Ludum Dare 18 is officially over. My entry was turned in as it was last night, as today afforded me little development time, and my Carpal Tunnel was acting up. The theme was 'Enemies as Weapons', which I chose to interpret both ways -- Weapons as Enemies (your enemies are disembodied swords and maces and morningstars), and Enemies as Weapons (to kill an enemy weapon, you must capture a previous enemy weapon). It's incredibly unrefined, there're a number of graphical bugs, and I didn't get around to a in-game score. I plan on shelving it for a bit, but I may come back after a few weeks, if there is time.

Ludum Dare 18 begins at 19:00:00 Pacific. Ludum Dare is a 48-hour game making competition run by teh Internets. While previously I have competed in a mini-ld, this will be my first full-fledged experience.

The themes list is a bit daunting, and I don't know what I'd do for each of them, but I'm sure some idea or another will coalesce, if not immediately then by the end of fighting tomorrow. Perhaps I'll make a Dag game? Who knows? Certainly not I!

Keep an eye to this space, perhaps you'll see an announcement of a complete game!

My entry for Ludum Mini-Dare 16 has been updated! I took into consideration the criticism given me by the reviewers -- namely that it is unnecessary to deal with the controls -- by making the fuel expenditure contingent on continuous holding of the buttons. While this does not lessen the leisurely feel of the game, it does require interaction by the user. This version has been created as Version 1.0 for Windows and source. I hope you guys and gals enjoy it thoroughly!

The Spring 2010 Budget Crisis Challenge has ended, and the results are in! Budget Crisis 9000 has won second place! Oh happy day! My game was incredibly simple -- a set of sliders and progress bars were all the logic -- but the process of attempting to balance the budget while keep constituents happy would prove impossible. By design. However, I invite any of my loyal fans (all zero of you) to attempt to find an equilibrium point. Perhaps some maths on the values file will bring one out -- however I will not do that math for you, ah ah ah. At any rate, I hope this game proves enjoyable to those few more who stumble across it and play it! Salut!

Tower of Mediocrity has a new version available for download in both Windows and source versions. Updated Ubuntu/Debian packages are available via deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chris-cavein/ppa/ubuntu lucid main. Please take advantage of this new version to update, as a potential segfault bug was fixed, so the game should never crash with the new version. Enjoy!

The Spring 2010 Game Dev Club second challenge has finished. I completed a game for it, Budget Crisis 9000. The game is rather simplistic --- control an economy with value sliders and try to keep various constituency groups happy. Further constituency groups than Liberals and Conservatives were determined by popular vote --- Cat-People being the last group added.

The formats of the input files are not hard to understand, so anyone could ajdust the game to use differnt values. It was a major design decision to load values for files beforehand, rendering the `hidden values' not so hidden; I don't consider that a problem. Anyone willing to investigate text files would probably be willing to go source-diving.

Budget Crisis 9000 is, in addition to an entrant in the competition, an attempt to further my Python knowledge. I also learned a GUI toolkit with this project --- Qt4. It is an interesting toolkit. I'm not sure I'd want to do a game involving sprite collision with it, but for this it was a good fit. Perhaps I will do a simple blog editor in it, though I use ikiwiki so such editors are of less use to me. Perhaps I'll try my hand at microblogging...

Results of the competition is 2 weeks.

A segfault bug in Tower of Mediocrity has been fixed. The issue was that when I wrote the update function for Towers, the Zower tower returned itself. This worked fine until, in the interest of memory management, I de-allocated the Tower after the upgrade function. This resulted in the tower being de-allocated as well as being referenced, an obvious error. The fix was to allocate a new Zower. This has the downside of re-shuffling the firing frequency, but the upside of correct memory allocation.

Two week into the last challenge of the semester, the code is mostly finished. To be added are loss conditions; the majority of the work is in the configuration files. These files are the major meat of the game, where the `hidden' variables are defined. These require extensive tuning to allow for longer than a couple seconds gameplay. I envision the gameplay to require constant tuning of parameters to keep the game going.

As this is an open-source game, I will not embed the variables files into the executable, which ruins some of the `hidden'ness of the variables, but those who went source-diving could discover them anyway if I went the other route and hard-coded them. Hopefully, people will embrace and extend the game to make it easier/harder/more fun. Probably not, though.

I still must build it on Windows. I have a python development environment on a Windows 7 system, so I can build the .exe which embeds the necessary .dll files. This will require me to host the source of the PyQt4 distribution and allow replacement of the QT4 .dll files, but that's not too much of a hassle. Open Source for the win!

The upcoming challenge is significantly freer that the previous one. In addition to the obvious limits regarding intellectual property (all code must be produced by the team, as must be all art. Music/sounds however are acceptable if the original work is Public Domain), the only real limits are on team size (a maximum of five --- no minimum thank the heavens).

The theme for this competition is the Budget Crisis. This nebulous crisis can be interpreted however we would like, and I would like to deal with governmental budget management. The basic gist of my concept (at this point) is that one must allocate funds and taxes in various sectors in order to create a balanced budget, while also keeping the various constituency groups happy. This will be a hidden-variables type of game, and it will hopefully be difficult to keep enough people happy that you're not out-voted or --- gods forbid --- out-gunned.

Look for more information during the coming weeks, culminating April 27th at the conclusion of the competition. The project can be found here, but I don't guarantee frequent updates.

EDIT: link

The Game Development Club has concluded the programming section of the double-barreled competition. There was only one game that made it to completion, so Team Marek wins by default.

While I did not complete, I did put in a great deal of work towards the game. I learned a great deal about Computational Fluid Dynamics from Intel and a GDC Paper, but was unable to get something up and running that was

1) Correct

2) Fast-Enough (even in C++)

3) Understandable (especially in C++)

If anyone is interested at besting me at getting something to work, the Game-Design is Kelsey's. I will be doing my level best to get something working before I perish --- and hopefully before I lose all contact with Kelsey.