If you’ve already experienced Towlr, you don’t need this.  But if you plan to sacrifice any friends to Towlr, I’ve made some useful fixes and changes.

http://junk.mikekasprzak.com/Research/Towlr/Towlr2.zip

First off, I’ve removed the ESC and F10 keys, since they’ll just make the player sad (or relieved).  Next, I changed the background color to gradually become more red over time, to add to the “driving you crazy” factor.  Finally, I named the executable correctly, so in the future people can stop asking me if it’s towel-r or t-owl-r.

Enjoy.

EDIT: Linux Version (Experimental)
EDIT: MacOS X Version (Intel) (Experimental)

Tags: postcompo

I have a seemingly endless list of libraries and tools I want, and a few I need to finish up my current project. So I’ll be starting with something I need. If all goes according to plan, I’ll get to start another one tomorrow.

So I need a Texture Pool. In other words, I want a nice way to say “hey, load blah.png”, and it’ll use it’s brains to know that I already loaded “blah.png”, and return me the same copy. Pretty straight forward stuff.

This Texture Pool is a piece I’m adding to my graphics library. Said library is designed to wrap multiple graphics API’s. Currently it wraps OpenGL (1.5) and OpenGL ES (1.1), but it also has a slightly out of date software renderer too (lacking texture support, but does geometry and transformations).

The Texture Pool itself I’d like to eventually support several formats. Currently it supports a hybrid format of mine, LZMA’d Power VR (PVR) files. The way it’s structured, it’s easy enough for me to support ZLIB, BZIP, or RAW PVR files as well, I just don’t currently. And while I don’t yet support them, I have stubs in place for PNG and DDS files.

I have some other wild goals for the Texture Pool down the line. Right now, one of my main target platforms requires square power-of-two textures. So I’d like to build a tool for combining multiple smaller images in to a single texture atlas. I’d also like a way to automatically fatten up a PNG image file, yet still somehow remember the original dimensions. This slicing information I’d like to be known by the Texture Pool, so I can draw centered or aligned texture elements with just a call, instead of having to build geometry or remember dimensions.

My solution to both is a custom file format, vaguely like an archive format. As an added bonus, I want it to be able to support storing multiple images in the same file. But the important point is to create this “many to one” relationship, where I have a single texture and some way to say it contains many elements. I’m leaning towards throwing together a text based format and tool to generate a sliced file, so I can start using this right away.

Alas, that’s a tomorrow issue.

Today, we’re building a Texture Pool. After some breakfast, we’ll do it.

Tags: Pool, Texture

Alright. So I started out this morning by writing a long post where I detailed my decisions that were going in to my Texture Pool design. I nearly finished it, before finally realizing my argument could become moot with a couple simple hacks.

Disappointed in that, I put my head down and got to work.

While working, I realized I could combine both methods, and get the benefit of both.

And eventually finished.

So the Texture Pool is done, but it is late, so I’d rather call it a night. I may revisit earlier post, since it does have some meaningful information in it.

As for a Sunday tool, we’ll see. I gotta read over my notes and think a bit about how badly I want the image slicer stuff, or if I should get on to the slightly hacky screen builder. Hmm..

Toodles!

Tags: Pool, Texture

I’m curious.

We did a little bit of promotion for the Global Game Jam, but I’m wondering if anybody actually did (or is) attending.

Do we (perhaps) cater to the “too lazy to go outside” crowd, or the “I don’t have time for that” crowd?

Or maybe you were there, representing the big LD?

Your thoughts in the comments.

Hey there boys and girls.

I’ve been busily finishing up my taxes the past couple hours. I still have a couple more to go, but I’m certainly past the half way mark. So before I get caught up in more taxes and announcing the theme, I thought now would be a good time to take a break.

Snack time!

The last cookie+marshmallow thing, and a bag of chips from my lunch at Quiznos I hadn’t eaten yet. Yum yum!

Tags: foodphoto

I’m still doing taxes at the moment, but the idea I’m considering involves procedurally generating some architecture. Rooms connected to other rooms.

Right now, the point I can think of for the game is to exit the room you’re in before a/the walls squish cave in on you. The goal of the game being to escape as many rooms as possible before you get crushed.

I may diverge though (it’s happened, I call it PuffBOMB). Will finish taxes and sleep first.

Since the plane approach doesn’t look like it will be too useful, I’m going to try something with rectangles. Build rooms from overlapping rectangles. See bottom left sketch.

So I’ll get that going first, then see if I can get a character (i.e. circle) to move nicely throughout.

Nothing too fancy. Just drawing some planes.

Tagging your posts is easy.

From inside the WordPress, scroll down past the post box to the “Tags” box.

Enter your tag in the box and click Add.

Easy. If you make a mistake, you can click the X beside the tag to remove it.

Common tags include:

• Final – for your final entries
• deskphoto – for any pictures of your work environment
• motivation – for amusing images in the spirit of the competition
• foodphoto – what you ate during a compo. Yes, we’re silly

Tags: howto

Alright, rectangle box rooms now.

Next, give the rooms an occupant.

Well, I’ve just been made aware that the media (i.e. Zip file) uploading doesn’t work for most people. Thusly I’ve hidden those instructions, and updated the “how to submit” post.

Oh well, maybe next time.

So, we’ll do submissions as we’ve done for years. Provide a link. The submission instructions page include an entry naming guide that you may want to look at too.

If you don’t have webspace of your own, ask in the channel and we’ll try and help you out.

Less that 4 days to go!

Tags: motivation

Tags: motivation

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 5:20 pm and is filed under MiniLD #10. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Well, it’s not much of a press pack, but it certainly has a logo.

Under the bookmarks to your right, you’ll find a new link.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/logo-and-press-pack/

There you’ll find high resolution transparent PNG versions of the logo you now see at the top of the page.  Also a source PSP file for those few still living Paint Shop Pro users.

If there’s anything else like that you guys (and gals) want, let us know.  We’ll do what we can.

Tags: press

Hey everybody!

Probably the biggest thing that didn’t go well last time was entry voting.  So we’d like your help to artificially create similar conditions as last time, that way we can tweak a few things before the real compo begins.

So here’s what I’d like you to do.  First off:

READ THIS CAREFULLY

We’re going to create a fake compo that happened sometime in the year 2000.  The year is important, because we don’t want to litter the front page with these posts.

SERIOUSLY! READ THIS CAREFULLY!

Create a new post and do ALL the following.

1. Choose the category LD Test from the categories box.
2. Add a Final tag in the Post Tags box (don’t forget to click Add)
3. Set the date to any day in the year 2000.  You can change this in the Publish box, by clicking Edit beside “Publish immediately”.  *IMPORTANT*
4. Upload a screenshot to the blog! You must upload a new image! Tutorial here.

Give your post a reasonable (or silly) name.  Pick a tasteful (or silly) picture.  And fill the body of the post with some text, just for completeness.

DID YOU ACTUALLY READ ALL 4 THINGS?

If you did this right, you should show up here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/category/ld-test/

Checklist (circle your answer)

• I picked a date in Y2k (i.e. year 2000) [True/False]
• I uploaded an image to the blog [True/False]
  • My image shows up in the grid [True/False]
• I couldn’t think of a 4th point, but is your image showing up in the grid? [True/False]

If you’re screenshot is uploaded correctly, it should show up when you click “show me the grid” at the top of that page.  If you don’t, then for whatever reason your image isn’t in your posts local gallery (some wordpress feature we’re utilizing to make the grid work).  Delete your image, and re upload it (i.e. step 4).

Thanks!

PS: The answers should all be true.

Yeah, that’s it for me tonight. The compo’s running, the wiki has been revised somewhat, groovy.

I haven’t even started thinking of what to do yet. Compo site calling and all.

Whatever I do, it should probably be something small. Towlr like scope (i.e. only a couple hours to get up and running). I think I want to do something with audio though. Exactly what, I have no idea.

Until then.

Hi everybody!

I’m getting a lot of comments in IRC about things, so I figure I’d start a post to collect them all.

So if you have any thoughts about how thing ran this weekend, or the voting, post a reply here.  This way, they’re all in one place, and we can see them when we get a chance.

Thanks!

I went out for a walk and hit the grocery store not to long ago.  It was around 8:30 PM when I got got there, and I was pleased to discover they had reduced the price of the stuff in the hot food section.  Sooooo… Blam!

Delicious 50% off pack of fried chicken.

Yummay!

This should get me through the super busy end of compo submission phase, and provide some delicious leftovers for tomorrow.

Tags: foodphoto

I scribbled together a compo postmortem late last night (as I seem to do now). Woke up this morning, edited it a bunch, then decided to submit it to Gamasutra blogs… in the off chance that it might get featured.

Hooray for off chances. 😀

http://www.gamasutra.com/

If you don’t see me watching you from the Featured Blogs section of the site, then hit this link for the article.

http://www.gamasutra.com/…/Ludum_Dare_15_Was_Hugeer.php

Pretty cool.

Tags: press

I’m going to do a last call post some time tomorrow.

If your game previously didn’t work on Windows, but you made fixes after several “it doesn’t work” comments, leave a comment here. I’ll collect up a list and try to make them nice and visible to everyone. Hopefully that will give all the neglected people more proper/updated votes.

Also, we’re short 1 Windows port from the port request posting. Details and a link to the source can be found in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/09/08/defenestration/

Thanks!