Daily Rants

DuckTales game returns with remastered everything and old...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 09:48:00 -0400

DuckTales game returns with remastered everything and old gameplay. I remember everyone playing this game when I was at school. The game set a lot of standarts for metroidvania genre.

Looks like a must play.

Docpad – static site generator on node.js

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 07:12:00 -0400

Docpad – static site generator on node.js:

I was looking for a comfortable way to make my personal site and tried around 6 different static site generators. In the end Docpad hit the spot.

While being a javascript beast it lets you use any kind of css preprocessor you want so I’ve gone with sass. It has a lot of plugins and all of the everyday tasks are covered well. The only thing I had problem googling was rss support. So here is the link.

You’ll need around 2 hours to get a hang of this tool but then the power will be with you!

A post about posts I will (probably) never write

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 05:25:00 -0500

Pattern-matching, multi-methods and the life without visitor pattern.
Making your own cross-platform metroidvania using Haxe NME and Tiled.
Your first crossplatform Pure Data x openframeworks audio application.
Making drawing app with Flapjax or the joy of FRP.
Modular javascript: the good, the bad and the ugly.

My Ludum Dare #25 Post Mortem.

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 06:44:00 -0500

My first idea was to make a game about the dark lord who is trying to save himself from a prophesy of death brought by a hero by kidnapping and impregnating the princess so he can be reborn again.

I tried to prototype it as a board game but felt like it didn’t work. The idea was good but I couldn’t make a core gameplay from it. When I tried to mix it with additional mechanics of territorial conquest and resource management things got too complicated for a board game.

It pissed me off a lot and I’ve jumped to another idea in a different genre of platformer. It should be a dark knight running by a castle wall breaking through gates and slashing through guards to grab the princess. I was under a false impression that I have all the tools ready for it but alas my javascript code base lacked several important features:

frame-based sprite animations switchable by name
tween-based objects animations switchable by name
collision detection with collision groups and easy to setup results processing
simple audio API

So it’s ended in a whole lot of procrastination, waste of energy and lack of self confidence.

In the end of the first day I’ve jumped back to the original idea and started to prototype it as a simple adventure/strategy game where you as the dark lord talk to your servant imp who asks different questions about your actions for the day. Then next day comes, you listen to reports, give new commands and so on.

The goal is to live a long and evil life conquering the realm in the process.

In the beginning you own nothing but your lair and a gang of goblins. You can send your troops to siege, raze and pillow. Your evil actions makes you more popular among the monsters and from time to time they ask to join your cause. If you don’t act much your villainy fades, the monsters run off, and in the end you can even fall into slumber which is a game over.

Your acts of agression against villages and towns break the patience of the people and the king. So at some moment heroes begin their assasination attempts and your territorial conquest meets resistance from the king’s army.

The problem with heroes is everyone of those pesky bastards has a small chance to kill you. The more power you have the more the chance. There is a prophesy after all. To get around this problem you need to kidnap a princess and impregnate her using some special game mechanics. :) Of course when you kidnap the lady all kinds of heroes try to save her and you should be sure you can manage the situation. But if you have done your darkest deed you can die ‘cause you will be reborn after several turns.

So much ideas. I’ve got to the level of ugly prototype where you can talk with your imp, the days pass, the monsters come and you can send them to the villages. The next step was to implement siege, raze and pillow mechanics. But I was already out of time.

Lessons learned:

stick to one idea
be good at low level and fast game prototyping
ready your tools in advance ( again )
get the core gameplay ready in the first day

And I thought Zuma was original.

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:17:15 -0500

And I thought Zuma was original.

"The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a..."

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 09:01:00 -0500

“The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said “Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?” Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, “Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man’s closures.” Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire “Lambda: The Ultimate…” series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress. On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying “Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man’s closures.” Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying “When will you learn? Closures are a poor man’s object.” At that moment, Anton became enlightened.”

- RE: What’s so cool about Scheme?

A great in-joke for those who play modern rogue-likes.

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 02:47:06 -0500

A great in-joke for those who play modern rogue-likes.

SAME HAT!: INCREDIBLE FIRST-EVER MANGA TRANSLATED IN 1971

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 03:46:00 -0400

SAME HAT!: INCREDIBLE FIRST-EVER MANGA TRANSLATED IN 1971:

That’s a must see. There is a link to the PDF in the linked article.

This is a simple video art I’ve made a long time ago....

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 07:45:44 -0400

This is a simple video art I’ve made a long time ago. I’ve found quartz composer part of the project and you can download and use it if you’d like.

beatline.qtz

10 Timeframes | Contents Magazine

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 04:29:57 -0400

10 Timeframes | Contents Magazine:

If I have to choose only one article to read in this month this is it. Great view on the meaning of time and the values of life.

I have successfully failed the last Ludum Dare. The theme was...

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 21:43:33 -0400

I have successfully failed the last Ludum Dare. The theme was Evolution.

My idea was to make a shooter/roguelike with evolving enemies with evolution path defined by the agressive (or not) actions of a player.

I’ve spent too much time learning lua and programming the game engine. But I liked what I did. I’m goung to build upon the results and improve this engine. I’ve completely ignored OOP this time. It’s all functions and event maps (actually lookup tables) and that’s great! Gives me a bird-eye view on the inner mechanics of the game.

"Lua 1.0 was developed as a data-description language for Petrobras, the Brazillian oil company...."

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 01:54:53 -0400

“Lua 1.0 was developed as a data-description language for Petrobras, the Brazillian oil company. It’s hard to be any more “industrial” than that. PL theoretical features were added gradually as the language evolved — prototypish objects in 2.0, anonymous functions in 3.1, proper lexical scoping and coroutines in 5.0… At this point, Lua is (like JavaScript) a nice fusion of Scheme and Self. But unlike Scheme or Self, it’s never been a “research language” — the focus all along has been on providing a practical, embeddable language engine (a la Tcl). Highly recommended is the authors’ HOPL paper, An Evolution of Lua. Incidentally, one of the reasons (IMHO) that Lua is such an elegant language today is that it has discarded an awful lot of cruft along the way. With each major version, a number of features were thrown out to make way for the “new way of doing things”. This was possible because Lua is typically embedded (so if new Lua breaks your code, just don’t upgrade it for that app), but also (again, IMHO) because Lua isn’t mainstream, and the smaller userbase is more tolerant of breaking changes. Conversely, JavaScript is the mess it is today because it went big so early, and has to support all of the mistakes made in the early days. Also incidentally, one of the defining of features of Lua (all along) that hasn’t been mentioned in this thread is extensible semantics. In Lua, reading from or writing to a table can mean anything you want it to mean. So, lots of fancy features (inheritance, laziness, autocreation of subtables, functions with private state, memoizing, currying) can be implemented by the user in just a few lines, instead of having to be built into the language core.”

- Bret Victor

I’ve spent last day looking for a suitable technology to...

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 20:17:36 -0400

I’ve spent last day looking for a suitable technology to use in the upcoming Ludum Dare game making compo. A day of c/c++ compilation and breaking through dependency hell.

I’ve stumbled upon several interesting projects I’ll dig into later. Especially amazing are field and ipython. Both let you do some amazing live coding in python. The first one gives the ability to construct graphical interfaces built into code in a simple graphical interface (sorry :). The second one is a very advanced REPL second only to Lisp/Scheme REPLs.

The problem is the field is not suitable for games at all and projects made with ipython are hard to package and distribute.

In the end I found lua based solution and recorded a demonstration of my newly acquired power. I’m amazed to say the least! Watch the video.

Music For Geeks And Nerds

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 08:16:00 -0400

Music For Geeks And Nerds:

This is a very promising introduction to music theory for people with programming skill. The examples and exercises are all code, making it easy to experiment and gain insight into the structure of music. The eBook is ~15$ but that’s ok considering there is no other book like this.

The choice of programming language is Python. I personally don’t use it but it’s easy enough to use in this case. The default python’s interpreter is not too comfortable. It doesn’t have autocompletion, help and commands to save the functions defined live. So you should install ipython. It’s easy, just do:

sudo easy_install ipython

If you are on a mac and this gives you some strange errors there is a possibility you have installed another version of python breaking the apple’s provided distribution. Just use proper /usr/bin/easy_install

Also it’s a good idea to run ipython from bash. I’ve tried it with fish and the %edit command was broken.

Something more audible from my hard drive.

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 09:48:08 -0400

Something more audible from my hard drive.

Mood Loops

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 20:04:59 -0400

I have found some audio sketches on my hard drive and released them in a rather raw form.

My clipped tracks will blow your speakers.

This amazing video shows how easy and playful programming could...

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 16:12:54 -0400

This amazing video shows how easy and playful programming could and should be. The technology behind the show is REPL for JavaScript built on top of Emacs. This example makes me want to learn the editor.

The Emacs is highly interactive and has a built in tutorial. I have completed it and what I have learned is very promising so far. The editor looks like a perfect fit for all my live coding needs until the light table project is mature enough.

I’m on OS X by the way and you can grab your own copy of cocoa Emacs too at http://emacsformacosx.com

A very good introduction is available at How to Learn Emacs by David Röthlisberger.

And if you need some more inspiration the Emacs Rocks! has a lot more.

Two useful functions for fish shell on OS X Lion.

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:09:00 -0400

Recently I’ve stumbled upon a branch of fish shell tweaked to work well on OS X. It was really great but I was missing some neat commands I had in my zsh. I tried to replicate them but failed at first mostly because fish does IO redirection in a different way.

After half an hour of googling and another half an hour of pulling my hairs while trying to fix a lot of strange errors I succeeded! And here goes the result. To use it put these files into ~/.config/fish/functions/ folder. Create it if it doesn’t exist.

pfdir.fish will print folder path of the topmost Finder’s window
pfsel.fish will print the paths to all selected files and folders of the topmost Finder’s window

https://gist.github.com/2973949

Have to say I couldn’t do it without already existing and great oh-my-zsh plugin: https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/blob/master/plugins/osx/osx.plugin.zsh

It’s definitely worth checking out if you prefer zsh.

Fixed my game a bit.

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 08:20:00 -0400

Fixed my game a bit.:

Fixed a bug when a player jumps from the ledge to the right. No more annoying error messages!

Also fixed a several seconds game freeze at the beginning. I had to move from JSON format to TMX format. This library helped me a lot https://github.com/MattTuttle/HaxePunk-Tiled

I have redrawn grass tiles and they look much better now.

An interesting situation I’ve got playing Hack, Slash,...

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:34:00 -0400

An interesting situation I’ve got playing Hack, Slash, Loot. My game character was stuck inside a cage when my shadowform was dispelled by a monster. The shadowform is an ability which lets you pass through walls. You can see this poor lad in the bottom-right corner of the room. I had to restart the game ending his pity.