Allefant Games

time for an update

admin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:13:43 +0000

Guess it’s time to put an update here lest the wordpress upgrade will be the only post this year. Well, I just added 3 of my game entries I made in the last year or so: Ultimatum (TINS 2008), The Wave (LD #14) and Lawn (PyWeek 8).

Really looking forward to the next Allegro speedhack now which will be in a few days - and I should have time to spend the whole weekend making an entry. Of course, as always, speedhack has lots of rules the game must abide to… so can’t do any advance planning. Which is the fun in it.

Ultimatum

admin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:49:34 +0000

This was my TINS 2008 entry.

TheWave

admin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:05:40 +0000

This was my LudumDare 2009 entry.

Lawn

admin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:58:30 +0000

This was my entry to pyweek 2009.

Lua

admin — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:43:49 +0000

Looked a bit at Lua lately, as tinypy doesn’t really seem to carry on (yet) and so is a bit risky to use for anything.

Good points about Lua I’ve seen at first glance:

Human readable syntax.
Simple, fast and small virtual machine.
Secure embedded execution.
Easy to embed and extend in a C program.

Bad points:

Syntax is almost too simple - it’s almost 100% identical to a 20 year old BASIC dialect.
Variables are global instead of local by default - catastrophic design mistake.
Arrays start with “1″ instead of “0″. Somewhat cumbersome.

The global variables are a kinda big issue, makes it very hard to use scripts in a good way if you have many of them. But of course nothing stops you from sticking a “local” before every use of a variable - which would negates the “human readable” part in the good points though. Oh well.

Allefant7

admin — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:36:10 +0000

For now, see here for the pyweek logs: http://pyweek.org/e/allefant7/

wordpress upgrade

admin — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:00:09 +0000

Just upgraded to wordpress 2.7.1, which was suspiciously easy. The theme still works, page categories plugin still works (the plugin is still required though).In fact nothing looks different except the admin section. And all I did was unzip the new version over the old then let the auto-update thing convert the database or whatever. Well, really nice for sure, big plus point to the wordpress devs.

Why reverse polish notation is bad

admin — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 13:44:02 +0000

In one word: It’s unreadable for us humans. Just look at this example in RPN:

1 2 3 4 5 6 + - - + -

How long do you need to calculate the result if you just read along letter by letter? A long time, because until you reach the first plus sign, you simply can’t do anything at all but remember the numbers. And we’re bad at remembering many things.

Just to make this clear, do the same in in-fix notation:

6 + 5 - 4 - 3 + 2 - 1

Reading along letter by letter, when you get to the last “1″, you already have the answer of the calculation. This is not because we are used to infix notation more than RPN - it is just because it is the natural way things work.

This also is not only the case for mathematical formulas, but also language. If I say “I gave you a book.”, then in RPN it would be something like “I you book a gave”. Or “I went to the shop and bought a book.” would be “Book a I shop the to went bought and.”

Owl

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:57:42 +0000

My LD48 #12 entry. As so often, I didn’t really finish. Most of my efforts went into things I hadn’t planned like the 3D look implemented with basic OpenGL. (My original idea was to do it like Nebulous.)

Anyway, I managed to cobble together one big level in the 48 hours, and it can be won. Below’s a video (5 minutes of me struggling quite a bit, but I made it during compo time and was really tired..).

LD48 #12

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:55:19 +0000

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