Richard Jones' Log

Well, there goes another Ludum Dare 48-hour game programming comp. It went really well, and fortunately the Zope setup I wrote to handle the running of the comp held up pretty well too. Meant that I could focus on the actual comp itself. I've written a post-mortem of my competition experience.

PyGame did everything I asked of it, again. Well, except sound. The SDL resampling code is a bit dodgy, and I didn't have time to figure out what sampling rates I should be using to make it not crackle. Everything else went really well :)

I'll probably revise the Zope setup and produce a single stand-alone Product (rather than the hodge-podge of Products, Through The Web scripts and HTML pages that I did use ;) to make it even easier next time.

And yes, there'll be a next time. I reckon I'll probably run another in 3 months (which I won't enter) and then another in about 6 months. That second one will have slightly different rules (teams, maybe pre-recorded sound fx, maybe pre-recorded music).

Voting is still under way, so I can't say who won, but I'm pretty sure it'll be one of the three or four really outstanding entries. Jolle's entry in particular was my favourite. He seemed to get that real balance between fun and simplicity that I almost cracked this comp (I failed dismally last comp).

Web browsers so need to filter out double-clicks on <form> submit buttons. This is just silly:

<script type="text/javascript">
submitted = false;
function submit_once() {
    if (submitted) {
        alert("Your request is being processed.\\nPlease be patient.");
        event.returnValue = 0;    // work-around for IE
        return 0;
    }
    submitted = true;
    return 1;
}
</script>

(The above being code that appears in Roundup, which I've added to pretty much every system I've written that has a web form in it)

We've got some Flash design guy in the office throwing around the same old ideas about how to Make The Web Better. At the moment, this involves all the usual crap: mini frames embedded in the window that can't display any reasonable amount of information, whirling-and-spinning dynamic 3-D nagivation trees that zoom and whirl and consist entirely of spheres connected by lines with no semantic information whatsoever and the user's supposed to just guess what each sphere is, and where the information they want is.

One of the onlookers remarked that people would learn to navigate the site just like they do streets. Sure, if streets had no names or visible landmarks.

</rant>

The 48-Hour Game Programming Competition is a "mostly from scratch", timed, solo coding challenge where all willing game developers spend their allowed time making the best game they can under a common theme.

I've got the comp site up and running, taking registrations and testing some of the voting / rating features. The themes list is quite long and mostly interesting. I think I'm going to have lots of fun - hopefully the site will look after itself :)

In all, it took me about two days to develop the site - that includes the voting systems (instant-runoff and best-ten), rating system, weblog customisations (including the aggregate log), registration (including "home" dir setup), security setup, some basic styling and other content. About half of the work was done through the web (general content, security), the other half using on-disk Products or Extensions (voting, rating, weblog and registration). Zope's pretty cool, sometimes :)