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..).

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

This is the website for my Allefant project hosted on SourceForge. It is a collection of various games I wrote over the years for short game programming competitions, such competitions usually taking about 2 days to create the complete game (code as well as art). The first such game I made was Allefant back in the year 2000. Some of the games also were worked on afterwards and polished a bit, so they are actually playable. Most are little more than a tech demo though. They are all open source.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.