May 20th, 2011
There’s just no way to make this work. Without any sort of documentation, I’ll never be able to figure out how to use these functions. I’m going to have to hope I can download the appropriate compiler when we pull into port in England, and make that work.
May 2011
May 13th, 2011
Day three of deployment, and I’ve hit a brick wall. It seems that I installed the 64-bit version of the python compiler, while I downloaded the 32-bit version of the graphics/game library. Zero compatibility.
I thought I hit a breakthrough when I started looking through my C++ files and found an example that used an OpenGL library, but upon opening the library, I found ZERO documentation. At the top was a comment that said “refer to readme.txt for help,” and of course there is no readme.txt to be found. The subroutines all take user-defined data types as arguments whose purposes I cannot divine. In fact, the entire thing looks pretty mystical; I can’t seem to make any sense of it. The closest I came was learning how to load a bitmap and move it around, though I don’t know what sort of event to listen for when waiting for mouse input. Or how to draw anything other than bitmaps.
This is not going to work. I also found another python library called tkinter that looked promising, but again, no documentation. I might play around with that for a while before giving up. Only three days in… this is not looking good.
Some concept art/sketches for enemies in the game. While getting everything ready to take with me on deployment, I feel a second wind coming on, as far as motivation goes. I finally managed to get the entire script written, and a couple plot points worked out. I revamped some stuff about the final level, to make it flow a little easier. I can see right now that graphics are going to be an issue while I’m gone; I can’t draw worth a shit. I think I’ll leave most of the graphics as simple little pixelly sprites and line art until I get back. As long as I have a working engine and game, I can deal with art and music whenever I feel like it.
This is likely to be the last post for a ridiculously long while. However, if all goes according to plan, when I return, the game should be nearly complete. If I remember to, I’ll try and make little journal entries about my work, and I’ll post those when I return.