I’m about a month overdue in writing this entry, but better late than never. Back in April, I participated in the 23rd Ludum Dare by creating a game in 48h by myself. You can play my finished product: Tiny World Defense. Results of the competition were released last week, and I was really proud. I managed to get #176 in the “Fun” category, and #244 overall. For a field of over 1000 games, that’s pretty good. If you’re looking for some really fun games, check out the top 50, and top 25 per category. They’re pretty awesome. Remember, each one was completed in 48h.

Overall, it was a great experience. I got to challenge myself to finish something that I never had before, and I learned a lot along the way. It’s a lot of fun to watch the #ludumdare IRC channel during the compo, and the community is fun, even though I didn’t participate much.

Without further adieu, what went well:

1. The Keynote. Ludum Dare had an awesome, interactive keynote this year. Go check it out.

2. Working at KwartzLab. Having other people around who were working at the same time as me was extremely helpful. It was really encouraging, and provided a means to talk to people about successes/problems. For an extrovert like me that’s necessary.

3. Choosing Flixel. It’s a very good framework, and helped me out a lot. Probably won’t use it next time, but that’s no fault of its own.

4. Tools. mtPaint and bfxr made graphics and sound FX really easy. Aww yeah.

5. Participating in Warmup Weekend. This was probably the most critical factor for my success. The fact that I had already done something with my language and framework allowed me to get to work quickly when I finally started working.

6. Getting food delivered. Meant that we didn’t have to get up in order to eat. Very important for continuous work. Pepi’s Pizza is the bomb.

7. Going out for food. Spending all your time in one place, even if it is as awesome as KwartzLab, sucks. Going for a walk is important.

8. My heating regime. KwartzLab is cold in the spring and fall because of stingy heating from the landlord. I got myself a heated shrug for my legs, and a lizard heat lamp for my hands. Vital to my success in that environment.

9. Sponsors. CCJ Clearline and TribeHR each bought us some food. That was awesome.

10. Support from my wife. She recognised that this was important to me and let me do it. Without that, it never would have happened. Thanks, hon.

Things that could have been better:

1. Better planning of snacks. I bought some at a Shoppers Drug Mart on day 2, but the whole situation was meh. Need to plan that better for next time.

2. More sponsors! Food costs about $50/person for the weekend. I’m going to try to get that all raised so that it’s all covered next time.

3. Go deeper with the framework. There’s a lot of tools out there for making certain types of games in certain frameworks. Working with those to lessen my personal workload would be a good way to improve.

4. More testers, more often. One of the things that didn’t quite work out with my game was the balance of the powerups. Had I taken more time to get that balance right earlier and had people test, I think I could have had a better game at the end.

5. Participate in the community more. That would have been one way to get testers. Also to get help.

6. Theme. Tiny World? Really? What’s up with that? Bah.

As I said above, overall it was really awesome and one of the most fun things I’ve done in my life. Now I need to get ready for the next one in August!

I’ve now been playing with Flixel and PyGame for a weekend, and I think I’m going to end up working in Flash for Ludum Dare. PyGame was great. I was able to get up and running quickly, and working in Python definitely matches my brain nicely. Flixel is just so fast to build things though, and the language feels like a type-hinted bastard child of PHP and Javascript, so I’m comfortable enough with it.

I did find some new awesomeness with tools, however. First, mtPaint is great for pixel art. Much easier than GIMP. Second, Audacity has a bunch of new stuff in 2.0 that makes generating sounds a lot easier.

Oh, and for developing in Python, I would now recommend Aptana Studio (with vrapper if you are like me and need vim keybindings). Wonderful integrated environment. I might start using it on Linux for my PHP development at work. Of course, FlashDevelop is great for Flash (under Windows or Wine).

Overall, I’m very happy with what I got accomplished. My PyGame source and Flixel source are on GitHub, and you can try the Flixel game I made from a tutorial. See if you can beat my high score of 80!

Play the game!

First of all, credit where credit is due. This comes by way of @thinkontheclock via @josephfung (over a week ago). I spooled it, and just watched it tonight. If you’ve got 35 minutes, watch the first half of this talk. If you have less, I’ll tell you where to start).

If you’re a software developer of any kind, start at 10:20. If you see the GUI, and you’re like “Yeah, that’s nice, but how do I work with real code?” go to 16:25.

If you’re an electrical engineer, start at 23:00.

If you’re an artist, start at 29:20.

Don’t wait if you can avoid it. Watch it now.

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

If what you saw in those few minutes (of whatever segment you watched) impressed you, watch the first 35 minutes in its entirety. It’s amazing, even if you don’t exactly know what’s going on every second.

If you want to see some of this in action, check out Bret’s site, specifically the page on Tangle. (I’ll forgive the hashbang URL this once, because you’re awesome, Bret.)

There’s several video shows that I like to follow: Zero Punctuation and Extra Credits, for example. I like to get the newest episode automatically. Up until a few months ago, I was content to have them pulled into Google Reader, and then to watch them as time permitted. It worked okay, but they would tend to pile up. Sometimes I’d try to watch them on my mobile, but the buffering meant I wouldn’t get too many in on a bus ride.

Then I discovered Spool. Spool allows you to record videos and have them downloaded to your phone for later watching. Oh happy day! My pattern then became:

1. Every day, go to Google Reader.
2. Click “Add to Spool” for each video entry.
3. Watch at my leisure.

This past weekend, I realized something. RSS is designed to be automated. (Duh). So I wrote myself a plugin for FlexGet that takes the URL from an RSS feed and sends it off to Spool. Now the videos just show up in My Spool as they are posted!

So yeah, it’s available on GitHub: https://github.com/egerlach/flexget-plugins Go ahead and download, fork, and submit Pull Requests. It seems to only work right now if you copy it into the FlexGet main plugins directory… I can’t seem to get it to work at ~/.flexget/plugins. That’s the next step. (UPDATE: It now works in ~/.flexget/plugins! I just couldn’t have it in ~/.flexget/plugins/output is all)

The only problem now is that on Tuesday, YouTube asked Spool to not record their videos and make them available offline. This is annoying, because now the shows I watch from YouTube I can’t get offline. I’ll just have to write another plugin for that…

Merry Christmas everyone!

I have good news! I have successfully built a habit of exercising over the last 46 days. It was supposed to be 45 days, but I forgot to tweet on day 45, so I didn’t notice that I had passed the 45 day mark until after I had exercised on day 46.

The habit is pretty well ingrained at this stage. Starting around day 25, it became more of a compulsion. Now I barely think about it before starting. I call this a huge success. In fact, today Alex and I agreed that we’d sleep in. I got up at 9 to feed the cats, and it was hard for me not to start exercising at that time.

Given how well it went, I’m going to start a new habit on January 2nd, getting to bed on time. Here’s how it’s going to work:

• I will have an alarm set on my phone for 10 pm.
• When the alarm goes off, I will get to bed as quickly as possible. If I’m not at home, that means I start going home immediately.
• Before 6PM on a given day, I can exempt myself from the alarm by tweeting on @egerlachhabits. If I do that, I must turn the alarm off and set an alarm for 6 pm the next day to remind me to turn it back on.

So, here’s the full plan:

1. Timeline: January 2nd until February 15th.
2. Trigger: 10 pm alarm on my phone
3. Habit: Get to bed as quickly as possible.
4. Obstacles
   • “I just need to finish this”
   • “I’m in the middle of watching this”
   • “Alex won’t be going to be for a bit”
   • “Five more minutes won’t matter”
   • “I really need to get this done for tomorrow”
   • “I don’t need to be up early tomorrow”
5. Support structure: Primarily, it will be my wife. She’s the one whom I’m with every night. I will be tweeting about this on @egerlachhabits, though, so if you want to follow and ask me why I’m not in bed yet, I’d appreciate it.
6. Feedback: This will be a tough point, because I won’t get much. It will be the absence of negative feedback (being tired in the morning) that will be the most beneficial. I will be building on this habit though, and that’s where the positive feedback will come in. I think I’ll restrict myself to playing Scrabble for when I’m in bed. That will work.

This is going to be a tougher one for me. I’m really good at procrastinating going to bed, and there’s no inherent, immediate positive feedback. I’m going to have to build my own positive feedback. But I think I’ll be able to manage it. Follow @egerlachhabits on twitter if you want to find out how it’s going.