Category Archives: Random Gibberings

Randomness not particularly pertaining to any other category.

Little Quirks – week 4 …and beyond!

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Posted by stuckie on October 26, 2011 – 9:03 am
Filed under Ludum Dare, October Challenge 2011, Random Gibberings
Tagged as

Well.. this hasn’t gone to plan.

I do have something on screen now!
And I have Box2D Physics all bound up and active! ( Though I haven’t thoroughly tested it for the needs of the game, as yet. )
But that’s about it!

Actually, I fixed a couple more engine bugs and abstracted some bits and pieces out to make them easier to deal with, so that’s good.. but still, progress overall has been rather minimal.

With only this weekend left, which has already been taken for something more important, there’s probably not much of a chance of Little Quirks getting out in time for the October Challenge.

So, what now?

I think that abandoning the Quirks ( again ) would be a bad choice. Some of the people I’ve talked to about it do think there’s something in it, and that’s always a good sign that gibbering about whatever game you’re working on sparks interest in those not affiliated with it, so it would be good to actually finish something that people might actually play.

But when will that happen?

That’s a trickier question… the remainder of this year is going to be pretty hectic for me, and finding time to work on anything outside standard work-related tasks could be particularly difficult. As this stuff doesn’t fall under the “standard work-related tasks” banner, it gets pushed to the side till free time comes available. So it’s *cough* done when it’s done.

The next few months are going to be mental compared to most of the year, so we’ll have to see what happens. I would like to have it done – or at least playable – by Christmas though.

That said, I have been known to randomly pull things out from nowhere, so we’ll see what happens on the run up to Tuesday.

Little Quirks – End of Week 1

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Posted by stuckie on October 7, 2011 – 9:14 am
Filed under GLESGAE, Ludum Dare, October Challenge 2011, Random Gibberings

Well, it’s Friday, so what have I managed to get done this week?

Sadly, not much… I still haven’t started on the actual game logic, nor have I even finished the Renderer changes…
It’s not that the Renderer changes have been difficult – all the rendering logic was there, it just needed moved about a bit, it’s that things have just been too stressful to concentrate much.
The plus side is I should have the Renderer fixed up and running again “soon” … and I’ve also done some fiddlings to Resource so it can act as a shared_ptr in it’s own right, as well as allow it to recast itself into other types where necessary ( for example, passing a RenderWindow into the X11 Event System and recasting it to a X11RenderWindow while keeping it within a Resource object so it dies properly when there are no more references to it. )

None of the engine is thread-safe in the slightest at the moment, though I’m not too bothered about that for now.. there are a few sync points that will need dealt with ( Resource being a key place, for example ) but there aren’t too many at the moment.
That and I don’t particularly need that for Quirks so, that can be ignored for now.. what I DO need for Quirks is the Renderer fixed up – at the very least the Fixed Function pipeline – so I can get stuff drawing again. I then need to add Sound ( which should’ve been done last month… ) and support for more platforms than just Linux and Pandora – specifically Android, iOS and Win32 with the possibility of OS X. I do require a bit more than that, but that’ll at least let me start the game logic which I’m hoping to have the majority of done for next weekend. Hah.

Yes.. next weekend.. that’s going to be fun. That’s a major point of stress just now, and I can only hope it goes well else things are going to be up a certain creek without a paddle. That said, if it goes well, then effectively all that stress effectively disappears! Well, for a couple months at least… as then I move.

Anyway, off to work!

Sunrise 2011

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Posted by stuckie on September 14, 2011 – 8:58 am
Filed under GLESGAE, Ludum Dare, Random Gibberings

I was at Sunrise 2011 last weekend, along with Octopi!

That was fun :)
It was our first demoparty, as was probably evident from the fact we were rather nervous and just sortof hid out the road up at the back of the room. For those wondering, I was the one with the two-tone blue zippy hoodie and the multi-coloured space invaders t-shirt, and Octopi wore the red zippy hoodie.

It was also a nice holiday break too.. so during the day, we mostly went wandering around Luton and the surrounding areas, to be back for the events in the evening – or most of them at least ( we were both really knackered on Saturday and missed the prizegiving, but did catch CoLD SToRAGE, all the entries and the start of hoffman’s set! )

I was particularly exhausted as I got to travel to and from the scenic route of Liverpool to Luton…via Dundee! But it was worth it, so it’s all good.

We both really enjoyed ourselves and will be looking forward to attending next year’s party!

And maybe I’ll have time to make a release too :)

 

Also, while I’m here.. this weekend marks the cross over point with me fiddling with git to fiddling with mercurial. Annoyingly, I’ve done bugger all on it.. so I’ll be making a bit more of a concentrated effort the rest of the week. The second half of the month will also see me fixing up the engine in time for the Ludum Dare October Challenge. Or attempting to at any rate!

Right, off to work!