How to trick yourself into getting more exercise

I still owe blog posts on Ludum Dare 23 followup, and my presentation at KWLUG. I haven't forgotten. I'm sure I'll get around to them eventually.

Yesterday, I biked to work. Near the end of the day, My brother called, saying that he wanted to pick up some boardgames for a gaming night he was going to. Of course I agreed, and said I could get them to him faster if he gave me a ride home (forgetting that I had biked to work).

Realized half-way home that I had left my bike at work. So now, I'm about to run to work to pick up my bike, which I will then ride home. At least I'll be getting my exercise in!

What I'm going to be using for Ludum Dare 23

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!

Deciding on a Toolset for Ludum Dare's warmup weekend

This weekend is warmup weekend for the 23rd Ludum Dare. Ludum Dare is a 48-hour solo game-making competition. I've been wanting to participate since competition #2 or 3, but never had the chance. This April is the 10th anniversary of Ludum Dare and I decided that there's no time like the present to to finally throw my hat into the ring.

This will be my first time making a game from start to finish. I'm fully prepared for the possibility that I won't finish and if I do that the game will suck. One of the things that everyone says that helps improve your chances is to know your toolset well. Since I'll have to write all the code, create all the art, and record all the audio during the weekend, I need to figure out what tools I'm going to use so I'm not wasting time learning the tools when I should be creating.

If you're interested in coming out to try your hand at making a game in 48 hours, you can checkout my post on the KwartzLab blog on how you can sign up and join us at KwartzLab!

Engine

Picking the game engine is probably the most important decision I have to make. The engine will dicate what will be easy/hard during the competition itself. Different engines have different strengths and weaknesses. I've been looking at 3 different options:

1. Unity: This is an awesome engine that a lot of indie devs use. It's a 3d engine that publishes to web, Flash, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Wii. I'd really love to learn this engine, as it would be great for converting my Ludum Dare project into a real game. Sadly, it's 3d, which means I'd need to do modeling, etc. I'm not that good at it, and so I've concluded it would take too much time for my first try.

2. Flixel: Flixel is a Flash-based engine for doing rendering and collision detection. Apparently it's really easy to use. I see a lot of games that are using it. I think this would be a good choice for getting something up and running that's easy to publish (which is important for the sprint to the finish at the 47th hour). The only problem is that I haven't touched Flash or ActionScript in about a decade.

3. PyGame: PyGame is a 2d engine written in Python. In terms of capability, it's pretty similar to Flash+Flixel. I'm much more familiar with Python than ActionScript, so that's a huge advantage in terms of time. Packaging PyGame games is a fair bit harder than pushing a Flash file to a website, so I could lose some time there.

I think this is where I'm going to be spending most of my time during warmup weekend. I just don't know whether Flash or Python will serve me better. I think I just have to try them both and see what fits.

Visual Asset Creation

I think I'm just going to use pixel art, so The GIMP should do. It has everything I need (I think). I've never done pixel art though, so I'm going to have to practice this a bit during warmup weekend too.

Audio Asset Creation

For sound effects, I'm probably just going to use Audacity and a crappy mic. If I have time, I might create some fancier stuff, but still in Audacity. If I get time for music, I'll likely do some chiptunes. I found two guides online that give some tips. If I have spare time during

I'm going to be quite busy over warmup weekend...

Some of the most wonderful things I've ever seen

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.)

Breaking the blog

So, I had noticed that some of the modules I had installed on this Drupal-based blog were out of date. Thinking it might be a problem with my Drupaldeb service, I started there. First, it appears that I might have a few bugs with ensuring that packages are actually properly put into the APT repository. There were two packages that were out of sync between the website and the repo. Need to fix that in the future.

But then I found the real problem. When you upgrade Ubuntu, it disables other APT sources. So when I last updated, it disabled the Drupaldeb APT repo, thus not allowing me updates. Simple task to re-enable that and voila. Modules updating.

After I had everything updated, I needed to update the database. That's when I made the fatal flaw of running drush up instead of drush updatedb. The former command happily overwrite my APT installed version of Drupal with 6.25 from the repository, which disabled a bunch of my modules. They even disappeared from my list of installed but disabled modules! Oh no, my website looks like crap!

After manually re-enabling the modules in the database (which didn't work), and downgrading Drupal again (which didn't work), I found the problem. When Drupal upgraded, it deleted everything from my /usr/share/drupal6 directory. Including my modules. So all I had to do was reinstall all my modules and themes and I was fine. This is something else I will have to test soon.