Hi! First LD, although with a bit more restricted time scope. Toolage:

• linux
• sfxr for audio
• gimp or graphics gale (http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/, using wine) for pixels
• vim or emacs editor (depending on mood)
• haskell (http://www.haskell.org/platform/) as programming language, with haste backend for targeting html5/js canvas (https://github.com/valderman/haste-compiler)
• I share my in-progress library for haste canvas bindings, feel free to use: https://github.com/robinp/haste-html5 (see https://github.com/robinp/haste-html5/blob/master/html5-test/Main.hs for quickstart).

Best luck for everyone!

Attempting to build a train controlling game – ancient, since the trains are supposed to be old, and the gfx should resemble and ancient home computer, the ZX Spectrum. Not much time to work on it though, so let’s see how far I get. Below a screenshot with PyxelEdit, toying around with track tiles. The benefit (and hurdle) of ZX Spectrum gfx is that while designing sprites, it’s enough to draw in 1-bit color depth. Later when placing tiles on the screen, a foreground and a background color can be specified from a limited palette. This was known as the “color attribute block” model, followed by many home computers of the time to save memory. Looking forward to see some nice color clash!

After tinkering for a while, I have a minimal tileset ready. My hunch is that I can be happy with a “tech demo” – probably won’t reach the complete game state.

Got to sketch the data structures, which would let a train navigate a track with switches. Seems simple enough that I might be able to pull it off, though no level parsing etc – most likely data will be hardcoded. I also don’t yet have a tilemap/sprite decoding routine, so likely I’ll transcribe them by hand into numbers (single byte per 8 bit rows).

Didn’t finish a whole game, but given my limited time I’m satisfied. Got time to write a small tile loader and added some animation by manual timing. My ZxHs framework really needs more high-level combinators to ease drawing. For example, a singel operation to draw a sprite while also setting the color of all the intersecting attribute blocks. And probably drawing modes like XOR, AND, in addition to the (implicitly default) OR mode. Combining that with spritemasks and mask extensions, some nice effects could be added. Anyway, here’s the working gif-shot:

For code see https://github.com/TreeTide/zxhs/blob/ld36/trainy-day/app/Main.hs . I’ll probably rename the game, and eventually merge to master, so keep clicking around if it isn’t there. Be sure to follow on Twitter if you are into these kind of things.