End of Thursday Morning

tsmaster on 2007/04/05 17:15 of Woody Tigerbaum's Interplanetary Package Delivery (Big Dice Games - PW4)

With the "New Game" and "Options" menu complete, I've knocked off the last of the features I really wanted to get in.

I have a handful of remaining features in my "if I have time" list, and I want to take some time to churn out a number of levels to make the tutorial experience distinct from the "real" course progression.

I'm pleased with where things are right now, and especially satisfied that people have had fun playing the "work in progress" versions I've posted so far. Thanks to everybody that's tried the game and provided feedback.

I just did a quick estimate of how many hours I've spent so far on this, and I think it's around 46, not counting brainstorming before the theme was announced. In one sense, that's a scary high number - it's almost exactly all my waking non-work time for this week. On the other hand, I'm pretty impressed that I can get something this complete that fast.

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Comments

simono on 2007/04/05 17:56:

would love to try out the new version, would you mind posting .src for us linuxes.. thank you

tsmaster on 2007/04/05 22:29:

I will - I posted a source build last night and found that there was one line that kept it from running.

I changed it, and the (I hope) working version is here. It's not in the submission-friendly format, the next source upload will be, though. You'll want to run main.py once you unzip that.

Perhaps the next thing I do will be to automate my own source submission packaging process. I can almost make a Windows build in my sleep now, but making something for Linux requires thought.

I'd love to know how (if) it works on your machine!

simono on 2007/04/05 23:33:

yes, this works. great...

When i first started, i pressed ESC, space nervously... then i couldn't select anything in the menu. but after restarting the game and only pressing mouse-buttons it worked... i dont like intros :-)

tsmaster on 2007/04/06 00:01:

Oh, but I spent so much time on that intro! :)

I had someone else say that they had trouble with the menu in Linux when they tabbed away and came back. I've got a feature that if the game loses focus, the pause menu comes up (during a level, not in the main menu or intro screens). I noticed this wasn't working on my Mac, either, so I disabled that feature on Mac and Linux.

Hitting any key during the opening splash screens or the "cinematic" should have skipped straight to the main menu - that code, at least, isn't complicated. Well... not very complicated.

saluk on 2007/04/06 15:38:

46 hours? So you could have done this for a 48 hour contest if you worked on it non-stop :) I'm pretty impressed with all you've been able to do tsmaster - great work!

tsmaster on 2007/04/06 17:13:

I think this is much better than my entry into LD48, in part because the downtime when I wasn't working on the game gave me a chance to come back and try a few different things.

Case in point: I was thinking about having a "chat" console that would come up and feed you useful information, but I decided that I couldn't make an intuitive interface for operating it fast enough, so I ditched the idea and went to dialog boxes. A simpler approach, but it's a little bit different direction.

Also, that intro with the retro-raster graphics was a second approach - I was thinking about doing a more classic retro-vector approach for my drawings, but turning a drawing into a vector image wasn't something I had the tools for, or could write the tools for quickly enough. I took a stab at it, and it sort of worked for "Woody"'s portrait, but the rest of the images didn't work as well.