Competition Diary - alexkidd

No QA during late night coding

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 22:41:10 +1000

Well, I booted into windows to try and make a py2exe thing. Didn't have any luck at all (problems with pyopengl, then problems with libz.. gave up). But I did find an incredibly embarrasing issue when running at low framerates. By default my video card is set up to cap at 60fps on windows, but on linux the game chugs along at a healthy 200fps. At the low framerate the AI calls get completely missed due to a completely inappropriate "if" statement.

If you want to try out the game as it was meant to be (i.e., with zombies fighting back!), open gamescene.py and change line 135 from

    if self.gameTime % self.goalPeriod == 0:

    if self.gameTime > self.goalPeriod:
        self.gameTime = 0

Please deduct many marks for complete lack of intelligence..

A game emergeth!

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 06:57:48 +1000

It's 6:54am local time, so I've been working on it straight for 22 hours... and now I have a game! It's too hard for me to play, so I hope it's challenging enough for you guys.

Here is the source submission: brains-1.0.1.tar.gz. If I wake up in the next 3 hours I'll see if it runs on Windows and maybe try and package an exe. For now, though, sleep...

Grr, argh, moo...

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 00:28:41 +1000

Yes, we now have cows and some terribly unreastically-sized houses. Actually there is some real gameplay implemented now... zombies will cause cows to turn into brains, which in turn feed the zombies. Ah, the circle of life. Don't worry, the "power" aspect will become all too apparent soon enough. No, really!

Meanwhile the other members of my team have Mysteriously Disappeared; I can only assume something supernatural has happened to them, as no force on Earth could tear them away from a game of this calibre. Bedtime for me so I can prepare myself for a real-life zombie marathon from 6pm tomorrow night until 10am Sunday (40 hours should be just enough to finish this!)

BTW, all the other games are look Really Cool.. I am very jealous of all you people with artistic and/or game programming skills!

Rumble in the park

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 01:00:35 +1000

Made great progress today; wrote a level editor for placing sprites, stopped things walking through walls and fixed up the massively laggy event loop.. pleased to get 200fps even with 100 or so zombies on screen at once (with collision detection).

Grr argh

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 00:37:27 +1000

Well we made great progress on Sunday, but are finding that the time between work and bedtime is very short.. so things are looking much as they did yesterday.. it could be that most of the work will be done next weekend. Here's a zombie for you to make friends with:

I make art

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 21:06:12 +1000

and art is done

I'm not a geek

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 23:07:28 +1000

I _heart_ nerds

fear us

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 22:51:00 +1000

You are reading the debut diary entry for our team, "two nerds and a girl". The name of our team is not entirely accurate, as one of the nerds is yet to join and the girl is also a nerd anyway.

Anyhow, meet the fearsomest team ever to show its knobbly face around the python mob. With our combined knowledge of python (very little), game programming (some of us, a little) and the black arts (one of us, far too much), expect a game of monumentally stupendous.. something.

Until then..