Announcement
Hiya! Now that the next Ludum Dare is upon us again, I figured this would be a good time for another pre-event blog. Also I can say that this last duration of silence has been FAR more productive than the one before it. I've still been busy at work since a secondary project deadline was established conveniently as soon as the first was completed. At least now I don't feel as crushed, and am happy to start getting back into game development.
Improvements
I started this month trying to get back into game development by creating a turn-based RPG system from scratch. However after I started groundwork for it, I quickly realized I wasn't going to have enough time to do anything of interest before the upcoming Ludum Dare jam, so I gave up trying to make a game, and focused on engine improvements. Not super happy going so long without writing actual game code, but at least I got to spend some time improving my sprite skills by creating sprites for that started game.
Some of the sprites created for the RPG using the PICO-8 color scheme.
Binary format for PNM image loader: After trying to add 40 32by32 images to this fresh project I quickly realized how slow the text format loaded at scale. After adding support for the binary variants of the format, I noticed a reduction of load time by 4 times.
In-code synthesis of sounds: Took the time to understand the music theory around basic audio programming. Put this knowledge to the test by starting to build a framework around the creation of audio in code. Right now that includes a simple keyboard with configurable filter and oscillator support plus a basic sequencer. My hope is this is a good enough start to finally include some sound with my upcoming jam submission.
Type hints and documentation: Added a bunch of missing hints to several of the large engine packages. Modern Python IDEs like PyCharm can do wonders with these and greatly improve a programmers experience handling the code.
Setbacks
Ubuntu: At the very beginning of the month I decided I was going to upgrade my Ubuntu 16.04 development laptop to the latest and greatest 17.10. Besides the bit of overhead that it took to get my tools and repos setup again, I had to build Python 3.5 from source to get the interrupter version on the OS since it ships with 3.6. Combine that with the long running series of UI/UX bugs I've been having (probably due to the replacement of Unity with Gnome) and I've had it. Going to find some time to reinstall the LTS version this week.
IndieDB: Tonight I had started typing this blog entry earlier, but a failure to upload images led me to lose all of my progress. Not a major loss, but I really do wish you could save drafts in this blog editor.
Upcoming
Probably just going to work on either engine or process improvements until the start of the next game jam. I hope to see some of you guys and girls out there for this upcoming Ludum Dare jam. Number 40, should be quite eventful! If not, I wish everyone a joyful autumn holiday. Talk to you again soon!
