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Quel dommage! (Does mockup work on these things?)
Unfortunately for me and for the gaming world, I have a conference to attend on the Friday and Saturday of Speedhack - "The Genomics Revolution and the Origins of Humanity" at McMaster University.
Does this mean I won't be submitting a game for Speedhack this year? Hardly! It just means that I'll be spending most of Friday at the conference, most of Saturday at the conference and probably visiting some friends, and most of Sunday traveling home on a 12-hour bus ride.
However, I plan to make very good use of the "games framework" I've been developing on and off for the past 3 seasons. You may remember it from my XmasHack entry entitled "The Usual Spices." The upside with this framework is that it's very easy to make games with--it's got lua bindings and everything's all set up nice-nice. The downside is, there are so many dependencies (allegro, DUMB, jpgalleg, boost, lua, and luabind, which is extremely finicky about which compilers it supports), you have no chance of compiling it. I'm not joking here--not even Matthew Leverton could compile my Xmashack game for Linux.
So, if you're not on Windows... well, I apologize. It's posssible that I'll have a last-minute deathbed conversion and just decide to use plain vanilla Allegro, or my framework sans the lua scripting support (which is what pulls luabind and boost into the mix). We'll see, young grasshopper.
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With just over 10 hours until the official start of the SpeedHack, I am getting very excited. Matthew's cryptic comments about the results of the final Rule-O-Matic spin (something about loose technical requirements but complex gameplay requirements) have my interest piqued.
Given that I can't spend very much time this weekend on the game itself, I intend to continue developing my games framework tonight in order to make the actual game development as easy as possible. The current framework is catered to a tile-based design, so hopefully that jives with the Rule-O-Matic results.
In past years, I have always coded my game from scratch, not thinking about design or anything until the official start time of the competition, and I have usually considered actively developing a framework/game before the contest start to be slightly counter to the nature of the SpeedHack. But I don't really feel that way anymore, and I'd probably be using the framework even if I weren't as busy as I am.
On a side note, today was the registration-slash-wine-and-cheese for my weekend conference. What fun it is to be the only undergraduate student among a bunch of very intelligent professors from all around the world! I've already met people from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Liepzig, Germany; another from the Netherlands . . . well, those were the only people I met of "exotic progeny" today, but there will be more to come. This has absolutely nothing to do with SpeedHack. Sorry.
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I'm sitting at the computer, waiting for the rules. Last night and this morning I spent a bit of additional time working on the framework, but I was a bit distracted, so I didn't get all that much done. I'm excited to find out the Rules!
Let me describe my setup here for a moment. I'm staying with my sister for the conference that I'm attending, armed with a laptop on which I will do all my development, but which has no internet access. So, in order to update my blog, read rules, consult reference materiel, etc, I will need to use her computer. So, progress updates may be a bit sporadic; we'll have to see. I also won't have instant access to online documentation, which I'm used to . . .
Well, it's almost time for the Rule-O-Matic spin to be revealed. Good luck to all participants!
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Interesting
Good rule set this year, I think. Should make for a very interesting competition... I love a good challenge!
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(This post was written Saturday morning at 05:25 UTC (1:25 AM local time) at a computer with no Internet access; I have re-typed it here now.)
Well, I'm about to wrap it up for the day. I had a difficult time coming up with a concept, but I've finally got one that I'm satisfied with. It involves (wait for it) portals! Yes, portals are all the rage this season, and my game will ride that bandwagon like so many teenaged groupies.
I have just finished stripping down my games framework to its bare essentials: no lua, luabind, Boost, DUMB, or jpgalleg; it now just uses vanilla C++ and Allegro. Hopefully, this will allow my game to be compiled without too much hassle on all platforms. The game engine itself should be relatively simple to code (at least as simple as these things tend to get), so hopefully I'll finish the engine early enough tomorrow that I can spend the evening and Sunday working on content.
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Today is the second of two days of my conference on "The Genomics Revolution and the Origins of Humanity." It has been interesting so far, and I'm looking forward to today's talks. However, this time I'll bring my laptop with me--that way, if a talk starts to get boring, I can pull the ol' "pretend to take notes on the computer while actually programming a SpeedHack entry" trick.
Luckily, my brain seems to have kept working on the game concept through the night, because shortly after I woke up, I had a lot of cool ideas about possible game mechanics in my head.
I suppose I'll spill a little more info about the game now: it's a puzzle game, and it involves collecting bananas from an insane old monkey's banana orchard with the help of portals.
I am hopeful that I'll be finished the game engine by the end of the conference today (luckily we have a few coffee breaks and a long lunch break, so I hope to use that time wisely--instead of networking with my peers and making connections for grad school, I'll be working on my entry. That is the sign of a true hacker!). Then I can spend a bit of my evening and the bus ride home designing levels. Then I plan to spend Sunday on art and polishing and the two-player mode.
I also hope to have a screenshot available by the end of the day. But... no promises!
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I got about an hour during the conference today to do some programming. It was limited, but fruitful; I hope to get a working and mostly, if not entirely, complete engine finished tonight, while I ride the bus back to my hometown (a 14 hour trip through the night!).
Once I finish the engine to my satisfaction (or once the battery runs out) I will start designing levels on paper. I hope to recharge my laptop at one of the bus stations tomorrow morning and then input the level files themselves. I might code a hackish map editor to make things a bit easier.
During my one hour I implemented basic collision detection, and a few "terrain" types like water and conveyors. What I have coded is very general; hopefully it won't take much longer to add the remaining features, which probably number a little over a dozen.
Sadly, I don't have a screenshot as I indicated I might in my last post. If anyone's following this blog, you can expect my next post in about 16 hours. Ta ta!
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Here are the blogs I wrote on paper while riding home on the bus.
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Saturday, 22:01 EST (Sunday, 02:01 UTC)
I'm on the bus now, headed for Toronto to make my first connection. I'm thinking about a map editor and what I would need to do to make one as quickly as possible, since I want to save battery power. Maybe I should wait until I get home to make one; I'm a perfectionist and I would definitely waste a lot of laptop battery getting maps "perfect" at this point. Perhaps my time is better spent on the nascent engine. Yeah.
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Saturday, 22:42 EST (Sunday, 02:42 UTC)
I just found out that my next bus doesn't leave Toronto until 1 am. It is now 10:30 pm. Given that this is Toronto, I'm not going to tempt fate in this busy terminal by pulling out my laptop, so it looks like I've got 2.5 hours to kill designing levbels and reading "DC Universe: the stories of Alan Moore."
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Sunday, 06:38 GMT (Sunday, 10:38 UTC)
It's 6:30 AM. I didn't get any programming done last night--it turned out that there were no empty pairs of seats on the bus, so I had to share. I didn't want to disturb the person next to me with the brightness of the laptop screen. (Though she later repaid me by yelling into her cell phone in Russian intermittently between 03:00 and 06:00, preventing me from getting more than 1.5 hours of sleep today - ed.) I did get some levels onto paper--six--and some algorithms designed.
I'm at the Sudbury bus station now, and the last leg of my trip starts at 7:15 AM. Hopefully by then I'll have some more algorithms and designs down. I'd love to have somewhere in the range of 16 stages, but that probably won't happen.
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And now I'm back home, very tired and without even a finished engine. I've probably only spent around 8 hours on it so far. I got some programming done on the bus this morning but my battery ran out sooner than I thought it would (about 90 minutes was all it had in it). I will try to finish my entry as best as I can.
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This is an accidentally duplicated post. (Or is it an attempt to pull more traffic to my blog?)
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About 8 hours remain in the competition. It's now midnight, and I'm already working on 1.5 hours of sleep and about as many gallons of coffee. Looking at my feature list and problems I'm running into, I don't think that I can realistically expect to finish this game in my current state of mind in so little time.
So, I'm out! It was still a great weekend because of 1) the conference I attended 2) all the work I got done on the games framework through this entry and 3) the game idea that I came up with, which I still like and may further develop.
Good luck to everyone else!
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- Sometimes you win 'em, sometimes you lose 'em. Good luck next year! - Billybob
