GBGamesHere is the initial design I’ve come up with. Over a year ago I wrote down a one-liner idea about defending a castle, and these notes flesh it out a bit more.
I want a microphone because I really do want my knight to say “STAB!” when you mouse over him.
Since so many people got a kick out of my Awesome! brand paper towels, I thought I’d juxtapose them with my Optimum Power cereal:
Awesome. Just awesome.
Last time Minimalist surprised everyone. This time, Tower did. It’s weird how surprising it is when it was voted upon!
The IRC channel is filled with talk about what can be done. I spent the first 30 minutes eating dinner.
I made vegetable stir fry and rice. The rice came out surprisingly well. I also put hummus on pita, and then put the stir fry in it to make LD-approved sandwiches. I washed it all down with tutti-frutti flavored Jarritos.
I’m not sure what to do with the theme yet.
I know it’s a bit hokey, but since the Olympics are happening today, I thought that Ludum Dare needed its own pyrotechnics.
Enjoy the Ludum Dare Opening Ceremonies!
I’m cross posting my Ludum Dare posts here and at LudumDare.com.
I only managed to get it clean enough to sit in comfortably a few weeks ago.
Yes, there are three separate chairs in a small room.
While SolHSA’s tips are useful, and mrfun’s tips are hilarious, I decided to post my own list of tips for Ludum Dare.
Here is the summary list:
In about 15 hours, the theme for Ludum Dare #12 will be announced and the 48 hour game development competition will start.
Once again, I’ll be using C++, SDL, Makefiles, and vim. This time I will be practicing my unit test fu, which may or may not be a mistake in a coding competition based on speed. We’ll see. My office is actually cleaned up, so I can avoid the back pains of using my couch for the entire competition.
Good luck to all who are participating! Let’s make some games!
Oh, and I guess there is some other global competition starting today, too.
For some reason I woke up this morning wanting to play a game I haven’t played in years. That game is The Magical Quest starring Mickey Mouse
If you’ve never played this game, probably because you think you’re too old for Mickey Mouse games, you missed out. This game was surprisingly well made and had a number of my friends in grade school and high school asking to play it. These were the same friends who would pop you in the face if you dared to question their tough guy image.
My favorite level was when Mickey donned the mountain climbing gear. It was like playing Bionic Commando! Rather than go through all of the obstacles, I enjoyed falling below the (floating?) mountain and swinging my way below the level. You bypass everything, and there was something satisfying about knowing I did.
There are other games from my past I’d like to play today. I want to get back to my save game in Homeworld so I can continue through the series. I still haven’t finished any of the Wizardry titles. Conquest of the Crystal Palace music still gets stuck in my head occasionally. I want to get my Atari 2600 out and play Berzerk, one of my favorite games from my childhood.
While new games are constantly getting released, there are still some older games that never get old for me. How about you? Are there any games you still play long after it disappeared from store shelves and the game-playing public’s mind?
[tags] games, classics [/tags]
I got home from the day job yesterday to find that my laptop was off. Weird. Maybe the cats knocked the AC adapter loose? I turned it back on, setup the IRC client that I always run, and went out. I came back, and again it was off, only this time it was really off. It wouldn’t turn back on.
Then I found that the AC adapter brick was cold and was missing the little green light. It also had a very quiet beeping sound as if someone had placed a bomb inside that was about to go off if I didn’t cut the correct wire. It’s a bit disconcerting.
I found the contact info for Dell, and went through their online support. I was surprised at how great it was. I thought I would need to explain my problem twice to multiple people. Instead, David Brown replied with a simple, “I’d be glad to have the AC adapter replaced. What address do you want me to send it to?” Wow.
So I have to wait until Monday at the earliest for a new AC adapter, and unless I find someone else with a Precision M90, I can’t charge my laptop until then. Luckily my desktop still works.
Of course, it reminds me that hardware WILL fail. My desktop currently acts as a backup, but what about when one of its components fails? I haven’t had a backup system in place in way too long, which is sad because I have bought a few 300GB drives over the past year that have been collecting dust. Now I can probably get 1 terabyte of storage on a thumb drive for $3, but it still won’t do me any good if I don’t make use of it for backup purposes.
If these were just personal use machines, it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but I’m running a business, and so I need to treat the possibility of data corruption much more seriously than I have been. I would hate to discover one day that I lost the source code to all of my projects.
If you don’t have backup plans in place for your hardware failures, which WILL happen, you’re asking for trouble. Get something in place before it is too late. If it wasn’t for my desktop, I’d be out of commission for the weekend, and I’m worried that the data on the hard drives in it aren’t going to last too much longer. I shouldn’t be worried because I should have dependable backups.
EDIT: Now I know why the AC adapter stopped working. My cats chewed through the wire. They’re lucky they’re cute.
[tags] hardware, failure, backup [/tags]
It’s been a long time since I last looked at Test-Driven Development, or TDD. It has been years since I first read about it, and since then I learned about C++ frameworks, but I’ve never used it. It always seemed like a great idea, but optional. Agile or extreme programming sounded cool, but without paired programming, what is a lone indie to do? I had written about Agile individuals years ago, but I lost interest in finding the answers.
Not anymore. I had the chance to see Robert Martin of Object Mentor give a few talks about clean code and TDD, and he made quite the impression on me. He said that software developers give off an air of being unprofessional, but there are things professional programmers do, and TDD is one of them.
Writing tests is one of the practices in Agile development and extreme programming, and the benefits of writing tests are demonstrable. Besides allowing you to have reasonable confidence in the quality of your code, it can actually help drive the design of it, too. I want to emphasize this point since I apparently missed it years ago when I first read it. The design of your code, the actual decisions you make regarding when and when not to use a class, an interface, or a virtual function, gets shaped by your tests! I’ve read more than a few articles in which the author claimed that TDD’s effect on the design was the most important benefit.
That said, aside from High Moon Studios, you don’t hear too much about game developers making use of TDD. If business software developers are seen as unprofessional, what do game developers in general come off as?
I’ve been rereading Noel Llopis’ articles on Test-Driven Development, and I recently downloaded UnitTest++, which is a C++ unit testing framework. I joined the mailing list, which shows that a few other studios are making use of it. Still, I would love to hear more about game developers who have used TDD and other professional developer practices. EDIT: Oh, there is Agile Game Development. A game tends to change towards the end of the project, and having tests ensuring that everything is still working when you make those changes seems desirable. Quicker iterations, better code quality, ease of refactoring, and better code designs should help wrestle those multi-year projects down to manageable levels.
[tags] unit tests, tdd, game development, agile [/tags]