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.

Getting videos offline, automatically, on my phone

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...

Exercising victorious! Next week, sleeping!

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.