LD4 log

Friday Afternoon. Spend time on harebrained idea: Download, burn and install Mandrake Linux 10.0 so as to kill two birds with one stone during this compo, learning gamedev and Linux(or at least KDE) at the same time.

6:05. Find out theme, spend time sketching out design while CDs finish burning.

~7:30. Mandrake is installed. Poke about trying to get development set up.

~8:30. Manage to get a binary version of pygame working, albeit with warnings. (binaries from Redhat 8)

9:15. Take bits of the Chimp pygame demo for use and make map generator. Overlays mountain, water, and city tiles on top of a 8x8 grid.

9:35. Use Gimp(1.2, 2.0 isn't included with Mandrake 10) to create said tiles and also title logo.

9:40. Figure out how to sftp into the uni account using KBear. Begin writing this for upload.

10:32. Work on players and calculating strength of their nanovirii per region(this is a turn-based strategy game btw). A little bit tricky, and I still don't have anything "up on the screen" yet. I think I might do that last, right when it needs an interface though.

10:44. I thought I had a bug where it was adding the strength wrong. No --- I was just too clever for my own good. You see, I had it so that plains were tile "0" and mountains were tile "1" but when it came time to calculate strengths those two were reversed, haha, so it looked as though the strength + bonuses were simply added incorrectly. :P Oh, and I like the fact that Linux is actually stable. Only one program, in all, has crashed on me yet, and that was Konqueror. And it didn't mean I had to reboot!!!! (got used to doing it 5-6 times a day with WinME)

11:11. I think I'm a bit tired now. Been a long day...so now I'm seeing if I can get Karamba running ^.^

11:17. I think I'll try again tomorrow.

<I stay up until about 1:30, doing a little more, moving on to sorting influence levels>

Saturday.

11:00. After having some breakfast, doing morning things etc., I set to work again, getting the attack procedure in place. Except that it doesn't work yet - attacks are performed but none of them succeed o.O

12:15. Break for a little bit to toy with KDE some more.

1:15. Piddle about a little, trying to figure out the problem. Go to eat.

3:00. Figure out problem, change all the test printing into debug function calls. Running through 40 sets of attacks produces some very neat results. Now it's gotta go graphical, like I planned.

4:57. Well, there's an SDL window up, but it's not showing anything yet. Dunno exactly why though seeing as most of my time was spent on writing the display code >.< It's a pretty ugly design, too. I wouldn't want to keep working with it after this is over.

5:26. After spending another break reading Slashdot, am returning to work. Going to try to rework the display system.

8:13. Much waffling about, and dinner-eating. But finally the problem is resolved, and my code's cleaner to boot, w00t. I will put up my first screenshot now.

9:00. Again, being a bit lazy. And the site's down so I haven't been able to show my progress. But I fixed up some things in the display - most notably, now it shows text and isn't trying to use the exact same image in different locations :P I will be able to work almost exclusively on the bits of interface and gameplay now - the core is ready. I probably have one of the richer simulations of the projects out there, with many interdependent factors and some chance determining the order, and success or failure of attacks. In the second shot you see three numbers in a box: The first is overall strength, including both the terrain and the player. The second two are the base strength for the terrain type and the random bonus for that particular square, which goes up to three. Part of the gameplay is that you have to discover which places are best as you go along - there are no "magic formulas" and every turn takes only a single action, so success depends on making the best of your situation.

9:15. I notice that I called this "Monday." Hum... Well, now it's Saturday.

Friday.

3:15 AM. Wow, I took my time updating. Prolly cause the site's been down so long. Anyhow, the game mostly works now, with AI players - but there are some issues with taking turns and I still need to add player control. I think it'll turn out great if I can do just those two.

11:41. I had a nice rest, got up a little past 10, had breakfast, and finished!! It's a very interesting game and challenging even with poor AIs, though it's tricky to understand what's going on. I don't have enough of a "concept" for strategy to play well myself, even. I'll have to write documentation now.