Well this gonna my first try to participate in Ludum Dare! I hope I can manage to complete something by the end of the week-end. Still not sure which platforms ill target, as I was thinking to do something on the iPhone but from the rules it seems this is not very recommended. Will see how it goes.

Ohh and I have experience last week my first game jame by participating remotely to the 360iDev Game Jam and made an attemp to complete a small space shooter ;-).

And of course here is the official deskphoto of where I am going to work this week-end. Maybe some people will recognize some interesting stuff in this picture…

Tags: deskphoto ludum dare 17

Currently still experimenting with SDL on my Mac, but in the meantime I got 2 ideas for my games, one would be more like a stratety tile-based board game and the second one is more like an adventure.  Will see how this afternoon goes.

And if you are interested in seeing what I am doing you can check my live stream here :

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/quebarium—ludum-dare-17/v3

Well its seems I wont be able to fully complete something in less then 12h, but I’ve learned some valuable lessons for next time 😉

– Use tools/API you are familiar with and check that you have a base code running before…

It seems I didn’t respect this at all, as I went with SDL (I’ve used it in the past on my Windows box for doing GP2X development, but never used it on OSX with Xcode, oops got many surprise there).  And didn’t have a base code running (well I was finally able to get sound running late yesterday and still no graphics pfff!).

– Make sure its not a monthly production week-end at work…

Well I knew about this, but since the last few month they were never got any problems so the guys doing the support never had to call me on week-end.  Of course guess what happen? Yup got a call at they were some several errors with processing data in the data base, so had to connect via VPN debug the crap :-(.

– Verify the schedule for family events…

Well yesterday had 2 important family events in our family, first it was my wife birthday of 40 years old (an important year), 2nd we were also celebrating the 50 years old marriage of one of my uncle and aunt and came back late.

Here a little screenshot of what I did so far ahaha in the few time I got ;-).

Well took a little break of my coding this morning to eat a little bit, here is some the tasty food I eated 😉 (what I eat that isn’t on the photo was ham, rice and green beans).

First the cheese P’tit Québec

The the sweet dessert which is called Pets de soeur 😉

Tags: foodphoto

Well today was like yesterday with so many interuptions, but I am getting somewhere at least, but definately not going to complete something good in the 3h left in the compo.  Will see if ill submit my SDL failure LOL 😉

Here is the first interuption of the day :

Yes I had to go buy this product, as I was going to take a little break at around 15h and went to grab some cookies in the closet I saw an army of ants picking up those chocolate cookies :-(.  So went to the store to buy this, take out everything and let say I didn’t eat cookies.

Second interuption was for some healthy reason, I had to prepare a dinner for myself and my wife :-).

Tthe pots contains potatoes, meatballs, carrots, pepper corn sauce and the important ingredient BEER ;-).

Well just less then 1h to go and totally not going to finish something decent so here how my sad attempt look like right now.  Still missing some actual game play ahahaha, now you can just move the boat around the see and islands and that’s about it.

So its definitely a NO GO for me, oh well did have fun experimenting and still have several ideas with the theme islands to make some real games with a bit more time ;-).

So the Quebarium crew is bringing their keyboards to play some synth pop music of the 80'.
 
 Ohhhh wait, this is not that kind of "Jam"... ;-).
 
 Of course we know about that, so this morning the first thing is the agenda is to reach

@fcycles and @tronicsynth and get their inputs for ideas and if they have time to provide

some times (either to do code, music, graphics).

Yup it's me @frederictessier "alone" that decided to bring them a long in my madness ahahaha ;-p

(hope they won't be mad at me LOL), anyway they have still 2 days to give me their answer.

Maybe the first thing today would be to introduce the 3 members of Quebarium for people

that doesn't know us.

Well… well…

It seems I didn’t listen to my own advice from last time which was to stick to thing I know and be able to start right away.

Hmmm well how about this?

Yup I am trying to get SDL to work once more but now under VisualStudio 2010! When am I gonna learn… it seems not this time once more ;-p.

Tags: LD22

Got a little progress this morning, got the basic SDL setup working ;-p, now it display some graphics, play some music.

Next steps, to start to work on the actual game ;-).

Tags: LD22

Sadly I had to eject from the cockpit…

This week-end wasn’t so good for any of us at Québarium as each of us already have other plans and thing to do in our todo list.

Since it was a “Jam” we could have kind of cheated and prepare thing in advance and be more prepare (like having a project template for SDL all setup in the IDE). Since I spent time to setup first SDL 1.3 (which I grab the recent snapshots) which in the end I couldn’t get to compile properly (I was really interested to get it to work as it’s now supporting iOS).

Alas it was not to be, I though at first I will have more time yesterday as I was all “alone” (wife went out to university), but then I care thing in the house like setting up xmas decoration. Looking for iOS devs stuff for a friend that had call me in the afternoon for his own project. And today was back to work and just came back home at 18h30… and have a big headache so not in the mood to do any coding.

But I did learn new thing this time, as I got a bit more familiar with VS 2010 C++ Express Edition. Got to setup SDL 1.2 properly (will still take a look at SDL 1.3) which I will make into some kind of template for next time. Found some interesting tools, as I played a bit with Autotracker-C to get some music. And found an interesting character creation tools (http://charas-project.net/charas2/index.php). So not all time is lost 😉 and the goal was to have fun.

Hopefully next time we will organize our self a bit better (the same way we did for our participation in a fast demo compo last month, where we have less 1/2 day to build up something with the theme “potato” and hey we end being the #1 demo of that day ;-), you can see our “Poutine” demo here : http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=58079)

See you next time everyone!
And I also wish everyone Happy Holidays! Ho Ho Ho