January Game: DONE! (microgue)

It was finished at literally 11:59 and I didn’t get it actually beaten until 11:22 (confirming my 11:59 revision is gold), but it finished.
One-day game this time, started at 1AM on the 31st and finished at the above time. Given breaks for family and food, I think I spent 19.5 hours on this game.

It’s a roguelike, with a lot of almost-features.
It has random map generation, but no curved corridors.
It has an inventory system, and one item (which you can’t use but have to collect anyway)
It has gold, but no shops.

And so on. Still, it’s playable, and as annoying as all roguelikes. I’mma go sleep a week.

python’s curses module and delwin

If you check the docs, you’ll notice it’s missing. Googling “curses delwin python” gives a few people asking about it but no answers. HERE IS AN ANSWER:

You don’t need it. Python internally calls it when the window object is deallocated, or when you shutdown curses with curses.endwin(), whichever happens first.

WebRemote 2.0: UDP Harder

So I modified by web-remote Android app and my server so that they support UDP, along with the older HTTP API.

Results: Excellent. There’s no longer a 0.5-1.0 second pause when clicking buttons. I’m still not sure where the hell that came from, HTTP shouldn’t be this slow.

December Game: SOKOBAN

So I technically didn’t start this today, but when I started coding last week I didn’t get anywhere and the first thing I did today was to just delete it all.
It’s a simple game and the code is pretty simple too, but my reason for doing it is I wanted to design it backwards from how I usually do games. Instead of starting with graphics and
technical details (setting up pygame or whatever), I wrote it gameplay first. I started trying to describe the rules of Sokoban in the simplest possible code, coding to an imaginary API
for tile-based games. Then when I was happy with how that worked, I wrote the implementation of the API I had described in the game module.

It worked pretty much when I first ran it (other than a typo where I had left off “self” on one constructor call, which was kinda surprising for a game by me. I tend to iterate like crazy:
1. Start with my PyGame template
2. Make a change to make it more like a game
3. Run it.
4. If it crashes or looks wrong, make a quick fix and go to #3 .If it runs, go to #2

This may explain why I have so many problems with making games.

(PS: I did fail at November game)

October Game: Gameplay video

I had to do weird things with the emulator to capture this video.

October game: wait which month is it again?

Yeah I’m still working on this, apparently. No actual November game in sight. Kinda a bit low on days left in the month.

I started out refactoring the whole cheats system so that it’s a lot less hardcoded int arrays and a lot more object oriented and enumerable at runtime.
And then I added the stuff you can see in the screenshot:

1. A health display for bosses (Well, boss, there’s only one boss fight so far).
This was pretty easy to hack in, but I ended up refactoring the health-display so it was a bit less hacky. The hardest part is the scaling, since the one boss I’ve implemented has
too much health to fit on screen. At least I figured out a shiny way to autoscale and I don’t have to manually hardcode scaling for various boss healths.

2. A pixely font and border for the in-game text (pause, you win, you lose bits).

And now I have to go find an older version to screenshot to show how it changed, since I now see that didn’t post a pic of it (probably because it was so ugly). It took forever too, since I didn’t really understand how Android does its magical border-images. I’m still not happy with it, but unless I write my own font engine I think I’m stuck with anti-aliased fonts. WHY DO YOU HATE MY PIXELS, GOOGS?

Project: Zelda Door

Someone on tumblr said that they love this theme and that it should play whenever they enter their house.

Since it’s Halloween and I had a microcontroller handy, I made it happen.

Technical type details:

The Arduino is running a minor variant of the Debounce tutorial, with serial status writing added. On the laptop there’s a simple python script that waits for the serial status to show that the door has been open for 1/5th of a second, and then it runs an external command. I set the external command to “playsound zelda_oot_house.mp3″, so it plays the House theme (and not the Massive Attack one).

The biggest design problem I had was that the frame of the door is metal, so there’s always connectivity between the two halves of the security lock, even when the door is open. I had to rewrite it halfway through to detect the change in resistance (since the door open is about 600ohms and closed is about 1). It would have been nice to know that ahead of time, I really should have checked with my multimeter before wiring it up.

Canon FS20, Canon FS21, Canon FS22, Canon FS200

Posting in the hopes that Google will help others fix this problem:
Ditch the USB cable that comes with the camera. This camera is VERY sensitive to cable length. I swapped it for a two-foot cable from some old device and it worked fine.
If you’ve already got the camera in USB mode and it’s failing to connect with the supplied cable, you’ll have to pull the battery to get it out of USB mode. Try with a shorter cable (connect the power adapter first) and you should be golden.

It’ll mount as a removable drive, and the movies are in SD_VIDEO as PRG001, PRG002, etc. They’re in MOD format, which mplayer/mencoder can handle just fine.

Or if you want to get fancy, you can always use Kino which has no problem importing them.

October Game: Declaring victory

So since I think I’m going to keep working on this and jam it up on the market, I realized I can’t do that and use this as my October Game. So version 2.0 will be released on the market, October Game is 1.0.

And 1.0 is done! OCTOBER: GOOD.

I added a “you win” screen, a cheat code to upgrade your main gun (powerups later), backgrounds (four different backgrounds used across 11 levels), and extended credits which properly attribute the backgrounds (NASA) and the other art (Danc/Lost Garden from “Hard Vacuum”).

October Game: Misc work

A bunch of various minor changes this time, like a neat new animation when you win (complete with trail of fire self-plagiarized from R.E.A.W.).
I’ve also improved the level selector with confirmation (when resetting the levels-beaten counter) and cheat codes! (well, cheat code)

There are finally more levels. I’m up to 10 so far, with some nice lead up before the boss instead of 3 levels going tutorial/regular level/OH GOD END BOSS EVERYONE IS DEAD.

Update: And now I see that the cheats don’t work and can’t be made to work on a real device that lacks a hardware keyboard. Drat.
Double Update: And now it works!