’s new qtconsole rules.
• I have something, despite drifting off a few dozen times, that has taken less time to calculate than draw imperfectly.
• THAT is a major accomplishment, really.
• (yes this is a bit sad.)

still plugging along. game internal code versy soon, but this bit needs put down beforehand as it’s integral to the game logic.

I am behind (we knew that when I _started_) BUT.

the plotting idea I had worked – I had to debug it quite a bit as I made some mistakes in calculations, but the idea worked and I was able to finish it in – well, actually, faster than before. Doing it by hand would have been faster, yes, but it looked pretty crap and I could not have done the next bit – calculate distances. Which is gonna be a BIT tough – thinking on how that works and how to relate this ‘grid’ to the, well, I have to reverse the grid now into a different array oh wait that’s simple, let me go do that now.

Ok – people who have math skills – I’m not one of them.

I honestly only recently learned that sinus and cosinus had … well ok they were taught in school as ‘opposite over hypotenuse’ but that never struck me as “Hey! This is a value that represents a slope, or a way to calculate distances on a circle!” and maybe it just wasn’t really _clear_ in class.  I don’t know.  All I know is I had no idea those values came from anything other than, you know, magic.

So sinus tables and everything were neat curves and all magic and I was going to do some stuff once to calculate distances myself and lo and behold that’s what these _are._

That was a few years ago, 2 or 3.  I’m old enough to remember the internet before HTML, so that’s… you know.

Anyway. Math people probably are not all that impressed that I have now a method of creating the game grid/planet, and measure the available distances from any ‘cell’ on the planet to another.

I’m happy, even tho we’re seriously not going to have a full game to test at the end. I’ve made significant progress. Really.

Finishing is important, tho.

It’s not going to get finished in an hour.

This is not, however, the normal “Truck didn’t get it done” crap.

I got quite a bit accomplished; I actually CAN finish this into a game, and will be doing so in the coming days. Now, true, tommorrow I have the show, but after that I probably will get into this and work on it more.

I have accomplished a math thing that I had previously not done. In fact, it’s – well, the most complex math I’ve ever done. The last time I did something like this, it was in perl, 10+ years ago, and it took far longer.

I have fixed some issues with my work area. He**, I _have_ a work area now. I really do.

I probably ate better this weekend than I usally do. (I had breakfasts and fruit. That’s not normal.)

I didn’t have a beer, tho I had 20. This confirms that, even though I may have wanted one, I still have the ability to say “no, not now.”  This means I do not have a serious drinking issue. I just have to watch myself, and I still can.

I have a clear layout of things to do, and much documentation.

I know what to work on next – or, well, I know what I probably will work on next. It’s client/server interface stuff. And maybe I’ll do some stuff with the canvas tag (:

This has been a _really_ good thing to do, and I’ve also seen some really cool stuff others have worked on. I’ve learned a lot. It’s good to be coding on stuff again.

I might even have managed to do a bit of defeating of the traditional “oh I just spent 8 hours daydreaming about the project and stuff surrounding it and now I have to sleep and I haven’t done anything” and I managed to spend limited time on irc, despite having the internet.

And, I think I’ll use ‘drone’ as the background music in future when doing coding, it works well.  I’ll switch back to scenesat in a few minutes.

There are some things I should fix in the workflow – but I _can_ now that I have synergy working! W007.

◊ so I’m happy. I’m not FINISHED. But I will be.

Thanks, Ludum Dare (:

Next round, I’ll finish (:  Or I’ll jam, we’ll see (:

Ok seriously, I need synergy working with osX ppc and Arch Linux intel. It doesn’t. This swapping the usb keyboard back and forth is SERIOUSLY annoying, and since I suck at maintaining concentration, it REALLY gets bad.

later

I realized, suddenly, “Hey I tried brew instead of macports, I wonder if it has synergy and if it would work, I mean… this swapping USB keyboards every 3 minutes is REALLY bad”

It did.

IT WORKS

I AM SO HAPPY

So originally I said “I will not use a object-relational mapper.”  My reasons were:

• Overhead
• I don’t mind designing by hand, in fact, I’m fairly good at it
• I don’t have experience with any aside from django’s mapper
• I am not using django (waay too much overhead and wrong toolkit for this.)

I’d looked at the Canonical thing, I think it’s called storm, and it looked decent but in my attempted use of it a month or so ago, I hit upon lack of documentation beyond the tutorial which did not explain some basic things, like “how to get your db design to map.”  Sort of, you know, what a mapper… should do.

I do not feel that sqlalchemy is a good choice because it’s just plain too much overhead.  I don’t really need an ORM.  I need connectivity, and I’ll handle keeping the database in line. I’ve dealt far too many times with software that assumes that if you use a mapper, the database will never get corrupted. Like, you know, 100% of all java db stuff I’ve ever dealt with. In production. Costing me months of time. I hate java; too many “developers” who _can’t._  Those who _can_ develop in java never end up working anywhere near me.

Anyway so with all that background, I said “no” and was busy setting up the db by hand, and – darn it, I went and changed tools. I used to draw stuff up and build the whole design first, then publish; but no I went and was doing it bit by bit using Sequel Pro. No. Bad. It doesn’t … it works but it is NOT a design tool. It is … usable for some stuff I’ve been dealing with at work. With crap db’s designed by people who have no clue. _should have known_ but didn’t think it would be THIS bad.

MySql Workbench worked well but lately it’s just been PANTS. Meaning “Hi, I will crash now!” and such. Also they don’t do ppc. And… yeah.

So in short: I will need to probably write my own ORM type thing after this is over. What I need is a way to define the db directly, quickly, and without having breakage upon a change. And very little overhead.  I want data, put into an object, and I’ll do the push/pull when I need to.

Oh that’s right, another issue with storm was it did not explain in any way, shape, or form how to avoid the problem of persistent connections that needed to be re-attached. Like, if you went to sleep, and they timed out, how to reconnect them the next morning when you were looking at it.

Anyway not publishing this til after. Just saying, this is one of the things that went awry.

Less than a week to go, and what do I have over last year’s setup?

(this is a list to check off this week before starting)

Is my editor thing ready to go?
Is the build/test server ready?
Is the sql bit ready? (server? ORM? Connector?)

How is your javascript stuff going?

Do you have your books/tutorials done?

are you READY to CODE and not FUTZ WITH YOUR ENVIRONMENT?

• python (2)
  • would use 3 but not 100% sure of compat issues with postgres, ran into them a while back
  • this is about getting stuff done not fighting with stuff
• postgres
• sqlalchemy
  • I normally don’t use an ORM but I will to make dev/prototyping move faster.
• cherrypy
  • considered others but I seem to come back to cherrypy a lot
  • not that I have gotten far with it, but oh well
• wingide
  • emacs as secondary. wing has emacs keys and a good debugger.
• prolly jquery
• lighttpd (or cherokee, we’ll see in deployment phase)
• android tablet + oreilly safari
• gfx tools of various things
• chromium/firefox
• archlinux devboxen, ubuntu server
  • cuz it’s set up from months ago, or a year ago?
  • yes I normally don’t do ubuntu. It runs and I can adapt afterward.
• Ipython
• git
  • maybe github. maybe.

Things I also have to help:

1. tea (pu ehr, gunpowder)
2. irssi/screen
   1. to be used as helper not _NOT HELPER_

Things to get at first break when stores open:

1. apples
2. cheerios (if they have oat only cheerios which are the only proper cheerios)
3. milk
4. grapefruit soda

work area is set I think.

so we have no theme.

I guess I’ll just make a game, and since there is no way to NOT make a game with the theme “You are the villian”  it will fit.

this sucks. I was going to do something, and now… well, fuck it.

Since you can’t _not_ fit the chosen theme to any game or any idea ever, I’m going to use one of the creative ones – I’ll go for colonization.

I don’t care if it doesn’t get ‘judged’ or whatever, the idea is to make something in 48 hours with a theme, and since there ISN’T a theme this time, I’ll use ‘colonization.’

Now I will sleep.

after having a rather bad “oh shit someone is going to do shooting kids at an elementary school”  (and they will.) moment, I went back to irc for more brainstorming (which is mostly me trying to defeat the issue of this “theme” being far too broad.

asteriscus came up with an idea of world generation and death.

I will modify this idea slightly and make it competitive.