Allefant Games

I took part in the 12th LudumDare contest on the weekend, was lots of fun. My entry is called Owl. Not much more to say. Actually, this was not meant to be a news entry (wordpress “post”) but just a game entry (wordpress “page”) - but I clicked the wrong type. Or rather, “post” is default. So well, instead of deleting it, I renamed it and published also a news entry

Over at ludumdare.com they decided to hold “mini LDs” in the months without real LDs, and I played around with some code for the previous two mini LDs. I only spent a few hours in each. The theme for the first one was “versus”, and my idea involved Python vs Perl - i.e. you take control of a Python and have to eat perls

I think I did pretty well with it, screenshots and video are at its LD48 entry page.

For the second mini LD, the theme vs “the game to the movie”, and I had no idea at all. Consequently also no finished game. I did spent some time writing up some kind of 2D vector collision engine in pure python though - the result can be seen here.

Hm, and I really should get me some cheap host, SF doesn’t allow outgoing connections and therefore no akismet. Anyone who has a wordpress blog probably knows what the means On the other hand, free hosts such as wordpress.org don’t allow any customization, so that wouldn’t work either. Besides, there’s no real content here, and I don’t really blog.. so the only reason for this site’s existance is that I like to play around with the website from time to time

Well, I just changed the software the site runs on from moin to wordpress. Some things were nicer with moin, but having this be a wiki really was quite pointless - as it’s not supposed to be edited by anyone but me. And the comment posting interface of moin was rather kludgy, and abused by spam bots a lot. So now it’s a blog. Which also is not ideal, since this is rather kludgy now for long-term storage pages. Why can’t there be a simple content management system..

So now, with my post rate of 2 or 3 posts a year, this would be a rather sad site, therefore I tried to import the old contents. Formatting is messed up and pictures are missing, but I plan to fix it all eventually.

Ok, it’s 2008 since some time, but the first time I feel like posting. In the meantime, there was another LD48 I took part in, sometime last December. Results are here, and while not doing good in general, I made second place in the graphics category. Need to figure out how I can get one of those pelly graphics to display here, I always wanted one, and now finally, rather unexpectedly, I got one Maybe not totally unexpected, as I did take some time making shiny animations in Blender. On the other hand, I chose to make a puzzle game and ran out of time to create levels during the compo. When will I ever learn. Also have yet to add the game to the site here.

Recently Phil Hassey from #ludumdare directed my attention to Shedskin. Shedskin is a Python to C++ compiler - so it could solve the same thing I’m currently solving with my crude line-by-line .py -> .c converter.

However, my experience with it was that it’s not quite ready. It started with being hard to get running at all - I ended up copying the lib folder and the FLAGS file from the original distribution into my project. Also, it is all but obvious to me how to interface external libraries. I ended up manually keeping 3 files, a .py, a .cpp and a .hpp in sync, editing each one for each function to add. This is what stopped me from actually doing much at all with it, it’s clearly too painful to be useful that way. Maybe a way could be found to directly let me use external code instead? I call libc.printf, and it puts a call to printf. At the most, there should be a single description file where I specify the necessary header stdio.h and the types (and maybe also the library?) Editing three files for each symbol is almost as bad as manually using the Python-C-API. Also, again packaging related, there needs to be sane way to incorporate shedskin into my projects, the generated makefile and FLAGS file won’t cut it at all.

Furthermore, one of the main reasons I prefer C over C++ is compile time. This was already noticeable with my shedskin test - gcc needed several seconds just to compile the code produced by shedskin for the short test program and library wrapper, likely because it’s somehow pulling in lots of headers. My reference code doing the same only takes an instant from .py (reg-exped to .c) to the executable. Additionally, the Shedskin website says that it will need increasingly longer for the type inference with growing number of lines, so with a real program, that may add a lot more time even. Not compatible with my rapid testing way of coding.

Finally, I don’t think type inference is very important for me personally. With dynamic code, it is nice that I can just throw around objects of different types and let everything be sorted out where I want, even using techniques like duck typing. With static code, seeing what types are needed actually can be an advantage sometimes - else I manually would have to add comments about the types or do manual type inference. So, for now, shedskin is not for me.

Took part in the allegro.cc Retrohack. Teaming up with Paul, we made quite a nice little beat-em-up - yet have to update the games section and put up a page for it.

In other news, there’s another LD48 coming up soon. Sadly, I was just informed today that I will lose at least half of Saturday - so that sucks. But well - might still be able to pull something off, just have to sleep less or something.

Seems I made fifth place for single entries in this pyweek, which is pretty good for me, since I just take those compos as excuse to work on games and don’t really try to achieve scores Actually, I’m tied with fourth place, fun category is 3.1 for both, but mine has less innovation but more production. In fact, surprisingly, I won the production category (no other solo entry even reach 4). Guess rendered graphics as opposed to pixel art does count a bit, and my 8 seconds of looping music were quite well received in the comments (except for the fact that it starts getting annoying after 8 seconds :P). Also, unlike my previous pyweek, 100% could play this one. What a difference not using any OpenGL extensions makes.

As for Speedhack which I also participated in this month, I made a 3D game, trying to implement the rules - especially the dialog rule was hard (and I didn’t really get to the friction and influence rules much). Also, 48 hours aren’t enough to make Halo 3, but I think I got pretty close

I signed up for pyweek. The theme is “twisted”. Most of my games naturally should fit that theme, so I went to write Allefant5. It aims to be a standard platformer. The twist is, levels are twisted around - that is, everything is in polar coordinates. And when you walk along in a direction, eventually you will end up where you started.

Now, let’s see how much of that I’ll actually be able to pull off. I wrote the base of the engine on Sunday, and basically have Saturday for level design and testing. During the week I made some artwork and sounds in the evenings.

I’m really annoyed. A few weeks ago when I updated harddrives, I accidently deleted my old Allefant-for-cellphone code, as it wasn’t placed along with my other C code (it’s Java after all). So in the last days, I decided to attempt and rewrite it. Just, going with the time, I finally gave in and thought, what the heck, I can as well use Eclipse for this and see what all those Java users are talking about. But then, what happened, I’m editing away for a few hours, struggling with this Java code - then all of a sudden it crashes. Memories of windows 98, almost 10 years ago. But ok, even in Linux apps can crash, even though it’s a long time I had any app do that for me. So, I restart eclipse - but the file I had edited is complete blank. Also no mention of a crash or anything. It simply is gone. Hard to believe, but it seems Eclipse is a program which just emerged out of the stone ages of software design. Needless to say, I de-installed Eclipse and decided to never use it again, and also my Java endeavors are on hold for now as I don’t feel the least bit motivated again rewriting this code which was lost due to the stupidity of the Eclipse creators. And my opinion about Java itself also hasn’t change in the least bit by this incident (likely Eclipse is written in Java)

Back in April, I wrote Battery for LudumDare #9. It’s written in Python. Nothing much new besides that. The LD theme was “Build the level you play”, and so I coded a nice little RTS. Another theme would have been “battery”, and Hamumu said it sounded like a game about hatching bats. I found that so hilarious that I named my game after it and made it about hatching bats

Not sure what will be up next. Right now, I’m toying a bit with a scripting language (talk not just about reinventing the wheel but about reinventing the walking stick), and also with Allegro. Not much time for much anything else.