maximalist

Here’s my entry for mini-LD#5.

It’s a cover of GBGames LD#11 entry, ‘minimalist’; turned evil. I like to think of it as a minimalist survival horror.

You can download maximalist and read more details here.

There is a gameplay video here … but it leaves off the surprise ending, so you still have to play the game :) .

The goal is to complete 25 levels an achieve the highest score possible.

Libraries used: Pygame, Rabbyt (including the pygame_font.py font rendering code), my (alpha) simplemenu library.

Tools used: The Gimp, Sfxr (DrPetter saves the day, yet again), Audacity, oggenc

I used a scanner to ‘photograph’ various objects around the house (including myself) to provide source images for further manipulation.

Assests: “Squealer” font by Ray Larabie, A scan of my face, A scan of a carved wooden ‘skull’ box on my desk, some hand drawn sprites (exit and glowstick), me screaming into the microphone.

Things I learned

Rendering fonts using the Rabbyt library is a little ugly unless you are using Pyglet for textures. I was using Pygame, so while I was able to use the *pygame_font.py* code which comes with Rabbyt to render fonts, it just *felt wrong*.

Source control (SVN) saved my butt this time. I was happily coding away, when I realized a few revisions ago the game performance had really dropped … constant slowdowns and jitters. I checked out copies of several revisions back and tested them to see at which revision things started to go all sluggish. Then, looking at the svn diffs (using Trac), I could see that it was my implementation of the score rendering code that was the likely culprit. Sure enough, making some sensible changes fixed the slowdowns … silky smooth gameplay again :)

I also learned that I perform better when I’m more relaxed … I deliberately choose a very simple game to ‘cover’ so I could focus more on graphics and polish, and I wasn’t even fully committed to completing the game this weekend. Taking a laid back approach really helped (at least it *felt* better).