This will be my first attempt at the Ludum Daré 😉 I’m writing (almost) everything from scratch in Haskell. I have some stub game code to start from that includes opengl bindings, windowing, keyboard, mouse and joystick control. All of that amounts to me being able to control a sprite of a grim reaper using my joystick:

In my toolchain I’m using vim for editing, ghc for compilation, hdevtools for quick error checking, steeloverseer for file watching / automatic recomp, and photoshop for image editing. If all goes well I should have a very minimal game without sound by the end of the weekend. Let’s hope!

Tags: schell

I’ve finished my goals for the night – I got collision testing working and have an okay animated reaper. I also hacked in some quick z-sorting and mass. Things are looking okay. Tomorrow will be tricky though.

schell scivally ld31

If you’d like to follow along here is my github repo https://github.com/schell/ld31.

SLEEEEEEP

Tags: schell

Maybe I’ve taken the wrong approach to work and sleep. I thought I could work all night, wake up at an hour or so past my normal wake up time and then keep working. I was wrong and I slept through half of my work day. It would have been better for me to have gone to sleep early, gotten lots of sleep and woken up early with an entire nights worth of time to work. I guess I’ll be doing that tonight. Hopefully the sleep deprivation won’t hurt me too much. Just in case I’m taking two Aderol right now.

Just kidding, I’ve got my normal intravenous coffee drip and yerba mate drinks 😉

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Tags: schell

With five hours left I don’t think I’ll be finished in time for the compo. I’m still working on engine type things. I’ve ditched trying to implement an event system and am fixing up tweens and such so that I can display the story to the user. This is going to be tricky. I may need some family hiking to clear my head
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Tags: haskell, schell

I started this compo months in advance – I had been working on some libraries that I thought would be really useful for making games. I had written a soft FRP lib and a 2d vector-ish graphics library. I spent a LOT of time on those! Mostly reading white papers about polygon decomposition, path rendering and rasterization. I thought I would have very nice looking 2d vector graphics for my FRP game simulation.

At the last minute I read this post linked on reddit about an entity component system using extensible effects and I decided to try to use that as well.

I ended up loving the component system (though I’m still figuring out how to handle and sequence events). I ended up barely using my libraries *at all*. I think I had been a victim of depth-first development. I got really deep into figuring out how to decompose polygons and do very low-level things when I should have been thinking about Haskell game dev as a whole. I should have been writing one specific game, then writing another specific game (and then another) and then library-izing the parts that are shared and good. Instead I had an idea like “hey, this would be cool to use for game dev – I’ll dive deep into building this out.” I also had strong intuitions about what a good API would be for those libraries and I worked hard to materialize them. I thought “yes! this is pure and clean and good!” – but once I started the compo I realized that I wasn’t using the libs in the way I had written them. I had over-theorized! What I really needed were dirty tricks and quick get-er-dones! This is a hard lesson and one that (admittedly) I’ve learned before.

In the next couple months I’ll be dedicated to developing games rather than developing libraries for games. By the next ludum dare I’ll hopefully have accumulated some tried and true techniques and dirty tricks.

To see the code I accumulated you can visit my github: https://github.com/schell/ld31.