Mr. Norm S, the story

Sorry...

2006-08-13T11:01:00.000-07:00

Sorry for not posting in a bit. I'm going to be moving over to an actual site for my blogging and hosting my projects. More on the new domain and stuff. If you feel cool check out this. It's mine and it's not funny. You'll have to wait for me to come up with some good material (read: "you'll have to wait for me to see the people who are the characters.")

As for my game

2006-07-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

Ltg. So, I started working on the graphics for my mod, for my game engine. Here is a little sneak peek. Nothing is done yet, just fleshing out the character with the help of random people. Here it is. Anyway, comments are welcome.

The Results are in

2006-07-24T10:30:00.000-07:00

Here's what Emo Kid Kills Zombies scored in the 72 Hour Game Design Competition:
Graphics 5.35
Sound 0.31
Gameplay 5.15
Innovation 4
Completeness 4.23
Theme 5.19
Overall 4.85
It should be noted that if whoever gave us more than 0 for our non-existent sound is reading this they should please contact me with a reason. Anyway, I'm satisfied with that. The game really wasn't very good, so I'll forgive myself for getting less than 50%. Our highest mark was graphics, which didn't surprise me all that much. Anyway, I know I'll continue to compete.

Game Engine Creation Anti-Woes

2006-07-22T17:50:00.000-07:00

The game engine is continuing to evolve. Known now as '4', it is beginning to develop seriously into a game engine. Right now it lacks many features (almost all of them) but it is well designed and thought out and will allow me to put together fully scripted mods. Anyway, here's the logo:

It's over.

2006-07-21T10:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, so we didn't get everything we wanted finished. No title screen, no ending screen. The collision detection is really sketchy... like horribly so. I really don't want to fix it up but Nick wants me to finish it up so we can give it to our friends. Personally I think that code doesn't even deserve to be run. Hideous. To redeem myself I've started writing a moddable game engine. I'm not sure how other moddable game engines have been made in python, but my system works pretty well. It involves mods being modules in separate directories and the game engine adds the appropriate directory to sys.path and then imports them. So far the engine can easily create and modify the game's keybindings. Not much else goes on, but it works pretty well. The code is the cleanest, most pythonic and most well-designed code I've ever come up with. Even the comments adhere to style rules. Anyway, the engine is being built to create my latest idea for a game. Hopefully I can get it all done. If I get bored I'll just use to do stuff for infotech next year so I'm forced to do it. It might be a good year long projects. Anyway, check back for screenshots and updates... For now I'll leave you with this font (click on it) :

0 days, 11 hours Remaining

2006-07-16T23:01:00.000-07:00

Okay, some advancements. Zombies die beyond their previous state of undeadness. They go as far as becoming instances of class Bloodspot. Atrocious frame rates were abundant because, on top of writing this in Python, I wrote really slow code. I'm not even going to release it unless I have to. Mainly I did things with the goal of making it easy to read. Later that just forced me to make parts of it hard to read. Very obfuscated in places. Anyway, to fix ridiculous frame rates I started removing bloodstains if the frame rate dropped below 20. That seemed to work well enough. You'll see from the screenshot you have health now. I'm just fixing the damage system up right now. The number in the corner is the number of kills. The goal is one thousand... and it won't be too hard to get to by the looks of it. I'm not sur ehow to make this game harder than it is; it is way too easy. Maybe it'll just be a stress reliever. I mean who doesn't want to control a little emo kid killing zombies. Have a look:

0 days, 21 hours Remaining

2006-07-16T13:04:00.000-07:00

Zombies are spreading their gore all over the place. I'm running through the tangles of code fixing things. There are still plenty of bugs/things that aren't implemented yet that I need to do. Alias1 is at work but I'm still working away. Back to the mess of code I'm dealing with. Oh, here's a screenshot.

1 days, 0 hours Remaining

2006-07-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

Just spent a bunch of time not doing what I meant to. Zombies are quasi dying. It's more that they are freezing than anything... but it's better than nothing. I guess I'll get to work on doing that properly. Here's a screenshot... oh ya... hud.

1 day, 9 hours Remaining

2006-07-16T00:49:00.000-07:00

Okay, so, currently we're almost so that the player attacks. He kinda swings the crowbar with flashes of pink to show actually where the collision detection is happenning. Hot pink... like... punk rock. Most punk rock is clearly hot pink. Also... we are really going to need to work tomorrow... as Alias1 is going to have to work another shift tomorrow (4.5h) and I get distracted easily. Luckily I figured out py2exe. That should read "Luckily Timmy_Isdaman figured out py2exe for us." He gets credit for that. Studley also noticed that we had failed to add a number zero to our number sprites. Thumbs up to him. Also, a shout out to the people who post comment on here. Those people are: Studley, [insert how you spell your name] and me. I'm going to sleep now (it's 1:51 by my clock.)

1 days, 11 hours Remaining

2006-07-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

Okay. My home-boy Studley came over along with R.-J.C.-D. and we wasted 4 hours on pizza and videos making fun of people on the internet. Probably not the best use of time since Alias1 had gone to work for 4.5 about the time the arrived. Consequently I didn't do almost anything I said I would while he was gone. Rushing to catch up. Attacking is half implemented. Visually it works... but it doesn't hurt anybody, especially not the zombies. Peace.

1 days, 19 hours Remaining

2006-07-15T14:35:00.000-07:00

I pretended to get collision detection working well, but I'm far too lazy. The zombies have sight range and follow the player. About to give the player a health meter and the ability to attack.

2 days, 1 hours Remaining

2006-07-15T08:07:00.000-07:00

So, now Derek is walking around animatedly, not leaving the map and the camera stop at the edges of the map. Time for a screenshot. Oh no, you got to see some of my hideous code. Oh ya, the theme is retro, so we decided to just do a 320x240 res sprite based deal. You know, like something you might play on a SNES.

2 days, 2 hours Remaining

2006-07-15T07:38:00.000-07:00

Well, we have woken, and are back at it. Derek is walking around, animated and everything, and it's time to move on to bigger and better things. Zombies!!!!

2 days, 10 hours Remaining

2006-07-14T23:07:00.000-07:00

Alias1 has been hard at work on MSN and reading web comics. In his spare time he's managed to turn out some sprites for our player character and some parts of zombies... I'm not sure where that's at right now. I'm feeling like sleeping as it is 11:15 in my time zone. Anyway, the player is moving around, camera is following and the player has come to grips with which direction he is facing. Pretty soon he might just be animating his walking... because that's something the character does, not us, the developpers.

2 Days, 14 hours Remaining

2006-07-14T20:03:00.000-07:00

So, currently I just finished doing camera movement. It just follows the player mindlessly right now but later I've got it so I can easily add a more inuitive camera. The player is not being drawn but he is moving around, as I can tell from the camera. Here's a little plot sample. I mean, it's more of a premise, but whatever. You are Derek, professional emo kid. Okay, it isn't a profession, but you are pretty freaking good at it. You moped around for a while until you noticed that everyone had actually turned to mindless zombies. There you are left, having picked up a crowbar, to fight off the evil hordes of the undead. Peace.

We're off

2006-07-14T15:09:00.001-07:00

Alias 1 and I are set up. Let's roll.

Prepping

2006-07-11T19:11:00.000-07:00

I'm getting ready for the competition by writing a simple little game in Python with Pygame. Here is a screenshot. You can walk around and almost shoot. It's all themed after my band (They Live / We Sleep) and our website. Which also happens to be how I themed my computer (Linux with Openbox and Pypanel.)

Welcome

2006-07-10T16:26:00.000-07:00

As of Friday you will be able to read up on the current state of my 72 Hour Game Design Contest [see links] entry. I will be working on it with a friend of mine. I will be coding in Python, using Pygame, and he will be doing art and sound stuff. See everybody later.