PyWeek - Cine-Science Logic 2

[ gordallott @ 01:24 ] CSL-II - The Unfortunate Undoing Is Live

Well pyweek is over and csl-II is live, we called this 'The Unfortunate Undoing'

We took the premise of 'Get off my lawn!' and decided not to look at the immediate implications of someone saying that, but rather try and produce something that looks at the reasons as to why this person said that. Out of that came the idea of following a persons life and influencing their decisions in order to help guide them to hopefully becoming a person that does not say 'Get off my lawn!'

Jeiel did an absolutely amazing job on the graphics, he went for a rather neat style that works really well, the lack of detail in those pixels really lets you personify those blocky people :) But i'll let him talk about that himself.

Some notes: if you have a 64-bit machine you may have to provide your own chipmunk shared library, sorry about that. press escape to quit the game, the game itself only uses your pointing device.

Good luck to everyone involved, I look forward to playing as many of your games as possible :)

Update

okay okay we are out of the uploading grace period, but i thought i would provide this small patch for people that are having trouble with the windows version, it just loads dlls from the already provided winlibs/ folder.
http://gordallott.com/run_game.zip

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[ ZeroByte @ 23:18 ] Day 6 - One day more

Cause it's fitting and cause my working soundtrack for pyweek has been Les Miserable, go watch One Day More. Lea Salonga!

Mostly spent today doing the final graphics. Nothing much to show though. gord has been building all the levels. Looks like I might not be touching code at all this pyweek... which is might be a good thing depending on your opinion of my code. Anyhoo, its the last day of pyweek, chase that deadline kiddo!

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[ ZeroByte @ 03:28 ] Day 5 - Crunch, the chocolate bar

So day 5, this is crunch time. Been animating the whole day except when I was watching mythbusters and gilmore girls (I have sisters, argh). Still got a ton more art to do tomorrow so I'll be going full bore tomorrow, hopefully without getting distracted by the shineys on the internet. For now though, see the animations go!

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[ ZeroByte @ 01:51 ] Its Day 4 and I was struttin' down the street

In the interest of getting the game done in time, we've axed one location and I've started on animating the sprites. I'm getting these done at the rate of about one animation per 1-2 hours. Hopefully that speed will be enough to finish all the animations that we'll need. So today I break my uberlong screenshot streak, can't be arsed to mock it up anymore but I have two animations to look at! The first is the character walking while the next is the character strutting his stuff about.

Once again I shall be optimistic and think that I can get these animations done faster if I'm not as knackered as I am right now. Whew. I'm going to sleep later and later each day.

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[ gordallott @ 21:49 ] Engine flexibility

Hurrah, the engine i designed is finally at a place where any modifications to the gameplay/gamedesign are made though modifications to custom AI routines, By accident last time i slipped into a system where AI's were flexible so this time i designed it that way from the ground up. all the work i'm doing at the moment is in AI.base \o/

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[ ZeroByte @ 00:23 ] Day 3 Art - We've Got Lawn!

End of day 3, another poor showing from me on the art side. I need to get some sun to get myself out of this funk I think. I've managed to partially finish one location which is less than what I had set for myself to finish this day. For this location I need to do a few rooms to make the house tilable and then I can work on the final location (I think) before I have the character(s) to animate. This is going to be a looong art week. In other news though, there's finally a craptastic looking lawn in our game! That also needs further tweaking. I shall go off to sleep now.

Each day seems to make the thumbnails ridiculously smaller.

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[ gordallott @ 11:53 ] Day Three has begun! - tech review, quadtrees, opengl3.0/ES1.1 compliance

Well its day three and i'm fairly confident that the game will be finishable by Saturday night, Its actually not been too hard for me this time, our game idea mostly requires zb to produce mountains of artwork, might i say what a fine job he does at that though! If i can keep him focused until Friday then we'll be fine ;)

I thought I Would take some time out to talk about a few of the technologies that I have been using in the backend.

• The most interesting thing I have been playing with this time is QuadTree's, No one else seems to go for them for some reason, favouring one giant list of objects to render. I used this method last time and ran into problems, ended up having to create large display lists of large area's of geometry just to reduce the size of the python list. Lesson learnt - python does not do well with giant lists.

  Quadtree's however a nice idea, you partition the world space into buckets, once the bucket gets full you split it into four more smaller buckets, in doing this you create a tree of spacialy organised data. Retrieving the items that are in a certain spacial area is trivial then. Quadtree's basically let you create worlds as big as you like without having to worry about speed problems :)

• The second technology I am playing with in this setup is trying to stay true to the backwards incompatible ideals of opengl 3.1, the codebase does not require opengl3.1 in any way (at the moment it should work on anything that has vertex buffer object support) but its a rather interesting way of coding.

  Basically the major change is the removal of

  glBegin() ... ... glEnd()

  Instead you are now encouraged to create vertex buffer objects for everything in your scene, Its a system that works quite well and is especially speedy if your not switching buffers too much. I'm not going 100% gl3.1 though, namely in that 3.1 glTranslate() and such are depreciated in favour of you modifying the matrices yourself, I have done that in the past and its not the most fun, especially not in python, that would be rather slow :)

• Oh and as usual inkscape is being used as our level editor, not much to say about that though apart from this time i designed the game to be using inkscape from the ground up rather than hastily adding it half way though, the code is much cleaner :)

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[ ZeroByte @ 22:51 ] Eh.

It's been a slow art day in that I didn't get as much done as I had wanted. Been working on the mockup for one level, here's the results. Thumbnail cause its ridiculously long now.

Once I fill out the last part of this mockup I will have maybe one more location to do. I think. I swear we're planning this and totally not making this up as we go along! After the locations are done I guess I'll be turning my attention to character art and animation.

To commemorate emo monday (too many real life friends getting 'mo, including myself) heres Jeff Buckley

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[ ZeroByte @ 12:21 ] On the art side...

It was nice to get the theme that we wanted, we had our game idea fleshed out enough that we could quickly move into engine creation on gord's side and art direction on mine. The way I figure the game, we'll be needing loads of art so I'm going to be using pixelart this time to be a bit faster. At the same time I wanted to take my pixelart in another direction rather than the normal retro 8bit style so this time I took heavy influence from the work of Superbrothers who has a very interesting look to his pixel art. I'm also trying for a 50's animation feel to it but I'm not quite sure I'll be able to get it.

Here's a mockup that I've gone done whipped up a bit slowly.

Inspiration:

• Superbrothers
• 101 dalmatians colour key - very nice muted colours, started as my base
• Rhapsody of Steel - simple yet effective backgrounds!
• Morning sky - the natural world rules!

Whelp, back to doing more art and story writing (maybe!)

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[ gordallott @ 10:08 ] Going well

Well we are progressing nicely so far, the end still seems very far away but im confident in our ability to get it done :) heres a way early screenshot!

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