Here’s a shot of me gloating over my victim!

Woohoo! Not only did I resolve my aforementioned issues with the box models (primary problem is that Chipmunk always describes position by the center of an object - Gosu typically does top-left corner), but now you can shoot things at things. Exciting, er, things!

In addition to shooting your enemies, you can jump into their faces to knock them over and kill them. Since they are basically Pez dispensers a rather satisfying toppling takes place.

Now I’m at a cross-roads. I’ve ticked off most of the features I had listed before, but I’m far from a completed game. I think from here I go in one of two directions in order to have something I can call a “game” without resorting to this definition:

game (n.): a trick or joke.

One way towards gamedom would be turning this into a little two-player deathmatch game. That is a tiny world, after all. The other fast alternative would be to gradually flood the small arena with more and more enemies and basically see how long the player can hold out against the masses in an effort to thin the crowd (back towards my original idea of “This world is too small for the both of us, everyone else and me.”)

I’m going to clean this up a bit for the rest of the evening and sleep on it.

tl;dr - screenshot at end, code at github.com/citizenparker/the-two-of-us

More like my first four hours, as I really enjoy sleep. =)

As you may know, I’ve been participating in this weekend’s Ludum Dare competition. I say competition, but I should really say “quote” “competition” (quote quote quote) as I am really only competing against my inability to make games and personal inertia. It’s largely inspire by the “Punk’s Not Dead” entries at Rock Paper Shotgun.

In other words, this:

sparker: I don’t anticipate getting anywhere or building anything great. At most I plan on being able to look back on my work, sigh, and say “Well, that happened.”

sean Lofty goal. You can also treat it more as a kickstart to your game

sparker: Bah

sparker: I can 100% guarantee completely abandoning whatever I build, almost on principle

sparker: Also, I pledge to provide no more than 60-90 seconds of content that a jury of peers would consider “fun”

So, a recap on the few twelve hours then, yeah?

This year’s theme is “Tiny World.” I struggled a bit coming up with a theme I liked. For creativity, I always follow the rule “Write down 5 things immediately and then throw them away.” This turned out to be a struggle and I lost the first 90 minutes to this. However, I’ve landed on something I like, a silly platformer where you set out to destroy the world with increasingly destructive weapons because “this world is too small for the two of us. Sorry, everyone else, but you have to go.”

I’m violating the first rule of Game Jams by learning my tools on the fly, but so far it’s going well-ish. Gosu has been refreshingly easy to pick up and run with. I have some viewport and scaling issues I need to resolve today, but I have bullish confidence. Chipmunk has been a bit more challenging only because documentation on the Ruby bindings is largely lacking, incomplete, or out-of-date. Brian Marick’s quote “An example would be handy right about now” keeps running through my head.

I think my goal post-LD may be writing a tutorial on building a platformer in Ruby with Chipmunk. I’ll have to land on a coding style and structure for this that I’m pleased with. Currently that’s not the case.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Goals for the next four hours are as follows:

• Movement
• Shooting a basic gun
• Killing and being killed

Code at github.com/citizenparker/the-two-of-us, and screenshot below!

This is pretty much the best thing I’ve ever drawn. Thanks, Drawception, for the inspiration.

I spent some quality time this weekend digging into a few presentations that I thought I’d share with you.

Let’s start with the Shibuya Rubyist Lunch lightning talk from RubyConf 2011. It’s short, about three minutes, and will set the right tone for what’s to come. You can’t help but feel joy when you see the enthusiasm of the audience and speaker for one another. This video encapsulates why I love the Ruby community dearly.

Rich Hickey’s talk from Strange Loop 2011, “Simple Made Easy,” is the best presentation I’ve seen in years. Rich makes the case that we have abandoned the concept of “simple” entirely in a slavish pursuit of “easy.” It’s incredibly thought-provoking - see Uncle Bob’s follow-up, for instance. It also gives the best context yet for Rich’s disregard for testing. Definitely have to watch this sometime - it’s already given us a new word, “complect.”

Also from this year’s Strange Loop is Nathan Marz with an overview of the new Storm framework. This platform for distributed real-time computation looks incredibly promising. I need to dig into this further, but this could potentially solve many different problems I’m looking at today. It’s not quite the brain-burner that Rich’s talk can be, so it makes a wonderful “cool-down.”

Just wanted to take a moment and capture some random thoughts about MadisonRuby.

Thanks everyone who came to Dan’s and my talk today at MadisonRuby. This has been a tremendous conference so far and I’m honored to be a part of it. If you have any follow-up questions, I’d love to continue the conversation. Feel free to contact me or find me on Twitter.

Madison is perhaps the loveliest town I’ve ever been to. Although I’m not sure I get the whole cheese thing. I’ve spent a fair amount of time elsewhere in Wisconsin and so I’m familiar with cheesemania. However, Madison takes this to a whole new level. My heart no longer pumps but instead goes “squelch” every so often.

Special moments abound at this conference. It’s an incredible conference with a special ethos - lots of hugs and affection everywhere. Sometimes I forget there’s special connections everywhere in the Ruby community. It’s such a marvelous experience, thanks guys. Big Tiger in particular, you’ve been totally awesome. I am in your debt for these moments.

I’ve included some of my favorite MadisonRuby moments below courtesy of twip.us - you can view their entire MadisonRuby collection here.