Huzzah! Work’s been picking up on Red Rover — case in point: I finally got the CDLOD algorithm working in OGRE, and with a spherical object! The sphere is Mars! Ignoring oblateness!

The results are very preliminary, but it’s the kind of black triangle that gives me the warm fuzzies. Given my boundless felicity, I decided to forego the usual Screenshot Saturday, and instead favour a Movie Monday. Why not, Zoidberg?

Video embedded below. Possibly available in HD? Who knows. Internets are hard.

Astute readers (read: the three of you who’ve been here longer than two weeks) may note that this is the very first video update since my prelude/announce video, from August 2009.

Yes. Yes we’re really moving now.

i played Proteus.

it was my childhood, twenty-four years young.

it was lonely.

it was warm.

it was like massaging my ears with breasts.

i chased a raincloud.

i saw the moon set in an ocean.

i found islands within islands.

i wondered at the falling snow.

i played Proteus.

you should play Proteus.

In my last post, I discussed Oases, my entry for the Ludum Dare 48-hour game jam (check out the game here); not long thereafter, I issued the following challenge on Twitter. As shown below, my lofty target of getting at least one more rating was hit — what dazzling heights we reach upon aiming low.

Not being one to break a promise, today I ate a bagel. It was an emotional journey which I captured in photographs (several of which were doctored unnecessarily in my cell phone’s software), and which I present herewith.

I insist that you open up this song in an adjacent tab to accompany the very brief, nostalgic — one might even say Internet — slide viewing.

2011 is dead. Long live &c.

As reported previously, last weekend I took part in my first Ludum Dare, a (nearly 10 year-old) 48-hour Internet-wide game jam. Interested parties had previously voted for the theme “Alone,” and then at 21h (local Montreal time), we were off to the races.

Some screenshots of my entry — Oases — below, and a few more words below that.

Now with a theme like “Alone,” there’s obviously going to be a large share of Limbo- or Closure-likes — because once an innovative game is popular, by Humphrey, everyone wants to innovate the same way. (Actually, that’s unfair: I’ve since played and voted on a number of really interesting puzzle or exploration games, for instance.)

So, bypassing all ideas of “it’s art because death,” I started to think about wireless networks, which is frankly something I do almost every Friday night. It occurred to me that I was swimming in them — my neighbour had recently pointed out a new one with a creative name, as people seem fairly wont to do. I started to like the idea of incentivising players to escape from the wifi — a sort of reverse-wardriving. I toyed with the idea, for instance, of making a shmup where every visible wifi network becomes an enemy spawner. But of course, a (well-balanced) shmup takes more than two days of work, so I knew I’d have to scale back somewhat.

In the end, I made it as simple as possible. Visible networks are represented on-screen (as shown above), and this list of objects is periodically refreshed. The “netspawn” (as I like to call them (and as the C++ class is called)) emit all sorts of noises swiped from Freesound.org — I figured the more cacaphonic the netspawn (Googlewhack?), the more relieved the player will be to get away. Actually, as I was collecting sound clips, the idea of a vague narrative formed in my mind, though I’ll leave its discovery (and its implications for the competition’s theme) as an exercise to the reader. And finally, the game becomes brighter as the number of visible networks drops — I sort of got off on the mental image of a solitary gamer trundling knee-deep in snow, in the woods or a park, carrying in their laptop a brilliant, shining point of light.

Anyway, the original network code I used was a bit finnicky and Windows-specific; I’ve since replaced it with parts from the Qt API, so it should be more cross-platform and stable (if it doesn’t work, let me hear it!). The game’s available on my own games page (in Windows and Linux flavours), as well as on the Ludum Dare site itself.

Hope you dig my own little take on the theme. And I hope you dress warm.

This past weekend was my first Ludum Dare experience. A huge number of themes were voted upon in the week or two leading up to this weekend; then, at 21h00 this past Friday (Montreal time), the winning theme was announced — “Alone.”

The game is online-ish, but! First and foremost, I’m dealing with bugs. If the game doesn’t run at all, or forces you to quit for not having your wireless card turned on, I apologise. Working on that presently. Will update this post with the actual post-mortem once the dust has settled.