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[Corpus]

Progress:

• Build tile engine basics: done
• Conquer OSX application bundles: done
• Make a very quick icon for said bundle, depicting a grinning man with an afro: done
• Implement player + player movement: done
• Implement first enemy + hazards
• Create level editor: done
• Design map: current job
• Create art: current job
• Dialogue
• Realise I can't do all of this in time and implement an episodic structure...

NYC (?), 20XX.

You open your eyes. Your head is splitting, but you seem, generally, to be unharmed. You are hanging upside down, strapped to a chair at the waist. An oxygen mask dangles from your face. Below you, dim orange lights flicker on and off. Thin smoke drifts about, and sparks of electricity can be seen darting from place to place on the floor.

You realise that you are in an aeroplane, and that what you initially took to be the floor is, in fact, the ceiling. Why are you here? Why is the plane upside down?

You begin to piece together your hazy memories. You were on board a flight back to your home in New York when you hit a patch of turbulence - No, not turbulence. Something hit you. You saw strange dark forms moving outside the plane, and then it went down. As it did, you saw something below you, blanketing the earth: a dense black mass, undulating gently, oblivious to the carnage above it. In your panicked state, it looked like a gigantic afro. It wasn't actually an afro, though. Obivously. Right?

You remember something else: nobody screamed. There were women and children among the passengers, but not one made a single sound. They looked... calm, somehow. Where are they now? You are alone in the wreckage, but you can see no blood or even any indication that there was ever anybody else on board.

Deciding to take a look around at the crash site, you free yourself from the seat belt and deftly jump to the ground. Moving a broken chair out of the doorway, you exit the plane. Terror grips you as your eyes adjust to the light: you are in some sort of cavern. You can hear something moving nearby, but can see nothing. Looking up, your heart falls further as you see how you arrived here: above the plane a rough tunnel stretches, a trail of destruction left by your descent. You can see the sky above you, but it's a long way up. The tunnel is moving, too; it's swaying as if caught by a breeze - undulating, even.

What is this place? Why is the cavern floor beneath you so springy? Wait, is that... is this cavern made of hair?!



INFINITE AFRO IN THE HOOD
Intrigue! Adventure! Exploration! Gentrification! Afros!

[medieval]

Awesome title.

[Corpus]

Because I'm totally hardcore and not inconsiderably foolhardy, I opted to forego GameMaker and build my game using C++ and SDL. For the same reasons, I chose to scorn Xcode and instead work using nothing but vim, bash, my own Makefiles and a not inconsiderable amount of a few tigIRCers' time.

It's taken me a while to get running, since this is my first time making something other than Hello World in C++ (it's also my first time using vim, my first time making a Makefile and my first time developing something for OS X).

Anyway!

Progress thus far:

• Build tile engine: done
• Conquer OSX application bundles: done

[Chris Whitman]

The standard SDL application template for XCode includes SDLMain.m, which has handy-dandy utilities like setting your working folder to the application's location so you can keep the same folder structure across platforms.

I was also kind of worrying about the universal binary application bundle thingy until I found that out.

[Corpus]

Oh, man, does it?

Heh, I've just done something with CFBundle. I wish I'd known. It would have saved me valuable time -_-

[C418]

I wanna see screenshots today! Even if you fake them :D

[Eclipse]

I wanna see screenshots today! Even if you fake them :D

me too.
Also because you need a lot of time and memory to do the infinite afro sprite

[Corpus]

The infinite afro sprite's infinity is such that it has no beginning and no end. I never started making it, and I will never complete it; I am in a perpetual state of, um, working on it.

[Massena]

The infinite afro sprite's infinity is such that it has no beginning and no end. I never started making it, and I will never complete it; I am in a perpetual state of, um, working on it.

Beautiful, just beautiful. 
We must have screenie though, stop delaying it.

[Corpus]

Alright, another uninteresting update! Player movement, collisions, jumping etc. are now all completed and (as far as I can tell) functioning correctly. I've also completed a simple, two-handed, keyboard-controlled, tile-based level editor.

C418 and BaronCid have created music for the game which is probably better than the game itself will be. It's really awesome.

[Golds]

Why vim instead of XCode?

[dustin]

Why vim instead of XCode?

Because vim is what we like to call "hardcore"?   

[Corpus]

Hah, no. Xcode is too fiddly. There are too many different options, all tucked away, and doing it this way is better for me as a programmer because I've learned how to write Makefiles.

Also, supposedly, if you learn to use vim well, it's a lot faster and more efficient than keyboard-and-mouse editors, so I thought it would be worthwhile to take this opportunity to start learning to use it.


EDIT:
Also, I can't use Xcode (as far as I know) to compile for Windows, which, obviously, is a requirement for this competition. All of the tools and libraries I'm using work both on windows and mac, so the only thing I have to change is the libs section of the command to g++ in my Makefile (i.e. using frameworks on OSX and just using plain libs on XP) to compile on each OS.

[Chris Whitman]

Dude, it's easy. XCode is the way to go with SDL if you also have Visual Studio, because the conversion process is largely clicking and dragging and then putting in a WinMain and an #include windows dot whatever. Five minutes!

I'm skeptical when people talk about text editor efficiency, because personally what I find to be most efficient is writing code, and if you're doing the same thing again and again in code-writing to the degree where you require macros, it means you're writing bad code.

Keeping it real.

[Corpus]

Heh, I use if(), for() etc. quite repeatedly

Anyway, I don't know the veracity of claims that vim is faster or more efficient. I'm still trying it out and giving it a chance. Also, I do quite like it, for whatever reason. It's convenient not to have to keep moving your hand to the mouse.

[dustin]

vim is faster (for me) then a mouse driven editor but not because of macros but because moving your hands off of home row to the mouse wastes time.

That said I use xcode with vim as the editor sometimes.

[Corpus]

Fantastic news! I slaved away for hours upon hours upon hours, but there's no way in hell that I'm going to get this finished in time for the deadline. I therefore withdraw from the competition.

The game is not, however, being abandoned. I'm (really) behind on schoolwork because of it, so there's no way I'm going to let my time have gone to waste. It will be completed. My rate of working on it will slow dramatically since I now have to catch up on all of my school work (and I'm also now starting to revise for my AS levels), but it will be completed.

This situation displeases me greatly.

EDIT: Okay, that sounded really bitter. But, hey, I feel pretty bitter. Or, at least, very disappointed.

EDIT 2: Sorry.