Heya all, this’ll be my first attempt at LD. I’ve done the 7DRL a few times, but this is a little more brutal 
I’ll be using:
IDE : Code::Blocks
Language : C++
Framework: OpenGL, GLFW
Libraries : irrKlang, possibly box2D or bullet
Can’t wait for the theme!
Tags: hello world
Tags: motivation
First meal of the compo is a simple one :
After the theme was announced I took about an hour long bike ride (really nice since it was midnight here) and mulled over some ideas. Ironically enough it started RAINING! (RIP rain. You’ll be chosen next time, I promise!)
Managed to come up with a possibly doable idea involving a huge spinning circular wall of debris that closes in on you. At worst I hope to have the huge spinny wall thing done so it’ll at least look neat Filled up my whiteboard with a todo and now its time for bed.
Tags: food, whiteboard
it isn’t breakfast time here but i’m just now getting around to uploading breakfast photos. ahhh kroger-brand cereal, so cheap and tasty
Tags: food
mmm day old cold chinese! my favorite coding food (seriously i always order a ton of chinese before a compo starts and it lasts me a few days)
also a video of my progress so far. i have a spinning wall of doom!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW5-O6wRIqc
(can’t get embedding to work…)
Tags: food
Couldn’t get flash to embed in my last post so here is a screenshot of current progress:
The wall spins. The goal will be to dive into this spinning wall of doom and collect stuff. Now to work on making the wall more dense…
This has been an enjoyable 48 hours! Too tired to think of anything witty, so just enjoy the game
Download (windows executable and source)
How to run: extract archive and run ‘chandrasekhar.exe’
You happen upon a planet in the middle of gravitational collapse. Collect data spheres to preserve this planet’s history and knowledge.
Tags: final
Youtube is kinda being strange with it, but here it is anyway
Tags: timelapse
Tags: motivation
Tags: motivation
Tags: motivation
Getting in my pre-compo meal:
Tags: deskphoto
Tags: motivational
Well, couldn’t get a demo working in time. This is my second LD and my first fail. I’ll try to take away some of the sting by detailing what went wrong!
I wanted a procedurally generated cavern that you could climb using a grappling hook. I wanted the grappling hook to be modeled as realistically as possible, so it would react like real rope and not stretch much, wrap around corners, etc. Turns out this is a pretty tough thing to do 😉
I used the Bullet physics library because I’ve messed with it before, and also because I saw a demo for Softbody Rope which seemed exactly what I needed. Unfortunately, like EVERYTHING in that library, the rope was very sparsely documented. It took me almost 10 hours to get it working. This was something I hoped to get done in an hour or so.
Finally, at the end of my first day I got the rope behaving somewhat how I wanted. Good enough to proceed at least, so the second day I focused on cavern generation. I wanted to be able to create interesting geometry out of a huge block, so I decided to implement the “marching tetrahedrons” algorithm for turning a volumetric dataset into polygons. This took longer than anticipated due to a silly small mistake that was hard to track down. It didn’t help that I was already bummed about losing so much time due to the rope issue 😛
So after finally getting the rope working and a basic cavern generated, I tried to add the cavern mesh to Bullet and get some collisions going. Unfortunately this is when the deadline snuck up on me, and despite coding furiously I couldn’t finish in time. I do think I’ll continue with this concept until I get something playable.
Despite the fail, I had a great time as usual. I’m happy about finally implementing the marching tetrahedron algorithm, as I have a few project ideas that will definitely benefit from it. And as much as I want to hate on Bullet right now, it is a fun library to play with. Just not the most fun when there is no documentation and precious little time to comb through source files trying to figure out how something works.
I’ll end with some random shots of things going wrong
Tags: post-mortem
