So, this weekend was Ludum Dare ( http://ludumdare.com/ ) which is a game jam compo thing. It's awesome and I've tried to enter it in the past, and not ... completed anything. Last year at this time Leblane and I tried to do the jam (rather than the compo, which is single person, 48 hours, make a game - jam is 72 hours, team of one or more people) and we ... didn't finish.

This year, we finished. Well, ok, we submitted. We didn't really get the game I wanted to make, but there's a game, and there's some stuff unused, and it could be worked on some more which I will do.

It is for pico-8, which is a fun little toy not-a-real-console (except now it is, hardware has been built to run it) and it's a lot of fun to work with. It's also something you can sit-down-and-work-on, rather than deal with 'ok which library can I use to get this, what is the php command for this oh man why is php so sht you know scrw php let's use an ACTUAL FREAKING LANGUAGE' and similar issues. Oh, and no cross-platform crap; it works on Unix-like and other things that aren't any good that quite frankly I'm not going to spend a damned minute supporting. So 'boom, it works' oh and it works on phones too. YAY. And stuff.

It's lua, I like lua, but it's got some helpers and some odd things which if you're thinking normally will catch you (the Y axis for sin is reversed, which makes it easy/fun, but if you're trying to port it somewhere else after using pico-8 as a testbed - it'll be "wtf.")

So right Halides did music and sound effects, and they are better than the code. I'd redo the code if I were starting today, mainly - well...

quite frankly when I started doing the 'move the guy around' I looked at an example and went for a full 'more than one object can move' model with a global holding them (table, objects in it) and - we had a single thing that moved. Also, I think I'd do more structure and planning for the actual things that were used - I went back and forth on looking up things a lot. (I stuffed them all in a 'ship' structure, which was 'shaped' and thus you couldn't really look a room up by it's index - x,y would be better, but then - doors. 4 doors? no, each room needed a maximum of 2 doors - and it's neighbors would have the other doors. And some walls did NOT have neighbors...) This could actually have dealt with different shapes than the ship shape, and I may just do this as something else at some other time.

I spent a bit too much time looking at some things, and had too many distractions (it's me, so that happens) and I would have liked to have made the animation for the phone dialer... but the phone dial itself took 20 minutes. Moving the dude around the ship and dealing with the doors took 12. Probably could have been less...

It is too bad Leblane was sick, he mainly didn't get much into the game, but... well, I probably ended up with more good stuff out of it because of that.

You know this edit window is WAAY too small, I could expand it, but I need to get in and look at this code for this site and see about improving some of it.

Ok so yes, it is an hour and a half after the submission, I have not had a beer yet, and it's 5:37 and you know I should sleep because technically I should do work tommorrow. Possibly more on this tommorrow. I've already written it up a few times and I can already hear some people complaining about it, but you know, screw that noise, I finished something before a deadline. Even though it's not what I wanted it to be, I got it to the point where it could be submitted, even if it is missing HUGE chunks of what it could be.

Hmm we need a preview as well (:

http://iam.notonfire.co.uk/ineedtea/ineedtea.html

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=8368