Here are some screenshots for an improved version of "Vacaciones Santillana", the game I did for LD #26 (I've renamed it to Minimcentric, but I'm not too sure about that name either). I found out it was quite fun to play, so I took notice of all the feedback and began polishing it. As gaming , writing and real life responsibilities interfere with programming at home as a hobby, I haven't devoted as much time as I should have, so I'm working at snail pace. Still, it's looking nice so far -and I managed to keep my non-gamer mother hooked for a couple of hours, which is a triumph of its own.
I'll upload a playable version as soon as I polish the sound and menu flow. Stay tuned!
One month after submission, here is the complimentary post about the latest Ludum Dare edition. The theme this time was "You only get one", and I came up with an idea for a single-turn-based strategy game, where the turn restriction actually made it more of a puzzle game.
Enter Just one more turn (please!). Below follows a re-post of the post-mortem blog entry on the Ludum Dare page. I'd like to keep working on it (although with a complete overhaul of the graphics, probably), so I'll try to update the blog as I do.
I’m back to life again, so it only feels appropriate to write a postmortem. Just one more turn (please!) is my fifth LD game, and this has probably been the one that I’ve had a hardest time with so far, to the point that I considered quitting in some occasions.
The game came to be after I failed shaping some fun mechanics (or even plot) for the main idea I had been thinking about: something abstract about choices in life and how you only get one chance for each of them. As I was getting stuck I decided to throw it to the rubbish bin and come up with a better idea. I ruled out another one partially inspired by Battle Royale and the random weapon that is assigned to each of the students, too. Luckily, memories of games such as Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, X-Com or Fire Emblem came to the rescue, and together with the theme I managed to combine both things to create a turn-based strategy game where each unit only had one turn (which actually makes the game a bit more of a puzzle). It sounded feasible, it sounded interesting, and it had potential to be fun. How did it turn out, then?
What went wrong
Physical/Mental exhaustion: I came home late at night after a Christmas party with the people from work (and before that I’d been exercising, too), and I woke up on Saturday after 4 hours of sleep, hangover and really tired. This is definitely not the best situation to work , and as time piled up it only got worse: now put into the mix some unrelated personal issues and obsessions of mine, together with my perception of how development was progressing, and the final result was not one nor two but three panic attacks throughout Sunday. By the third one the pot was boiling and I seriously thought that I should leave it there. I have some anxiety-related issues (AvPD, to be specific), but panic is almost news for me, so I was feeling worn out from both the long hours and all that other crap, even a bit scared and quite demotivated, all of which had a very negative impact in the game end result.
No Planning: On the last LD I decided to keep a detailed backlog of features to do, which really helped define priorities and keep things on focus. This time I had nothing like that, just some scribbles on a notebook, and then I would work in whatever I would feel like at the moment. I paid for it.
Insufficient gameplay: Lots of features related to the core gameplay were only partially designed (for example, how would the turn play out, if enemies should counter, if all the ally units should move before the enemies, if the player and AI would alternate,...), and many more (unit stats, more unit types,... the list is way too long) got left out because of lack of time. Also, the number of levels is really short and easy, but I didn't have time to do much more.
Lackluster graphics: While I like the character designs (if few, and with only one simple animation), and the backgrounds on their own aren’t completely terrible, they don’t really blend with each other, so the result is quite subpar.
Sound: I’d hoped to compose some music this time, choose or create some fitting sounds and help with polish to help with immersion. In the end I just used Autotracker and randomly clicked for a couple of minutes on Bfxr. :/
What went right
Submitted: Despite all the problems, and even though I’m not particularly happy with the results (I can’t thank @Zener enough for putting up with all my whining via chat), I managed to submit a more or less defined game. The fact that I didn’t just give up makes me a bit prouder of myself.
Unity3D: This is the first game I’ve coded on Unity (besides a 2.5D prototype I’d done at work some months ago), and I’m really glad with it. It’s very usable and lets you build content and functionality really fast. As a counterpart it takes some control away from you (which is somewhat important for me as a programmer), but for this project I didn’t actually need that much.
Idea: Again, the final result is not exactly what I had in mind, but the idea has potential. I would like to try to think a bit more about it and then extend it.
Despite what I mentioned on the first point on the "What went wrong" list, the moments when I managed to get in the "zone" coding helped me get distracted from everything else. I tend to see programming as puzzles waiting to be solved, and that "game" aspect of it is one of the reasons why I love it.
I've come back to life to....eat your braaaaainz!!!.
Well, not really.
I could start with the prototype I've been coding at a ridiculously irregular rate, but I'll restrain for now until I have something that I can show or talk about. Instead, I want to talk about the Ludum Dare.
This weekend was the 24th edition, and I contributed with my first submission. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, it is a speed game development jam. There are two modes: the competition, where you have 48 hours to develop a game by yourself, and the jam. In the jam you can work in teams and have one more day to do stuff.
I've always liked the idea, and the challenge a game jam represents, so I was considering to join one sooner or later. Since the theme for this edition was Evolution, which is a topic I've been interested in for some time, I couldn't let it go. My choice was to make a god game where you could control an evolving ecosystem sim of sorts, based in an overly simplistic implementation of genetic algorithms.
I won't delve in much detail. Instead, I'll just link to the submission and post-mortem posts, stating what went right (a couple of lessons that could be valuable for life), and what went wrong (almost everything else).
Despite this, I'm thinking that the idea is interesting, so I might give it a go and develop it in the future (once I'm done with the prototype and a full version of Wall Chaos, of course).
And, of course, the direct link. Don't dig too much into the code, please... it is embarrassing :P Dropbox link here. Uncompress and enjoy (Windows only, sorry :S)
I came home from work today and, instead of taking a nap (something that would have come in really handy) or playing Mass Effect 2, I started coding a couple of scripts to help me organising some files that I've got in several Micro SD cards.
Keep in mind that I've omitted the imports, "const-like" vars declarations and the if __name__=="__main__" statement for the sake of brevity.
The first one just lists the files and subdirectories from a given path, and then it saves it to a text file. Python also provides the function os.walk (or the deprecated os.path.walk), but I got it into my head that I wanted to indent the files according to the depth from the root path and the easiest way to accomplish this was using os.listdir, which worked as a charm =)
The second one gets the HTML contents of a given URL which are parsed to a DOM-like object. After that, all that it's left is to extract the data of interest and do whatever you want. In my case, I decided to write them to a *.CSV file for future use. I used the library available at http://www.boddie.org.uk/python/libxml2dom.html
It was pretty easy to use, and it allowed for DOM-like processing of HTML pages, which aren't generally well-formed. This causes complaints and exceptions when using better known Python DOM libraries.
def main(): #URL returns a list of links, of which I'll only be
#interested in their text values.
#FROM and TO are the values I want to pass to the query
#as GET parameters. with contextlib.closing(urllib.urlopen(URL%(FROM,TO))) as url: encoding = url.headers['Content-type'].split('charset=')[1] contents = url.read().decode(encoding).encode('utf-8') doc = libxml2dom.parseString(contents,html=1) links = doc.getElementsByTagName("a") results = [] for l in links: release = l.childNodes[0].nodeValue #...then do whatever you want with it :P
