First things first: I promise to try to limit the related posts in the future and I apologize to the legions of l337 coders for the continued coverage.
Right, now, on to todays topic: "Colour like that" (Awright, punning on my own blog post titles!). While watching the livestream of Minicraft, I was intrigued by his dynamic sprite colorising. After a little reverse engineering and experimentation I realised it was dang simple, and we could apply something similar to HTML5 games.
Last weekend was the 22nd Ludum Dare 48 hour game comp. Again Notch livestreamed it, again I watched pretty much all of it, and again I learned a lot. But having seen Notch in action before, this time I could afford to take my eyes off the code from time to time, and spend a bit more time to perusing the informative "chat" that accompanied the videos.
The problem with the real world is it's not enough like Minecraft. The fix is simple: pipe haunting and beautiful C418 tracks at various random times throughout the day, in a Minecraft-y fashion. To keep you on your toes, add in some rare-but-scary cave sounds. And that's exactly what my Grindcraft python script is for.
If you're a fan of the game (a fan is someone who has played it) then you'll know that the music in Minecraft is "special". The game proceeds largely in silence... you'll be deep in the process of constructing a summer house out of glass, or building a railroad to your lava pit when it starts... ever-so-slowly drifting in, and filling your body with smiles. Then it washes away without you even noticing.
I decided I needed this for my daily grind, so I whipped up a dodgy python script that plays random ogg files out of the Minecraft resources directory. But first I needed to figure out which songs Minecraft plays, and at what times.
Read on for more »
As I move into my twilight years (mid 30s) I start to have flashbacks surrounding various aspects of my youth. This very morn', for example, I was whisked back to an endless summer evening circa the mid 80s... The scene is composed of; a large christmas tree, me, my grandmother, and our TV. Connected to the TV is my first ever computer: a SpectraVideo 318 (sold mostly in Japan and Sweden, apparently - but powered by the famous Zilog Z-80 chip [as seen to this day in my washing machine]).
The Play! framework went and made Java development more fun than Ruby development (*ducks*) - and then Martin Odersky went and made Java more fun than Java (*considers ducking, but doesn't*), and then the Play framework went and mashed those fun things together and now there is the Play! 2.0 framework.
Play 2.0 gives a big hug to Scala (the core is all Scala now - though there are still Java APIs for everything if you haven't convinced your bosses to switch yet). One small-yet-nice feature of the new version is built-in CoffeeScript and Less CSS support. Here's how you use it...
Lil' reference for anyone doing the Stanford AI class... It's a collection of playlists for each unit, so you can grab them with something like youtube-dl (I use the command youtube-dl -w -t -f 18 http://playlisturl. I didn't check what those flags do, but it says "wtf", and that's all that matters).
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Since having a chat about what I learned from watchin' live coding, I've received buckets of emails 'n' tweets asking for links to the videos... After an epic google search of 5 minutes I've collected them all and aggregated them in this one happy place.
Someone coded Prelude of the Chambered for the Lundum Dare #21 game competition over 48 hours of August 19th-22nd 2011. I think most of it is here - and I've started annotating some of the good bits. Started. I'll fill out this post as I go...
It's well worth a study if you've got a couple of days to spare!
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"Bit of advice: if you want a role model, pick an old guy. By the time you grow up, they're dead" - Bob's Burgers
Six hundred games: invented, designed, and coded - in 2 days. That was the Lundum Dare game competition #21, held from the 19th to the 22nd of August. Hoards of game makers spent 48 hours creating lil' masterpieces based on the given theme: "Escape".
One of the contestants was a one-time gamedev superstar. He took the intrepid step of livestreaming his entire process (which now exists as a 5 minute timelapse video): every move, every mouse-click, every keypress he made for 2 days - streamed live to an average audience of 10,000 viewers.
Over the weekend of the competition I ingested around 30 hours of the action in full screen; surrendering my complete attention to a programmer writing Java. Java! Tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people watched a guy code Java. It was incredible and inspiring. Here's what I learnt:
I was messing around with Google's "correlate draw" thingo and found a sad story regarding Windows Mobile Apps mentions...
What happened there, hey?!