![\"\"](\"https:\/\/t-machine.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/device-2011-08-31-003735.png\" "\\"device-2011-08-31-003735\\"")
<\/a>\n<\/td>\nEscape From the Pit<\/a>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n Failed to officially enter the competition, but otherwise succeeded…<\/p>\n LudumDare challenges you to write an entire game in under 2 days (technically: 48 hours – it’s up to you how much of that you sleep). You can’t even design it in advance – there’s a theme that’s only decided shortly before the 48 hours starts.<\/p>\n LudumDare was the weekend before last – but I had to work that weekend on urgent day-job stuff. Like: I had to work all day Saturday, and there was no way out of it. So I couldn’t do the same 48-hour stint as everyone else.<\/p>\n Also, I know from previous experience that the “48 hours in one stretch” is very different from – say – “12 hours for 4 days”. When you do a 24 or 48 hour game, you tend to only manage a certain percent of “productive” hours. The challenge of designing + building something from scratch forces you to keep taking “time off” to go think about what do next.<\/p>\n So, I kept a diary of hours worked, and hours taken “off” as well. I’m confident I’d have fitted all of this – development time AND down-time – into the 48 hours. But I had to spread it over 2 successive weekends :(.<\/p>\n (3 hours) – install Eclipse and the Android plugin, and the Android SDK. Document what I’ve done (1 hour) and check I can re-do it at will. Google, please wise-up and fix your install process – it’s not changed in almost 2 years, and it SUCKS<\/p>\n (1 hour) – install some extra Android OS versions, get the emulator working correctly, get projects imported, get everything in source-control, get empty app running on hardware device. Ready to start project!<\/p>\n — NB: everything up to this line I should have done before the contest started. If I were the kind of person that had free time on weekdays. Which sadly I’m not —<\/p>\n (1 hour) – getting Android base classes up and running. Takes a while: Android is insanely badly designed for the “Core application” part. Needs hundreds of lines of code to make a Hello World app that *actually* works as an app (Google’s code example that does it in 4 lines is fake: no real app could do that).<\/p>\n (3 hours) – on the beach, not working<\/p>\n (4 hours) – upgrading the open source Entity System Libraries on http:\/\/entitysystems.wikidot.com<\/a> to support a bunch of features I’ve been using for a while in my own projects. This required writing a lot of stuff from scratch (using my own old source as inspiration), and integrating some improvements from patches\/forks that other people had submitted.<\/p>\n — NB: everything up to this line I could have done before the contest started. Interesting though that I thought this was going to be “about to start writing the actual game” and I’ve only finally got to the point where I can write my first line of game-code —<\/p>\n (0.5 hours): trying to make textures in Photoshop. Photoshop really sucks. Half the online resources for making the kinds of textures I want require PSP’s unique filters\/effects – useless :(.<\/p>\n (0.5 hours): get a single sprite to appear on screen. A couple of idiot errors in one of my libraries – plus Google’s Eclipse plugin being really really bad at understanding “the scroll bar” (bug in ADT: it implements the world’s only non-static scrollbar)<\/p>\n (1 hour): random maze generation (using: http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Maze_generation_algorithm#Randomized_Prim.27s_algorithm<\/a> ) that makes nice mazes, printing out onto the screen, still with my default “starfield” background. Rotating the screen is causing the entire game-state to be regenerated – includkng the maze – which was an accident, but actually helped A LOT with testing the maze algorithm (just tilt to re-run the algorithm instantly)<\/p>\n (0.5 hours): learn how to do Android input-handling correctly; en-route, discover I’m missing the SDK docs, and set about downloading + installing them … + updating my blog instructions on how to install Android to include “SDK docs” as a section.<\/p>\n (2.5 hours): discovering MAJOR bugs in Google’s basic “touch handling” API for Android – including bugs on Google’s own website source code, and an API designer on crack who broke the core Java contract didn’t document it. Not Happy.<\/p>\n (1 hour) – implementing a collision detection system that does proper swept-collisions, but works OK with the poor fine-grained control of touch input<\/p>\n (1 hour) – added filters to collision detection so I could have background images that the player will NOT collide with (1 hour) – refined the user-controls so you can hold your finger still and character keeps moving in that direction. Added handling in collision-detection system to allow character to slide along walls and into side-passages without the player having to stop and be ultra-precise (pixel perfect!) in timing the change of direction.<\/p>\n (0.5 hours) – added an exit, fixed bugs in the maze-generation (if started on a right or bottom edge, it crashed)<\/p>\n (1 hour) – fix Android’s brain-dead handlig of Bitmaps, giving a big speed boost, and re-learning how to use DDBS memory-allocation-tracking. I’m now auto-caching each bitmap inside my Sprite object. Sigh. There’s no easy workaround: Google says “don’t use getter methods” but Google also says “don’t call our getDrawable method more than once”.<\/p>\n (1 hour) – added ghosts, made them move around the map nicely, and collide with player was *automatic* on first compile (freebie from using an Entity System!). Also made arrows float nicely in same place on screen even while scrolling.<\/p>\n (1 hour) merge code from laptop back to desktop. Finally add the “win” conditions that makes the app playable!<\/p>\n To make this game, I improved the basic Java Entity System up on the ES Wiki, and added some usability improvements and features. I created a whole new page for it here:<\/p>\nAims<\/h3>\n
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Background<\/h3>\n
Day 1<\/h4>\n
Day 2<\/h4>\n
Day 3<\/h4>\n
\n(previously was colliding with every on-screen rendered sprite). Also added a very simple lighting system where squares that the player has walked close to or upon gradually light up, showing how much has been explored<\/p>\nSource Code<\/h3>\n